n lived intensely in the world which he affected to despise. Shelley
prophesied, with eyes fixed upon the coming age. We have found, in
Byron's contributions to the Pope controversy, one expression of his
instinctive sympathy with the classical and contempt for the Gothic.
Shelley, too, was a Hellenist; and to both, in their angry break with
authority and their worship of liberty, the naked freedom, the clear
light, the noble and harmonious forms of the antique were as attractive
as the twilight of the "ages of faith," with their mysticism, asceticism,
and grotesque superstitions, were repulsive. Remote as their own
feverish and exuberant poetry was from the unexcited manner of classical
work, the latter was the ideal towards which they more and more inclined.
The points at which these two poets touch our history, then, are few.
Byron, to be sure, cast "Childe Harold" into Spenserian verse, and gave
it a ballad title.[1] In the first canto there are a few archaisms;
words like _fere_, _shent_, and _losel_ occur, together with Gothic
properties, such as the "eremite's sad cell" and "Paynim shores" and
Newstead's "monastic dome." The ballad "Adieu, adieu my native shore,"
was suggested by "Lord Maxwell's Good-Night" in the "Border Minstrelsy,"
and introduces some romantic appurtenances: the harp, the falcon, and the
little foot-page. But this kind of falsetto, in the tradition of the
last-century Spenserians, evidently hampered the poet; so he shook
himself free from imitation after the opening stanzas, and spoke in his
natural voice.[2] "Lara" is a tale of feudal days, with a due proportion
of knights, dames, vassals, and pages; and an ancestral hall with gloomy
vaults and portrait galleries, where

"--the moonbeam shone
Through the dim lattice o'er the floor of stone,
And the high fretted roof and saints that there
O'er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer. . . .
The waving banner and the clapping door,
The rustling tapestry and the echoing floor;
The long dim shadows of surrounding trees,
The flapping bats, the night-song of the breeze,
Aught they behold or hear their thought appalls,
As evening saddens o'er the dark grey walls."

But these things are unimportant in Byron--mere commonplaces of
description inherited from Scott and Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe. Neither
is it of importance that "Parisina" is a tale of the year 1405, and has
an echo in it of convent bells and the death c