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literary sky, awful, fascinating, to which all eyes were turned, eclipsing for a time the very fixed stars of the firmament. How is this extraordinary success, this wide and deep-reaching influence to be explained?

No doubt, to some extent it is due to his real genius and great qualities, to his pithy style, his force and vigour, his originality of thought and conception. Then he was new, quite new, generally in his subjects, always in his manner of treating them. The classic had become trite and tedious; W. Scott's modernised romanticism had awakened and'still entertained a taste for the extraordinary, for whatever was widely different from actual'reality in costume, manners and characters; but these were shadows, life-like shadows indeed, but still only shadows evoked by the Wizard of the North from the dust of parchments and the gloom of ruins. Byron opens new scenes, quite as strange and more captivating, new manners and customs quite as extraordinary, personages as different in their way of thinking and feeling as they are in their costumes and way of living from all that we see about us, yet contemporary, actual, drawn from personal observation and experience and reflected in the mirror of a mind whose depth and darkness imparts something of its own mysterious gloom to whatever picture it throws back. The„exhaustless East“— exhaustless not only for the conqueror and the mer- chant, but also for the scholar and the poet— had indeed been explored and— plundered by many. But they generally brought back only the ready-made jewels of Persian or Arabic poetry, or imitated them, often in baser metal, in their apologues and allegories. Not so Byron. He opens new mines, unexplored before him, in those countries where the brutal dominion of a barbarous race had created a state of things— we cannot call it society— possessing nothing of civilisation but its luxury, nothing of humanity but its most violent passions. All this was new and could not but be attractive, and even fascinating, to a generation which did not believe in poesy in real life, but sought or placed it outside the sphere of modern civilisation.

So far indeed Byron is as much a romantic poet as Walter Scott himself. But as he discovered a new land of Romance, as it were, so he, at the same tBime, peopled it with beings essentially modern, embodying that morbid, deep-rooted discontent, that feeling of disgust and revolt, that gloomy philosophy of despair, almost longing for nothingness, which is the character of his own days. And this, probably, is the true cause of his immense success and celebrity.

After the giant struggle against the great tyrant of Europe in which all the energies of nations and individuals had been strained to the utmost, there was a reaction of fatigue and indolence. Patriotic hopes and noble aspirations were sadly disappointed; the frivolous sought satisfaction or forgetfulnes in dissipation and even in debauchery; vulgarity and mediocrity strutted about decked with the cloak of hypocritical decorum; the better gave themselves up to dark melancholy or sought solace in poetical and religious mysticism. Seeing no ideal before them worth to live, work and struggle for, the general feeling was:„Whatever is is wrong“.