Byron 711 gifts and station required to draw to himself the attention of his countrymen. The descendant of a long line of noble ancestors, vigorous if lawless in character, he succeeded when a hoy to a great position and to an impoverished estate. His own temperament, intensely morbid, was rendered more so by the injudicious treatment of it by his mother, who, after her husband had wasted all her fortune, was left a widow when her son was only three years old. At the age of thirteen he was sent to Harrow, a school at that time largely recruited from the sons of the Whig aristocracy, and noted for the lawlessness of its scholars. Here he distinguished himself by his pugnacity, and was the leader in two rebellions. In his eighteenth year he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where his habits were equally turbulent; though he qualified himself for his M.A. degree in 1808. In 1807 he published his first volume of poems, with the title Hours of Idleness. His verses, crude in feeling and workmanship, were coloured with the romantic sentimentalism and introspection then fashionable. But they showed a passionate sensibility, and were far from deserving the contemptuous notice bestowed on them by the Edinburgh Review in March, 1808. This criticism called into play the active and satiric side of Byron's genius; and his vigorous retaliation on his critics in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was received by the public with interest and favour. In 1809 he left England to travel for two years on the Continent, during which time he wrote the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. These he published with reluctance, having himself but a poor opinion of them; and it was with real surprise that, after their appearance, he awoke — to use his own words — one morning and found himself famous. The glimpse of Childe Harold's character given in the first canto, combined with the poetic descriptions and meditative reflections inspired by his wide wanderings, exactly hit the taste of an aristocratic society, devoured by ennui, which recognised in the sentiment of the self-banished Childe a lively image of its own suppressed opinions. The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos published in 1813, and followed in 1814 by The Corsair and Lara, added to the reputation Byron had already acquired as the orator of romantic feeling. But in 1816 the whole character of his genius was altered by his domestic misfortunes. He had married in the previous year; and his daughter, Augusta Ada, had just been born to him, when his wife resolved to leave him. The reason of her action has never been fully explained, but it seems probable that her husband's morbid habits had caused her to believe him mad. On the other hand the malignant scandal of society raised a public outcry against his character, which became more virulent after the appearance of The Siege of Corinth and Parisina. Perceiving himself to be regarded as a moral outcast, he left England in 1816 and never revisited it. The effect on his genius was twofold. When he became famous his satiric passion had subsided, and his introspective 712 Shelley temper was satisfied with reproducing its romanticism in forms such as the figure of Lara, suggested by the fictions of Mrs Radcliffe. In the third canto of Childe Harold, published in 1816, and in Manfred, which appeared in 1817, the expression of his self-consciousness became doubly intense; but his satiric genius was also roused to vengeance against the society which had expelled him ; and in Don Juan (1819) and The Vision of Judgment (1822), he turned upon his moral censors with the same reckless energy he had displayed in his boyish satire against his Scotch reviewers. His fiery and rebellious career was brought to a manly conclusion at Missolonghi in 1824, as he was taking a leading part in the war for the liberation of Greece. The genius of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) offers in many respects a striking contrast to that of his friend and fellow-poet. Like Byron he was born of an ancient family; and the marks of race displayed themselves in his refined and patrician features. But in him aristocratic distinction had developed in to a singularity which approached to madness. From an early age he devoured romances, and, inspired by his love of chemical experiments and by the revolutionary theories of the time, began to dream of the unlimited powers of human nature. At Eton his peculiar tastes secluded him from the public life of the school; at Oxford his wild political enthusiasm brought him under the notice of the authorities of his college, and led to the severe measure of his expulsion. While the imagination of Byron, nurtured in a social atmosphere of supernatural fiction, and brooding over his own destiny, caused him to project his personality into a hundred shapes, Shelley's fancy was absorbed in the idealisation of the human race. He had formed a conception of society founded on the theories put forward by William Godwin (1756-1836) in his Political Justice; and his mind was peopled with shadows evoked from the books he read, for which he was constantly seeking anti-types in the world without him. Byron conceived his imaginary actions in the deeds of various kinds of rebels and outlaws, suggested by his own character and circumstances, and strongly coloured with sentiments familiar to all his readers. Shelley created a visionary world, in which he himself was always a leading actor, but the forms of which existed only in his own consciousness. " You talk Utopian," as he makes Byron say to him in Julian and Maddalo. In his eagerness to propagate his political enthusiasms he resembled Coleridge ; but he was devoid of the humour which enabled the latter to realise the causes of the failure of his journalistic schemes. Completely ignorant of the nature of mankind, and passionately sincere in his own convictions, Shelley was in the habit of investing his most common-place acquaintances with ideal attributes, as in Epipsychidion, and of regarding them as demons when they came short of his expectations. At the same time his consistent endeavours to put his theories into practice brought him frequently into collision either with the laws Revolutionary character of Shelley's poetry 713 or the customs of his country. This perpetual conflict with society exaggerated in his mind the ideas of pessimism on which his philosophy rested. He imagined evil to have gained the supreme power in the world, and held that the first duty of man was to aid the suppressed principle of good to overthrow tyranny, by subverting all existing authority and established opinion. A character so single-minded and quixotic was more fitted, with all its genius, to shock than to convert society. Shelley's opinions reacted on the style of his poetry. He used epic and dramatic forms to embody his political ideas; but in his representation of human affairs his readers found none of the conditions which centuries of great poetical tradition had led them to expect. While their fancy was dazzled with a succession of sublime images, a poem like The Revolt of Islam presented them with no intelligible order of ideal action, and no character whose motives and behaviour could win their sympathetic admiration. They were forced to trust themselves entirely to the conduct of the poet's capricious imagination, and to accustom themselves to the company and conversation of the disembodied spirits to whom he introduced them. Even in his Prometheus Unbound, where the subject, with sound judgment, is associated with ideas made familiar by a drama so famous as the Prometheus Vinctus, the revolutionary idea, embodied in the person of Prometheus, fades after the first act, and all distinctness of form and orderdies awayinto vaporous landscapesand mystical choruses. Landor's graphic description of Coleridge's poetical style, " bright colours without form, sublimely void," applies with equal or greater justice to the style of Shelley. The excellence of his poetry is concentrated in himself: it is essentially lyric. When he lighted on a subject which connected him by human sympathy with his readers, — such as the ideal description of himself in Prince Athanase ; or when he expressed in verse his own griefs, hopes, aspirations, and despondencies, — as in Adonais, the Ode to the Skylark, and To the West Wind, the Lines written among the Euganean Hills, or those composed In Dejection at Naples, — he touched chords of unique beauty; but he is, as a rule, powerless to represent the objects required to arouse pity, terror, or indignation. In the single exception, The Cenci, which is written with admirable self-restraint, and the characters of which are distinctly conceived, the poet himself says that he deliberately avoided poetical ornament, concentrating his efforts on a vivid realisation of actual events; at the same time the subject of the play was too horrible for representation on the stage. The poetry both of Byron and Shelley was revolutionary, but not in the same sense as that of Wordsworth. The latter, like Coleridge, sympathised at the outset with the principles of the French Revolution, because he did not foresee the effect they would produce. He thought that they could be assimilated, without disturbing the religious and moral basis of society, which, however, he hoped might be reconstructed 714 The diction of Byron and Shelley on the lines of his own imagination. Hence the analytic process which, with the approval of Coleridge, he assigns to poetic imagination, placing its chief duty in discovering to the world the nature of common objects in their true, that is, their poetic, relations. In Byron and Shelley, on the other hand, imagination performs its time-honoured creative functions in a new way. Byron creates entirely out of his own individuality, Shelley out of his philosophical fancy; both of them, like the old poets, carry the imagination of the reader into an ideal world. In this respect at least they were conservative. Byron was never tired of ridiculing the experiments of the Lake School from the traditional point of view; and Shelley in Peter Bell the Third satirises Wordsworth's attempts at poetical creation by means of imaginative analysis. In another respect the poetical practice of Byron and Shelley was far more conservative than Wordsworth's theory of the art. Their diction was completely removed from the language of prose, and in different degrees was founded on the metrical example of their predecessors. The style of Byron in particular was essentially an extension and amplification of the principles of Dryden and Pope; that is to say, it was grounded upon the colloquial usage of educated society refined by literary selection. Familiar with the conversation of men and women in the most aristocratic walks of life, he employed all their idioms with fine audacity, in various established metres, as his purpose required. He wrote with equal facility in the heroic couplet, blank verse, Spenser stanza, and ottava rima. His style, often careless, tawdry, obscure, is never affected; when he is writing under the inspiration of strong feeling it is animated by a tremendous force and directness, unapproached by any of his contemporaries, or indeed by any other poet. Shelley's style, less nervous, is far more spiritual and refined. To him the lines of Drayton or Marlowe seem to apply with special force, as one who, Bathed in the Thespian springs, He moves in his far-off sphere with all the swiftness and ease of a disembodied spirit. Never attempting condensation and comparison, he builds his aerial imagery, as it rises in his mind, out of an apparently boundless vocabulary, which seems to adapt itself instinctively to all the windings of his thought. But he uses the established metres of his country; and, in the larger part of his verse, iambic or trochaic rhythms are adequate vehicles for the remotest flights of his fancy. In two'characteristic passages he has described his own aim in metrical composition. In the preface to The Cenci, he says that he has written " without an over-fastidious and learned choice of words. In this respect Thomas Moore 715 I entirely agree with those modern critics who assert that, in order to move men to true sympathy, we must use the familiar language of men ; and that our great ancestors, the ancient English poets, are the writers a study of whom might incite us to do that for our own age which they have done for theirs. But it must he the real language of men in general, and not that of any particular class to whose society the writer happens to belong." And again, in the preface to The Revolt of Islam, in which he has stamped his own individuality on the Spenser stanza, he says: " I have sought to avoid the imitation of any style of language or versification peculiar to the original minds of which it is the character, designing that, even if what 1 have produced be worthless, it should still be properly my own. I have simply clothed my thoughts in what appeared to me the most obvious and appropriate language. A person familiar with nature, and with the most celebrated productions of the human mind, can scarcely err in following the instinct, with respect to selection of language, produced by that familiarity." With the name of Byron is naturally associated that of his biographer, Thomas Moore (1779-1852). Moore stands to Byron and Shelley, in the group of nineteenth-century Romantic poets, much in the same relation as Gay stood to Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot, in the Classic confederacy of the previous century. With a poetical genius far inferior to that of his companions, he possessed certain genial and popular qualities that endeared him to the society with which the others were at war. He resembled Gay in the facility with which he could adapt himself to the taste of the moment, and in the readiness with which he subordinated the art of poetry to fashionable demands. The son of an Irish grocer and wine-merchant, his sympathies were early enlisted in the cause of Irish nationality ; but he kept free from the entanglements of the conspiracy in which his friend Emmet was involved. Like Gay, he understood the art of music ; and the foundation of his success as a poet was laid in the skill with which he composed melodious and flowing lyrics for old Irish airs. These, being often inspired by the nationalist movement, excited enthusiasm and admiration in Ireland, and, falling in with the catchword of liberty employed by the English Whigs, were welcomed by the leaders of the Opposition, in whose houses Moore, a sweet singer of his own melodies, became a familiar and petted figure. When the Whigs were estranged from the Prince Regent, Moore placed at the disposal of the party his gift of easy, familiar verse ; and his Twopenny Post-bag reflected successfully the humours of the not very interesting political intrigues in the period preceding the battle of Waterloo. In 1816 he turned the public taste for Oriental romance to account in the most ambitious of his poetical efforts, Lalla Roolch. He took great pains in accumulating details of Eastern manners for the colouring of this poem, and contrived to blend them very happily with a form of romance borrowed from |