den and deafening
storm of applause when the century was young, and now, at its close (I
refer, of course, to the Tales, not to Byron's poetry as a whole, which,
in spite of the critics, has held and still holds its own), are ignored
if not forgotten, passed over if not despised--which but few know
thoroughly, and "very few" are found to admire or to love. _Ubi lapsus,
quid feci?_ might the questioning spirit of the author exclaim with
regard to his "Harrys and Larrys, Pilgrims and Pirates," who once held
the field, and now seem to have gone under in the struggle for poetical
existence!

To what, then, may we attribute the passing away of interest and
enthusiasm? To the caprice of fashion, to an insistence on a more
faultless _technique_, to a nicer taste in ethical sentiment, to a
preference for a subtler treatment of loftier themes? More certainly,
and more particularly, I think, to the blurring of outline and the
blotting out of detail due to lapse of time and the shifting of the
intellectual standpoint.

However much the charm of novelty and the contagion of enthusiasm may
have contributed to the success of the Turkish and other Tales, it is in
the last degree improbable that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers
were enamoured, not of a reality, but of an illusion born of ignorance
or of vulgar bewilderment. They were carried away because they breathed
the same atmosphere as the singer; and being undistracted by ethical, or
grammatical, or metrical offences, they not only read these poems with
avidity, but understood enough of what they read to be touched by their
vitality, to realize their verisimilitude.

_Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner._ Nay, more, the knowledge, the
comprehension of essential greatness in art, in nature, or in man is not
to know that there is aught to forgive. But that sufficing knowledge
which the reader of average intelligence brings with him for the
comprehension and appreciation of contemporary literature has to be
bought at the price of close attention and patient study when the
subject-matter of a poem and the modes and movements of the poet's
consciousness are alike unfamiliar.

Criticism, however subtle, however suggestive, however luminous, will
not bridge over the gap between the past and the present, will not
supply the sufficing knowledge. It is delightful and interesting and, in
a measure, instructive to know what great poets of his own time and of
ours have thought of