usly--certainly not with the conviction of Shelley--Byron was
on the side of the new movement in Europe; the spirit of Rousseau, the
unrest of 'Wilhelm Meister,' the revolutionary seething, with its tinge
of morbidness and misanthropy, its brilliant dreams of a new humanity,
and its reckless destructive theories. In France especially his
influence was profound and lasting. His wit and his lyric fire excused
his morbidness and his sentimental posing as a waif, unfriended in a
cold and treacherous world of women and men; and his genius made
misanthropy and personal recklessness a fashion. The world took his
posing seriously and his grievances to heart, sighed with him, copied
his dress, tried to imitate his adventures, many of them imaginary, and
accepted him as a perturbed, storm-tost spirit, representative of an age
of agitation.

[Illustration: LORD GEORGE GORDON BYRON.]

So he was, but not by consistent hypocritical premeditation; for his
pose was not so much of set purpose as in obedience to a false
education, an undisciplined temper, and a changing mind. He was guided
by the impulse of the moment. I think it a supportable thesis that every
age, every wide and popular movement, finds its supreme expression in a
Poet. Byron was the mouthpiece of a certain phase of his time. He
expressed it, and the expression remains and is important as a record,
like the French Revolution and the battle of Waterloo. Whatever the
judgment in history may be of the value to civilization of this
eighteenth-century movement extending into the nineteenth, in politics,
sociology, literature, with all its recklessness, morbidness,
hopefulness, Byron represented it. He was the poet of Revolt. He sounded
the note of intemperate, unconsidered defiance in the 'English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers.' This satire was audacious; many of its judgments were
unjust; but its wit and poetic vigor announced a new force in English
literature, and the appearance of a man who was abundantly able to take
care of himself and secure respectful treatment. In moments afterward he
expressed regret for it, or for portions of it, and would have liked to
soften its personalities. He was always susceptible to kindness, and
easily won by the good opinion of even a declared enemy. He and Moore
became lifelong friends, and between him and Walter Scott there sprang
up a warm friendship, with sincere reciprocal admiration of each other's
works. Only on politics and religion