memorate their valour
and patriotic self-sacrifice in heroic verse.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] _Anglo-Saxon Review_, June 1900.

[17] _Epic and Romance_, p. 15.

[18]
'Ay Espana
Perdita por un gusto y por La Cava.'

_Romance del Rey Rodrigo._

[19]
So doth a woman weep, as her husband in death she embraces,
Him, who in front of his people and city has fallen in battle,
Striving in vain to defend his home from the fate of the vanquished.
She there, seeing him die, and gasping his life out before her,
Clings to him bitterly moaning. And round her the others, the foemen,
Beat her, and bid her arise, and stab at her back with the lances,
Dragging her off as a slave to the bondage of labour and sorrow.

_Odyssey_, viii. 523-29.

[20] _Iliad_, vi. 86-90.

[21] Arnold's translation.

[22] _Iliad_, xix. 228-29.

[23] Lessing.

THE WORKS OF LORD BYRON[24]

'When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to recount her
poetic glories in the century which has then just ended, the first
names will be Wordsworth and Byron.' Thus wrote Matthew Arnold in
1881, and now that the century's last autumn is passing away, a new
edition of Byron's works appears in the fullness of time to quicken
our memories and rekindle our curiosity, by placing before us a
complete record of the life, letters, and poetry of one whom Macaulay
declared in 1830 to be the most celebrated Englishman of the
nineteenth century, and who seventy years later may still be counted
among its most striking and illustrious figures.

As the new edition is issued by instalments, and several volumes are
still to come, to compare its contents, arrangement, and the editorial
accessories with those of preceding editions might be thought
premature. We may say, however, that a large number of Byron's
letters, not before printed, have now been added; and that the text of
this new material has been prepared from originals, whereas it is now
impossible so to collate the text of the greater number of the letters
heretofore published. Moore is supposed to have destroyed many of
those entrusted to him; and moreover he handled the originals very
freely, making large omissions, and transposing passages from one
letter to another, though we presume that he did not re-write and
amplify passages after the fashion in which certain French editors
have dealt with recent memoirs. The letters now for the first time
publish