ture honestly be seen in the child of three years
of age, who tears his clothes because his nurse has punished him
unfairly? No; all that we see is what M. Taine wishes us to see for the
purpose he has in view, that is, admiration of the Lord Byron he has
conceived, and who is necessary to his cause,--a Byron only to be
likened to a furious storm.

Wishing Byron to appear as the type of energy, M. Taine exhibits him to
our eyes in the light of Satan defying all powers on earth and in
heaven. The better to mould him to the form he has chosen, he begins by
disfiguring him in the arms of his mother, whom with his father and his
family he scruples not to calumniate. Storms having their origin in the
rupture of the elements, and a violent character being, according to M.
Taine, the result of several forces acting internally and mechanically;
it follows that its primary cause is to be found in the disturbed moral
condition of those who have given birth to him in the circumstances
under which the child was born, and in the influence under which he has
been brought up. Hence the necessity of supplementing from imagination
the historical and logical facts which otherwise might be at fault.

As for Lord Byron's softness of manner, and as to that tenderness of
character which was the bane of his existence,--as to his real and great
goodness, which made him loved always and everywhere, and which caused
such bitter tears to be shed at the news of his death,--these qualities
are not to be sought in the strange, fanciful being who is styled Byron
by M. Taine. These qualities would be out of place; they would be
opposed to the idea upon which his entire system is founded. They must
be merged in the energy and greatness of intellect of the poetical
giant.

Unfortunately for M. Taine, facts speak too forcibly and too
inopportunely against him. Not one of the causes which he mentions, not
one of the conclusions which he draws in respect to Lord Byron's
character as a poet, and as a mere mortal, are to be relied upon. He,
who contends that he possesses pre-eminently the power of comprehending
the man and the author, insists that Lord Byron was no exception to the
rule, though his best biographer, Moore, most distinctly opposes this
opinion:--

"In Lord Byron, however, this sort of pivot of character was almost
wholly wanting.... So various indeed, and contradictory, were his
attributes, both moral and intellectual, that he may be prono