and
plague-spot of the perverted soul. Alcibiades in politics and Byron in
literature are among its most conspicuous examples. Their defiance of
rule was not the confident daring which comes from the vision of genius,
but the disdainful audacity which springs from its wilfulness.
Alcibiades, a name closely connected with those events which resulted in
the ruin of the Athenian empire, was perhaps the most variously
accomplished of all those young men of genius who have squandered their
genius in the attempt to make it insolently dominant over justice and
reason. Graceful, beautiful, brave, eloquent, and affluent, the pupil of
Socrates, the darling of the Athenian democracy, lavishly endowed by
Nature with the faculties of the great statesman and the great captain,
with every power and every opportunity to make himself the pride and
glory of his country, he was still so governed by an imp of boyish
perversity and presumption, that he renounced the ambition of being the
first statesman of Athens in order to show himself its most restless,
impudent and unscrupulous trickster; and, subjecting all public objects
to the freaks of his own vanity and selfishness, ever ready to resent
opposition to his whim with treason against the state, he stands in
history a curious spectacle of transcendent gifts belittled by
profligacy of character, the falsest, keenest, most mischievous, and
most magnificent demagogue the world has ever seen.

If we turn from Alcibiades the politician to Byron the poet, we have a
no less memorable instance of intellectual power early linked with moral
perversity and completely bewitched and bedevilled by presumptuous
egotism. What, in consequence, was his career? Petulant, passionate,
self-willed, impatient of all external direction, the slave and victim
of the moment's impulse, yet full of the energies and visions of genius,
this arrogant stripling passes by quick leaps from boyhood into the
vices of age, and, after a short experience of the worst side of life,
comes out a scoffer and a misanthrope, fills the world with his gospel
of desperation and despair, and, after preaching disgust of existence
and contempt of mankind as the wisdom gleaned from his excesses, he
dies, worn out and _old_, at thirty-six.

Now neither in Byron's works nor Byron's life do we recognize the spirit
of youth,--the spirit which elevates as well as stimulates, which cheers
as well as inflames. Compare him in this respect with