tions his 'desire of preserving a nearer approach to
unity, than the irregularity which is the reproach of the English
theatre.' And this sound view of the importance of form, and of the
barbarism to which our English genius is prone, from _Goody Blake and
Harry Gill_ up to the clownish savagery which occasionally defaces even
plays attributed to Shakespeare, is collateral proof of the sanity and
balance which marked the foundations of his character, and which at no
point of his work ever entirely failed him. Byron's admiration for Pope
was no mere eccentricity.

We may value this self-control the more, by remembering the nature of
his subjects. We look out upon a wild revolutionary welter, of vehement
activity without a purpose, boundless discontent without a hope, futile
interrogation of nature in questions for which nature can have no
answer, unbridled passion, despairing satiety, impotence. It is too
easy, as the history of English opinion about Byron's poetic merit
abundantly proves, to underrate the genius which mastered so tremendous
a conflict, and rendered that amazing scene with the flow and energy and
mingled tempest and forlorn calm which belonged to the original reality.
The essential futility of the many moods which went to make up all this,
ought not to blind us to the enormous power that was needed for the
reproduction of a turbulent and not quite aimless chaos of the soul, in
which man seemed to be divorced alike from his brother-men in the
present, and from all the long succession and endeavour of men in the
past. It was no small feat to rise to a height that should command so
much, and to exhibit with all the force of life a world that had broken
loose from its moorings.

It is idle to vituperate this anarchy, either from the point of view of
a sour and precise Puritanism, or the more elevated point of a rational
and large faith in progress. Wise men are like Burke, who did not know
how to draw an indictment against a whole nation. They do not know how
to think nothing but ill of a whole generation, that lifted up its voice
in heartfelt complaint and wailing against the conceptions, forms, and
rulers, human and divine, of a society that the inward faith had
abandoned, but which clung to every outward ordinance; which only
remembered that man had property, and forgot that he had a spirit. This
is the complaint that rings through Byron's verse. It was this complaint
that lay deep at the bottom of the R