Lady Byron, his wavering
purposes, his impulsive acts, are a part of the character we trace through
all his life and work,--a strange mixture of magnanimity and brutality, of
laughter and tears, consistent in nothing but his passion and his pride,
yet redeeming all his defects by his graces, and wearing a greatness that
his errors can only half obscure.

Alternately the idol and the horror of his contemporaries, Byron was,
during his life, feared and respected as "the grand Napoleon of the realms
of rhyme." His works were the events of the literary world. The chief
among them were translated into French, German, Italian, Danish, Polish,
Russian, Spanish. On the publication of Moore's _Life_, Lord Macaulay had
no hesitation in referring to Byron as "the most celebrated Englishman of
the nineteenth century." Nor have we now; but in the interval between
1840-1870, it was the fashion to talk of him as a sentimentalist, a
romancer, a shallow wit, a nine days' wonder, a poet for "green unknowing
youth." It was a reaction, such as leads us to disestablish the heroes of
our crude imaginations till we learn that to admire nothing is as sure a
sign of immaturity as to admire everything.

The weariness, if not disgust, induced by a throng of more than usually
absurd imitators, enabled Carlyle, the poet's successor in literary
influence (followed with even greater unfairness by Thackeray), more
effectively to lead the counter-revolt. "In my mind," writes the former,
in 1839, "Byron has been sinking at an accelerated rate for the last ten
years, and has now reached a very low level.... His fame has been very
great, but I do not see how it is to endure; neither does that make him
great. No genuine productive thought was ever revealed by him to mankind.
He taught me nothing that I had not again to forgot." The refrain of
Carlyle's advice during the most active years of his criticism was, "Close
thy Byron, open thy Goethe." We do so, and find that the refrain of
Goethe's advice in reference to Byron is--"nocturna versate manu, versate
diurna." He urged Eckermann to study English that he might read him;
remarking, "A character of such eminence has never existed before, and
probably will never come again. The beauty of _Cain_ is such as we shall
not see a second time in the world.... Byron issues from the sea-waves
ever fresh. In _Helena_, I could not make use of any man as the
representative of the modern poetic era except him, who is