CHAPTER XIV.

SIR WALTER SCOTT AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

THE chief public events during the first quarter of the present century were the Napoleonic wars, and the political settlements which followed the downfall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne of France. No English writer during this period filled so large a space in the public mind as Sir Walter Scott.

The writers of this period may be divided into six sections: 1. The Poets, beginning with Byron; 2. The Novelists, beginning with Scott; 3. The Reviewers and Political Writers, beginning with Gifford; 4. Philosophical and Scientific Writers, beginning with Dugald Stewart; 5. Religious and Theological Writers, beginning with Scott the Commentator; 6. Miscellaneous Writers, beginning with Mrs. Barbauld.

I. THE POETS.

Byron.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, 1788-1824, was, on the whole, the greatest English poet of his day, although he had many illustrious competitors. His poems are indeed very unequal, and abound in passages open to criticism. At the same time, it should be remembered that the amount which he wrote was large. If he often falls below the standard, and much that he has written could well be spared, a

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large amount still remains that is of a very high order of poetry, and there are passages in his works that are unsurpassed by anything in the language, except in the writings of Shakespeare.

Career. Probably no English poet that has ever lived was so much read, quoted, and canvassed, during his lifetime, as Lord Byron. Everything in his social position, in his personal history and character, and in the character of his writings, seemed to contribute to this result. He was of noble family, though his estate had been impoverished by spendthrift and prodigal ancestors. In person, though not faultless, he had yet such attractions of form and features and voice as amounted almost to a fascination. His talents, if not of the very highest order, were yet wonderful, and were precisely of the kind that dazzle and bewilder.

Byron's first attempt at authorship led to an issue at arms with the highest critical authority then known, the Edinburgh Review, and by the very fierceness of the attack and reply brought his name immediately to every one's mouth. His marriage only led to an open scandal, the mystery of which is not even yet solved; and by the high social position of the parties caused every utterance of the poet to be watched and analyzed. In addition to these things, the peculiar and irregular style of his lordship's writings, as well as of his life, caused everything to be in request that came from his pen.

First Publication.-Byron's first publication, issued at the age of nineteen, was Hours of Idleness. It contained little worthy of notice, and it might have passed quietly into oblivion but for the ferocious criticism upon it by the Edinburgh Review, then at the height of its power. Byron was furious, and under the impulse of his first burst of passion, he wrote, almost at white heat, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which he slashed away, right and left, with great injustice, but with a degree of daring and vigor that gained for him at once the public ear and sympathy. He afterwards condemned his youthful poems as heartily as the Reviewer had done, and suppressed them in England and wherever he could control the matter. He also acknowledged the injustice of his invective. But the affair gave him instant notoriety. It awakened him also to a consciousness of his powers.

Subsequent Career. Soon after this affair, Byron travelled on the continent, and gave the result of his observations in the first portion of his next and greatest poem, Childe Harold. If the first publication made him notorious, this made him famous.

Returning home, he entered Parliament, and took some part in public affairs. He was also married to Miss Millbanke, a lady of fortune; but after living together for a few months, they separated, for reasons admitted to be not creditable to him, though never clearly divulged. Lord Byron after this left England never to return. His remaining days were spent in Switzerland, Italy, and Greece, and he died in the noble effort to aid the Greeks in their struggle for independence.

Other Works.- Byron's other works, produced mostly during the irregular life that he led on the continent, were The Two Foscari, a Tragedy; Werner, a Tragedy; Sardanapalus, a Tragedy; The Deformed Transformed; Cain, a Mystery; Heaven and Earth, a Mystery; The Vision of Judgment; Don Juan; The Prisoner of Chillon; The Bride of Abydos; The Dream; Mazeppa; Marino Faliero; Manfred; The Giaour; The Corsair; The Siege of Corinth; Lara; Parisina, etc. The Memoirs of him by Moore must also be considered in giving an account of Byron's works, as these Memoirs are made up to a great extent of his own Letters.

Estimate of Him. — That Byron had genius of a high order, can hardly be called in question. But the mere possession of genius, or even an irregular and fitful exercise of it, does not insure greatness, either in art or in affairs. For the production of any great work of art, there must be, in connection with genius, long-continued, persistent labor and method, such as that which Milton gave to his Paradise Lost, such as that which Tennyson has given to his Arthurian Legends, such as, according to the best evidence we now have, Shakespeare himself gave to the composition and perfecting of his Dramas. Byron's works abound in passages of extraordinary beauty and sublimity; but they abound also in blemishes and marks of haste and feebleness; no one of his poems, taken as a whole, can be accepted as a finished and satisfying work of art.

Character as a Man. - Byron has so identified himself with his works that the two must be estimated together; and the settled judgment of the world is that he was a bad man. He had many shining and some noble qualities; but he was a selfish libertine, both in his life and opinions, and he deserves the neglect towards which he is slowly but surely gravitating.

Moore.

Thomas Moore, 1779-1852, survived most of the writers who were his contemporaries, but his chief works were written in the early part of this century. Although he lived till 1852, he is associated in history with Byron, Shelley, Southey, and the men of their time.

Career.-Moore was a native of Ireland, and studied at Trinity College, Dublin. He held at one time a Government position in Bermuda, made one journey through the United States, and visited the continent twice. The greater part of his life, however, was passed in England.

Moore's talent as a versifier and poet was very precocious. When only fourteen, he published in the Anthologia Hibernica, some verses which are not without merit, and which show plainly the future drift of his genius. His first really important publication was his Translations of Anacreon, in 1800. These have been both warmly admired and severely criticized. As specimens of English erotic verse they are undoubtedly among the best in the language, but are far from satisfying the modern canons of translation. They are not literal.

The Anacreon was followed by The Poetical Works of the late "Thomas Little," a pseudonym employed by Moore for a time to cover a collection of poems even more Anacreontic than Anacreon himself.

In 1806 appeared his Epistles, Odes, etc., which were no less licentious. A bitter review by Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review, caused a challenge to pass between him and the reviewer, but the duel was prevented by the arrest of both parties. The two subsequently became firm friends.

In 1812 there appeared the Intercepted Letters, or the Two-Penny Post-Bag. This was a collection of satires against the prince-regent and the Government, and met with immense success.

In 1813 Moore published the first instalment of his Irish Melodies, although the work was not completed until 1834. Lalla Rookh appeared in 1817, the Fudge Family in Paris (an imitation of the Two-Penny Post-Bag) in 1818, Loves of the Angels in 1823. These are Moore's principal poetical works. In prose he produced, among other things, the Life of Byron and the Life of Sheridan.

Character as a Poet. Few poets have been more successful than Moore, and this success is due, in part, to the consistency with which he devoted himself to one style of poetry. He never suffered himself to be tempted by ambition into writing on grand themes, for which he felt himself unfitted. His verses are the smoothest and softest in the language, and never rise above the level of average sentiment. Even his Irish Melodies, which profess to give the spirit of the Irish people, are anything but true folk-songs. They have not the intensity and abruptness of passion characteristic of that kind of verse. Moore is always graceful in his imagery, but never sublime; emotional, but not impassioned. The licentiousness which disfigured his earlier works disappeared in the later ones. Still, even at his best, Moore is not a grand lyric poet. He is merely a singer of sweet verse.

Shelley.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822, was a poet of great and original genius, whose career was in many respects like that of Byron, with whom indeed he was intimately associated.

Career. — Shelley was a descendant of one of the oldest English families. He appears to have displayed his poetic genius at an early age. In his sixteenth year, and before he had gone to college, he published two unsuccessful poems, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, and also assisted Medwin in his Ahasuerus. While at Oxford he got printed, in London, a pamphlet headed A Defence of Atheism. It was intended, as Shelley afterwards asserted, merely as a sort of dialectic

challenge, probably after the fashion of the scholastics of the Middle Ages. Had Shelley been content with merely publishing the pamphlet, the matter would have been ignored. But, in his youthful enthusiasm, he pressed himself so conspicuously and so persistently upon the attention of the University authorities, that they were forced to expel him publicly, as an atheist.

A few months afterwards he made a runaway match with the daughter of a retired hotel-keeper. There does not appear to have been much love on Shelley's part. Before the end of three years they were separated. Two years after the separation (1816) Mrs. Shelley committed suicide by drowning. The children by the marriage were retained by her father. Shelley applied to the Chancellor, Lord Eldon, for an order giving him the custody. This the Chancellor refused, on the ground that Shelley was an improper person to have the guardianship.

Soon after the death of his first wife, Shelley married Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, with whom he had been travelling on the continent. In 1818 he left England never to see it again. The remaining four years of his life were passed in Italy, during a part of which time he was very intimate with Byron. On June 30, 1822, he was drowned by the upsetting of a boat in a sudden squall in the Bay of Spezzia. His body was washed ashore, and, in accordance with the Tuscan quarantine law then prevailing, was burned by the authorities. The ashes were deposited in Rome.

Poetical Character. — Shelley is, of all English poets, pre-eminently the poet of imagination and sensibility. His life must be pronounced, in one sense, a failure. His physical organization was so delicate, his moral and poetical sensibilities were so acute, as to unfit him for the full exercise of his really great powers. It is generally conceded, at the present day, that had Shelley lived to outgrow his weakness, and to cure his vagaries by the slow but certain lessons of experience, he would have produced some masterpiece. This view is based upon the fact that his later productions show such a marked improvement upon his earlier pieces. Like Keats, with whom he has more than one trait in common, he grew better and better with age.

Works. His earliest work of note, Queen Mab, published in 1813, is little more than a treatise in defence of Atheism, full of conceits, and offering occasionally fine passages. Alastor, published only three years later, in 1816, shows already an immense improvement. The Cenci, 1819, although revolting from its subject, is still better as a poem, while the Prometheus Unbound, 1821, and the Adonais, or Elegy on Keats, are the best of his larger poems. Many of his minor poems appeared posthumously. Conspicuously among them are The Cloud, and The Sensitive Plant, so familiar to lovers of lyric poetry.

Shelley's views on religion and society seem to have been due to an innate spirit of boyish opposition, united with a feeling of contempt for the empty conventionality that reigned in England fifty years ago. His mind was already engaged in the process