undoubted
talent of the writer--of the mischief which Byronism did on the
Continent. With us, though it made a great stir, it really did little
harm except to some "silly women" (as the apostle, in unkindly and
uncourtly, but truly apostolic fashion, had called similar persons of
the angelic sex ages before). Counter-jumpers like Thackeray's own
Pogson worshipped "the noble poet"; boys of nobler stamp like Tennyson
_thought_ they worshipped him, but if they were going to become men of
affairs forgot all about him; if they were to be poets took to Keats and
Shelley as models, not to him. Critics hardly took him seriously, except
for non-literary reasons. There was, as I think somebody (perhaps
Thackeray himself) says upon something, "too much roast beef about" for
us to fill our bellies with this worse than east wind of Sensibility
gone rotten. But abroad, for reasons which would be easy but irrelevant
to dwell upon, Byron hit the many-winged bird of popular favour on
nearly all its pinions. He ran strikingly and delightfully contrary to
the accepted _Anglais_, whether of the philosophical or the caricature
type; he was noble, but revolutionary; he looked (he never was, except
in non-essentials) Romantic; he was new, naughty, nice, all at once. And
they went mad over him, and to a large extent and for a long time
remained so; indeed, Continental criticism, whether Latin, Teutonic,
Scandinavian, or Slav, has never reached "the centre" about Byron. Now
George Sand was at no time exactly a silly woman, but she was for a long
time a woman off her balance. Byronism was exactly the -ism with which
she could execute the wildest feats of half-voluntary and
half-involuntary acrobatics, saltimbanquery, and chucking of her bonnet
over all conceivable and inconceivable mills. Childe Harold, Manfred,
Conrad, Lara, Don Juan, Sardanapalus--the shades of these caught her
and waltzed with her and reversed and figured and gesticulated,

With their Sentimentalibus lacrimae rorum, and pathos and
bathos delightful to see,

--or perhaps _not_ so very delightful?

But let us pass to the next stage.

[Sidenote: _Consuelo._]

Those persons (I think, without tempting Nemesis too much, I might say
those fortunate persons) to whom the world of books is almost as real as
the other two worlds of life and of dream, may or must have observed
that the conditions and sensations of the individual in all three are
very much the same. In par