_.] and
Tasso [Footnote: Byron, _The Lament of Tasso_; Shelley, _Song for
Tasso_; James Thomson, B. V., _Tasso to Leonora_.] have received most
attention on account of their wrongs. [Footnote: The sufferings of
several French poets are commented upon in English verse. Swinburne's
poetry on Victor Hugo, Bulwer Lytton's _Andre Chenier_, and Alfred
Lang's _Gerard de Nerval_ come to mind.]

Naturally the adversities which touch our writers most nearly are those
of the modern English poets. It is the poets of the romantic movement
who are thought of as suffering greatest injustice. Chatterton's extreme
youth probably has helped to incense many against the cruelty that
caused his death. [Footnote: See Shelley, _Adonais_; Coleridge, _Monody
on the Death of Chatterton_; Keats, _Sonnet on Chatterton_; James
Montgomery, _Stanzas on Chatterton_; Rossetti, _Sonnet to Chatterton_;
Edward Dowden, _Prologue to Maurice Gerothwohl's Version of Vigny's
Chatterton_; W. A. Percy, _To Chatterton_.] Southey is singled out by
Landor for especial commiseration; _Who Smites the Wounded_ is an
indignant uncovering of the world's cruelty in exaggerating Southey's
faults. Landor insinuates that this persecution is extended to all
geniuses:

Alas! what snows are shed
Upon thy laurelled head,
Hurtled by many cares and many wrongs!
Malignity lets none
Approach the Delphic throne;
A hundred lane-fed curs bark down Fame's
hundred tongues.
[Footnote: _To Southey_, _1833_.]

The ill-treatment of Burns has had its measure of denunciation. The
centenary of his birth brought forth a good deal of such verse.

Of course Byron's sufferings have had their share of attention, though,
remembering his enormous popularity, the better poets have left to the
more gullible rhymsters the echo of his tirades against persecution,
[Footnote: See T. H. Chivers, _Lord Byron's Dying Words to Ada_, and
_Byron_ (1853); Charles Soran, _Byron_ (1842); E. F. Hoffman, _Byron_
(1849).] and have conceived of the public as beaten at its own game by
him. Thus Shelley exults in the thought,

The Pythian of the age one arrow drew
And smiled. The spoilers tempt no second blow,
They fawn on the proud feet that laid them low.
[Footnote: _Adonais._]

The wrongs of Keats, also, are not so much stressed in genuine poetry as
formerly, and the fiction that his death was due to the hostility of his
critics is dying out, though Shelley's _Adonais_ will go far towar