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that country early in this century made his school less important, he
had great power over Heine, its one towering genius; and he was almost
the sole master of young Russia, young Italy, young Spain, in poetry.
Nor, though his active and direct influence has of course been exhausted
by time, can his reputation on the Continent be said to have ever waned.

These various facts, besides being certain in themselves, are also very
valuable as guiding the inquirer in regions which are more of opinion.
The rapidity of Byron's success everywhere, the extent of it abroad
(where few English writers before him had had any at all), and the
decline at home, are all easily connected with certain peculiarities of
his work. That work is almost as fluent and facile as Scott's, to which,
as has been said, it owes immense debts of scheme and manner; and it is
quite as faulty. Indeed Scott, with all his indifference to a strictly
academic correctness, never permitted himself the bad rhymes, the bad
grammar, the slipshod phrase in which Byron unblushingly indulges. But
Byron is much more monotonous than Scott, and it was this very monotony,
assisted by an appearance of intensity, which for the time gave him
power. The appeal of Byron consists very mainly, though no doubt not
wholly, in two things: the lavish use of the foreign and then unfamiliar
scenery, vocabulary, and manners of the Levant, and the installation, as
principal character, of a personage who was speedily recognised as a
sort of fancy portrait, a sketch in cap and yataghan, of Byron himself
as he would like to be thought. This Byronic hero has an ostentatious
indifference to moral laws, for the most part a mysterious past which
inspires him with deep melancholy, great personal beauty, strength, and
bravery, and he is an all-conquering lover. He is not quite so original
as he seemed, for he is in effect very little more than the older
Romantic villain-hero of Mrs. Radcliffe, the Germans, and Monk Lewis,
costumed much more effectively, placed in scheme and companionship more
picturesquely, and managed with infinitely greater genius. But it is a
common experience in literary history that a type more or less familiar
already, and presented with striking additions, is likely to be more
popular than something absolutely new. And accordingly Byron's bastard
and second-hand Romanticism, though it owed a great deal to the
terrorists and a great deal more to Scott, for the moment alto