be remembered, that, while this dominant
conception of Nature as introduced by Rousseau and others into politics
was most mischievous and destructive, its place and worth in poetry are
very different; because here in the region of the imagination it had the
effect, without any pernicious practical consequences, of giving shape
and proportion to that great idea of _ensemble_ throughout the visible
universe, which may be called the beginning and fountain of right
knowledge. The conception of the relationship of the different parts and
members of the vast cosmos was not accessible to Byron, as it is to a
later generation, but his constant appeal in season and out of season to
all the life and movement that surrounds man, implied and promoted the
widest extension of consciousness of the wholeness and community of
natural processes.

* * * * *

There was one very manifest evil consequence of the hold which this idea
in its cruder shape, gained over Byron and his admirers. The vastness of
the material universe, as they conceived and half adored it, entirely
overshadowed the principle of moral duty and social obligation. The
domestic sentiment, for example, almost disappears in those works which
made Byron most popular, or else it only appears, to be banished with
reproach. This is quite in accordance with the revolutionary spirit,
which was in one of its most fundamental aspects a revolt on behalf of
unconditioned individual rights, and against the family. If we accept
what seems to be the fatal law of progress, that excess on one side is
only moderated by a nearly corresponding excess of an opposite kind, the
Byronic dissolution of domestic feeling was not entirely without
justification. There is probably no uglier growth of time than that mean
and poor form of domesticity, which has always been too apt to fascinate
the English imagination, ever since the last great effort of the
Rebellion, and which rose to the climax of its popularity when George
III. won all hearts by living like a farmer. Instead of the fierce light
beating about a throne, it played lambently upon a sty. And the nation
who admired, imitated. When the Regent came, and with him that coarse
profligacy which has alternated with cloudy insipidity in the annals of
the line, the honest part of the world, out of antipathy to the son,
was driven even further into domestic sentimentality of a greasy kind,
than it had gone from affe