matingly within us, unbidden, whether we turn to him or no.

For no Englishman now does Byron hold this highest place; and this is
not unnatural in any way, if we remember in what a different shape the
Revolution has now by change of circumstance and occasion come to
present itself to those who are most ardent in the search after new
paths. An estimate of Byron would be in some sort a measure of the
distance that we have travelled within the last half century in our
appreciation of the conditions of social change. The modern rebel is at
least half-acquiescence. He has developed a historic sense. The most
hearty aversion to the prolonged reign of some of the old gods does not
hinder him from seeing, that what are now frigid and unlovely blocks
were full of vitality and light in days before the era of their
petrifaction. There is much less eagerness of praise or blame, and much
less faith in knife and cautery, less confidence that new and right
growth will naturally and necessarily follow upon demolition.

The Revolution has never had that long hold on the national imagination
in England, either as an idol or a bugbear, which is essential to keep
the poet who sings it in effective harmony with new generations of
readers. More than this, the Byronic conception was as transitional and
inadequate as the methods and ideas of the practical movers, who were to
a man left stranded in every country in Europe, during the period of his
poetic activity. A transitional and unstable movement of society
inevitably fails to supply a propulsion powerful enough to make its
poetic expression eternal. There is no better proof of the enormous
force of Byron's genius than that it was able to produce so fine an
expression of elements so intrinsically unfavourable to high poetry as
doubt, denial, antagonism, and weariness. But this force was no
guarantee for perpetuity of influence. Bare rebellion cannot endure, and
no succession of generations can continue nourishing themselves on the
poetry of complaint, and the idealisation of revolt. If, however, it is
impossible that Byron should be all to us that he was to a former
generation, and if we find no direct guidance in his muse, this is no
reason why criticism should pass him over, nor why there may not be
something peculiarly valuable in the noble freedom and genuine modernism
of his poetic spirit, to an age that is apparently only forsaking the
clerical idyll of one school, for the reactionar