dom, the unsurpassed energy and courage? So
powerful, so commanding, is the movement of that Beggars' Chorus, that,
methinks, it unconsciously echoed in the brain of our greatest living
poet when he conceived the Vision of Sin. You shall judge for yourself.
Recall:

Here's to budgets, bags, and wallets!
Here's to all the wandering train!
Here's our ragged bairns and callers!
One and all cry out, Amen!

A fig for those by law protected!
Liberty's a glorious feast!
Courts for cowards were erected!
Churches built to please the priest!

Then read this: Drink to lofty hopes that cool
Visions of a perfect state:
Drink we, last, the public fool,
Frantic love and frantic hate.
......... Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,
While we keep a little breath!
Drink to heavy Ignorance
Hob and nob with brother Death!
Is not the movement the same, though the modern speaks a wilder
recklessness?

So in the best company we leave you, who were the life and soul of so
much company, good and bad. No poet, since the Psalmist of Israel,
ever gave the world more assurance of a man; none lived a life more
strenuous, engaged in an eternal conflict of the passions, and by them
overcome--'mighty and mightily fallen.' When we think of you, Byron
seems, as Plato would have said, remote by one degree from actual truth,
and Musset by a degree more remote than Byron.

XX. To Lord Byron.

My Lord, (Do you remember how Leigh Hunt
Enraged you once by writing _My dear Byron_?)
Books have their fates,--as mortals have who punt,
And _yours_ have entered on an age of iron.
Critics there be who think your satin blunt,
Your pathos, fudge; such perils must environ
Poets who in their time were quite the rage,
Though now there's not a soul to turn their page.

Yes, there is much dispute about your worth,
And much is said which you might like to know
By modern poets here upon the earth,
Where poets live, and love each other so;
And, in Elysium, it may move your mirth
To hear of bards that pitch your praises low,
Though there be some that for your credit stickle,
As--Glorious Mat,--and not inglorious Nichol.

This kind of writing is my pet aversion,
I hate the slang, I hate the personalities,
I loathe the aimless, reckless, loose dispersion,
Of every rhyme that in the singer's wallet is,
I hate it as you hated the _Excursion_,
But, while no man a hero to his va