does not concern us here. We have lived past the Day of Judgment set by Matthew Arnold, and found that neither his prophecy of Byron's supremacy nor Swinburne's equally sure prophecy of oblivion has befallen the poet. On the Continent, indeed, his reputation is as great as ever, while the eager welcome given to the new English and American editions of his poems proves that the twentieth century is ready to renew its acquaintance with a somewhat neglected Byron.

But his

The last and most prolific period of Byron's literary composition was the eight years after leaving England, all spent in Italy except the first few months in Switzerland and the last few months in Greece. Byron's love for Greece and his final devotion of time, purse, thoughts, and life itself to her liberation are well known. love for Italy, which was quite as intense, is less generally appreciated. The fourth canto of "Childe Harold" bears witness. Let those who will dismiss it as a " versified note-book"; nevertheless the Italy there pictured is the Italy that first fascinated the imagination of the English and American traveller.1 Because we in this blasé-tourist age are somewhat aweary of it and can find plenty of flaws in it is no reason for denying its many magnificent passages, its sympathy with Italy's skies and lakes and seas and mountains, its penetration into her inmost spirit, and its lyrical power in such passages as the stanzas beginning "O Rome, my country, city of the soul!"

1"It was the sight of the numerous English travellers following in the footsteps of Childe Harold' with Murray's handbook under their arms that suggested the first Bædeker." - HERR FRITZ BÆDEKER in London

Times, 1889.

Italy's history on its romantic side nowhere, even among her own poets, finds more thrilling expression.

But in a yet deeper and more interior way did Byron's removal to Italy become an epoch-making event in his poetry and in his life. Immediately on his arrival he began to study the Italian writers, especially their writers of burlesque, such as Pulci, Casti, Berni, and Ariosto. His letters show how quickly he became charmed by Pulci, and afterwards when he translated two books of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore" he repeatedly announced his conviction that this was the best work he had ever done. Soon he adopted the metre and spirit of this poet for an original work on a Venetian subject, calling it "Beppo: A Venetian Story." Other English writers - especially John Hookham Frere had used the same octave stanzas and had tried the same mingling of grave and gay in the Tuscan humoristic style. But Byron's achievement had a richness of execution, a mastery over his material all its own. It is doubtful if he himself knew his own power for comedy previously; certain it is that afterwards he never abandoned it, and that in this metre and of this type are the "Don Juan " and the "Vision of Judgment," on which rests his most secure fame.

Time was when no self-respecting person would mention "Don Juan" in polite society. Even many who would quote feelingly

or who would sing "Ave Maria, blessed be the hour" or "The Isles of Greece" did it in entire innocence of their indebtedness to the unmentionable poem. It is true that there is a great deal in it that one would spare gladly, both from the point of view of morals and of poetic art; but it served as a repository for all Byron's thoughts and feelings during several years and was left unfinished with the sixteenth canto at the time of his death. It is often too sensual, like his own life; too bitter, with rage against wrongs suffered by himself; too vindictive, as self-ostracized he watched his countrymen from afar and lashed their cant, their hypocrisy, their senseless and cruel customs in politics and society. No wonder that it gave England much offence at the time and that it can never be recommended for "family reading." But the wit, the verve, the humor, the satire have established it as chief of English humorous epics; in its best parts one of the most quotable of poems, the whole is greater than any of its parts.

In this kind-the mock-heroic - Byron's place remains secure. But the mock-heroic, after all, makes too little appeal to the higher nature of mankind to hold an enduring place in their hearts. He became easily the "voice-in-chief” of his generation because his temperament was so congenial to the great passions then agitating the souls of men. He was the supreme incarnation of its romantic ideals, the poet of its revolutionary spirit. In these calmer days, when we turn rather to those poets who bring us thought, revelation of truth, moral and spiritual insight, Byron does not respond to our call. Some of his poetry is magnificent; it compels our admiration,

but not the love we feel toward those who give us that "breath and finer spirit of all knowledge" which it is the supreme mission of poetry to convey.

Beside being a great poet, Byron was a brilliant and captivating letter-writer. Saucy, vain, reckless, profligate as his letters sometimes are, the fire of his own love for freedom, of his intensity of purpose to goad the slave to rise up and claim his birthright, burns through them no less than through the poems. Whether as author writing to publisher, as man of the world to lawyer or business agent, as brother to a beloved sister, or as friend to friend, there is a dash and piquancy to them that rank Byron high among the great letter-writers of all time. They have little to say about Italian scenery or Italian art (the poems are descriptive, but not the letters), but they have much to say about the Italian people and their customs, and they show how intimately he knew them and how persistently (except in the case of a few old friends) he shunned his own countrymen.

Byron must have sat for his likeness a wearisome number of times, judging by the long array of his portraits in oil, in miniature, in pencil-sketch, beside two busts. Most of these have been reproduced in photogravure in the thirteen-volume Murray edition of the Poems and Letters. Among them, however, is not included that of the Italian painter Vincenzo Camuccini (1773-1844), now in the Accademia di San Luca at Rome, reproduced in the present volume as frontispiece to the concluding portion, -The Years 1822 and 1823. No search either among the annals of this painter or in the Byron correspondence

reveals the precise time at which he sat for this picture. But, to me, this more than any of the others communicates that fascination of look and expression of which we hear so much and corresponds to the descriptions of his contemporaries, "small head, covered and fringed with brown curls," eyes "things of light and for light," nose "long and straight," "the sweep and shapely curves of chin and jaw." We feel that the artist who painted it was in sympathy with his subject, and that he has given us Byron as he looked while in the Italy that he loved and that loved him in return.

Byron had many a grievance against England, not the least of which was its habit of identifying his creations, "Childe Harold," "Cain," "Manfred," "Don Juan," with himself and his own life. Failing to understand him, his contemporaries substituted abuse and adoration in variously mingled proportions. Nor even now, when time has modified both of these feelings and when multitudes of critics from Macaulay to Paul E. More and Ernest Hartley Coleridge have essayed the task, can it be said that we have any adequate analysis of this most complex and puzzling character among the English poets. Until a psychologist equal to the occasion shall arise, the best means of arriving at an individual opinion may be to read side by side the poems and the letters during the most mature and most productive period of Byron's life, the years of his Italian residence.

ROME, 1906.

A. B. McM.