mere fact of my
being _un enfant du siecle_ rendered me liable to the infection of the
potent, proud, desponding bitterness of his writing.

The spirit of an age creates the spirit that utters it, and though
Byron's genius stamped its impress powerfully upon the thought and
feeling of his contemporaries, he was himself, after all, but a sort of
quintessence of _them_, and gave them back only an intensified,
individual extract of themselves. The selfish vanity and profligate vice
which he combined with his extraordinary intellectual gifts were as
peculiar to himself as his great mental endowments; and though fools may
have followed the fashion of his follies, the heart of all Europe was
not stirred by a fashion of which he set the example, but by a passion
for which he found the voice, indeed, but of which the key-note lay in
the very temper of the time and the souls of the men of his day. Goethe,
Alfieri, Chateaubriand, each in his own language and with his peculiar
national and individual accent, uttered the same mind; they stamped
their own image and superscription upon the coin to which, by so doing,
they gave currency, but the mine from whence they drew their metal was
the civilized humanity of the nineteenth century. It is true that some
of Solomon's coining rings not unlike Goethe's and Byron's; but Solomon
forestalled his day by being _blase_ before the nineteenth century.
Doubtless the recipe for that result has been the same for individuals
ever since the world rolled, but only here and there a great king, who
was also a great genius, possessed it in the earlier times; it took all
the ages that preceded it to make the _blase_ age, and Byron,
pre-eminently, to speak its mind in English--which he had no sooner done
than every nineteenth-century shop-boy in England quoted Byron, wore his
shirt-collar open, and execrated his destiny. Doubtless by grace of his
free-will a man may wring every drop of sap out of his own soul and help
his fellows like-minded with himself to do the same; but the everlasting
spirit of truth renews the vitality of the world, and while Byron was
growling and howling, and Shelley was denying and defying, Scott was
telling and Wordsworth singing things beautiful and good, and new and
true.

Certain it is, however, that the noble poet's glorious chanting of much
inglorious matter did me no good, and so I resolved to read that grand
poetry no more. It was a severe struggle, but I persevered i