so that though he recovers himself in
the final line, the general effect is much damaged:

'Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay,
The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife,
The morn the marshalling in arms--the day
Battle's magnificently stern array.
The thunder-clouds close o'er it, _which when rent,
The earth is covered thick with other clay,
Which her own clay shall cover_, heaped and pent,
Rider and horse--friend, foe--in one red burial blent.'

These blots, and there are many, become less pardonable when we
observe, from the new edition, that Byron by no means neglected
revision of his work. But his impetuous temper, and the circumstance
of his writing far from the printing-press, encouraged hasty
execution; and though the most true remark that 'easy writing is
devilish hard reading' is his own, though he praised excessively the
chiselled verse of Pope, he was always inclined to pose as one who
threw off jets of boiling inspiration, and in one letter he compares
himself to the tiger who makes or misses his point in one spring. He
ranked Pope first among English poets, yet he learnt nothing in that
school; he pretended to undervalue Shakespeare, yet he must have had
the plays by heart, for his letters bristle with quotations from them.
His avowed taste in poetry is hard to reconcile with his own
performances: his verse was rushing, irregular, audacious, yet he
overpraises the smooth composition of Rogers; he dealt in heroic
themes and passionate love-stories, yet Crabbe's humble pastorals had
their full charm for him. Except Crabbe and Rogers, he declared, 'we
are all--Scott, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, and I--upon a wrong
revolutionary poetical system, not worth a damn in itself;' but among
these are some leaders of the great nineteenth-century renaissance in
English verse; and Byron was foremost in the revolt against unnatural
insipidity which has brought us through romance to realism, by his
clear apprehension of natural form and colour, and even by the havoc
which he made among conventional respectabilities. He dwelt too
incessantly upon his own sorrows and sufferings; and in the gloomy
soliloquies of his dramatic characters we have an actor constantly
reappearing in his favourite part. Yet this also was a novelty to the
generation brought up on the impersonal poetry of the classic school;
and here, again, he is