Towards the close of the month—after almost fainting at the execution by guillotine of three bandits—he professes impatience to get back to Mariana, and early in the next we find him established with her near Venice, at the villa of La Mira, where for some time he continued to reside. His letters of June refer to the sale of Newstead, the mistake of Mrs. Leigh and others in attributing to him the Tales of a Landlord, the appearance of Lalla Rookh, preparations for Marino Faliero, and the progress of Childe Harold iv. This poem, completed in September, and published early in 1818 (with a dedication to Hobhouse, who had supplied most of the illustrative notes), first made manifest the range of the poet's power. Only another slope of ascent lay between him and the pinnacle, over which shines the red star of Cain. Had Lord Byron's public career closed when he left England, he would have been remembered for a generation as the author of some musical minor verses, a clever satire, a journal in verse exhibiting flashes of genius, and a series of fascinating romances—also giving promise of higher power—which had enjoyed a marvellous popularity. The third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold placed him on another platform, that of the Dii Majores of English verse. These cantos are separated from their predecessors, not by a stage, but by a gulf. Previous to their publication he had only shown how far the force of rhapsody could go; now he struck with his right hand, and from the shoulder. Knowledge of life and study of Nature were the mainsprings of a growth which the indirect influence of Wordsworth, and the happy companionship of Shelley, played their part in fostering. Faultlessness is seldom a characteristic of impetuous verse, never of Byron's; and even in the later parts of the Childe there are careless lines, and doubtful images. "Self-exiled Harold wanders forth again," looking "pale and interesting;" but we are soon refreshed by a higher note. No familiarity can distract from "Waterloo," which holds its own by Barbour's "Bannockburn," and Scott's "Flodden." Sir Walter, referring to the climax of the opening, and the pathetic lament of the closing lines, generously doubts whether any verses in English surpass them in vigour. There follows "The Broken Mirror," extolled by Jeffrey with an appreciation of its exuberance of fancy, and negligence of diction; and then the masterly sketch of Napoleon, with the implied reference to the writer at the end.

The descriptions in both cantos perpetually rise from a basis of rhetoric to a real height of poetry. Byron's "Rhine" flows, like the river itself, in a stream of "exulting and abounding" stanzas. His "Venice" may be set beside the masterpieces of Ruskin's prose. They are together the joint pride of Italy and England. The tempest in the third canto is in verse a splendid microcosm of the favourites, if not the prevailing mood, of the writer's mind. In spite of manifest flaws, the nine stanzas beginning "It is the hush of night," have enough in them to feed a high reputation. The poet's dying day, his sun and moon contending over the Rhaetian hill, his Thrasymene, Clitumnus, and Velino, show that his eye has grown keener, and his imagery at least more terse, and that he can occasionally forgot himself in his surroundings. The Drachenfels, Ehrenbreitstein, the Alps, Lake Leman, pass before us like a series of dissolving views. But the stability of the book depends on its being a Temple of Fame, as well as a Diorama of Scenery. It is no mere versified Guide, because every resting-place in the pilgrimage is made interesting by association with illustrious memories. Coblontz introduces the tribute to Marceau; Clarens an almost complete review, in five verses, of Rousseau; Lausanne and Ferney the quintessence of criticism on Gibbon and Voltaire. A tomb in Arqua suggests Petrarch; the grass-grown streets of Ferrara lead in the lines on Tasso; the white walls of the Etrurian Athens bring back Alfieri and Michael Angelo, and the prose bard of the hundred tales, and Dante, "buried by the upbraiding shore," and—

The starry Galileo and his woes.

Byron has made himself so master of the glories and the wrecks of Rome, that almost everything else that has been said of them seems superfluous. Hawthorne, in his Marble Fawn, comes nearest to him; but Byron's Gladiator and Apollo, if not his Laocoon, are unequalled. "The voice of Marius," says Scott, "could not sound more deep and solemn among the ruins of Carthage, than the strains of the pilgrim among the broken shrines and fallen statues of her subduer." As the third canto has a fitting close with the poet's pathetic remembrance of his daughter, so the fourth is wound up with consummate art,—the memorable dirge on the Princess Charlotte being followed by the address to the sea, which, enduring unwrinkled through all its ebbs and flows, seems to mock at the mutability of human life.

Manfred, his witch drama, as the author called it, has had a special attraction for inquisitive biographers, because it has been supposed in some dark manner to reveal the secrets of his prison house. Its lines have been tortured, like the witches of the seventeenth century, to extort from them the meaning of the "all nameless hour," and every conceivable horror has been alleged as its motif. On this subject Goethe writes with a humorous simplicity: "This singularly intellectual poet has extracted from my Faust the strongest nourishment for his hypochondria; but he has made use of the impelling principles for his own purposes.... When a bold and enterprising young man, he won the affections of a Florentine lady. Her husband discovered the amour, and murdered his wife; but the murderer was the same night found dead in the street, and there was no one to whom any suspicion could be attached. Lord Byron removed from Florence, but these spirits have haunted him all his life. This romantic incident explains innumerable allusions," e.g.,—

I have shed Blood, but not hers,—and yet her blood was shed.

Were it not for the fact that the poet had never seen the city in question when he wrote the poem, this explanation would be more plausible than most others, for the allusions are all to some lady who has been done to death. Galt asserts that the plot turns on a tradition of unhallowed necromancy—a human sacrifice, like that of Antinous attributed to Hadrian. Byron himself says it has no plot, but he kept teasing his questioners with mysterious hints, e.g. "It was the Staubbach and the Jungfrau, and something else more than Faustus, which made me write Manfred;" and of one of his critics he says to Murray, "It had a better origin than he can devise or divine, for the soul of him." In any case most methods of reading between its lines would, if similarly applied, convict Sophocles, Schiller, and Shelley of incest, Shakespeare of murder, Milton of blasphemy, Scott of forgery, Marlowe and Goethe of compacts with the devil. Byron was no dramatist, but he had wit enough to vary at least the circumstances of his projected personality. The memories of both Fausts—the Elizabethan and the German—mingle, in the pages of this piece, with shadows of the author's life; but to these it never gives, nor could be intended to give, any substantial form.

Manfred is a chaos of pictures, suggested by the scenery of Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald, half animated by vague personifications and sensational narrative. Like Harold, and Scott's Marmion, it just misses being a great poem. The Coliseum is its masterpiece of description, the appeal, "Astarte, my beloved, speak to me," its nearest approach to pathos. The lonely death of the hero makes an effective close to the moral tumult of the preceding scenes. But the reflections, often striking, are seldom absolutely fresh: that beginning,

The mind, which is immortal, makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts, Is its own origin of ill and end, And its own place and time,

is transplanted from Milton with as little change as Milton made in transplanting it from Marlowe. The author's own favourite passage, the invocation to the sun (act iii., sc. 2), has some sublimity, marred by lapses. The lyrics scattered through the poem sometimes open well, e.g.,—

Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains; They crowned him long ago, On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, With a null of snow;

but they cannot sustain themselves like true song-birds, and fall to the ground like spent rockets. This applies to Byron's lyrics generally; turn to the incantation in the Deformed Transformed: the first line and a half are in tune,—

Beautiful shadow of Thetis's boy, Who sleeps in the meadow whose grass grows o'er Troy.

Nor Sternhold nor Hopkins has more ruthlessly outraged our ears than the next two—

From the red earth, like Adam, thy likeness I shape, As the Being who made him, whose actions I ape(!)

Of his songs: "There be none of Beauty's daughters," "She walks in beauty," "Maid of Athens," "I enter thy garden of roses," the translation "Sons of the Greeks," and others, have a flow and verve that it is pedantry to ignore; but in general Byron was too much of the earth earthy to be a great lyrist. Some of the greatest have lived wild lives, but their wings were not weighted with the lead of the love of the world.

The summer and early months of the autumn of 1817 were spent at La Mira, and much of the poet's time was occupied in riding along the banks of the Brenta, often in the company of the few congenial Englishmen who came in his way; others, whom he avoided, avenged themselves by retailing stories, none of which wore "too improbable for the craving appetites of their slander-loving countrymen." In August he received a visit from Mr. Hobhouse, and on this occasion drew up the remarkable document afterwards given to Mr. M. G. Lewis for circulation in England, which appeared in the Academy of October 9th, 1869. In this document he says, "It has been intimated to me that the persons understood to be the legal advisers of Lady Byron have declared their lips to be sealed up on the cause of the separation between her and myself. If their lips are sealed up they are not sealed up by me, and the greatest favour they can confer upon me will be to open them." He goes on to state, that he repents having consented to the separation—will be glad to cancel the deed, or to go before any tribunal, to discuss the matter in the most public manner; adding, that Mr. Hobhouse (in whose presence he was writing) proposed, on his part, to go into court, and ending with a renewed asseveration of his ignorance of the allegations against him, and his inability to understand for what purpose they had been kept back, "unless it was to sanction the most infamous calumnies by silence." Hobhouse, and others, during the four succeeding years, ineffectually endeavoured to persuade the poet to return to England. Moore and others insist that Byron's heart was at home when his presence was abroad, and that, with all her faults, he loved his country still. Leigh Hunt, on the contrary, asserts that he cared nothing for England or its affairs. Like many men of genius, Byron was never satisfied with what he had at the time. "Romae Tibur amem ventosus Tibure Romam." At Seaham he is bored to death, and pants for the excitement of the clubs; in London society he longs for a desert or island in the Cyclades; after their separation, he begins to regret his wife; after his exile, his country. "Where," he exclaimed to Hobhouse, "is real comfort to be found out of England?" He frequently fell into the mood in which he wrote the verse,—

Yet I was born where men are proud to be, Not without cause: and should I leave behind Th'immortal island of the sage and free, And seek me out a home by a remoter sea?

But the following, to Murray (June 7, 1819), is equally sincere. "Some of the epitaphs at Ferrara pleased me more than the more splendid monuments of Bologna; for instance—

'Martini Luigi Implora pace.'

'Lucrezia Picini Implora eterna quiete.'"

Can anything be more full of pathos? These few words say all that can be said or sought; the dead had had enough of life; all they wanted was rest, and this they implore. There is all the helplessness, and humble hope, and death-like prayer that can arise from the grave—'implora pace.' "I hope, whoever may survive me, and shall see me put in the foreigner's burying-ground at the Lido, within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see these two words, and no more, put over me. I trust they won't think of pickling and bringing me home to Clod, or Blunderbuss Hall. I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country." Hunt's view is, in this as in other subtle respects, nearer the truth than Moore's; for with all Byron's insight into Italian vice, he hated more the master vice of England—hypocrisy; and much of his greatest, and in a sense latest, because unfinished work, is the severest, as it might be the wholesomest, satire ever directed against a great nation since the days of Juvenal and Tacitus.

In September (1817) Byron entered into negotiations, afterwards completed, for renting a country house among the Euganean hills near Este, from Mr. Hoppner, the English Consul at Venice, who bears frequent testimony to his kindness and courtesy. In October we find him settled for the winter in Venice, where he first occupied his old quarters, in the Spezieria, and afterwards hired one of the palaces of the Countess Mocenigo on the Grand Canal. Between this mansion, the cottage at Este, and the villa of La Mira, he divided his time for the next two years. During the earlier part of his Venetian career he had continued to frequent the salon of the Countess Albrizzi, where he met with people of both sexes of some rank and standing who appreciated his genius, though some among them fell into absurd mistakes. A gentleman of the company informing the hostess, in answer to some inquiry regarding Canova's busts, that Washington, the American President, was shot in a duel by Burke, "What, in the name of folly, are you thinking of?" said Byron, perceiving that the speaker was confounding Washington with Hamilton, and Burke with Burr. He afterwards transferred himself to the rival coterie of the Countess Benzoni, and gave himself up with little reserve to the intrigues which cast discredit on this portion of his life. Nothing is so conducive to dissipation as despair, and Byron had begun to regard the Sea-Cybele as a Sea-Sodom—when he wrote, "To watch a city die daily, as she does, is a sad contemplation. I sought to distract my mind from a sense of her desolation and my own solitude, by plunging into a vortex that was anything but pleasure." In any case, he forsook the "Dame," and, by what his biographer calls a "descent in the scale of refinement, for which nothing but the wayward state of his mind can account," sought the companions of his leisure hours among the wearers of the "fazzioli." The carnivals of the years 1818, 1819, mark the height of his excesses. Early in the former, Mariana Segati fell out of favour, owing to Byron's having detected her in selling the jewels he had given as presents, and so being led to suspect a large mercenary element in her devotion. To her succeeded Margarita Cogni, the wife of a baker who proved as accommodating as his predecessor, the linen-draper. This woman was decidedly a character, and Senor Castelar has almost elevated her into a heroine. A handsome virago, with brown shoulders, and black hair, endowed with the strength of an Amazon, "a face like Faustina's, and the figure of a Juno—tall and energetic as a pythoness," she quartered herself for twelve months in the palace as "Donna di governo," and drove the servants about without let or hindrance. Unable to read or write she intercepted his lordship's letters to little purpose; but she had great natural business talents, reduced by one half the expenses of his household, kept everything in good order, and, when her violences roused his wrath, turned it off with some ready retort or witticism. She was very devout, and would cross herself three times at the Angelus. One instance, of a different kind of devotion, from Byron's own account, is sufficiently graphic:—"In the autumn one day, going to the Lido with my gondoliers, we were overtaken by a heavy squall, and the gondola put in peril, hats blown away, boat filling, oar lost, tumbling sea, thunder, rain in torrents, and wind unceasing. On our return, after a tight struggle, I found her on the open stops of the Mocenigo Palace on the Grand Canal, with her great black eyes flashing through her tears, and the long dark hair which was streaming, drenched with rain, over her brows. She was perfectly exposed to the storm; and the wind blowing her dress about her thin figure, and the lightning flashing round her, made her look like Medea alighted from her chariot, or the Sibyl of the tempest that was rolling around her, the only living thing within hail at that moment, except ourselves. On seeing me safe she did not wait to greet me, as might have been expected; but, calling out to me, 'Ah! can' della Madonna, xe esto il tempo per andar' al' Lido,' ran into the house, and solaced herself with scolding the boatmen for not foreseeing the 'temporale.' Her joy at seeing me again was moderately mixed with ferocity, and gave me the idea of a tigress over her recovered cubs."

Some months after she became ungovernable—threw plates about, and snatched caps from the heads of other women who looked at her lord in public places. Byron told her she must go home; whereupon she proceeded to break glass, and threaten "knives, poison, fire;" and on his calling his boatmen to get ready the gondola, threw herself in the dark night into the canal. She was rescued, and in a few days finally dismissed; after which he saw her only twice, at the theatre. Her whole picture is more like that of Theroigne de Mericourt than that of Raphael's Fornarina, whose name she received.

Other stories, of course, gathered round this strange life—personal encounters, aquatic feats, and all manner of romantic and impossible episodes; their basis being, that Byron on one occasion thrashed, on another challenged, a man who tried to cheat him, was a frequent rider, and a constant swimmer, so that he came to be called "the English fish," "water-spaniel," "sea-devil," &c. One of the boatmen is reported to have said, "He is a good gondolier, spoilt by being a poet and a lord;" and in answer to a traveller's inquiry, "Where does he get his poetry?" "He dives for it." His habits, as regards eating, seem to have been generally abstemious; but he drank a pint of gin and water over his verses at night, and then took claret and soda in the morning.

Riotous living may have helped to curtail Byron's life, but it does not seem to have seriously impaired his powers. Among these adverse surroundings of the "court of Circe," he threw off Beppo, Mazeppa, and the early books of Don Juan. The first canto of the last was written in November, 1818, the second in January, 1819, the third and fourth towards the close of the same year. Beppo, its brilliant prelude, sparkles like a draught of champagne. This "Venetian story," or sketch, in which the author broke ground on his true satiric field—the satire of social life—and first adopted the measure avowedly suggested by Whistlecraft (Frere), was drafted in October, 1817, and appeared in May, 1818. It aims at comparatively little, but is perfectly successful in its aim, and unsurpassed for the incisiveness of its side strokes, and the courtly ease of a manner that never degenerates into mannerism. In Mazeppa the poet reverts to his earlier style, and that of Scott; the description of the headlong ride hurries us along with a breathless expectancy that gives it a conspicuous place among his minor efforts. The passage about the howling of the wolves, and the fever faint of the victim, is as graphic as anything in Burns—

The skies spun like a mighty wheel, I saw the trees like drunkards reel.

In the May or June of 1818 Byron's little daughter, Allegra, had been sent from England, under the care of a Swiss nurse too young to undertake her management in such trying circumstances, and after four months of anxiety he placed her in charge of Mrs. Hoppner. In the course of this and the next year there are frequent allusions to the child, all, save one which records a mere affectation of indifference, full of affectionate solicitude. In June, 1819, he writes, "Her temper and her ways, Mr. Hoppner says, are like mine, as well as her features; she will make, in that case, a manageable young lady." Later he talks of her as "flourishing like a pomegranate blossom." In March, 1820, we have another reference. "Allegra is prettier, I think, but as obstinate as a mule, and as ravenous as a vulture; health good, to judge by the complexion, temper tolerable, but for vanity and pertinacity. She thinks herself handsome, and will do as she pleases." In May he refers to having received a letter from her mother, but gives no details. In the following year, with the approval of the Shelleys then at Pisa, he placed her for education in the convent of Cavalli Bagni in the Romagna. "I have," he writes to Hoppner, who had thought of having her boarded in Switzerland, "neither spared care, kindness, nor expense, since the child was sent to me. The people may say what they please. I must content myself with not deserving, in this instance, that they should speak ill. The place is a country town, in a good air, and less liable to objections of every kind. It has always appeared to me that the moral defect in Italy does not proceed from a conventual education; because, to my certain knowledge, they come out of their convents innocent, even to ignorance of moral evil; but to the state of society into which they are directly plunged on coming out of it. It is like educating an infant on a mountain top, and then taking him to the sea, and throwing him into it, and desiring him to swim." Elsewhere he says, "I by no means intend to give a natural child an English education, because, with the disadvantages of her birth, her after settlement would be doubly difficult. Abroad, with a fair foreign education, and a portion of 5000l. or 6000l. (his will leaving her 5000l., on condition that she should not marry an Englishman, is here explained and justified), she might, and may, marry very respectably. In England such a dowry would be a pittance, while elsewhere it is a fortune. It is, besides, my wish that she should be a Roman Catholic, which I look upon as the best religion, as it is assuredly the oldest of the various branches of Christianity." It only remains to add that, when he heard that the child had fallen ill of fever in 1822, Byron was almost speechless with agitation, and, on the news of her death, which took place April 22nd, he seemed at first utterly prostrated. Next day he said, "Allegra is dead; she is more fortunate than we. It is God's will, let us mention it no more." Her remains rest beneath the elm-tree at Harrow which her father used to haunt in boyhood, with the date of birth and death, and the scripture—

I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.

The most interesting of the visits paid to Byron during the period of his life at Venice was that of Shelley, who, leaving his wife and children at Bagni di Lucca, came to see him in August, 1818. He arrived late, in the midst of a thunderstorm; and next day they sailed to the Lido, and rode together along the sands. The attitude of the two poets towards each other is curious; the comparatively shrewd man of the world often relied on the idealist for guidance and help in practical matters, admired his courage and independence, spoke of him invariably as the best of men, but never paid a sufficiently warm tribute in public to his work. Shelley, on the other hand, certainly the most modest of great poets, contemplates Byron in the fixed attitude of a literary worshipper.

The introduction to Julian and Maddalo, directly suggested by this visit, under the slight veil of a change in the name, gives a summary of the view of his friend's character which he continued to entertain. "He is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud; he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men; and instead of the latter having been employed in curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength;" but "in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as by a spell."

Subsequently to this visit Byron lent the villa at Este to his friend, and during the autumn weeks of their residence there were written the lines among the Euganean hills, where, in the same strain of reverence, Shelley refers to the "tempest-cleaving swan of Albion," to the "music flung o'er a mighty thunder-fit," and to the sunlike soul destined to immortalize his ocean refuge,—

As the ghost of Homer clings Round Seamander's wasting springs, As divinest Shakespeare's might Fills Avon and the world with light.

"The sun," he says, at a later date, "has extinguished the glowworm;" and again, "I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may; and there is no other with whom it is worth contending."

Shelley was, in the main, not only an exquisite but a trustworthy critic; and no man was more absolutely above being influenced by the fanfaronade of rank or the din of popularity. These criticisms are therefore not to be lightly set aside, nor are they unintelligible. Perhaps those admirers of the clearer and more consistent nature, who exalt him to the rank of a greater poet, are misled by the amiable love of one of the purest characters in the history of our literature. There is at least no difficulty in understanding why he should have been, as it were, concussed by Byron's greater massiveness and energy into a sense—easy to an impassioned devotee—of inferiority. Similarly, most of the estimates— many already reversed, others reversible—by the men of that age, of each other, can be explained. We can see how it was that Shelley overestimated both the character and the powers of Hunt; and Byron depreciated Keats, and was ultimately repelled by Wordsworth, and held out his hand to meet the manly grasp of Scott. The one enigma of their criticism is the respect that they joined in paying to the witty, genial, shallow, worldly, musical Tom Moore.

This favourite of fortune and the minor muses, in the course of a short tour through the north of Italy in the autumn of 1819, found his noble friend on the 8th of October at La Mira, went with him on a sight-seeing expedition to Venice, and passed five or six days in his company. Of this visit he has recorded his impressions, some of which relate to his host's personal appearance, others to his habits and leading incidents of his life. Byron "had grown fatter, both in person and face, and the latter had suffered most by the change, having lost by the enlargement of the features some of that refined and spiritualized look that had in other times distinguished it, but although less romantic he appeared more humorous." They renewed their recollections of the old days and nights in London, and compared them with later experiences of Bores and Blues, in a manner which threatened to put to flight the historical and poetical associations naturally awakened by the City of the Sea. Byron had a rooted dislike to any approach to fine talk in the ordinary intercourse of life; and when his companion began to rhapsodize on the rosy hue of the Italian sunsets, he interrupted him with, "Come, d—n it, Tom, don't be poetical." He insisted on Moore, who sighed after what he imagined would be the greater comforts of an hotel, taking up his quarters in his palace; and as they were groping their way through the somewhat dingy entrance, cried out, "Keep clear of the dog!" and a few paces farther, "Take care, or the monkey will fly at you!" an incident recalling the old vagaries of the menagerie at Newstead. The biographer's reminiscences mainly dwell on his lordship's changing moods and tempers and gymnastic exercises, his terror of interviewing strangers, his imperfect appreciation of art, his preference of fish to flesh, his almost parsimonious economy in small matters, mingled with allusions to his domestic calamities, and frequent expressions of a growing distaste to Venetian society. On leaving the city, Moore passed a second afternoon at La Mira, had a glimpse of Allegra, and the first intimation of the existence of the notorious Memoirs. "A short time after dinner Byron left the room, and returned carrying in his hand a white leather bag. 'Look here,' he said, holding it up; 'this would be worth something to Murray, though you, I dare say, would not give sixpence for it.' 'What is it?' I asked. 'My life and adventures,' he answered. 'It is not a thing,' he answered, 'that can be published during my lifetime, but you may have it if you like. There, do whatever you please with it.' In taking the bag, and thanking him most warmly, I added, 'This will make a nice legacy for my little Tom, who shall astonish the latter days of the nineteenth century with it.'"[2] Shortly after, Moore for the last time bade his friend farewell, taking with him from Madame Guiccioli, who did the honours of the house, an introduction to her brother, Count Gamba, at Rome. "Theresa Guiccioli," says Castelar, "appears like a star on the stormy horizon of the poet's life." A young Romagnese, the daughter of a nobleman of Ravenna, of good descent but limited means, she had been educated in a convent, and married in her nineteenth year to a rich widower of sixty, in early life a friend of Alfieri, and noted as the patron of the National Theatre. This beautiful blonde, of pleasing manners, graceful presence, and a strong vein of sentiment, fostered by the reading of Chateaubriand, met Byron for the first time casually when she came in her bridal dress to one of the Albrizzi reunions; but she was only introduced to him early in the April of the following year, at the house of the Countess Benzoni. "Suddenly the young Italian found herself inspired with a passion of which till that moment her mind could not have formed the least idea; she had thought of love but as an amusement, and now became its slave." Byron, on the other hand, gave what remained of a heart, never alienated from her by any other mistress. Till the middle of the month they met every day; and when the husband took her back to Ravenna she despatched to her idol a series of impassioned letters, declaring her resolution to mould her life in accordance with his wishes. Towards the end of May she had prepared her relatives to receive Byron as a visitor. He started in answer to the summons, writing on his way the beautiful stanzas to the Po, beginning—

River that rollest by the ancient walls Where dwells the lady of my love.

[Footnote 2: In December, 1820, Byron sent several more sheets of memoranda from Ravenna, and in the following year suggested an arrangement by which Murray paid over to Moore, who was then in difficulties, 2000l. for the right of publishing the whole, under the condition, among others, that Lady Byron should see them, and have the right of reply to anything that might seem to her objectionable. She on her part declined to have anything to do with them. When the Memoirs were destroyed, Moore paid back the 2000l., but obtained four thousand guineas for editing the Life and Correspondence.]

Again passing through Ferrara, and visiting Bologna, he left the latter on the 8th, and on his arrival at his destination found the Countess dangerously ill; but his presence, and the attentions of the famous Venetian doctor, Aglietti, who was sent for by his advice, restored her. The Count seems to have been proud of his guest. "I can't make him out at all," Byron writes; "he visits me frequently, and takes me out (like Whittington the Lord Mayor) in a coach and six horses. The fact appears to be, that he is completely governed by her—and, for that matter, so am I." Later he speaks of having got his horses from Venice, and riding or driving daily in the scenery reproduced in the third canto of Don Juan:—

Sweet hour of twilight! in the solitude Of the pine forest, and the silent shore Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood.

On Theresa's recovery, in dread of a possible separation he proposed to fly with her to America, to the Alps, to "some unsuspected isle in the far seas;" and she suggested the idea of feigning death, like Juliet, and rising from the tomb. Neither expedient was called for. When the Count went to Bologna, in August, with his wife, Lord Byron was allowed to follow; and—after consoling himself during an excursion which the married pair made to their estate, by hovering about her empty rooms and writing in her books—he established himself, on the Count's return to his headquarters, with her and Allegra at Bologna. Meanwhile, Byron had written The Prophecy of Dante, and in August the prose letter, To the Editor of the British Review, on the charge of bribery in Don Juan. Than this inimitable epistle no more laughter-compelling composition exists. About the same time, we hear of his leaving the theatre in a convulsion of tears, occasioned by the representation of Alfieri's Mirra.

He left Bologna with the Countess on the 15th of September, when they visited the Euganean hills and Arqua, and wrote their names together in the Pilgrim's Book. On arriving at Venice, the physicians recommending Madame Guiccioli to country air, they settled, still by her husband's consent, for the autumn at La Mira, where Moore and others found them domesticated. At the beginning of November the poet was prostrated by an attack of tertian fever. In some of his hours of delirium he dictated to his careful nurses, Fletcher and the Countess, a number of verses, which she assures us were correct and sensible. He attributes his restoration to cold water and the absence of doctors; but, ere his complete recovery, Count Guiccioli had suddenly appeared on the scene, and run away with his own wife. The lovers had for a time not only to acquiesce in the separation, but to agree to cease their correspondence. In December, Byron in a fit of spleen had packed up his belongings, with a view to return to England. "He was," we are told, "ready dressed for the journey, his boxes on board the gondola, his gloves and cap on, and even his little cane in his hand, when my lord declares that if it should strike one—which it did—before everything was in order, he would not go that day. It is evident he had not the heart to go." Next day he heard that Madame Guiccioli was again seriously ill, received and accepted the renewed invitation which bound him to her and to the south. He left Venice for the last time almost by stealth, rushed along the familiar roads, and was welcomed at Ravenna.



CHAPTER VIII.

1820-1821.

RAVENNA—DRAMAS—CAIN—VISION OF JUDGMENT.

Byrons's life at Ravenna was during the first months comparatively calm; nevertheless, he mingled in society, took part in the Carnival, and was received at the parties of the Legate. "I may stay," he writes in January, 1820, "a day—a week—a year—all my life." Meanwhile, he imported his movables from Venice, hired a suite of rooms in the Guiccioli palace, executed his marvellously close translation of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore, wrote his version of the story of Francesca of Rimini, and received visits from his old friend Bankes and from Sir Humphrey Davy. At this time he was accustomed to ride about armed to the teeth, apprehending a possible attack from assassins on the part of Count Guiccioli. In April his letters refer to the insurrectionary movements then beginning against the Holy Alliance. "We are on the verge of a row here. Last night they have over-written all the city walls with 'Up with the Republic!' and 'Death to the Pope!' The police have been searching for the subscribers, but have caught none as yet. The other day they confiscated the whole translation of the fourth canto of Childe Harold, and have prosecuted the translator." In July a Papal decree of separation between the Countess and her husband was obtained, on condition of the latter paying from his large income a pittance to the lady of 200 l. a year, and her undertaking to live in her father's house—an engagement which was, first in the spirit, and subsequently in the letter, violated. For a time, however, she retired to a villa about fifteen miles from Ravenna, where she was visited by Byron at comparatively rare intervals. By the end of July he had finished Marino Faliero, and ere the close of the year the fifth canto of Don Juan. in September he says to Murray, "I am in a fierce humour, at not having Scott's Monastery. No more Keats,[1] I entreat. There is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the manikin. I don't feel inclined to care further about Don Juan. What do you think a very pretty Italian lady said to me the other day, when I remarked that 'it would live longer than Childe Harold'? 'Ah! but I would rather have the fame of Childe Harold for three years than an immortality of D. J.'" This is to-day the common female judgment; it is known to have been La Guiccioli's, as well as Mrs. Leigh's, and by their joint persuasion Byron was for a season induced to lay aside "that horrid, wearisome Don." About this time he wrote the memorable reply to the remarks on that poem in Blackwood's Magazine', where he enters on a defence of his life, attacks the Lakers, and champions Pope against the new school of poetry, lamenting that his own practice did not square with his precept; and adding, "We are all wrong, except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell."

[Footnote 1: In a note on a similar passage, bearing the date November 12, 1821, he, however, confesses:—"My indignation at Mr. Keats' depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius, which malgre all the fantastic fopperies of his style was undoubtedly of great promise. His fragment of Hyperion seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as AEschylus. He is a loss to our literature."]

In November he refers to reports of his letters being opened by the Austrian officials, and the unpleasant things the Huns, as he calls them, are likely to find therein. Early in the next month he tells Moore that the commandant of their troops, a brave officer, but obnoxious to the people, had been found lying at his door, with five slugs in him, and, bleeding inwardly, had died in the palace, where he had been brought to be nursed.

This incident is versified in Don Juan, v. 33-39, with anatomical minuteness of detail. After trying in vain to wrench an answer out of death, the poet ends in his accustomed strain—

But it was all a mystery. Here we are, And there we go:—but where? Five bits of lead— Or three, or two, or one—send very far!

Assassination has sometimes been the prelude to revolution, but it may be questioned if it has over promoted the cause of liberty. Most frequently it has served as a pretext for reaction, or a red signal. In this instance—as afterwards in 1848—overt acts of violence made the powers of despotism more alert, and conduced with the half-hearted action of their adversaries to the suppression of the rising of 1820-21. Byron's sympathy with the movement seems to have been stimulated by his new associations. Theresa's brother, Count Pietro, an enthusiastic young soldier, having returned from Rome and Naples, surmounting a prejudice not wholly unnatural, became attached to him, and they entered into a partnership in behalf of what—adopting a phrase often flaunted in opposite camps—they called constitutional principles. Finally the poet so committed himself to the party of insurrection that, though his nationality secured him from direct attack, his movements were necessarily affected by the fiasco. In July the Gambas were banished from the Romagna, Pietro being actually carried by force over the frontier; and, according to the articles of her separation, the Countess had to follow them to Florence. Byron lingered for some mouths, partly from a spirit of defiance, and partly from his affection towards a place where he had enlisted the regards of numerous beneficiaries. The Gambas were for some time bent on migrating to Switzerland; but the poet, after first acquiescing, subsequently conceived a violent repugnance to the idea, and early in August wrote to Shelley, earnestly requesting his presence, aid, and counsel. Shelley at once complied, and, entering into a correspondence with Madame Guiccioli, succeeded in inducing her relatives to abandon their transmontane plans, and agree to take up their headquarters at Pisa. This incident gave rise to a series of interesting letters, in which the younger poet gives a vivid and generous account of the surroundings and condition of his friend. On the 2nd of August he writes from Ravenna:—"I arrived last night at ten o'clock, and sat up talking with Lord B. till five this morning. He was delighted to see me. He has, in fact, completely recovered his health, and lives a life totally the reverse of that which he led at Venice.... Poor fellow! he is now quite well, and immersed in politics and literature. We talked a great deal of poetry and such matters last night, and, as usual, differed, I think, more than ever. He affects to patronize a system of criticism fit only for the production of mediocrity; and, although all his finer poems and passages have been produced in defiance of this system, yet I recognize the pernicious effects of it in the Doge of Venice." Again, on the 15th: "Lord B. is greatly improved in every respect—in genius, in temper, in moral views, in health, and happiness. His connexion with La Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him. He lives in considerable splendour, but within his income, which is now about 4000l. a year, 1000l. of which he devotes to purposes of charity. Switzerland is little fitted for him; the gossip and the cabals of those Anglicised coteries would torment him, as they did before. Ravenna is a miserable place. He would in every respect be better among the Tuscans. He has read to me one of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan. It sets him not only above, but far above, all the poets of the day. Every word has the stamp of immortality.... I have spoken to him of Hunt, but not with a direct view of demanding a contribution. I am sure, if I asked, it would not be refused; yet there is something in me that makes it impossible. Lord B. and I are excellent friends; and were I reduced to poverty, or were I a writer who had no claim to a higher position than I possess, I would freely ask him any favour. Such is not now the case." Later, after stating that Byron had decided upon Tuscany, he says, in reference to La Guiccioli, "At the conclusion of a letter, full of all the fine things she says she has heard of me, is this request, which I transcribe:—'Signore, la vostra bonta mi fa ardita di chiedervi un favore, me lo accordarete voi? Non partite da Ravenna senza milord.' Of course, being now by all the laws of knighthood captive to a lady's request, I shall only be at liberty on my parole until Lord Byron is settled at Pisa."

Shelley took his leave, after a visit of ten days' duration, about the 17th or 18th of April. In a letter, dated August 26, he mentions having secured for his lordship the Palazzo Lanfranchi, an old spacious building on the Lung' Arno, once the family residence of the destroyers of Ugolino, and still said to be haunted by their ghosts. Towards the close of October, he says they have been expecting him any day those six weeks. Byron, however, did not leave till the morning of the 29th. On his road, there occurred at Imola the accidental meeting with Lord Clare. Clare—who on this occasion merely crossed his friend's path on his way to Rome—at a later date came on purpose from Geneva before returning to England to visit the poet, who, then at Leghorn, recorded in a letter to Moore his sense of this proof of old affection undecayed. At Bologna—his next stage—he met Rogers by appointment, and the latter has preserved his memory of the event in well-known lines. Together they revisited Florence and its galleries, where they were distracted by the crowds of sight-seeing visitors. Byron must have reached Pisa not later than the 2nd of November (1821), for his first letter from there bears the date of the 3rd.

The later months of the poet's life at Ravenna were marked by intense literary activity. Over a great part of the year was spread the controversy with Bowles about Pope, i.e. between the extremes of Art against Nature, and Nature against Art. It was a controversy for the most part free from personal animus, and on Byron's part the genuine expression of a reaction against a reaction. To this year belong the greater number of the poet's Historical Dramas. What was said of these, at the time by Jeffrey, Heber, and others, was said with justice; it is seldom that the criticism of our day finds so little to reverse in that of sixty years ago.

The author, having shown himself capable of being pathetic, sarcastic, sentimental, comical, and sublime, we would be tempted to think that he had written these plays to show, what no one before suspected, that he could also be dull, were it not for his own exorbitant estimation of them. Lord Byron had few of the powers of a great dramatist; he had little architectural imagination, or capacity to conceive and build up a whole. His works are mainly masses of fine, splendid, or humorous writing, heaped together; the parts are seldom forged into one, or connected by any indissoluble link. His so-called Dramas are only poems divided into chapters. Further, he had little of what Mr. Ruskin calls penetrative imagination. So it has been plausibly said that he made his men after his own image, his women after his own heart. The former are, indeed, rather types of what he wished to be than what he was. They are better, and worse, than himself. They have stronger wills, more definite purposes, but less genial and less versatile natures. But it remains true, that when he tried to represent a character totally different from himself, the result is either unreal or uninteresting. Marino Faliero, begun April, finished July, 1820, and prefixed by a humorous dedication to Goethe—which was, however, suppressed—was brought on the stage of Drury Lane Theatre early in 1821, badly mangled, appointed, and acted—and damned.

Byron seems to have been sincere in saying he did not intend any of his plays to be represented. We are more inclined to accuse him of self-deception when he asserts that he did not mean them to be popular; but he took sure means to prevent them from being so. Marino Faliero, in particular, was pronounced by Dr. John Watkins—old Grobius himself—"to be the dullest of dull plays;" and even the warmest admirers of the poet had to confess that the style was cumbrous. The story may be true, but it is none the less unnatural. The characters are comparatively commonplace, the women especially being mere shadows; the motion is slow; and the inevitable passages of fine writing are, as the extolled soliloquy of Lioni, rather rhetorical than imaginative. The speeches of the Doge are solemn, but prolix, if not ostentatious, and—perhaps the vital defect—his cause fails to enlist our sympathies. Artistically, this play was Byron's most elaborate attempt to revive the unities and other restrictions of the severe style, which, when he wrote, had been "vanquished in literature." "I am persuaded," he writes in the preface, "that a great tragedy is not to be produced by following the old dramatists, who are full of faults, but by producing regular dramas like the Greeks." He forgets that the statement in the mouth of a Greek dramatist that his play was not intended for the stage, would have been a confession of failure; and that Aristotle had admitted that even the Deity could not make the Past present. The ethical motives of Faliero are, first, the cry for vengeance—the feeling of affronted or unsatiated pride,—that runs through so much of the author's writing, and second, the enthusiasm for public ends, which was beginning to possess him. The following lines have been pointed out as embodying some of Byron's spirit of protest against the more selfish "greasy domesticity" of the Georgian era:—

I. BER. Such ties are not For those who are called to the high destinies Which purify corrupted commonwealths: We must forget all feelings save the one, We must resign all passions save our purpose, We must behold no object save our country, And only look on death as beautiful So that the sacrifice ascend to heaven, And draw down freedom on her evermore.

CAL. But if we fail—?

I. BER. They never fail who die In a great cause: the block may soak their gore; Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs Be strung to city gates and castle walls, But still their spirit walks abroad.

—a passage which, after his wont, he spoils by platitudes about the precisian Brutus, who certainly did not give Rome liberty.

Byron's other Venetian Drama, the Two Foscari, composed at Ravenna, between the 11th of June and the 10th of July, 1821, and published in the following December, is another record of the same failure and the same mortification, due to the same causes. In this play, as Jeffrey points out, the preservation of the unities had a still more disastrous effect. The author's determination to avoid rant did not hinder his frequently adopting an inflated style; while professing to follow the ancient rules, he forgets the warning of Horace so far as to permit the groans of the tortured Foscari to be heard on the stage. The declamations of Marina produce no effect on the action, and the vindictiveness of Loridano, though effectively pointed in the closing words, "He has paid me," is not rendered interesting, either by a well established injury, or by any trace of Iago's subtle genius.

In the same volume appeared Sardanapalus, written in the previous May, and dedicated to Goethe. In this play, which marks the author's last reversion to the East, we are more arrested by the majesty of the theme—

Thirteen hundred years Of empire ending like a shepherd's tale,

by the grandeur of some of the passages, and by the development of the chief character, made more vivid by its being distinctly autobiographical. Sardanapalus himself is Harold, raised "high on a throne," and rousing himself at the close from a life of effeminate lethargy. Myrrha has been often identified with La Guiccioli, and the hero's relation to his Queen Zarina compared with that of the poet to his wife; but in his portrait of the former the author's defective capacity to represent national character is manifest: Myrrha is only another Gulnare, Medora, or Zuleika. In the domestic play of Werner—completed at Pisa in January, 1822, and published in November, there is no merit either of plan or execution; for the plot is taken, with little change, from "The German's Tale," written by Harriet Lee, and the treatment is throughout prosaic. Byron was never a master of blank verse; but Werner, his solo success on the modern British stage, is written in a style fairly parodied by Campbell, when he cut part of the author's preface into lines, and pronounced them as good as any in the play.

The Deformed Transformed, another adaptation, suggested by a forgotten novel called The Three Brothers, with reminiscences of Faust, and possibly of Scott's Black Dwarf, was begun at Pisa in 1821, but not published till January, 1824. This fragment owes its interest to the bitter infusion of personal feeling in the first scene, and its occasional charm to the march of some of the lines, especially those describing the Bourbon's advance on Rome; but the effect of the magical element is killed by previous parallels, while the story is chaotic and absurd. The Deformed Transformed bears somewhat the same relation to Manfred as Heaven and Earth—an occasionally graphic dream of the world before the Deluge, written October, 1821, and issued about the same time as Moore's Loves of the Angels, on a similar theme—does to Cain. The last named, begun in July, and finished at Ravenna in September, is the author's highest contribution to the metaphysical poetry of the century. In Cain Byron grapples with the perplexities of a belief which he never either accepted or rejected, and with the yet deeper problems of life and death, of good and ill. In dealing with these his position is not that of one justifying the ways of God to man—though he somewhat disingenuously appeals to Milton in his defence—nor that of the definite antagonism of Queen Mab. The distinction in this respect between Byron and Shelley cannot be over-emphasized. The latter had a firm faith other than that commonly called Christian. The former was, in the proper sense of the word, a sceptic, beset with doubts, and seeking for a solution which he never found, shifting in his expression of them with every change of a fickle and inconsistent temperament. The atmosphere of Cain is almost wholly negative; for under the guise of a drama, which is mainly a dialogue between two halves of his mind, the author appears to sweep aside with something approaching to disdain the answers of a blindly accepted tradition, or of a superficial optimism, e.g.—

CAIN. Then my father's God did well When he prohibited the fatal tree.

LUCIFER. But had done better in not planting it.

Again, a kid, after suffering agonies from the sting of a reptile, is restored by antidotes—

Behold, my son! said Adam, how from evil Springs good!

LUCIFER. What didst thou answer?

CAIN. Nothing; for He is my father; but I thought, that 'twere A better portion for the animal Never to have been stung at all.

This rebellious nature naturally yields to the arguments of Lucifer, a spirit in which much of the grandeur of Milton's Satan is added to the subtlety of Mephistopheles. In the first scene Cain is introduced, rebelling against toils imposed on him by an offence committed before he was born,—"I sought not to be born"—the answer, that toil is a good, being precluded by its authoritative representation as a punishment; in which mood he is confirmed by the entrance and reasonings of the Tempter, who identifies the Deity with Seva the Destroyer, hints at the dreadful visitation of the yet untasted death; when Adah, entering, takes him at first for an angel, and then recognizes him as a fiend. Her invocation to Eve, and comparison of the "heedless, harmless, wantonness of bliss" in Eden, to the later lot of those girt about with demons from whose fascination they cannot fly, is one of the most striking in the drama; as is the line put into the mouth of the poet's most beautiful female character, to show that God cannot be alone,—

What else can joy be, but diffusing joy?

Her subsequent contrast of Lucifer with the other angels is more after the style of Shelley than anything else in Byron—

As the silent sunny moon, All light, they look upon us. But thou seemst Like an ethereal night, where long white clouds Streak the deep purple, and unnumber'd stars Spangle the wonderful mysterious vault With things that look as if they would be suns— So beautiful, unnumber'd and endearing; Not dazzling, and yet drawing us to them, They fill my eyes with tears, and so dost thou.

The flight with Lucifer, in the second act, in the abyss of space and through the Hades of "uncreated night," with the vision of long-wrecked worlds, and the interminable gloomy realms

Of swimming shadows and enormous shapes,

—suggested, as the author tells us, by the reading of Cuvier—leaves us with impressions of grandeur and desolation which no other passages of English poetry can convey. Lord Byron has elsewhere exhibited more versatility of fancy and richness of illustration, but nowhere else has he so nearly "struck the stars." From constellation to constellation the pair speed on, cleaving the blue with mighty wings, but finding in all a blank, like that in Richter's wonderful dream. The result on the mind of Cain is summed in the lines on the fatal tree,—

It was a lying tree—for we know nothing; At least, it promised knowledge at the price Of death—but knowledge still; but, what knows man?

A more modern poet answers, after beating at the same iron gates, "Behold, we know not anything." The most beautiful remaining passage is Cain's reply to the question—what is more beautiful to him than all that he has seen in the "unimaginable ether"?—

My sister Adah.—All the stars of heaven, The deep blue noon of night, lit by an orb Which looks a spirit, or a spirit's world— The hues of twilight—the sun's gorgeous coming— His setting indescribable, which fills My eyes with pleasant tears as I behold Him sink, and feel my heart flow softly with him Along that western paradise of clouds The forest shade—the green bough—the bird's voice— The vesper bird's, which seems to sing of love, And mingles with the song of cherubim, As the day closes over Eden's walls:— All these are nothing, to my eyes and heart, Like Adah's face.

Lucifer's speech, at the close of the act is perhaps too Miltonic to be absolutely original. Returning to earth, we have a pastoral, of which Sir Egerton Brydges justly and sufficiently remarks, "The censorious may say what they will, but there are speeches in the mouth of Cain and Adah, especially regarding their child, which nothing in English poetry but the 'wood-notes wild' of Shakespeare, ever equalled." Her cry, as Cain seems to threaten the infant, followed by the picture of his bloom and joy, is a touch of perfect pathos. Then comes the interview with the pious Abel, who is amazed at the lurid light in the eyes of his brother, with the spheres "singing in thunder round" him—the two sacrifices, the murder, the shriek of Zillah—

Father! Eve! Adah! Come hither! Death is in the world;

Cain's rallying from stupor—

I am awake at last—a dreary dream Had madden'd me,—but he shall never wake:

the curse of Eve; and the close—[Greek: meizon ae kata dakrua]

CAIN. Leave me.

ADAH. Why all have left thee.

CAIN. And wherefore lingerest thou? Dost thou not fear?

ADAH. I fear Nothing, except to leave thee.

* * * * *

CAIN. Eastward from Eden will we take our way.

ADAH. Leave! thou shalt be my guide; and may our God Be thine! Now let us carry forth our children.

CAIN. And he who lieth there was childless. I Have dried the fountain of a gentle race. O Abel!

ADAH. Peace be with him.

CAIN. But with me!

Cain, between which and the Cenci lies the award of the greatest single performance in dramatic shape of our century, raised a storm. It was published, with Sardanapalus and The Two Foscari in December, 1821, and the critics soon gave evidence of the truth of Elze's remark— "In England freedom of action is cramped by the want of freedom of thought. The converse is the case with us Germans; freedom of thought is restricted by the want of freedom in action. To us this scepticism presents nothing in the least fearful." But with us it appeared as if a literary Guy Fawkes had been detected in the act of blowing up half the cathedrals and all the chapels of the country. The rage of insular orthodoxy was in proportion to its impotence. Every scribbler with a cassock denounced the book and its author, though few attempted to answer him. The hubbub was such that Byron wrote to Murray, authorizing him to disclaim all responsibility, and offering to refund the payment he had received. "Say that both you and Mr. Gilford remonstrated. I will come to England to stand trial. 'Me, me, adsum qui feci,'"—and much to the same effect. The book was pirated; and on the publisher's application to have an injunction, Lord Eldon refused to grant it. The majority of the minor reviewers became hysterical, and Dr. Watkins, amid much almost inarticulate raving, said that Sir Walter Scott, who had gratefully accepted the dedication, would go down to posterity with the brand of Cain upon his brow. Several even of the higher critics took fright. Jeffrey, while protesting his appreciation of the literary merits of the work, lamented its tendency to unsettle faith. Mr. Campbell talked of its "frightful audacity." Bishop Heber wrote at great length to prove that its spirit was more dangerous than that of Paradise Lost—and succeeded. The Quarterly began to cool towards the author. Moore wrote to him, that Cain was "wonderful, terrible, never to be forgotten," but "dreaded and deprecated" the influence of Shelley. Byron showed the letter to Shelley, who wrote to a common friend to assure Mr. Moore that he had not the smallest influence over his lordship in matters of religion, and only wished he had, as he would "employ it to eradicate from his great mind the delusions of Christianity, which seem perpetually to recur, and to lie in ambush for the hours of sickness and distress." Shelley elsewhere writes: "What think you of Lord B.'s last volume? In my opinion it contains finer poetry than has appeared in England since Paradise Lost. Cain is apocalyptic; it is a revelation not before communicated to man." In the same strain, Scott says of the author of the "grand and tremendous drama:" "He has certainly matched Milton on his own ground." The worst effect of those attacks appears in the shifts to which Byron resorted to explain himself,—to be imputed, however, not to cowardice, but to his wavering habit of mind. Great writers in our country have frequently stirred difficult questions in religion and life, and then seemed to be half scared, like Rouget de Lisle, by the reverberation of their own voices. Shelley almost alone was always ready to declare, "I meant what I said, and stand to it."

Byron having, with or without design, arraigned some of the Thirty-Nine Articles of his countrymen, proceeded in the following month (October 1821) to commit an outrage, yet more keenly resented, on the memory of their sainted king, the pattern of private virtue and public vice, George III. The perpetration of this occurred in the course of the last of his numerous literary duels, of which it was the close. That Mr. Southey was a well-meaning and independent man of letters, there can be no doubt. It does not require the conclusive testimony of the esteem of Savage Landor to compel our respect for the author of the Life of Nelson, and the open-handed friend of Coleridge; nor is it any disparagement that, with the last-named and with Wordsworth, he in middle life changed his political and other opinions. But in his dealings with Lord Byron, Southey had "eaten of the insane root." He attacked a man of incomparably superior powers, for whom his utter want of humour—save in its comparatively childish forms—made him a ludicrously unequal match, and paid the penalty in being gibbeted in satires that will endure with the language. The strife, which seems to have begun on Byron's leaving England, rose to its height when his lordship, in the humorous observations and serious defence of his character against "the Remarks" in Blackwood, 1819 (August), accused the Laureate of apostasy, treason, and slander.

In 1821, when the latter published his Vision of Judgment—the most quaintly preposterous panegyric ever penned—he prefixed to it a long explanatory note, in the course of which he characterizes Don Juan as a "monstrous combination of horror and mockery, lewdness and impiety," regrets that it has not been brought under the lash of the law, salutes the writer as chief of the Satanic school, inspired by the spirits of Moloch and Belial, and refers to the remorse that will overtake him on his death-bed. To which Byron, inter alia: "Mr. Southey, with a cowardly ferocity, exults over the anticipated death-bed repentance of the objects of his dislike, and indulges himself in a pleasant 'Vision of Judgment,' in prose, as well as verse, full of impious impudence. What Mr. Southey's sensations or ours may be in the awful moment of leaving this state of existence, neither he nor we can pretend to decide. In common, I presume, with most men of any reflection, I have not waited for a death-bed to repent of many of my actions, notwithstanding the 'diabolical pride' which this pitiful renegade in his rancour would impute to those who scorn him." This dignified, though trenchant, rejoinder would have been unanswerable; but the writer goes on to charge the Laureate with spreading calumnies. To this charge Southey, in January, 1822, replies with "a direct and positive denial," and then proceeds to talk at large of the "whip and branding iron," "slaves of sensuality," "stones from slings," "Goliahs," "public panders," and what not, in the manner of the brave days of old.

In February Byron, having seen this assault in the Courier, writes off in needless heat, "I have got Southey's pretended reply; what remains to be done is to call him out,"—and despatches a cartel of mortal defiance. Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, through whom this was sent, judiciously suppressed it, and the author's thirst for literary blood was destined to remain unquenched. Meanwhile he had written his own Vision of Judgment. This extraordinary work, having been refused by both Murray and Longman, appeared in 1822 in the pages of the Liberal. It passed the bounds of British endurance; and the publisher, Mr. John Hunt, was prosecuted and fined for the publication.

Readers of our day will generally admit that the "gouty hexameters" of the original poem, which celebrates the apotheosis of King George in heaven, are much more blasphemous than the ottava rima of the travesty, which professes to narrate the difficulties of his getting there. Byron's Vision of Judgment is as unmistakably the first of parodies as the Iliad is the first of epics, or the Pilgrim's Progress the first of allegories. In execution it is almost perfect. Don Juan is in scope and magnitude a far wider work; but no considerable series of stanzas in Don Juan are so free from serious artistic flaw. From first to last, every epithet hits the white; every line that does not convulse with laughter stings or lashes. It rises to greatness by the fact that, underneath all its lambent buffoonery, it is aflame with righteous wrath. Nowhere in such space, save in some of the prose of Swift, is there in English so much scathing satire.



CHAPTER IX.

1821-1823.

PISA—GENOA—DON JUAN.

Byron, having arrived at Pisa with his troop of carriages, horses, dogs, fowls, servants, and a monkey, settled himself quietly in the Palazzo Lanfranchi for ten months, interrupted only by a sojourn of six weeks in the neighbourhood of Leghorn. His life in the old feudal building followed in the main the tenour of his life at Ravenna. He rose late, received visitors in the afternoons, played billiards, rode or practised with his pistols, in concert with Shelley, whom he refers to at this time as "the most companionable man under thirty" he had ever met. Both poets were good shots, but Byron the safest; for, though his hand often shook, he made allowance for the vibration, and never missed his mark. On one occasion he set up a slender cane, and at twenty paces divided it with his bullet. The early part of the evening he gave to a frugal meal and the society of La Guiccioli—now apparently, in defiance of the statute of limitations, established under the same roof—and then sat late over his verses. He was disposed to be more sociable than at Venice or Ravenna, and occasionally entertained strangers; but his intimate acquaintanceship was confined to Captain Williams and his wife, and Shelley's cousin, Captain Medwin. The latter used frequently to dine and sit with his host till the morning, collecting materials for the Conversations which he afterwards gave to the world. The value of these reminiscences is impaired by the fact of their recording, as serious revelations, the absurd confidences in which the poet's humour for mystification was wont to indulge. Another of the group, an Irishman, called Taafe, is made, in his Lordship's correspondence of the period, to cut a somewhat comical figure. The master-passion of this worthy and genial fellow was to get a publisher for a fair commentary on Dante, to which he had firmly linked a very bad translation, and for about six months Byron pesters Murray with constant appeals to satisfy him; e.g. November l6, "He must be gratified, though the reviewers will make him suffer more tortures than there are in his original." March 6, "He will die if he is not published; he will be damned if he is; but that he don't mind." March 8, "I make it a point that he shall be in print; it will make the man so exuberantly happy. He is such a good-natured Christian that we must give him a shove through the press. Besides, he has had another fall from his horse into a ditch." Taafe, whose horsemanship was on a par with his poetry, can hardly have been consulted as to the form assumed by these apparently fruitless recommendations, so characteristic of the writer's frequent kindliness and constant love of mischief. About this time Byron received a letter from Mr. Shepherd, a gentleman in Somersetshire, referring to the death of his wife, among whose papers he had found the record of a touching, because evidently heart-felt, prayer for the poet's reformation, conversion, and restored peace of mind. To this letter he at once returned an answer. marked by much of the fine feeling of his best moods. Pisa, December 8: "Sir, I have received your letter. I need not say that the extract which it contains has affected me, because it would imply a want of all feeling to have read it with indifference.... Your brief and simple picture of the excellent person, whom I trust you will again meet, cannot be contemplated without the admiration due to her virtues and her pure and unpretending piety. I do not know that I ever met with anything so unostentatiously beautiful. Indisputably, the firm believers in the Gospel have a great advantage over all others—for this simple reason, that if true they will have their reward hereafter; and if there be no hereafter, they can but be with the infidel in his eternal sleep.... But a man's creed does not depend upon himself: who can say, I will believe this, that, or the other? and least of all that which he least can comprehend.... I can assure you that not all the fame which ever cheated humanity into higher notions of its own importance, would ever weigh in my mind against the pure and pious interest which a virtuous being may be pleased to take in my behalf. In this point of view I would not exchange the prayer of the deceased in my behalf for the united glory of Homer, Caesar, and Napoleon."

The letter to Lady Byron, which he afterwards showed to Lady Blessington, must have borne about the same date; and we have a further indication of his thoughts reverting homeward in an urgent request to Murray—written on December 10th, Ada's sixth birthday—to send his daughter's miniature. After its arrival nothing gave him greater pleasure than to be told of its strong likeness to himself. In the course of the same month an event occurred which strangely illustrates the manners of the place, and the character of the two poets. An unfortunate fanatic having taken it into his head to steal the wafer-box out of a church at Lucca, and being detected, was, in accordance with the ecclesiastical law till lately maintained against sacrilege, condemned to be burnt alive. Shelley, who believed that the sentence would really be carried into effect, proposed to Byron that they should gallop off together, and by aid of their servants rescue by force the intended victim. Byron, however, preferred in the first place, to rely on diplomacy; some vigorous letters passed; ultimately a representation, convoyed by Taafe to the English Ambassador, led to a commutation of the sentence, and the man was sent to the galleys.

The January of 1822 was marked by the addition to the small circle of Captain E.J. Trelawny, the famous rover and bold free-lance (long sole survivor of the remarkable group), who accompanied Lord Byron to Greece, and has recorded a variety of incidents of the last months of his life. Trelawny, who appreciated Shelley with an intensity that is often apt to be exclusive, saw, or has reported, for the most part the weaker side of Byron. We are constrained to accept as correct the conjecture that his judgment was biassed by their rivalry in physical prowess, and the political differences which afterwards developed between them. Letters to his old correspondents—to Scott about the Waverleys, to Murray about the Dramas, and the Vision of Judgment, and Cain—make up almost the sole record of the poet's pursuits during the five following months. In February 6th he sent, through Mr. Kinnaird, the challenge to Southey, of the suppression of which he was not aware till May 17. The same letter contains a sheaf of the random cynicisms, as—"Cash is virtue," "Money is power; and when Socrates said he knew nothing, he meant he had not a drachma"—by which he sharpened the shafts of his assailants. A little later, on occasion of the death of Lady Noel, he expresses himself with natural bitterness on hearing that she had in her will recorded a wish against his daughter Ada seeing his portrait. In March he sat, along with La Guiccioli, to the sculptor Bartolini. On the 24th, when the company were on one of their riding excursions outside the town, a half-drunken dragoon on horseback broke through them, and by accident or design knocked Shelley from his seat. Byron, pursuing him along the Lung' Arno, called for his name, and, taking him for an officer, flung his glove. The sound of the fray brought the servants of the Lanfranchi to the door; and one of them, it was presumed—though in the scuffle everything remained uncertain—seriously wounded the dragoon in the side. An investigation ensued, as the result of which the Gambas were ultimately exiled from Tuscany, and the party of friends was practically broken up. Shelley and his wife, with the Williamses and Trelawny, soon after settled at the Villa Magni at Lerici in the Gulf of Spezia. Byron, with the Countess and her brother, established themselves in the Villa Rossa at Monte Nero, a suburb of Leghorn, from which port at this date the remains of Allegra were conveyed to England.

Among the incidents of this residence were, the homage paid to the poet by a party of Americans; the painting of his portrait (and that of La Guiccioli) by the artist West, who has left a pleasing account of his visits; Byron's letter making inquiry about the country of Bolivar (where it was his fancy to settle); and another of those disturbances by which he seemed destined to be harassed. One of his servants—among whom were unruly spirits, apparently selected with a kind of Corsair bravado,—had made an assault on Count Pietro, wounding him in the face. This outburst, though followed by tears and penitence, confirmed the impression of the Tuscan police that the whole company were dangerous, and made the Government press for their departure. In the midst of the uproar, there suddenly appeared at the villa Mr. Leigh Hunt, with his wife and six children. They had taken passage to Genoa, where they were received by Trelawny, in command of the "Bolivar"—a yacht constructed in that port for Lord Byron, simultaneously with the "Don Juan" for Shelley. The latter, on hearing of the arrival of his friends, came to meet them at Leghorn, and went with them to Pisa. Early in July they were all established on the Lung' Arno, having assigned to them the ground floor of the palazzo.

We have now to deal briefly—amid conflicting asseverations it is hard to deal fairly—with the last of the vexatiously controverted episodes which need perplex our narrative. Byron, in wishing Moore from Ravenna a merry Christmas for 1820, proposes that they shall embark together in a newspaper, "with some improvement on the plan of the present scoundrels," "to give the age some new lights on policy, poesy, biography, criticism, morality, theology," &c. Moore absolutely refusing to entertain the idea, Hunt's name was brought forward in connexion with it, during tho visit of Shelley. Shortly after the return of the latter to Pisa, he writes (August 26) to Hunt, stating that Byron was anxious to start a periodical work, to be conducted in Italy, and had proposed that they should both go shares in the concern, on which follow some suggestions of difficulties about money. Nevertheless, in August, 1821, he presses Hunt to come. Moore, on the other hand, strongly remonstrates against the project. "I heard some days ago that Leigh Hunt was on his way to you with all his family; and the idea seems to be that you and he and Shelley are to conspire together in the Examiner. I deprecate such a plan with all my might. Partnerships in fame, like those in trade, make the strongest party answer for the rest. I tremble even for you with such a bankrupt Co.! You must stand alone." Shelley—who had, in the meantime, given his bond to Byron for an advance of 200l. towards the expenses of his friends, besides assisting them himself to the utmost of his power—began, shortly before their arrival, to express grave doubts as to the success of the alliance. His last published letter—written July 5th, 1822—after they had settled at Pisa, is full of forebodings. On the 8th he set sail in the "Don Juan"—

That fatal and perfidious bark, Built in th'eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark,

and was overtaken by the storm in which he perished. Three days after, Trelawny rode to Pisa, and told Byron of his fears, when the poet's lips quivered, and his voice faltered. On the 22nd of July the bodies of Shelley, Williams, and Vivian, were cast ashore. On the 16th August, Hunt, Byron, and Trelawny were present at the terribly weird cremation, which they have all described. At a later date, the two former were seized with a fit of delirium which is one of the phases of the tension of grief. Byron's references to the event are expressions less of the loss which he indubitably felt, than of his indignation at the "world's wrong." "Thus," he writes, "there is another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly and ignorantly and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it." Towards the end of the same letter the spirit of his dead friend seems to inspire the sentence —"With these things and these fellows it is necessary, in the present clash of philosophy and tyranny, to throw away the scabbard. I know it is against fearful odds, but the battle must be fought."

Meanwhile, shortly after the new settlement at the Lanfranchi, the preparations for issuing the Liberal, edited by Leigh Hunt in Italy, and published by John Hunt in London, progressed. The first number, which appeared in September, was introduced, after a few words of preface, by the Vision of Judgment, with the signature Quevedo Redivivus, and adorned by Shelley's translation of the "May-Day Night," in Faust. It contained besides, the Letter to the Editor of my Grandmother's Review, an indifferent Florentine story, a German apologue, and a gossiping account of Pisa, presumably by Hunt. Three others followed, containing Byron's Heaven and Earth, his translation of the Morgante Maggiore, and The Blues—a very slight, if not silly, satire on literary ladies; some of Shelley's posthumous minor poems, among them "I arise from dreams of thee," and a few of Hazlitt's essays, including, however, none of his best. Leigh Hunt himself wrote most of the rest, one of his contributions being a palpable imitation of Don Juan, entitled the Book of Beginnings, but he confesses that owing to his weak health and low spirits at the time, none of these did justice to his ability; and the general manner of the magazine being insufficiently vigorous to carry off the frequent eccentricity of its matter, the prejudices against it prevailed, and the enterprise came to an end. Partners in failing concerns are apt to dispute; in this instance the unpleasantness which arose at the time rankled in the mind of the survivor, and gave rise to his singularly tasteless and injudicious book—a performance which can be only in part condoned by the fact of Hunt's afterwards expressing regret, and practically withdrawing it. He represents himself throughout as a much-injured man, lured to Italy by misrepresentations, that he might give the aid of his journalistic experience and undeniable talents to the advancement of a mercenary enterprise, and that when it failed he was despised, insulted, and rejected. Byron, on the other hand, declares, "The Hunts pressed me to engage in this work, and in an evil hour I consented;" and his subsequent action in the matter, if not always gentle never unjust, goes to verify his statements in the letters of the period. "I am afraid," he writes from Genoa, Oct. 9, 1822, "the journal is a bad business. I have done all I can for Leigh Hunt since he came here; but it is almost useless. His wife is ill, his six children not very tractable, and in the affairs of this world he himself is a child." Later he says to Murray, "You and your friends, by your injudicious rudeness, cement a connexion which you strove to prevent, and which, had the Hunts prospered, would not in all probability have continued. As it is ... I can't leave them among the breakers." On February 20th we have, his last word on the subject, to the same effect.

In the following sentences, Moore seems to give a fair statement of the motives which led to the establishment of the unfortunate journal—"The chief inducements on the part of Lord Byron to this unworthy alliance were, in the first place, a wish to second the kind views of his friend Shelley in inviting Mr. Hunt to Italy; and in the next, a desire to avail himself of the aid of one so experienced as an editor in the favourite object he has so long contemplated of a periodical work in which all the offspring of his genius might be received as they sprung to light." For the accomplishment of this purpose Mr. Leigh Hunt was a singularly ill-chosen associate. A man of Radical opinions on all matters, not only of religion but of society—opinions which he acquired and held easily but firmly—could never recognize the propriety of the claim to deference which "the noble poet" was always too eager to assert, and was inclined to take liberties which his patron perhaps superciliously repelled. Mrs. Hunt does not seem to have been a very judicious person. "Trelawny here," said Byron jocularly, "has been speaking against my morals." "It is the first time I ever heard of them," she replied. Mr. Hunt, by his own admission, had "peculiar notions on the subject of money." Byron, on his part, was determined not to be "put upon," and doled out through his steward stated allowances to Hunt, who says that only "stern necessity and a large family" induced him to accept them. Hunt's expression that the 200l. was, in the first instance, a debt to Shelley, points to the conclusion that it was remitted on that poet's death. Besides this, Byron maintained the family till they left Genoa for Florence in 1823, and defrayed up to that date all their expenses. He gave his contributions to the Liberal gratis; and, again by Hunt's own confession, left to him and his brother the profits of the proprietorship. According to Mr. Galt "The whole extent of the pecuniary obligation appears not to have exceeded 500 l.; but, little or great, the manner in which it was recollected reflects no credit either on the head or heart of the debtor."

Of the weaknesses on which the writer—bent on verifying Pope's lines on Atossa—from his vantage in the ground-floor, was enabled to dilate, many are but slightly magnified. We are told for instance, in very many words, that Byron clung to the privileges of his rank while wishing to seem above them; that he had a small library, and was a one-sided critic; that Bayle and Gibbon supplied him with the learning he had left at school; that, being a good rider with a graceful seat, he liked to be told of it; that he showed letters he ought not to have shown; that he pretended to think worse of Wordsworth than he did; that he knew little of art or music, adored Rossini, and called Rubens a dauber; that, though he wrote Don Juan under gin and water, he had not a strong head, &c., &c. It is true, but not new. But when Hunt proceeds to say that Byron had no sentiment; that La Guiccioli did not really care much about him; that he admired Gifford because he was a sycophant, and Scott because he loved a lord; that he had no heart for anything except a feverish notoriety; that he was a miser from his birth, and had "as little regard for liberty as Allieri,"—it is new enough, but it is manifestly not true. Hunt's book, which begins with a caricature on the frontispiece, and is inspired in the main by uncharitableness, yet contains here and there gleams of a deeper insight than we find in all the volumes of Moore—an insight, which, in spite of his irritated egotism, is the mark of a man with the instincts of a poet, with some cosmopolitan sympathies, and a courage on occasion to avow them at any risk. "Lord Byron," he says truly, "has been too much admired by the English because he was sulky and wilful, and reflected in his own person their love of dictation and excitement. They owe his memory a greater regard, and would do it much greater honour if they admired him for letting them know they were not so perfect a nation as they supposed themselves, and that they might take as well as give lessons of humanity, by a candid comparison of notes with civilization at large."

In July, when at Leghorn, the Gambas received orders to leave Tuscany; and on his return to Pisa, Byron, being persecuted by the police, began to prepare for another change. After entertaining projects about Greece, America, and Switzerland—Trelawny undertaking to have the "Bolivar" conveyed over the Alps to the Lake of Geneva—he decided on following his friends to Genoa. He left in September with La Guiccioli, passed by Lerici and Sestri, and then for the ten remaining mouths of his Italian life took up his quarters at Albaro, about a mile to the east of the city, in the Villa Saluzzo, which Mrs. Shelley had procured for him and his party. She herself settled with the Hunts—who travelled about the same time, at Byron's expense, but in their own company—in the neighbouring Casa Negroto. Not far off, Mr. Savage Landor was in possession of the Casa Pallavicini, but there was little intercourse between the three. Landor and Byron, in many respects more akin than any other two Englishmen of their age, were always separated by an unhappy bar or intervening mist. The only family with whom the poet maintained any degree of intimacy was that of the Earl of Blessington, consisting of the Earl himself—a gouty old gentleman, with stories about him of the past—the Countess, and her sister, Miss Power, and the "cupidon dechaine," the Anglo-French Count Alfred d'Orsay—who were to take part in stories of the future. In the spring of 1823, Byron persuaded them to occupy the Villa Paradiso, and was accustomed to accompany them frequently on horseback excursions along the coast to their favourite Nervi. It has been said that Lady Blessington's Conversations with Lord Byron are, as regards trustworthiness, on a par with Landor's Imaginary Conversations. Let this be so, they are still of interest on points of fact which it must have been easier to record than to imagine. However adorned, or the reverse, by the fancies of a habitual novelist, they convey the impressions of a goodhumoured, lively, and fascinating woman, derived from a more or less intimate association with the most brilliant man of the age. Of his personal appearance—a matter of which she was a good judge—we have the following: "One of Byron's eyes was larger than the other; his nose was rather thick, so he was best seen in profile; his mouth was splendid, and his scornful expression was real, not affected; but a sweet smile often broke through his melancholy. He was at this time very pale and thin (which indicates the success of his regimen of reduction since leaving Venice). His hair was dark brown, here and there turning grey. His voice was harmonious, clear and low. There is some gaucherie in his walk, from his attempts to conceal his lameness. Ada's portrait is like him, and he is pleased at the likeness, but hoped she would not turn out to be clever—at any events not poetical. He is fond of gossip, and apt to speak slightingly of some of his friends, but is loyal to others. His great defect is flippancy, and a total want of self-possession." The narrator also dwells on his horror of interviewers, by whom at this time he was even more than usually beset. One visitor of the period ingenuously observes—"Certain persons will be chagrined to hear that Byron's mode of life does not furnish the smallest food for calumny." Another says, "I never saw a countenance more composed and still—I might even add, more sweet and prepossessing. But his temper was easily ruffled and for a whole day; he could not endure the ringing of bells, bribed his neighbours to repress their noises, and failing, retaliated by surpassing them; he never forgave Colonel Carr for breaking one of his dog's ribs, though he generally forgave injuries without forgetting them. He had a bad opinion of the inertness of the Genoese; for whatever he himself did he did with a will—'toto se corpore miscuit,' and was wont to assume a sort of dictatorial tone—as if 'I have said it, and it must be so' were enough."

From these waifs and strays of gossip we return to a subject of deeper interest. The Countess of Blessington, with natural curiosity, was anxious to elicit from Byron some light on the mystery of his domestic affairs, and renewed the attempt previously made by Madame de Stael, to induce him to some movement towards a reconciliation with his wife. His reply to this overture was to show her a letter which he had written to Lady Byron from Pisa, but never forwarded, of the tone of which the following extracts must be a sufficient indication:—"I have to acknowledge the receipt of Ada's hair.... I also thank you for the inscription of the date and name; and I will tell you why. I believe they are the only two or three words of your hand-writing in my possession, for your letters I returned, and except the two words—or rather the one word 'household' written twice—in an old account book, I have no other. Every day which keeps us asunder should, after so long a period, rather soften our mutual feelings, which must always have one rallying-point as long as our child exists. We both made a bitter mistake, but now it is over, I considered our re-union as not impossible for more than a year after the separation, but then I gave up the hope. I am violent, but not malignant; for only fresh provocations can awaken my resentment. Remember that if you have injured me in aught, this forgiveness is something, and that if I have injured you, it is something more still, if it be true, as moralists assert, that the most offending are the least forgiving." "It is a strange business," says the Countess, about Lady Byron. "When he was praising her mental and personal qualifications, I asked him how all that he now said agreed with certain sarcasms supposed to be a reference to her in his works. He smiled, shook his head, and said, they were meant to spite and vex her, when he was wounded and irritated at her refusing to receive or answer his letters; that he was sorry he had written them, but might on similar provocations recur to the same vengeance." On another occasion he said, "Lady B.'s first idea is what is due to herself. I wish she thought a little more of what is due to others. My besetting sin is a want of that self-respect which she has in excess. When I have broken out, on slight provocation, into one of my ungovernable fits of rage, her calmness piqued and seemed to reproach me; it gave her an air of superiority that vexed and increased my mauvaise humeur." To Lady Blessington as to every one, he always spoke of Mrs. Leigh with the same unwavering admiration, love, and respect.

"My first impressions were melancholy—my poor mother gave them: but to my sister, who, incapable of wrong herself, suspected no wrong in others, I owe the little good of which I can boast: and had I earlier known her it might have influenced my destiny. Augusta was to me in the hour of need a tower of strength. Her affection was my last rallying-point, and is now the only bright spot that the horizon of England offers to my view. She has given me such good advice—and yet finding me incapable of following it, loved and pitied me but the more because I was erring." Similarly, in the height of his spleen, writes Leigh Hunt—"I believe there did exist one person to whom he would have been generous, if she pleased: perhaps was so. At all events, he left her the bulk of his property, and always spoke of her with the greatest esteem. This was his sister, Mrs. Leigh. He told me she used to call him 'Baby Byron.' It was easy to see that of the two persons she had by far the greater judgment."

Byron having laid aside Don Juan for more than a year, in deference to La Guiccioli, was permitted to resume it again, in July, 1822, on a promise to observe the proprieties. Cantos vi.-xi. were written at Pisa. Cantos xii.-xvi. at Genoa, in 1823. These latter portions of the poem were published by John Hunt. His other works of the period are of minor consequence. The Age of Bronze is a declamation, rather than a satire, directed against the Convention of Cintra and the Congress of Verona, especially Lord Londonderry's part in the latter, only remarkable, from its advice to the Greeks, to dread—

The false friend worse than the infuriate foe;

i.e. to prefer the claw of the Tartar savage to the paternal hug of the great Bear—

Better still toil for masters, than await, The slave of slaves, before a Russian gate.

In the Island—a tale of the mutiny of the "Bounty"—he reverts to the manner and theme of his old romances, finding a new scene in the Pacific for the exercise of his fancy. In this piece his love of nautical adventure reappears, and his idealization of primitive life, caught from Rousseau and Chateaubriand. There is more repose about this poem than in any of the author's other compositions. In its pages the sea seems to plash about rocks and caves that bask under a southern sun. "'Byron, the sorcerer,' he can do with me what he will," said old Dr. Parr, on reading it. As the swan-song of the poet's sentimental verse, it has a pleasing if not pathetic calm. During the last years in Italy he planned an epic on the Conquest, and a play on the subject of Hannibal, neither of which was executed.

In the criticism of a famous work there is often little left to do but to criticise the critics—to bring to a focus the most salient things that have been said about it, to eliminate the absurd from the sensible, the discriminating from the commonplace. Don Juan, more than any of its precursors, is Byron, and it has been similarly handled. The early cantos were ushered into the world amid a chorus of mingled applause and execration. The minor Reviews, representing middle-class respectability, were generally vituperative, and the higher authorities divided in their judgments. The British Magazine said that "his lordship had degraded his personal character by the composition;" the London, that the poem was "a satire on decency;" the Edinburgh Monthly, that it was "a melancholy spectacle;" the Eclectic, that it was "an outrage worthy of detestation." Blackwood declared that the author was "brutally outraging all the best feelings of humanity." Moore characterizes it as "the most painful display of the versatility of genius that has ever been left for succeeding ages to wonder at or deplore." Jeffrey found in the whole composition "a tendency to destroy all belief in the reality of virtue;" and Dr. John Watkins classically named it "the Odyssey of Immorality." "Don Juan will be read," wrote one critic, "as long as satire, wit, mirth, and supreme excellence shall be esteemed among men." "Stick to Don Juan," exhorted another; "it is the only sincere thing you have written, and it will live after all your Harolds have ceased to be 'a schoolgirl's tale, the wonder of an hour.' It is the best of all your works—the most spirited, the most straightforward, the most interesting, the most poetical." "It is a work," said Goethe, "full of soul, bitterly savage in its misanthropy, exquisitely delicate in its tenderness." Shelley confessed, "It fulfils in a certain degree what I have long preached, the task of producing something wholly new and relative to the age, and yet surpassingly beautiful." And Sir Walter Scott, in the midst of a hearty panegyric: "It has the variety of Shakespeare himself. Neither Childe Harold, nor the most beautiful of Byron's earlier tales, contain more exquisite poetry than is to be found scattered through the cantos of Don Juan, amidst verses which the author seems to have thrown from him with an effort as spontaneous as that of a tree resigning its leaves."