rker and a fighter. He hated tyranny, and was
prepared to sacrifice money and ease and life in the cause of popular
freedom. If the issue of his call to arms was greater and other than he
designed or foresaw, it was a generous instinct which impelled him to begin
the struggle.

With regard to the criticism of his works, Byron's personality has always
confused the issue. Politics, religion, morality, have confused, and still
confuse, the issue. The question for the modern critic is, of what
permanent value is Byron's poetry? What did he achieve for art, for the
intellect, for the spirit, and in what degree does he still give pleasure
to readers of average intelligence? It cannot be denied that he stands out
from other poets of his century as a great creative artist, that his canvas
is crowded with new and original images, additions to already existing
types of poetic workmanship. It has been said that Byron could only
represent himself under various disguises, that Childe Harold and The
Corsair, Lara and Manfred and Don Juan, are variants of a single
personality, the egotist who is at war with his fellows, the generous but
nefarious sentimentalist who sins and suffers and yet is to be pitied for
his suffering. None the less, with whatever limitations as artist or
moralist, he invented characters and types of characters real enough and
distinct enough to leave their mark on society as well as on literature.
These masks or replicas of his own personality were formative of thought,
and were powerful agents in the evolution of sentiment and opinion. In
language which was intelligible and persuasive, under shapes and forms
which were suggestive and inspiring, Byron delivered a message of
liberation. There was a double motive at work in his energies as a poet. He
wrote, as he said, because "his mind was full" of his own loves, his own
griefs, but also to register a protest against some external tyranny of law
or faith or custom. His own countrymen owe Byron another debt. His poems
were a liberal education in the manners and customs of "the gorgeous East,"
in the scenery, the art, the history and politics of Italy and Greece. He
widened the horizon of his contemporaries, bringing within their ken
wonders and beauties hitherto unknown or unfamiliar, and in so doing he
heightened and cultivated, he "touched with emotion," the unlettered and
unimaginative many, that "reading public" which despised or eluded the
refinements and subt