— 11— Everything appeared„weary, stale, flat aud iunprofitable“; not only in the State there was something rotten: civilisation was come to a nonplus; the world was out of joint, and none even felt called upon to set it right. Fie on it! Fie on its canting morality, on its hypocritical decency and dignity, on its hollow conventionalism and vulgar respectability! It is past mending, past hope; then let us separate from it, scorn it, oppose to its smooth hypocrisy the open vio- lence of crime, to its shallow enjoyment the deep pangs of devouring passion, to its tame vices and superficial levity the horrors of bloody deeds and scenes of death.. Byron is the very incarnation of this state of mind which, with the more metaphysical Germans, took the name of„Weltschmerz“. Like his Lara, „He long'd by good or ill to separate Himself from all who shared his mortal state“, just as Heine, later, said: „Gib her die Larvy! Ich will mich jetzt maskiren In einen Lumpenkerl, damit Hallunken, Die prächtig in Charaktermasken prunken, Nicht meinen, ich sei Einer von den ihren“. But while Heine assumes the tone of scurrilous buffoonery and cutting sarcasm, Byron is gene- rally pathetically grand and terrible, gloomy and sublime.

The parallel might be followed up farther by showing how both, as a set-off to their general tendency, occasionally exhibit the most delicate touches of tenderness, of compassion and humanity. ¹)

„ To the general feeling of satiety, dissatisfaction, disgust and hatred, Byron gives an expression so vigorous, so intense, so impetuous, that all those who shared it at once recognised in him the poet of the day. And so he is, and this will be his lasting title to an eminent place in the literary history of his country and of Europe. His own life and personal character too, avoiding and shunning that aristocratic and refined society in which his place was marked among the first, but which he despised and contemned as shallow and hypocritical, preferring the undisguised vice and frivolity of Venice, roving with Arnauts and pirates among Greeks and Turks, were a de facto protest, corroborating his writings, and he became the type as well as the poet of sullen and indignant warfare against social and moral cant and hypocrisy.

If such an author is at all to be read in our course of tuition, it must be with a view to initiate our pupils to the intellectual movement and moral state of ithe first quarter of this century. Separated from this and taking him in an absolute sense, Byron does not offer wholesome food for the young. We might indeed select passages, perhaps even choose

I wonder that this parallel between the two poets has not been pointed out more fully and distinctly

by the biographers of Heine, such as Strodtmann, and more recently, Prölss. 2*