ery stone. For those who were fascinated by the
picture of a reckless prodigal, always in love and in debt, with
fierce passions and a haughty contempt for the world, who defied
public opinion and was suspected of unutterable things--such a
personality added enormous zest to his poetry. But now that Byron's
whole career has been once more laid out before his countrymen, with
light poured on to it from every cranny and peephole, those who take
up this final edition of his life and works must feel that their main
object and duty should be to form an unbiased estimate of the true
value, apart from the author's rank and private history, of poems
which must always hold a permanent place in the high imaginative
literature of England.

It may be said that every writer of force and originality traverses
two phases of opinion before his substantive rank in the great order
of merit is definitely fixed: he is either depressed or exalted
unduly. He may be neglected or cheapened by his own generation, and
praised to the sides by posterity; or his fame may undergo the inverse
treatment, until he settles down to his proper level. Byron's
reputation has passed through sharper vicissitudes than have befallen
most of his compeers; for though no poet has ever shot up in a brief
lifetime to a higher pinnacle of fame, or made a wider impression upon
the world around him, after his death he seems to have declined
slowly, in England, to a point far below his real merits. And at this
moment there is no celebrated poet, perhaps no writer, in regard to
whom the final judgment of critics and men of letters is so
imperfectly determined. Here is a man whom Goethe accounted a
character of unique eminence, with supreme creative power, whose
poetry, he admitted, had influenced his own later verse--one of those
who gave strenuous impulse to the romantic movement throughout
England, France, and Germany in the first quarter of this century, who
set the fashion of his day in England, stirred and shaped the popular
imagination, and struck a far resonant note in our poetry. Yet after
his death he suffered a kind of eclipse; his work was much more unduly
depreciated than it had been extolled; while in our own time such
critics as Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne have been in profound
disagreement on the question of his worth and value as a poet. Nor is
it possible for impartial persons to accept the judgment of either of
these two eminent artists in poetry,