le causes might teach us this. He never grudged either money or time
or personal peril for the cause of Italian freedom, and his life was the
measure and the cost of his interest in the liberty of Greece. Then
again he was full not merely of wit, which is sometimes only an affair
of the tongue, but of humour also, which goes much deeper; and it is of
the essence of the humoristic nature, that whether sunny or saturnine,
it binds the thoughts of him who possesses it to the wide medley of
expressly human things. Byron did not misknow himself, nor misapprehend
the most marked turn of his own character when he wrote the lines--

I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

It was this which made Byron a social force, a far greater force than
Shelley either has been or can be. Men read in each page that he was one
of like passions with themselves; that he had their own feet of clay, if
he had other members of brass and gold and fine silver which they had
none of; and that vehement sensibility, tenacious energy of imagination,
a bounding swell of poetic fancy, had not obliterated, but had rather
quickened, the sense of the highest kind of man of the world, which did
not decay but waxed stronger in him with years. His openness to beauty
and care for it were always inferior in keenness and in hold upon him to
his sense of human interest, and the superiority in certain respects of
_Marino Faliero_, for example, where he handles a social theme in a
worthy spirit, over _Manfred_, where he seeks a something tumultuously
beautiful, is due to that subordination in his mind of aesthetic to
social intention, which is one of the most strongly distinctive marks of
the truly modern spirit. The admirable wit both of his letters, and of
pieces like the _Vision of Judgment_ and _Don Juan_, where wit reaches
as high as any English writer has ever carried it, shows in another way
the same vividness and reality of attraction which every side of human
affairs possessed for this glowing and incessantly animated spirit.

In spite of a good many surface affectations, which may have cheated the
lighter heads, but which may now be easily seen through, and counted off
for as much as they are worth, Byron possessed a bottom of plain
sincerity and rational sobriety wh