had little affinity,
moral or artistic, with the spirit of our so-called Augustans, and his
determination to admire them was itself rebellious. Again we are reminded
of his phrase, "I am of the opposition." His vanity and pride were
perpetually struggling for the mastery, and though he thirsted for
popularity he was bent on compelling it; so he warred with the literary
impulse of which he was the child.

Byron has no relation to the master-minds whose works reflect a nation or
an era, and who keep their own secrets. His verse and prose is alike
biographical, and the inequalities of his style are those of his career.
He lived in a glass case, and could not hide himself by his habit of
burning blue lights. He was too great to do violence to his nature, which
was not great enough to be really consistent. It was thus natural for him
to pose as the spokesman of two ages--as a critic and as an author; and of
two orders of society--as a peer, and as a poet of revolt. Sincere in
both, he could never forget the one character in the other. To the last,
he was an aristocrat in sentiment, a democrat in opinion. "Vulgarity," he
writes with a pithy half-truth, "is far worse than downright black
guardism; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong sense at
times, while the former is a sad abortive attempt at all things,
signifying nothing." He could never reconcile himself to the English
radicals; and it has been acutely remarked, that part of his final
interest in Greece lay in the fact that he found it a country of classic
memories, "where a man might be the champion of liberty without soiling
himself in the arena." He owed much of his early influence to the fact of
his moving in the circles of rank and fashion; but though himself steeped
in the prejudices of caste, he struck at them at times with fatal force.
Aristocracy is the individual asserting a vital distinction between itself
and "the muck o' the world." Byron's heroes all rebel against the
associative tendency of the nineteenth century; they are self-worshippers
at war with society; but most of them come to bad ends. He maligned
himself in those caricatures, and has given more of himself in describing
one whom with special significance we call a brother poet. "Allen," he
writes in 1813, "has lent me a quantity of Burns's unpublished letters....
What an antithetical mind!--tenderness, roughness--delicacy, coarseness--
sentiment, sensuality--soaring and grovelling--di