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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 abrupt ness 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 bis 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

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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 lyrio 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

of self-purification when arrested by death. Imperfect as he remained, he has not been excelled by any English poet in the subtlety and burning force of his imagination and in exquisitely chosen diction.

"The strong imagination of Shelley made him an idolater in his own despite. Out of the most indefinite terms of a hard, cold, dark, metaphysical system, he made a gorgeous Pantheon, full of beautiful, majestic, life-like forms. He turned Atheism itself into a mythology, rich with visions as glorious as the gods that live in the marble of Phidias, or the Virgin saints that smile on us from the canvas of Murillo. The Spirit of Beauty, the Principle of Good, the Principle of Evil, when he treated of them, ceased to be abstractions. They took shape and color. They were no longer mere words, but 'intelligible forms,' 'fair humanities, objects of love, of adoration, or of fear. As there can be no stronger sign of a mind destitute of the poetical faculty than that tendency which was so common among the writers of the French school, to turn images into abstractions, -Venus, for example, into Love, Minerva into Wisdom, Mars into War, and Bacchus into festivity, -so there can be no stronger sign of a mind truly poetical than a disposition to reverse this abstracting process, aud to make individuals out of generalities. Some of the metaphysical and ethical theories of Shelley were certainly most absurd and pernicious. But we doubt whether any modern poet has possessed in an equal degree the highest qualities of the great ancient masters. The words bard and inspiration, which seem so cold and affected when applied to other modern writers, have a perfect propriety when applied to him. He was not an author, but a bard. His poetry seems not to have been an art but an inspiration. Had he lived to the full age of man, he might not improbably have given to the world some great work of the very highest rank in design and execution."-Macaulay.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, 1798–1851, daughter of the wellknown William Godwin, and second wife of Shelley, was herself a writer of considerable abilities.

Mrs. Shelley is chiefly known to the literary world by her edition of her husband's works, to which she has prefixed a good biographical sketch, and also by her novels, among which are Frankenstein, Valperga, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, etc. They belong to the sensational class. Frankenstein, otherwise named The Modern Prometheus, is among the first of what might be called the galvanic novels, í. e. novels in which the occult, demoniacal forces of nature play a leading part. Germany is the birthplace of such vagaries. Frankenstein is the result of a compact between the authoress, Byron, and Shelley himself, that each should write a romance in imitation of the German school. In Mrs. Shelley's work, the hero discovers the secret of life and generation, and actually succeeds in creating a man-monster, who is the agent of numerous horrid performances. Mrs Shelley's Rambles in Germany, etc., form a pleasing account of her travels with her husband.

Keats.

JOHN KEATS, 1796-1821, was a poet of great promise, who died before reaching the full maturity of his powers.

Career.- Keats was a native of Moorfields. London. He received a meagre classical education, and was apprenticed in his fifteenth year to a surgeon, but soon abandoned medicine for literature. He made the acquaintanceship of Leigh Hunt, then editor of The Examiner, and published some effusions in that periodical. In 1817, he published a volume of poems dedicated to Hunt. In 1818 appeared Endymion, a Po

etical Romance. This work was reviewed with unsparing severity by Gifford, in the Quarterly Review, and many, misled by the allusion in Byron's Don Juan and by Shelley's lines, have supposed that the shock thus given to Keats's sensibilities was the cause of his speedy death. It is now generally believed, however, that Keats would have died early in any case, as his constitution was of the frailest.

Other Works. In 1820 he published a second volume, containing Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, and several minor poems. Keats's merits and defects as a poet are now generally understood and acknowledged. Endymion has many rich passages, but, as a whole, is weak. Hyperion and The Eve of St. Agnes display immense progress, and there is every reason for supposing that, had the author been permitted to ripen to maturity, he would have added another to the list of great English poets. As it is, he falls just short of greatness.

Of Keats's minor poems the most admired are the Lines on Chapman's Homer, The Ode to a Nightingale, The Ode to a Grecian Urn. Keats is distinguished for his sensuous warmth, the play of his imagery, and his exquisite ear for harmony.

Kirke White.

HENRY KIRKE WHITE, 1785-1806, gave in very early life evidence of poetical genius, but died before accomplishing anything of permanent value.

He was the son of a butcher, and attracted attention by his precocity. Through the influence of friends he was placed at Cambridge, where his health was ruined by excessive study, and he sank into an early grave. During his lifetime he had published several poetical pieces in local magazines, and also a volume of poetry, entitled Clifton Grove. This was criticized by the London Monthly Review in what the poet's friend Southey called "cruel and insulting" terms, although it can scarcely be said that the reviewer exceeded his province. After White's death his unpublished pieces were edited by Southey, with a biographical sketch, under the title, Remains of Henry Kirke White. His Correspondence has also been published.

White's place is among those poets who attract us more through sympathy with their adverse fate than by the intrinsic value of their productions His poems unquestionably possess merit, but not such merit as entitles the poet to rank in the first or even the second class. It is idle, of course, to speculate upon what White might have become, had his faculties had a fair chance to develop and mature. Judged by what he actually accomplished, we must admit that he has left us nothing profound, or even intensely passionate. His verses are rather plaintive and agreeable than vigorous. The best known of them are: The Star of Bethlehem, To an Early Primrose, Song of the Consumptive, Savoyard's Return, etc.

Campbell.

Thomas Campbell, 1777-1844, has an honored place among the fixed stars of the poetical firmament. His poems are not so considerable in amount as those of some other writers. But there is an excellence and finish in all that he did write that secures for him a permanent place in letters.

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