rtion. The ashes belong as much and as necessarily to the methods
of the Revolution in that phase, as do the blaze, that first told men
of possible light and warmth, and the fire, which yet smoulders with
abundant life underneath the gray cinders. And we have to remember that
Byron came in the midst of a reaction; a reaction of triumph for the
partisans of darkness and obstruction, who were assured that the
exploded fragments of the old order would speedily grow together again,
and a reaction of despondency for those who had filled themselves with
illimitable and peremptory hopes. Silly Byronical votaries, who only
half understood their idol, and loved him for a gloom that in their own
case was nothing but a graceful veil for selfishness and mental
indolence, saw and felt only the melancholy conclusion, and had not
travelled a yard in the burning path that led to it. They hugged
Conrad's haughty misery, but they would have trembled at the thought of
Conrad's perilous expedition. They were proud despondent Laraes after
their manner, 'lords of themselves, that heritage of woe,' but the
heritage would have been still more unbearable, if it had involved
Lara's bodily danger.

This shallowness has no part in Byron himself. His weariness was a
genuine outcome of the influence of the time upon a character consumed
by passion. His lot was cast among spent forces, and, while it is no
hyperbole to say that he was himself the most enormous force of his
time, he was only half conscious of this, if indeed he did not always
inwardly shrink from crediting his own power and strength, as so many
strong men habitually do, in spite of noisy and perpetual
self-assertion. Conceit and presumption have not been any more fatal to
the world, than the waste which comes of great men failing in their
hearts to recognise how great they are. Many a man whose affectations
and assumptions are a proverb, has lost the magnificent virtue of
simplicity, for no other reason than that he needed courage to take his
own measure, and so finally confirm to himself the reality of his
pretensions. With Byron, as with some of his prototypes among the men of
action in France and elsewhere, theatrical ostentation, excessive
self-consciousness, extravagant claims, cannot hide from us that their
power was secretly drained by an ever-present distrust of their own
aims, their own methods, even of the very results that they seem to have
achieved.

This diffidence was a