episode, where he is a half-reluctant party, with Catherine of Russia, he retains many traces of honour. (“In royalty’s vast arms he sigh’d for beauty.”) The spirit, however, of gaiety and irony that pervades the whole work, though it might at first seem to make matters worse, is really the solvent and antidote. There is, once more, that curious fundamental coolness and freedom of mind, and that dominance of reason, which emerges from Byron’s torments, mysteries, posings, and more or less factitious confessions of wickedness and weakness. As a painter of manners, who leaves a true document behind him, his position seems to be safe. The Near East, and the London of the Regency—these are his two great hunting-grounds; and the latter cantos of Don Juan are a real addition to the memoirs of Regency England. Again we go back to the previous century for our comparisons. The real parallel to these scenes and persons, and to Byron’s letters, is to be found not in the literature of romance at all, but in the letters and records of the serene, imperturbable old patrician free-living wits of the middle and later eighteenth century. Such are George Selwyn, and “Gilly” Williams, and that old Marquis of Queensberry who is not so bad as he has been painted. And Byron’s strong, natural prose, as he pours out his stories and memories, is in essence their prose; it is not that of the age or set of Keats, and Leigh Hunt, and Wordsworth and Shelley. It is penetrated throughout with a masculine humour, coarse no doubt in fibre, but not in the least feeble or insidious or precious. And the same tone, the same diction, reign in his verse, in the pliable octave measure, which wavers and changes with every mood and gust. Why, you hear the gay light old verse of the last age even in the Hours of Idleness:
Why should you weep like Lydia Languish
And fret with self-created anguish?
Or doom the lover you have chosen
On winter nights to sigh half-frozen;
In leafless shades to sue for pardon,
Only because the scene’s a garden?
I will add, that if we are asking what Byron can give us to-day, and to what gap in contemporary poetry his performance points, one reply will be, that we have had no new Don Juan. We have no great satirist in verse; the art seems to be lost. We have nobody with a large, free, gay, unflinching knowledge of the world, and with the ability to express that knowledge in verse. Allowing for the vast and obvious differences, Byron, at the opening of the nineteenth
