or enthusiasm to the career of poet. His first little volume, however, decided his fate. Nothing can be more vain than to speculate what might or might not have occurred in case of some contingency which never happened; and therefore it would be foolish to assert that, had Jeffrey never assailed the "Hours of Idleness," "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan" would never have come into being. But there can be little doubt that Jeffrey's assault was the first great impetus given to Byron's genius, which, without that sharp prick, might have dallied for years longer with its budding powers before it rushed into the field. The "Hours of Idleness" would seem truly to be described by their title; they were, as their author describes them in one of the letters of the time, "the effusions of a boy :" and he informed the world, with much grandeur in his preface, that "it was highly improbable, from my situation and pursuits hereafter, that I should ever obtrude myself a second time on the public." But the effect produced upon the young poet's life by this languid and harmless publication was such as no one could have divined. The whole event is too far past, the sin was too promptly punished, and the effect of it was on the whole too good, to warrant us in re-reviewing the review which stung Byron into life. Amid all the partialities of criticism, the almost inevitable penchant towards the work of friends and disinclination to applaud an enemy, it is very rarely that an unhappy reviewer picks up a work at random with the intention for once of doing simple justice, without laying himself open to some frenzied attack. Why select my work? the victim cries. "Out of the thousand and one volumes of indifferent verse which happened to be printed in the year 1807, only one bore a noble

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name on the title-page: and the portunity of insulting a lord was too tempting to be resisted," says Byron's advocate. We have no desire to defend Jeffrey, whose shortcomings were glaring enough; but certainly it was hard upon him to be subjected to this quite unnecessary animadversion; and he never did a more effectual piece of work in his life than when he insulted the lord in question. The young giant got up from his youthful affectations and languor in all the fury of wounded amour propre and injured pride. The shaft pierced through and through his silken garments. It was the first real vivifying touch which he had met with in his life.

To our own thinking, it was great condescension on the part of the big and popular Review, then at the very zenith of its greatness—but with no prophetic power given to it to enable it to divine that this was Byron-to trouble itself about the boy's verses.

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But the boy came to violent life under the hands of that skilful operator. After the gentle little commencement made in placid superiority and grandeur, with a sense that it was "highly improbable" that so lofty and splendid a figure should ever again "obtrude itself" upon the public, what a fiery and real start was that which the poet made in his first genuine and energetic production! sham sentiments were there, no copies of verses labelled with initial letters like drawers in a cabinet, but one furious flood of real and glowing invective, genuine expression of that contempt for everybody's works and powers which filled the soul of the noble poet, looking down from his platform upon all the petty people round him. The great and the small, the names which are household words and those which have faded alto

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gether out of our memory-the young Ishmael spared none of them. Because he himself had been chastised, it seemed natural to him that all his poetical contemporaries who were already known to the world should taste the whip. He sacrificed a whole hecatomb of reputations to the manes of that stillborn fame of his own, whose decease he attributed to Jeffrey's blow. Not only Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, but virtuous Southey and musical Moore, and even Monk Lewis, and Graham of the 'Sabbath,' and Bowles of the 'Sonnets;' every soul who wrote in rhyme shared the outpouring of his fury. They had nothing to do with the Edinburgh Review,' or his own slaughter in it. Yet he reviled them as if they had every one had a hand in his humiliation; never was such a burst of rampant self-assertion and disdain of all authority. "Down with everybody" was the device of this wild champion's banner. Such a production is not likely to procure permanent fame for any man, notwithstanding that the "Dunciad " still holds its place in literature, and is still discussed and annotated. But " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers has a human interest above that of its poetry. It was the birth - pang of the poet. He came furious to life ready-armed like Minerva, blazing in sudden light and deadly power, with a quiver full of poisoned arrows, and an unsheathed sword which cut wherever it touched. The whole earth shook with this unexpected and prodigious onset. Edition after edition came pouring from the press, and the poet, panting and breathless from his exertions, was already crowned with the sudden result they had won for him, before he had wiped the moisture from his brow, or laid his weapons out of his hand.

This was the first birth, or rather manifestation, of Byron's genius, and it was a very characteristic one. Impatient of remark, furious at censure, sceptical of all excellence, he poured forth his own violent criticisms and mockeries with a glowing power and fervour which it was impossible to mistake; no more hours of idleness-hours of passion and heat and excitement, which printed their impression, temporary yet vigorous, upon the world, and made men hold their breath. It is easy to imagine the commotion raised in the literary atmosphere by this rush of the new actor upon the stage, like a caged lion into the old Colosseum, or its modern Spanish representative into the arena. body could doubt the reality of the new appearance, or its immense energy and promise of unforeseen power.

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Before, however, we quit this preface to his existence, there are two things to be mentioned which are very greatly to the credit of the young poet. When the "Hours of Idleness" were first published, a clergyman, who knew Lord Byron well, and who had apparently some influence with him, wrote to him objecting to certain poems which were, according to the language of the time, "too warmly expressed." "The imagination of the young bard," says Moore, "had indulged itself in a luxuriousness of colouring beyond what even youth could excuse." The first copy of the work had been presented to this gentleman, Mr Becher, and his protest was made in the gentle form of a "copy of verses." The headstrong young man, who was so little amenable to criticism, immediately responded to this representation. did a most heroic thing for a boy of twenty to do. He called in the volume, of which, we are told, only one copy had got out of his reach,

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and cancelled the whole edition, in order to satisfy his friend and abolish the objectionable verses. It is right that such a fact should be noted to his honour; and it is all the more honourable from the proof he soon gave of his furious resentment of the public criticism which was inspired by anything but friendship. A few years later, he did another generous and creditable act of a similar kind: when his reputation was established, and when perhaps he had begun to be a little ashamed of the vehemence of his youthful self-defence, he struck out "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" from his works, sending orders to his publisher, according to Moore, "to commit the whole impression to the flames," and steadily refused to allow its republication. This resolution was taken no later than 1812, so that what he did at twenty he cancelled at twenty-four. These two acts of reparation, unforced and voluntary, are enough to cover a multitude of literary sins.

Byron went abroad immediately after the publication of his satire. Whatever the cause might be, this young Peer, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, with all the prestige of his title, and with all the means of acquiring acquaintances, if not friends, which his bringing-up must have made inevitable, seems to have been as lonely in London as any poor clerk from the distant recesses of the country. He had no one to stand by him when he took his seat, lonely and defiant, in the House of Lords; and to a mind which attached so much importance to the privileges of rank this must have been doubly mortifying. He seems to have had no means of introduction into society. Nobody noticed him, except Jeffrey; and it was with a proud disappointment and solitude of soul, more real than most people suppose, that he set out upon his

first expedition to the East. These were the days of the war, when our easy highway across the Continent did not exist, and the nearest way to begin this journey was by ship to Lisbon, a voyage which he made in company with various officers on their way to the scene of war. This was the beginning of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." It was made when he was just one-and-twenty, an age at which it is difficult to believe that any great amount of debauchery could have been possible. He had held carnival at Newstead, unrestrained by any sober influence, for very brief intervals now and then, and had indeed just wound up his youthful life in England by a short time spent there in the company of a few of his favourite friends of his own age, no doubt an uproarious and not very decorous assembly; but the lads, however vicious and undisciplined, could scarcely have gone to any very terrible lengths at so early a period. We believe that a great many readers associate the poem of "Childe Harold" entirely with the latter portion of Byron's life, and accept the attitude assumed by the poet in the first canto as something not inappropriate to the natural feelings which might move a man abjured by society and his friends, ruined in personal reputation, and expelled from everything that could be called a home. But it must be remembered that this was not in the least degree his case in 1809. He was twenty-one. He had no home, because he had no relations, and because it was impossible for his mother and himself to "get on," as people say, together; and he had no doubt already a local reputation which was anything but desirable. But every one knows how little local reputation affects a man in the bigger world of society, and with what ease that world forgives

such stigmas as those which alone could stain Byron's youth. The sentiments of "Childe Harold" could not therefore have any foundation in reality; but yet their fantastic and artificial misanthropy was not without some excuse. The young man, if not so guilty or so miserable as he made himself out to be, was yet very lonely and friendless and a great deal of exaggeration may be allowed to youth in respect to that forlorn sense of solitude which sometimes possesses it like a passion. The self-conscious tragic attitude of the "Childe" is indeed quite characteristic of youth, and as such has a certain claim upon the indulgence of every body who has been young, and has felt the luxury of being miserable. It was the first time that this luxury, in which most of us have indulged in our day, had been presented in a poetical shape to the world. It was quite false; and yet it was true: the reasons given were sham, and so were the sentiments, and yet the state of mind was real. Indeed, its very artificialness made it real, if we may use a paradox, and helped, as nothing else could, to express the strange chaos of wilfulness and waywardness, of suffering and self-importance, of complacent masquerading and genuine uneasiness, which so often fill a mind of twenty when left to itself.

Byron's journey was begun in what seems to us a very magnificent way, and one which was little in keeping with his impoverished fortunes, however it might accord with his own splendid ideas of his importance. We who are used to the exploits of young men "of quality" in many wild ways of adventure, and who have learned that it is possible for a lord to travel with very scant attendance, and fight his way like any other young Englishman, can scarcely restrain a smile at the following description of

the retinue which this very poor and indeed obscure young lord thought necessary: "Fletcher begged so hard that I have continued him in my service," he writes to his mother on the eve of his departure. "If he does not behave well abroad, I will send him back in a transport. I have a German servant (who has been with Mr Wilbraham in Persia before, and was strongly recommended to me by Dr Butler of Harrow), Robert and William; they constitute my whole suite." Four men for the personal service of this one boy! Nothing could give a more amusing picture of his pomp and consequence. "The pecuniary supplies necessary towards his outset at this epoch were procured from money-lenders, at an enormously usurious interest,' is the unintentional comment supplied by Moore. Even in this respect no one seems to have had sufficient interest in the young man to attempt to restrain him from expenditure so foolish. Thus he set out, his yeoman and his page being supplied for all necessary poetic uses, and plunged, with all his conventionalities about him, into the novelty of the unknown. We will not attempt to follow him through his wanderings. The reader will find the topography in "Childe Harold," where indeed crowds of readers did find and delight in it, spending an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm upon the two earlier cantos of that poem. It would be difficult to say too much of the power of the versification, or of the energy and life of the descriptions therein contained; but we avow that it is extremely difficult to us to understand how, apart from all Byron produced afterwards, this splendid guide-book should have taken such absolute possession of the popular mind, especially as in those days travel was an almost forbidden luxury,

and the number of persons who could be attracted to the poem by a desire to compare their own emotions with that of the poetical wanderer must have been very small. The great charm of the poem, however, we believe-its chief popular attraction-lay in the wanderer himself, shadowy as he is, and vague in personality. He was, let us remember, the very first sketch of that blasé poetical misanthrope, who has since done so much service, and who in many different disguises charmed the popular soul for years after, the very incarnation of the conventional picturesque. He it was who gave the charm of romance to all those melodious verses which celebrated the praises of “August Athena," of "Stern Albania's hills," and "Dark Suli's rock," and, nearer home, of "Lovely Spain, renowned romantic land!" The reader, as he roamed from verse to verse among the dark-eyed Lusitanian maids and Turkish houris, between the wild Albanian and the high-capped Tartar, was always conscious of another standing by, trying to distract himself by all the scenes and figures that passed along the surface of the panorama, but ever hugging to him his mysterious solitude, his passionate recollections, his inconsolable sadness. There was not very much absolutely about Harold except in the first few pages; but Harold was in the very air, brooding over the verse. Each line was read with a little thrill of expectation; throughout every page attention was on the alert to find again that wanderer in his splendid superiority seeing everything as if he saw it not, occupied with his own thoughts, musing over his fatal memories. And when a universal whisper ran through the world-whisper which nobody could trace, and still less contradict that the poet himself

was that mysterious personage, the interest swelled higher and deeper. All the internal evidence was in favour of this idea, and the immediate zest of a living romance spread over the reading world. The story, slight and vague as it was, became real on the spot, and people pored over it with a view to discovering the secret of the poet's trouble, as well as the quality of his genius. Such an addition to the attractions of poetic literature it would be difficult to overestimate. The lovers of Byron will grudge, perhaps, that any secondary reason should be called in, in order to explain the first marvellous success of this poem; and had "Childe Harold" been published entire we should have sought no secondary reasons; but it must be remembered that it was to the first two cantos that the world responded with enthusiasm so universal, and that these are not the portions of the poem to which we now turn with the greatest pleasure. The beauty of the poetry, indeed, is not enough to explain its immense popularity; for, fine as that is, it is not finer than portions of Shelley's long descriptive poems, which won nobody's ear; and nothing like so real as Wordsworth, which shared the same fate. And long stretches of descriptive poetry, however fine, are slow to attract the ordinary reader. It was Harold who attracted him. It was Byron, the real Harold, who riveted that attraction. To us nowadays the presence of a self-absorbed, darklymusing figure, roaming about with finger on lip and eyes full of wild meanings-or with his arms folded in his romantic cloak, contemplating the things and sights around from the summit of a melancholy superiority,-is no attraction, but rather provokes a smile. We name the apparition at once: we have known