mischief." The answer is obvious: as long as
men call _bad_ good, there is a call for iconoclasts: half the reforms of
the world have begun in negation. Such comments also point to the common
error of trying to make men other than they are by lecturing them. This
scion of a long line of lawless bloods--a Scandinavian Berserker, if there
ever was one--the literary heir of the Eddas--was specially created to
wage that war--to smite the conventionality which is the tyrant of England
with the hammer of Thor, and to sear with the sarcasm of Mephistopheles
the hollow hypocrisy--sham taste, sham morals, sham religion--of the
society by which he was surrounded and infected, and which all but
succeeded in seducing him. But for the ethereal essence,--

The fount of fiery life
Which served for that Titanic strife,

Byron would have been merely a more melodious Moore and a more
accomplished Brummell. But the caged lion was only half tamed, and his
continual growls were his redemption. His restlessness was the sign of a
yet unbroken will. He fell and rose, and fell again; but never gave up the
struggle that keeps alive, if it does not save, the soul. His greatness as
well as his weakness lay, in the fact that from boyhood battle was the
breath of his being. To tell him not to fight, was like telling Wordsworth
not to reflect, or Shelley not to sing. His instrument is a trumpet of
challenge; and he lived, as he appropriately died, in the progress of an
unaccomplished campaign. His work is neither perfect architecture nor fine
mosaic; but, like that of his intellectual ancestors, the elder
Elizabethans whom he perversely maligned, it is all animated by the spirit
of action and of enterprise.

In good portraits his head has a lurid look, as if it had been at a higher
temperature than that of other men. That high temperature was the source
of his inspiration, and the secret of a spell which, during his life,
commanded homage and drew forth love. Mere artists are often mannikins.
Byron's brilliant though unequal genius was subordinate to the power of
his personality; he

Had the elements
So mix'd in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world--"This was a man."

We may learn much from him still, when we have ceased to disparage, as our
fathers ceased to idolize, a name in which there is so much warning and so
much example.

INDEX.

_Abydos, Bride of_
Adeline (Lady), analysis of female character