ldly advice of
Rogers and Madame de Stael was thrown away, whenever they presumed to
counsel him. Nobody could influence him. His abandonment to fitful
labors or pleasures was alike his glory and his shame. After a day of
frivolity he would consume the midnight hours in the intensest studies,
stimulated by gin, to awake in the morning in lassitude or pain,--for
work he must, as well as play. The consequence of this burning the
candle at both ends was failing health and diminished energies, until
his short race was run. He had produced more poetry at thirty-four years
of age than any other English poet at the age of fifty,--some of almost
transcendent merit, but more of questionable worth, though not of
questionable power. Aside from the "Childe Harold," the "Hebrew
Melodies," the "Prisoner of Chillon," and perhaps the "Corsair," the
"Bride of Abydos," "Lara," and the "Siege of Corinth," the rest,
excepting minor poems, however beautiful in measure and grand in
thought, give a shock to the religious or to the moral sentiments.
"Cain" and "Manfred" are regarded as almost blasphemous, though probably
not so meant to be by the poet, in view of the stirring questions of
Grecian tragedy; while the longest of his poems, "Don Juan," is an
insult to womanhood and a disgrace to genius; for although containing
some of the most exquisite touches of description and finest flights of
poetic feeling, its theme is along the lowest level of human passion.

Whatever Byron wrote was unhesitatingly published and read, whether
good or evil, whatever were those follies and defiances which excluded
him from the best society; and it is a matter of surprise to me that any
noted and wealthy publisher could be found, in respectable and
conventional England, venal enough to publish perhaps the most
corrupting poem in our language,--worse than anything which Boccaccio
wrote for his Italian readers, or anything which plain-spoken Fielding
and the dramatists of the reign of Charles II. ever allowed to go into
print; for though they were coarser in their language, they were not so
seductive in their spirit, and did not poison the soul like "Don Juan,"
the very name of which has become a synonym for extreme depravity. That
abominable poem was read because Lord Byron wrote it, and because its
immorality was slightly veiled by the beauty of the language, even when
a copy could not be found on the table of any respectable drawing-room,
and the name of the