was so beautiful that it might have lighted up by its magic soft
rays the dark regions of Satan. His doubts being cleared away, M. de
Lamartine will end by saying that Byron was an "angel, not a demon."

Byron's misfortune was to have been born in the England of those days.
Do you remember his beautiful lines in the "Due Foscari?"--

"He might have lived,
So formed for gentle privacy of life,
So loving, so beloved; the native of
Another land, and who so bless'd and blessing
As my poor Foscari? Nothing was wanting
Unto his happiness and mine save not
To be Venetian."

In writing these lines Byron must have thought of his own fate. He was
scarcely British by origin, and very little so by his turn of mind, or
by his tastes or by the nature of his genius. "My ancestors are not
Saxon, they are Norman," he said; "and my blood is all meridian."

If, instead of being born in England then, he had come before the world
when his star would have been hailed with the same love and regard that
was granted to Dante in Italy, to Chateaubriand and Lamartine in France,
or to Goethe in Germany, who would ever have blamed him for the slight
errors which fell from his pen in "Don Juan,"--a poem written hastily
and with carelessness, but of which it can be said, as Montesquieu said
of the prettiest women, "their part has more gravity and importance than
is generally thought." If the sense of the ridiculous is ever stronger
among people whose appreciation of the beautiful is keenest, who more
than Byron could have possessed it to a higher degree? Is it therefore
to be marvelled at that, in order to make the truth he revealed
accessible to all, and such whose minds had rusted in egotism and
routine, he should have given to them a new and sarcastic form?

Had he been born anywhere but in the England of those days, he never
would have been accused of mocking virtue because he claimed for it
reality of character, and not that superficial form which he saw existed
then in society. He believed it right to scorn the appearances of virtue
put on only for the purpose of reaping its advantages. No one respected
more than he did all that was really holy, virtuous, and respectable;
but who could blame him for wishing to denounce hypocrisy? As for his
supposed skepticism, and his expressions of despair, they may be classed
with the misgivings of Job, of Pascal, of Lamartine, of Chateaubriand,
and of other great minds, fo