."

The critics did not wait for Byron's death--it was vivisection. And after
his death the dissection was zealously continued. Byron's life lies open
to us in many books. Scarcely a month in the entire life of the man is
unaccounted for, and if a hiatus of a few weeks is found, the men of
imagination fill in and make him a pirate on the Mediterranean coast, or
give him a seraglio in some gloomy old Moorish palace in Venice.

In his lifetime Byron was overpraised and overcensured, and since his
death the dust has been allowed to gather over his matchless books.
Between the two extremes lies the truth; and the true Byron is just now
being discovered. Byron in literature will not die. He is the brightest
comet that has darted into our ken since Shakespeare's time; and as comets
have no orbit, but are vagrants of the heavens, so was he. Tragedy was in
his train, and his destiny was disgrace and death.

And yet as we review the life of this man, "the lame brat" of his mother,
as this mother called him, and behold the whirlwind of passion that swept
him on, the fulsome praise, the shrill outcry of hypocritical prudes and
pedants, the torrent of abuse, and the piling up of sins that he never
committed (and God knows he committed enough!); and yet behold his craving
for tenderness, the reaching out for truth, and hear his earnest and
unquenchable prayer to be understood and loved, we blot out the record of
his sins with our tears. To know the life of Byron and not be moved to
profoundest pity marks one as alien to his kind.

"God is on the side of the most sensitive," said Thoreau. And did there
ever tread the earth a man more sensitive than Byron?--such capacity for
suffering, such exaltation, such heights, such depths! Music made him
tremble and weep, and in the presence of kindness he was powerless. He
lived life to its fullest, and paid the penalty with shortened years. He
expressed himself without reserve--being emancipated from superstition and
precedent. And the man who is not dominated by the fetish of custom is
marked for contumely by the many. Custom makes law, and the one who
violates custom is "bad." Yet all respectable people are not good; and all
good people are not respectable. If you do not know this you are ignorant
of life.

So imagine this handsome, headstrong, restless young man, in whose lexicon
there was no such word as prudence, with time and money at his command,
defying the state, society and relig