wit and
daring ridicule the performance is not unworthy of that supreme master
in _diablerie_. Nor can it be asserted that this lashing sarcasm was
undeserved, or that all the profanity was in Byron's parody, for
Southey's conception of the Almighty as a High Tory judge, with an
obsequious jury of angels, holding a trial of George III., browbeating
the witnesses against him and acquitting him with acclamation, so that
he leaves the court without a stain on his character, was false and
abject enough to stir the bile of a less irritable Liberal than Byron.
There exists, moreover, in the mind of every good English Whig a
lurking sympathy with the Miltonic Satan, insomuch that all subsequent
attempts by minor poets to humiliate and misrepresent him have
invariably failed. Southey's _Vision_, and Robert Montgomery's libel
upon Satan, have each undergone the same fate of being utterly
extinguished, knocked clean out of English literature by one single
crushing onslaught of Byron and Macaulay respectively.

Our conclusion must be brief, for in fact it is not easy to propound
to the readers of this Review any general observations, which shall be
new as well as true, upon a man's life and works that have been
subjected to incessant scrutiny and criticism throughout the
nineteenth century. At the beginning of this period Byron found
himself matched, in the poetic arena, against contemporary rivals of
first-class genius and striking originality. And from his death almost
up to the century's close there has been no time when some
considerable poet has not occupied the forefront of English letters,
and stamped his impression on the public mind. Variety in style and
ideas has produced many vicissitudes of taste in poetry; it has been
discovered that narrative can be better done in prose, and so the
novel has largely superseded story-telling in verse. There have also
been great political and social changes, and all these things have
severely tested the staying powers of a writer who is too closely
associated with his own period to be reckoned among those wide-ranging
spirits whom Shelley has called 'the kings of thought.' Nevertheless
the new edition of Byron is appearing at a moment which is, we think,
not inopportune. There is just now, as by a coincidence there was in
the year 1800, a dearth of poetic production; we have fallen among
lean years; we have come to a break in the succession of notable
poets; the Victorian celebrities