CHAPTER XVII.

BYRON.

THE two great literatures of Europe in the eighteenth century, as in the seventeenth, were those of France and England. In the eighteenth century, as in the latter part of the seventeenth, English literature was largely affected by the great French writers, above all by Voltaire and Rousseau : while, conversely, these writers themselves derived much of their inspiration from the example of English political freedom. With the period inaugurated by Burns-the period of the French Revolution and its consequences-the parts changed. England had the great writers, and French poets and novelists for the first time were proud to copy the northern barbarians; while the strongest impetus given to English writers came from the spectacle of what was doing in France.

This generalisation does not apply fully to Scott, who was a Tory in blood and bone; an antiquarian can scarcely be a reformer. But Scott's influence was felt in France, and bore rich fruit, though he did not live to see it, in the prose of Hugo, of Mérimée, and of the elder Dumas. And where Scott entered he paved the way for Shakspeare.

More sudden and more direct was the impact of Scott's younger contemporary, Byron, who leapt at once into the greatest fame that a living English writer has ever enjoyed outside the English-speaking communities. If posterity, indeed, “commences at the frontier," then Byron's rank was fixed for all time before he was thirty. But his transcendent popularity at home was followed, as often happens, by a period of obscuration, from which his true stature only of late begins to emerge. And, upon the whole, posterity seems to have modified very little the contemporary verdict.

As with Scott, so with Byron, pedigree is important. His remote ancestors were among the Conqueror's knights, a fact which we find duly noted in Don Juan. But he did not lack progenitors of a nearer significance. Byron's immediate predecessor in the title killed in a desperate duel without seconds his neighbour and kinsman, Mr. Chaworth, and incurred a verdict of manslaughter. The rest of his life he passed in a kind of lunatic isolation, earning for himself the title of "The Wicked Lord." His brother, grandfather to the poet, was the notable admiral, "Foulweather Jack," of whom Byron writes, "he had no rest on sea, nor I on shore," and whose "Narrative" supplied the poet with many hints for the shipwreck canto in Don Juan. The poet's father was a soldier, whose veins held the same fierce and stormy blood; and "Mad Jack," as he was called, married a Highland lady, Miss Catherine Gordon, with a temper as wild as his own. Byron was their only child; but his father had previously been married, and had by this union a daughter, Augusta, the half-sister whose love and devotion Byron never tires of celebrating.

Thus sprung of a stock passionate and reckless

even to insanity, he was reared by a woman who varied transports of fury with hysterical tenderAnd he was born lame. Deformity in strong natures is almost always accompanied by violent ambition, as if to obliterate nature's stigma, and Byron had all the sensitiveness and the ambition of the type. At ten years old, in 1798, when he succeeded to the title and an embarrassed property, he was taken to Newstead Abbey, the ancestral seat of his family, which he has described again and again. At twelve he was sent to Harrow, and thence to Cambridge, where he proved no more amenable to discipline than was to be expected. But he had read enormously, and while still an undergraduate published his immature collection of verse, Hours of Idleness. The Edinburgh Review selected the volume for slashing review, and undoubtedly the "perfect Timon, not nineteen,” if only by this description of himself, invited attack. But if he did, he could hit back, and the literary satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, published in 1809 at once earned a vogue. Crude judgments have seldom been so forcibly expressed as by this youth of one-and-twenty: it is to the credit of all concerned that close friendship was afterwards cemented by him with men whom his boyish petulance had affronted-chief of all with Scott.

In the meantime he had taken his seat in the House of Lords, had held high revel at Newstead with Cambridge companions (dissipations luridly depicted in the first canto of Childe Harold), and now, in June, 1809, he set out for foreign travel, shipping for Lisbon. The next two years were passed in those wanderings of which he kept an account in the long descriptive poem ultimately to be known as the first two cantos of Childe Harold.

But an episode of his boyhood left too deep a trace on his emotions to be omitted in any narrative which should help to understand his work. The representative and heiress of the family, whose head “the Wicked Lord" had killed, was Mary Chaworth, a beautiful girl two years older than the poet. Living at Annesley, near to Newstead, she met him, and a boy and girl intimacy sprang up, which in Byron's tropical nature soon ripened into passion. In his sixteenth year he spent his whole summer holidays with her, in the next summer they met, when she was engaged. The whole story is told in The Dream, as characteristic a poem as ever Byron wrote, and it was written twelve years after the parting, and a year after his own marriage. Yet fiction is blended with the truth, for there is no reason to believe that any such fate befell Mary Chaworth in marriage as is assigned to her in the stanzas which I omitquoting those only which seem obviously to describe remembered emotions:

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
There was an ancient mansion, and before
Its walls there was a steed caparison'd:
Within an antique Oratory stood

The Boy of whom I spake ;-he was alone,
And pale, and pacing to and fro: anon

He sate him down, and seized a pen, and traced
Words which I could not guess of; then he lean'd
His bow'd head on his hands, and shook as 'twere
With a convulsion-then arose again,

And with his teeth and quivering hands did tear
What he had written, but he shed no tears.
And he did calm himself, and fix his brow
Into a kind of quiet as he paused,

The Lady of his love re-entered there;
She was serene and smiling then, and yet
She knew she was by him beloved, she knew,

For quickly comes such knowledge, that his heart
Was darken'd with her shadow, and she saw
That he was wretched, but she saw not all.

He rose, and with a cold and gentle grasp
He took her hand; a moment o'er his face
A tablet of unutterable thoughts

Was traced, and then it faded, as it came;
He dropp'd the hand he held, and with slow steps
Retired, but not as bidding her adieu,

For they did part with mutual smiles; he pass'd
From out the massy gate of that old Hall,
And mounting on his steed he went his way;
And ne'er repass'd that hoary threshold more.

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Wanderer was return'd.-I saw him stand
Before an Altar-with a gentle bride;

Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The Starlight of his Boyhood ;—as he stood
Even at the altar, o'er his brow there came
The self-same aspect, and the quivering shock
That in the antique Oratory shook

His bosom in its solitude; and then-
As in that hour-a moment o'er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts

Was traced, and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke

The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reel'd around him; he could see

Not that which was, nor that which should have been--
But the old mansion, and the accustom'd hall,
And the remember'd chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade,
All things pertaining to that place and hour,
And her who was his destiny,-came back
And thrust themselves between him and the light:
What business had they there at such a time?

In the seven years intervening between Byron's departure on his Eastern wanderings, here referred to, and 1816, when the lines were written in Switzerland, surprising vicissitudes had befallen him. He had traversed much of Portugal and Spain (still in the grip of France), had voyaged about the Mediterranean, visiting many scenes of classic memory, and contracting that affection for