John Nichol

“ The position would doubtless have been acceptable to a man who never—amid his many self-deceptions—affected to deny that he was ambitious: and who can say what might not have resulted for Greece, had the poet lived to add lustre to her crown? In the meantime, while faring more frugally than a day-labourer, he yet surrounded himself with a show of royal state, had his servants armed with gilt helmets, and gathered around him a body-guard of Suliotes. ”

“ No one ever lived who, in the same space, more thoroughly ran the gauntlet of existence. Having exhausted all other sources of vitality and intoxication—travel, gallantry, and verse—it remained for the despairing poet to become a hero. But he was also moved by a public passion, the genuineness of which there is no reasonable ground to doubt. Like Alfieri and Rousseau, he had taken for his motto, "I am of the opposition;" and, as Dante under a republic called for a monarchy, Byron, under monarchies at home and abroad, called for a commonwealth. ”

“ His shifting attitude towards Lady Byron, his wavering purposes, his impulsive acts, are a part of the character we trace through all his life and work,—a strange mixture of magnanimity and brutality, of laughter and tears, consistent in nothing but his passion and his pride, yet redeeming all his defects by his graces, and wearing a greatness that his errors can only half obscure.
Alternately the idol and the horror of his contemporaries, Byron was, during his life, feared and respected as "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme." His works were the events of the literary world. ”

“ Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence.... Your whole generation are not worth a canto of the Dunciad, or anything that is his. ”

“ His command over the verse itself is almost miraculous: he glides from extreme to extreme, from punning to pathos, from melancholy to mad merriment, sighing or laughing by the way at his readers or at himself or at the stanzas. Into them he can fling anything under the sun, from a doctor's prescription to a metaphysical theory.
When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter,
And proved it, 'twas no matter what he said,
is as cogent a refutation of idealism as the cumbrous wit of Scotch logicians. ”

“ There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it." "Give me a republic. Look in the history of the earth—Rome, Greece, Venice, Holland, France, America, our too short Commonwealth—and compare it with what they did under masters." ”

“ Never was poet born to so much illustrious, and to so much bad blood. The records of his infancy betray the temper which he preserved through life—passionate, sullen, defiant of authority, but singularly amenable to kindness. ”

“ Professor Brandes, of Copenhagen, introduces his striking sketch of the poet by a reference to the model, that has its natural place in the museum named from the great sculptor whose genius had flung into the clay the features of a character so unlike his own. The bust, says the Danish critic, at first sight impresses one with an undefinable classic grace; on closer examination the restlessness of a life is reflected in a brow over which clouds seem to hover, but clouds from which we look for lightnings. ”

“ It is impossible to define the influence of Nature, either on nations or individuals, or to say beforehand what selection from his varied surroundings a poet will for artistic purposes elect to make. Shakespeare rests in meadows and glades, and leaves to Milton "Teneriffe and Atlas." Burns, who lived for a considerable part of his life in daily view of the hills of Arran, never alludes to them. But, in this respect like Shelley, Byron was inspired by a passion for the high-places of the earth. Their shadow is on half his verse. ”

“ The biographer's reminiscences mainly dwell on his lordship's changing moods and tempers and gymnastic exercises, his terror of interviewing strangers, his imperfect appreciation of art, his preference of fish to flesh, his almost parsimonious economy in small matters, mingled with allusions to his domestic calamities, and frequent expressions of a growing distaste to Venetian society. On leaving the city, Moore passed a second afternoon at La Mira, had a glimpse of Allegra, and the first intimation of the existence of the notorious Memoirs. ”

“ His rank and fame, the glittering splendour of his verse, the romance of his travels, his picturesque melancholy and affectation of mysterious secrets, combined with the magic of his presence to bewitch and bewilder them. The dissenting malcontents, condemned as prudes and blues, had their revenge. Generally, we may say that women who had not written books adored Byron; women who had written or were writing books distrusted, disliked, and made him a moral to adorn their tales, often to point their fables with. ”

“ To the well-known passage in Childe Harold on Soracte and the "Latian echoes" he appends a prose comment, which preserves its interest as hearing on recent educational controversies:—"I wish to express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote, before we get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of composition, which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish or to reason upon.... ”

“ He has swept into the pages of his poem the experience of thirty years of a life so crowded with vitality that our sense of the plethora of power which it exhibits makes us ready to condone its lapses. Byron, it has been said, balances himself on a ladder like other acrobats; but alone, like the Japanese master of the art, he all the while bears on his shoulders the weight of a man. Much of Don Juan is as obnoxious to criticism in detail as his earlier work; it has every mark of being written in hot haste. ”

“ Had the Liberal proved a lamp to the nations, instead of a mere "red flag flaunted in the face of John Bull," he might have cast anchor at Genoa; but the whole drift of his work and life demonstrates that he was capable on occasion of merging himself in what he conceived to be great causes, especially in their evil days. Of the Hunts he may have had enough; but the invidious statement about La Guiccioli has no foundation, other than a somewhat random remark of Shelley, and the fact that he left her nothing in his will. ”

“ No one else—except, perhaps, Wordsworth—who could write so well, could also write so ill. This fact in Byron's case seems due not to mere carelessness, but to incapacity. Something seems to stand behind him, like the slave in the chariot, to check the current of his highest thought. The glow of his fancy fades with the suddenness of a southern sunset. His best inspirations are spoilt by the interruption of incongruous commonplace. He had none of the guardian delicacy of taste, or the thirst after completeness, which mark the consummate artist. ”

“ Lord Byron, electrified by this unexpected act, seemed to recover from his sickness; and the more the Suliotes raged, the more his calm courage triumphed. The scene was truly sublime." "It is impossible," says Count Gamba, "to do justice to the coolness and magnanimity which he displayed upon every trying occasion. Upon trifling occasions he was certainly irritable; but the aspect of danger calmed him in an instant, and restored him the free exercise of all the powers of his noble nature. A more undaunted man in the hour of peril never breathed." ”

“ He is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud; he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men ”

“ Byron had, on occasion, more self-control than Burns, who yielded to every thirst or gust, and could never have lived the life of the soldier at Mesolonghi; but partly owing to meanness, partly to a sound instinct, his memory has been more severely dealt with. The fact of his being a nobleman helped to make him famous, but it also helped to make him hated. No doubt it half spoiled him in making him a show; and the circumstance has suggested the remark of a humourist, that it is as hard for a lord to be a perfect gentleman as for a camel to pass through the needle's eye. ”

“ The other, with a fever in his veins, calmed it in the sea and in the cloud, and, in some degree because of his very excellencies, has failed as yet to mark the world at large. The poets' poet, the cynosure of enthusiasts, he bore the banner of the forlorn hope; but Byron, with his feet of clay, led the ranks. Shelley, as pure a philanthropist as St. Francis or Howard, could forget mankind, and, like his Adonaïs, become one with nature. ”