his haughty soul demanded; he was a peer, the descendant of peers, and he was a poet.

During this time in London, he was advised to marry and settle down; and, having had his fling in the world, probably, also, hoping to retrieve his fortune, he proposed to Miss Milbank. Unfortunately he was accepted. He did not pretend to be deeply in love; perhaps the only real passion of his life was his youthful attachment to Mary Chaworth, the daughter of a neighbor and hereditary enemy. At all events her shadow rose before him at the altar. He seemed, however, to live happily enough with his wife for a year, and it was she who forced the separation between them. Soon after the birth of their daughter, she went home on a visit and from there informed him that she did not intend to return.

The reasons for her action may never be exactly known. Undoubtedly, Byron was of uneven temper, and had been disappointed in not coming into immediate possession of his wife's property. Perhaps Lady Byron was jealous. Be that as it may, the whole world rose against the man who during four years had been its idol. No invented story was too atrocious to be believed. His friends considered his very life in danger; he himself was anxious to leave a country where he was so detested, and a mode of life the hollowness of which had begun to tire him.

He spent the next seven years chiefly in Italy, at times leading a life unworthy of his better self, but profiting by the friendship of Shelley, and always displaying a keen interest in politics both at home and abroad. He even aided the movement toward liberty which swept over Italy in 1820-1821, although he saw clearly that the time

for Italian unity had not yet come. When the Greeks broke out into rebellion, he was asked to see what his presence and negotiations might do. He went, but lived only long enough to win the confidence and affection of all parties by his diplomatic skill. He died of malarial fever, at Missolonghi, in 1824.

Pre-eminent among other poets of his time, Byron is the poet of the Revolution. The inherent conservatism of Wordsworth and Coleridge asserted itself soon after their first youthful outbreaks; they were frightened by the excesses of France into adherence to England, the product of evolution rather than of revolution. By the time Byron was old enough to understand something of politics, the reaction against Napoleon was at its height; on the other hand, the worst details of the years 17921794 had sunk into the background, so that Byron felt the grandeur of the ideal for which the French had striven, without its sickening horrors. Moreover, he was a hero-worshipper. Napoleon, the man of achievement, fired his soul. He burned with the zeal of self-assertion. He gloried in the joy of individual freedom.

This characteristic was not wholly the effect of the age in which he lived; it was the result of his strong personality. He was a man of exaggerated emotions. He judged everything in life as it affected himself. Every scene or incident was colored to his imagination by his own feelings, which were peculiarly vivid.

Another and less happy trait was a lack of reserve. The frankness which helped to ruin his own life, however, was of value to succeeding poets. He created a new style of poetry, which scattered broadcast a most intimate knowledge of his own personality; and, whatever

its accompanying faults, the sincerity with which he struck this new note was true enough to make his name honored. Though he carried self-revelation to the point of weakness, his fearless expression of individuality was as important an element in the new era of poetry as Wordsworth's return to nature.

The force of Byron's sentiment and the boldness with which he revealed his personality captured the heart of society; but the rashness, the lack of self-control, the theatrical display of emotion which he exhibited in his earlier work have caused an eclipse of his popularity during the last forty years. Englishmen are only now beginning to appreciate his inherent strength, which foreigners perceived from the first; but even without an understanding of his merits, English poetry has shown the effect of his influence.

Another manifestation of the independence of Byron's nature lay in his strong historic sense. England had, it is true, a reverence for her own past, though little knowledge of the world's history; but men of the Revolutionary period had lived so entirely in the present, affairs of the moment were so overwhelmingly pressing, that continentals and English alike had lost all interest in the great names of former times. It is the distinguishing mark of Byron that, hand in hand with his capacity for hero-worship went a veneration for past achievement and forgotten splendors. Any evidences of man's activities, any battle-field or ruined castle, roused his emotional nature to reflection, and every place he visited in his varied travels gave rise to a picture or a monologue, which, in course of time, found its way into his poetry.

His method forbade any unity in most of his poems,

but it wakened in Englishmen a feeling for history, hitherto quite unknown. There is hardly a spot in Europe, ordinarily visited by travellers, which has not acquired an historic as well as a literary association because of his writing.

These two elements-the appeal to personal feeling and a sense of the historic past—are Byron's contribution to English poetry. Besides these qualities, his vivid description, his thrilling narrative, his caustic wit, the cleverness of his vocabulary, though they had their counterparts in earlier poetry, will be sufficient to preserve his fame, notwithstanding the roughness of his metre, the lack of harmony in his verse, the crudeness of many of his ideas. These blemishes are the marks of a strong but untrained nature, and are atoned for by the vigor and earnestness with which he wrote.

With the death of Byron, the poetic impulse for a time subsided; Tennyson and Browning came a generation later. Nevertheless, a lasting revolution had been effected and a new era begun. With all its varied growth, Nineteenth Century poetry still retains something of the spirit with which the century opened, and traces its development to the work of the five men represented in this volume.