man a _monster_; but shocked
at his pride he would willingly have said with Pascal, "If he raises
himself, I will lower him; if he abuses himself, I will raise him up."
In his drama of "Cain," where Lucifer is conducting Cain through space
and worlds, "Where is earth?" asks Cain. "'Tis now beyond thee, less in
the universe than thou in it," answers Lucifer. Byron always wished to
make man feel his littleness. It is true that, while saying the same
thing, a notable difference exists between Lord Byron's thought and that
of great Christian souls, who humble man in order to make him see that
his sole hope is in supernatural power. Lord Byron follows the same
road, but his starting-point and his goal are not the same. When Lord
Byron humbles man, it proceeds from a soul-felt want of truth and
justice. He sought truth by a natural law of his mind, expressed it
unflinchingly, and thus yielded a pleasure to his heart and
understanding. But if the impulse that sometimes provoked his severe or
contemptuous words was not the sublime one of Christian orthodoxy, that
sees no remedy for human depravity save in God alone, it was still
farther off from belonging to the school of the pessimists, of La
Rochefoucault in particular, who, content with asserting evil, neither
saw nor sought for a remedy anywhere. Lord Byron never despaired of
mankind. In early youth, especially, he thought,--not like a Utopist, or
even a poet, but like a sensible, humane, generous man, who deems that
many of the evils that afflict his species, morally and physically,
might be alleviated by better laws, under whose influence more goodness,
sincerity, and real virtue might be substituted for the hypocrisy and
other vices that now deprave our nature. Lord Byron saw in many vices
and littlenesses the work of man rather than of nature. It was man
corrupted by society, rather than by nature, that he condemned.

If religious hopes did not furnish him with an escape from the cruel
sentence, philosophical hopes saved him from being overwhelmed by it.
Was that an error?--an illusion? In any case, it was a noble one;
sufficient to raise up an insurmountable barrier between him and La
Rochefoucault. For a time, it is true, in his first youth, he also
seemed to be under the prestige La Rochefoucault exercised over so many
minds, through his "Maxims." The elegant manner in which they were
written, the clever tone of observation they displayed, boldly laying
down the resu