however, the genius and the
personality of Byron had come to be vital influences all the world over,
and his voice had been recognised as the most human and the least insular
raised on English ground since Shakespeare's. In Russia he had created
Pushkin and Lermontoff; in Germany he had awakened Heine, inspired
Schumann, and been saluted as an equal by the poet of _Faust_ himself; in
Spain he had had a share in moulding the noisy and unequal talent of
Espronceda; in Italy he had helped to develop and to shape the melancholy
and daring genius of Leopardi; and in France he had been one of the
presiding forces of a great aesthetic revolution. To the men of 1830 he
was a special and peculiar hero. Hugo turned in his wake to Spain and
Italy and the East for inspiration. Musset, as Mr. Swinburne has
said--too bitterly and strongly said--became in a fashion a Kaled to his
Lara, 'his female page or attendant dwarf.' He was in some sort the
grandsire of the Buridan and the Antony of Dumas. Berlioz went to him
for the material for his _Harold en Italie_, his _Corsaire_ overture, and
his _Episode_. Delacroix painted the _Barque de Don Juan_ from him, with
the _Massacre de Scio_, the _Marino Faliero_, the _Combat du Giaour et du
Pacha_, and many a notable picture more. Is it at all surprising that M.
Taine should have found heart to say that alone among modern poets Byron
'atteint a la cime'? or that Mazzini should have reproached us with our
unaccountable neglect of him and with our scandalous forgetfulness of the
immense work done by him in giving a 'European _role_ . . . to English
literature' and in awakening all over the Continent so much 'appreciation
and sympathy for England'?

Byron and Wordsworth.

He had his share in the work of making Matthew Arnold possible, but he is
the antipodes of those men of culture and contemplation--those artists
pensive and curious and sedately self-contained--whom Arnold best loved
and of whom the nearest to hand is Wordsworth. Byron and Wordsworth are
like the Lucifer and the Michael of the _Vision of Judgment_. Byron's
was the genius of revolt, as Wordsworth's was the genius of dignified and
useful submission; Byron preached the dogma of private revolution,
Wordsworth the dogma of private apotheosis; Byron's theory of life was
one of liberty and self-sacrifice, Wordsworth's one of self-restraint and
self-improvement; Byron's practice was dictated by a vigorous and
voluptuou