on Lord Castlereagh, may
equally apply to all the satire hurled against other individuals,
against governments and nations. His benevolence was so great and
universal, that it rendered the idea of the sufferings endured by
humanity quite intolerable to him. His love of justice likewise was so
great, that he became thoroughly indignant at seeing what he worshiped
trampled under foot by individual or national selfishness, while deceit
and injustice were reigning triumphant. Lord Byron conceived a sort of
hatred and dislike for the wicked, and those who voluntarily prevented
the well-being of men. And when thus indignant at some injustice, if he
snatched up a pen, he could not help expressing himself with a certain
kind of violence, in order to chastise, if he could not change, the
guilty men who martyrized Ireland, crushed and degraded Italy, and
condemned England to the hatred of the whole world. The sparkling, witty
strain, mocking at all human things, which had served as a weapon for
his reason while asserting the interests of truth and injustice in
Italy, and protesting against folly and evil, no longer sufficed him
then. He required to brand with fire the limit where folly stops and
crime begins. Thus it was not mocking, joking satire he would inflict on
these great culprits; but burning words to mark the limits where this
should stop, and stigmatize them by condemning moral deformity. This is
what he did, and wished to do, with regard to Castlereagh, and also with
regard to the Austrians in Italy. Shall it be said that his language was
occasionally too violent; that the punishment went beyond the crime?
But, in the first place, condemnation was pronounced in the language of
poetry; and then, does not appreciation of the measure kept depend
solely on the point of view taken by reason and conscience when they sat
in judgment?

Shall it be said that the moral sense of these invectives was not always
brought forward with all the clearness desirable? But let them be
examined attentively, and then the fine sentiments to which they owe
their origin will be understood.

Let us read "Avatar," for instance,--"Avatar," teeming with noble
anger,--and say if any poetry exists emitting flame and light purer, and
more intense in its moral life, more efficacious for keeping within the
boundaries of that humane just policy from which Lord Byron never
swerved.

If, in the war he waged against evil and its perpetrators, he did not