forgotten because they teach nothing is to strike at the very life and soul of poetry. It does not exist to teach, but to please; it can cease to exist only when it ceases to give pleasure.
Perhaps what Mr. Bagehot meant to imply is that it would be a difficult task to review Byron's poetry after the approved modern fashion; to assign him, as we assign more contemplative and analytic poets, a moral raison d'être. Pick up a criticism of Mr. Browning, for example, and this is the first thing we see: "What was the kernel of Browning's ethical teaching, and how does he apply its principles to life, religion, art, and love?"[1] It would be as manifestly absurd to ask this question about Byron as it would be to review Fielding from the standpoint adapted for Tolstoï, or to discuss Sheridan from the same field of view as Ibsen. With the earlier writers it was a question of workmanship; with our present favorites it has become a question of ethics. Yet when we seek for simple edification, as our plain-spoken grandfathers understood the word, as many innocent people understand it now, the new school seems as remote from fur-
- ↑ Quarterly Review.
