ver a soul came forth to share
what is now regarded as ingrained criminality.

Perhaps the virulent treatment of Byron ranks with the meanest and
most impotent actions of the militant oligarchists because of his
shocking (?) sympathy with England's enemy. The fierce though
exquisite weaver of rhymes, who had been the idol of the nation and
the drawing-room, was sought after by the highest and most cultured in
the land. Byron had fallen a victim to public displeasure partly
because he gave way to excesses that shocked the orthodoxy of a
capricious public. He had reached a pinnacle of fame such as no man of
his years had ever attained, and suddenly without warning he fell, a
victim to unparalleled vituperation. His faults, if the meagre
accounts that have been handed down are true, were great, but many of
them were merely human. His marriage was not compatible, and his love
entanglements embarrassing. His temper and habits were very similar to
those of other geniuses, and great allowances should be made for
personalities whose mental arrangements may be such as to nullify
normal control.

It is all very well to say that these men should be compelled to
adhere to a conventional law because ordinary mortals are expected to
do so, but a man like Byron was not ordinary. In his particular line
he was a great force with a brain that took spasmodic twists. It is
absurd to expect that a being whose genius produced "Childe Harold"
and "Manfred" could be fashioned into living a quite commonplace
domestic life. Miss Milbanke, who married him, and the public who
first blessed and then cursed and made him an outcast, were not
faultless. Had they been possessed of the superiority they piously
assumed, they would have seen how impossible it was for this eccentric
man of stormy passions to be controlled and overridden by
conventionality.

It is possible the serene critic may take exception to this form of
reasoning and produce examples of genius, such as Wordsworth, who
lived a strictly pious life, never offending any moral law by a
hairbreadth; but Wordsworth was not made like Byron; he had not the
personality of the poor wayward cripple who at one time had brought
the world to his feet, neither had Wordsworth to fight against such
wild hereditary complications as Byron. Wordsworth never caught the
public imagination, while Byron had the power of inflaming it. But,
alas! neither his magnetic force nor his haughty spirit could stem t