ere also.
The really great poets do not injure each other in the very least by
comparison, different as they are. Milton does not "kill" Wordsworth;
Spenser does not injure Shelley; there is no danger in reading Keats
immediately after Coleridge. But read Byron in close juxtaposition with
any of these, or with not a few others, and the effect, to any good
poetic taste, must surely be disastrous; to my own, whether good or bad,
it is perfectly fatal. The light is not that which never was on land or
sea; it is that which is habitually just in front of the stage: the
roses are rouged, the cries of passion even sometimes (not always) ring
false. I have read Byron again and again; I have sometimes, by reading
Byron only and putting a strong constraint upon myself, got nearly into
the mood to enjoy him. But let eye or ear once catch sight or sound of
real poetry, and the enchantment vanishes.

Attention has already been called to the fact that Byron, though
generally ranking with the poets who have been placed before him in this
chapter as a leader in the nineteenth century renaissance of poetry, was
a direct scholar of Scott, and in point of age represented, if not a new
generation, a second division of the old. This was still more the case
in point of age, and almost infinitely more so in point of quality, as
regards Shelley and Keats. There was nothing really new in Byron; there
was only a great personal force directing itself, half involuntarily and
more than half because of personal lack of initiative, into contemporary
ways. The other two poets just mentioned were really new powers. They
took some colour from their elders; but they added more than they took,
and they would unquestionably have been great figures at any time of
English literature and history. Scott had little or no influence on
them, and Wordsworth not much; but they were rather close to Coleridge,
and they owed something to a poet of much less genius than his or than
their own--Leigh Hunt.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, the elder of the two, was Byron's junior by four
years, and was born at Field Place in Sussex in August 1792. He was the
heir of a very respectable and ancient though not very distinguished
family of the squirearchy; and he had every advantage of education,
being sent to Eton in 1804, and to University College, Oxford, six years
later. The unconquerable unconventionality of his character and his
literary tastes had shown themselves while he was