8, were a great
advance upon the first two, and contain the best of Byron's serious
poetry. He has written his name all over the continent of Europe, and on
a hundred memorable spots has made the scenery his own. On the field of
Waterloo, on "the castled crag of Drachenfels," "by the blue rushing of
the arrowy Rhone," in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, in the Coliseum at
Rome, and among the "Isles of Greece," the tourist is compelled to see
with Byron's eyes and under the associations of his pilgrimage. In his
later poems, such as _Beppo_, 1818, and _Don Juan_, 1819-1823, he passed
into his second manner, a mocking cynicism gaining ground upon the
somewhat stagey gloom of his early poetry--Mephistophiles gradually
elbowing out Satan. _Don Juan_, though morally the worst, is
intellectually the most vital and representative of Byron's poems. It
takes up into itself most fully the life of the time; exhibits most
thoroughly the characteristic alternations of Byron's moods and the
prodigal resources of wit, passion, and understanding, which--rather
than imagination--were his prominent qualities as a poet. The hero, a
graceless, amorous stripling, goes wandering from Spain to the Greek
islands and Constantinople, thence to St. Petersburg, and finally to
England. Every-where his seductions are successful, and Byron uses him
as a means of exposing the weakness of the human heart and the
rottenness of society in all countries. In 1823, breaking away from his
life of selfish indulgence in Italy, Byron threw himself into the cause
of Grecian liberty, which he had sung so gloriously in the _Isles of
Greece_. He died at Missolonghi, in the following year, of a fever
contracted by exposure and overwork.

Byron was a great poet but not a great literary artist. He wrote
negligently and with the ease of assured strength; his mind gathering
heat as it moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion. His
work is diffuse and imperfect; much of it is melodrama or speech-making,
rather than true poetry. But, on the other hand, much, very much of it
is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere utterance of personal
feeling. Such is the quality of his best lyrics, like _When We Two
Parted_, the _Elegy on Thyrza_, _Stanzas to Augusta_, _She Walks in
Beauty_, and of innumerable passages, lyrical and descriptive, in his
longer poems. He had not the wisdom of Wordsworth, nor the rich and
subtle imagination of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats whe