gether
eclipsed the pure and original Romanticism of his elders Coleridge and
Wordsworth, of his juniors Shelley and Keats.

But although the more extreme admirers of Byron would no doubt dissent
strongly from even this judgment, it would probably be subscribed, with
some reservations and guards, by not a few good critics from whom I am
compelled to part company as to other parts of Byron's poetical claim.
It is on the question how much of true poetry lies behind and
independent of the scenery and properties of Byronism, that the great
debate arises. Was the author of the poems from _Childe Harold_ to _Don
Juan_ really gifted with the poetical "sincerity and strength" which
have been awarded him by a critic of leanings so little Byronic in the
ordinary sense of Matthew Arnold? Is he a poetic star of the first
magnitude, a poetic force of the first power, at all? There may seem to
be rashness, there may even seem to be puerile insolence and absurdity,
in denying or even doubting this in the face of such a European concert
as has been described and admitted above. Yet the critical conscience
admits of no transaction; and after all, as it was doubted by a great
thinker whether nations might not go mad like individuals, I do not know
why it should be regarded as impossible that continents should go mad
like nations.

At any rate the qualities of Byron are very much of a piece, and, even
by the contention of his warmest reasonable admirers, not much varied or
very subtle, not necessitating much analysis or disquisition. They can
be fairly pronounced upon in a judgment of few words. Byron, then, seems
to me a poet distinctly of the second class, and not even of the best
kind of second, inasmuch as his greatness is chiefly derived from a sort
of parody, a sort of imitation, of the qualities of the first. His verse
is to the greatest poetry what melodrama is to tragedy, what plaster is
to marble, what pinchbeck is to gold. He is not indeed an impostor; for
his sense of the beauty of nature and of the unsatisfactoriness of life
is real, and his power of conveying this sense to others is real also.
He has great, though uncertain, and never very _fine_, command of poetic
sound, and a considerable though less command of poetic vision. But in
all this there is a singular touch of illusion, of what his
contemporaries had learnt from Scott to call gramarye. The often cited
parallel of the false and true Florimels in Spenser applies h