for their sin. How far
they were guilty, or which of them was the more guilty, we know not.
We can judge no man. It is as poets and teachers, not as men and
responsible spirits; not in their inward beings, known only to Him
who made them, not even to themselves, but in their outward
utterance, that we have a right to compare them. Both have done
harm. Neither have, we firmly believe, harmed any human being who
had not already the harm within himself. It is not by introducing
evil, but by calling into consciousness and more active life evil
which was already lurking in the heart, that any writer makes men
worse. Thousands doubtless have read Byron and Shelley, and worse
books, and have risen from them as pure as when they sat down. In
evil as well as in good, the eye only sees that which it brings with
it the power of seeing--say rather, the wish to see. But it is
because, in spite of all our self-glorifying paeans, our taste has
become worse and not better, that Shelley, the man who conceitedly
despises and denies law, is taking the place of Byron, the man who
only struggles against it, and who shows his honesty and his
greatness most by confessing that his struggles are ineffectual;
that, Titan as he may look to the world, his strength is misdirected,
a mere furious weakness, which proclaims him a slave in fetters,
while prurient young gentlemen are fancying him heaping hills on
hills, and scaling Olympus itself. They are tired of that notion,
however, now. They have begun to suspect that Byron did not scale
Olympus after all. How much more pleasant a leader, then, must
Shelley be, who unquestionably did scale his little Olympus--having
made it himself first to fit his own stature. The man who has built
the hay-rick will doubtless climb it again, if need be, as often as
desired, and whistle on the top, after the fashion of the rick-
building guild, triumphantly enough. For after all Shelley's range
of vision is very narrow, his subjects few, his reflections still
fewer, when compared, not only with such a poet as Spenser, but with
his own contemporaries; above all with Byron. He has a deep heart,
but not a wide one; an intense eye, but not a catholic one. And,
therefore, he never wrote a real drama; for in spite of all that has
been said to the contrary, Beatrice Cenci is really none other than
Percy Bysshe Shelley himself in petticoats.

But we will let them both be. Perhaps they know better now.