n of depreciating him. For him alone he finds expressions
of great admiration and real sympathy. He allows him to represent the
whole nation, and to be the incarnation of the English character; but on
one condition,--that of ruling it as its sovereign. Thanks to this
supremacy, the poet escapes more or less the exigencies of M. Taine's
theories.

M. Taine, however, is not subject to the weakness of enthusiasm.
Judging, as he does, in the light of a lover of nature, both of the
merits of virtue and of the demerits of vice, which to him are but fatal
results of the constitution, the climate, and the soil--"in a like
manner will sugar and vitriol"--why care about Lord Byron doing this or
the other _rightly_ or _wrongly_ rather than any one else? Nature
follows its necessary track, seeks its equilibrium, and ends by finding
it.

What pleases him in Lord Byron, is the facility which is offered to him
of proving the truth of this fatalist philosophy which appears at every
page of his book.

No one more than Byron could serve the purpose of M. Taine, and become,
as it were, the basis of his philosophical operations.

His powerful genius, his short but eventful existence, which did not
give time for the cooling down of the ardor of youth, to harmonize it
with the tempered dictates of mature age,--the universality of his mind,
which can furnish arguments to every species of critics,--all
contributed wonderfully to the realization of M. Taine's object.

Thus, thanks to the deceptive but generally received portrait which is
said to be that of Lord Byron, and to his identification with the heroes
of his poems, and in particular with "Manfred" and "Childe Harold,"
aided by the impossibility which the human mind finds in estimating
moral subjects as it would a proposition of "Euclid," M. Taine has been
able to make use of a great name, and to make a fine demonstration of
his system, to call Byron the interpreter of the British genius, and his
poetry the expression of the man himself.

In many respects, however, he has not been able to act in this way
without violating historical facts. This is what I hope to point out in
these pages, the object of which is to describe Byron as he was, and to
substitute, without any derogation to his sublimity of character, the
reality for the fiction created by M. Taine. To refute so brilliant and
so powerful a writer, my only means is to proceed in this work with the
help of positive proofs o