Alma Mater whose child he truly is. As far as a certain air of superiority and the habit of surveying mankind from an altitude are concerned, it will doubtless shock the democratic admirers of Shelley -who are the principal persons busied just at present in the making a fuss about him-to hear that such may be predicated, up to a certain point, of him and of Byron equally. Medwin, the most partial of witnesses where Shelley is concerned, and whose authority on such a point is therefore conclusive, says positively that Shelley "was not such a republican at heart as Mrs. Shelley makes him out." He adds that Shelley "did not love a democracy." He also assures us that "Shelley was in some respects as aristocratic as Byron, and was far from despising the advantages of birth and station." No one would dream of denying that Byron was what is usually meant by "aristocratic;" but that did not in the least prevent him from being a liberal, and even a revolutionist, in the days when there was good cause to be both, or from doing liberty immeasurably more practical service than it ever fell to poor dreamy Shelley's lot to render it. Conversely, Shelley's genuine and profound hatred of tyranny, and his genuine and profound passion for freedom-especially for the freedom of the individual-were by no means inconsistent with thoroughly aristocratic feelings. It would be strange, indeed, if any one should experience difficulty in understanding this, in days when the tyranny of democracy is hourly invoked not to allow superiority-in other words, aristocracy-of any kind longer to exist. It is well known what pleasure Byron took in Shelley's society, and what efforts he made to keep him within hail. Much, no doubt, must be set down to Shelley's powers of mind and conversation; but, as Rousseau shrewdly observes in the Emile,' friendship is based on similarity of tastes and sentiments rather than on similarity of intellect or opinion, and one of Byron's observations concerning Shelley on which he lays most stress is, that he was "a gentleman." What Byron meant by a word often misused we are left in no doubt, since, in a prose passage which may be unknown to many of our readers, and which is highly suggestive in many ways, he endeavours to render its real significance:-

"The grand distinction of the new school of poets is their vulgarity. By this I do not mean that they are coarse, but 'shabby-genteel,' as it is termed. It is in their finery that they are most vulgar, and they may be known by this at once. Far be it from me to presume that there was, or can be, such a thing as an aristocracy of poets; but there is a nobility of thought and of style open to all stations, and derived partly from talent, and partly from education-which is to be found in Shakespeare and Pope and Burns, no less than in Dante and Alfieri. If I were asked to define what this gentlemanliness is, I should say that it is to be defined only by examples of those who have it and those who have it not. In poetry, as well as in writing

VOL. XXXIV.

D

in general, it will never make entirely a poet or a poem ; but neither poet or poem will ever be good for anything without it. It is the salt of society and the seasoning of composition. Vulgarity is far worse than downright blackguardism; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong sense at times; while the former is a sad abortive attempt at all things, signifying nothing. It does not depend upon low themes, or even low language, for Fielding revels in bothbut is he ever vulgar? No. You see the man of education, the gentleman, and the scholar, sporting with his subject-its master, not its slave. Your vulgar writer is always most vulgar the higher his subject; as the man who showed the menagerie at Pidcock's was wont to say: This, gentlemen, is the eagle of the sun, from Archangel, in Russia; the 'otterer it is, the 'igherer it flies !'"

This gentlemanliness of Shelley-a gentlemanliness which is as apparent in his compositions as we have Byron's authority for saying it was in his manner-sprang from nothing else than that natural air and tone of superiority, that habit of looking at things from a certain altitude, of which we spoke. Both Byron and Shelley had it, and each of them alike had a burning detestation of despotism, an unquenchable love of liberty, and an undying desire for the amelioration of their species; dashed in Byron by doubt, if not despair; buoyed up in Shelley by hope, if not by confidence.

It is the common opinion that Byron was the spoilt child of fortune in every respect, and Shelley in every respect the reverse. We have already said that Byron enjoyed notoriety long before he merited fame, and that Shelley never enjoyed the reputation which is now his immutable share. There, however, Byron's advantage, as far as it was one, may be said to have ended. He had no father, and an unwise mother. The subject is one on which we do not care to dwell at any length; but it cannot be passed over in any comparison and contrast of the two men. Byron, if not an affectionate, was a dutiful son to a parent who strengthened her natural claims by no maternal merits; whereas Shelley, if the filial sentiment is still to be revered, was anything but an affectionate or dutiful son to a parent who, it must be owned, treated him with some consideration. We should be the last to say that a young man is bound to accept the opinions, theological, social, or political, of his parents, or even to conceal his own to the extent of dissimulation, in order to spare their feelings. It is a more difficult question to decide, whether, supposing his own opinions to be highly offensive to them, he should, or should not, say as little about them as possible, and, in any case, abstain from making a public parade of them. We are disposed to think that, in ordinary cases, he would do well to wound the authors of his being as little as possible; but we cannot forget that some men are born with the evangelizing instinct, and Shelley was probably one of these. Many

people are aware what offence the Pietistic tendencies of the great Saint Francis of Assisi gave to his family, and everybody could quote a yet higher and more revered example. It is perhaps, therefore, only fair to acquit Shelley of any blame in his active propagation of socalled anti-Christian notions. At the same time, if Shelley's father had disowned him altogether for so doing, though we should have regretted and reprehended such a retaliation, he would have done only what hundreds of parents of all creeds have done to their children for milder forms of heresy. Sir Timothy Shelley did nothing of the kind, however, even though Shelley added to that provocation a strange wandering life and an extraordinary marriage. He allowed Shelley £200 a year from the very first; and if he alleged that his reason for so doing was "to prevent his son cheating strangers," Shelley's sublime disregard of money obligations afforded some excuse for the petulant sentence. It is not easy to render an accurate account of Shelley's finances at any time; but when we find him heading a subscription in 1812 with £500, his means, even in those young days, could not have been miserably narrow. Before very long, however, his income was raised by his father to £1000 a year, though father and son remained as much estranged as ever, and any references to be found in Shelley's conversation upon the subject display the most unfilial attitude of mind. We do not wish it to be inferred that we consider Shelley very blameworthy in the matter, which is perhaps best to be described by the word "unfortunate." All we intended to show was that in the relation of son to parent he was, to say the least of it, as fortunate as Byron, and not so filial; and that here again we stumble upon cause for comparison, with a touch of contrast.

There is, perhaps, no point in the lives of poets, after their writings, which interests us so much as their loves; and once more Byron and Shelley sufficiently resemble and differ from each other to further our present study. The prevailing notion, doubtless, is that, in their relations to women, if a comparison is to be made, Byron was a demon and Shelley an angel. We will not say that the reverse would be nearer the truth; but it is easily demonstrable, that whilst Shelley was infinitely the more fortunate, Byron was considerably the more faithful. Byron's first flame was Mary Chaworth; and it is quite certain that in the gloomy chamber of his desolate heart its flickering light never wholly went out. What is called "calf love" is regarded by most people as a subject rather for ridicule than for sympathy or compassion; but it is probable that very young people, when they happen to be endowed with sensitive temperaments, suffer more from these early attacks of the heart than their elders ever do. Byron's love for Mary Chaworth, commencing in his seventeenth year, pursued him till he laid down his life in his thirty-seventh. He got beyond all other things-wife, child, country, envy, hate, society, calumny-but

never beyond that. Some shallow critics have striven to make the world believe that vindictiveness was the main passion in Byron's heart. Had it been true, how vindictive ought he to have felt towards Mary Chaworth! "Do you think I would ever marry that lame boy?" he himself overheard her say to her maid. But he went on loving her, all the same, and more and more deeply, the further that space and time removed him from her. "I doubt sometimes," be writes, "whether, after all, a quiet and unagitated life would have suited me; yet I sometimes long for it. My earliest dreams, as most boys' are, were martial; but a little later they were all love and retirement, till the hopeless attachment to Mary Chaworth began and continued, though sedulously concealed, very early in my teens." The stanzas he wrote, on leaving England for the first time, ending ever with the same refrain, "Because I cannot love but one," attest the thoroughness of the passion which had mastered him; and nothing is more certain than that he never loved again :

The whole of literature contains no love record so brief, yet so touching, as 'The Dream.' Insensible must be the heart that even now can read it without bleeding. It was written ten years after the passion it commemorates was proved to be for ever hopeless; it required ten years to pass away, before the man could describe what the boy had experienced. It is the least stormy, indeed the most tranquil, of all Byron's compositions. It is horribly still and, in a sense, silentstill and silent as the face of some dark unmoved mere, whose depths we feel a morbid desire to probe. After describing "a gentle hill, green, and of mild declivity," he tells us how

A maiden and a youth were there,
Gazing-the one on all that was beneath,
Fair as herself; but the boy gazed on her.
And both were young, but one was beautiful :
And both were young, but not alike in youth.
As the sweet morn on the horizon's verge,
The maid was on the eve of womanhood.
The boy had fewer summers, but his heart
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him. He had looked
Upon it till it could not pass away.

He had no breath, no being, but in hers;

She was his voice; he did not speak to her,

But trembled on her words. She was his sight,

For his eye followed hers, and saw with hers,
Which coloured all his objects. She was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all. Upon a tone,

A touch, of hers his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously-his heart
Unknowing of its cause of agony.

But she in these fond feelings had no share.

Her sighs were not for him; to her he was
Even as a brother-no more

Who does not know the rest of the picture ?-the boy standing within an antique oratory, "pale, pacing to and fro," tracing words not to be guessed, leaning his head upon his hands, shaking "as 'twere with a convulsion," then tearing with his teeth and quivering hands what he had written, and "a tablet of unutterable thoughts" stealing a moment over his face as there entered the "lady of his love," and he bade her adieu. And then at length we see him, when years have passed:

The beings which surrounded him were gone,
Or were at war with him. He was a mark
For blight and desolation, compassed round
With hatred and contention. Pain was mixed
In all which was served up to him, until,
Like to the Pontic monarch of old days,
He fed on poisons, and they had no power,
But were a kind of nutriment. He lived

Through that which had been death to many men.
And made him friends of mountains.

And the quick spirit of the universe

With the stars

He held his dialogues, and they did teach

To him the magic of their mysteries.

To him the book of Night was opened wide,
And voices from the deep abyss revealed
A marvel and a secret. Be it so."

'The Dream' is almost the only good specimen of blank verse Byron has left us. His blank verse is usually abominably bad. This is exquisite; for he was carried away, as he never was in his tragedies, by the fever and the force of his own feelings. He is for ever recurring to this first, last, hopeless love. It is the only one- Mary Chaworth is the only woman-he does not gird at, some time or other. Despite that terrible levity which was one of the strangest and most important traits in his disposition, he never for one moment makes fun of this. It was the only wholly serious event in his life. He makes fun even of his friends the mountains, of liberty, of fame, of the Italians for whom he lived, of the Greeks for whom he died, of Moore, of his wife, of his country, of heaven, and of the gods; but of Mary Chaworth, never. The nearest approach to any trifling with