views of Jesus Christ, but always including in them the repudiation of force as a means of attaining them. His opinion with regard to Christ's social views—put forward so many years ago when it was sacrilege in the eyes of the Church-is becoming more and more the opinion of those who are struggling towards a higher state of society. They abjure the greater part of the orthodox Christianity which has been laid as a heavy cross on the shoulders of Jesus, and on which he has been crucified afresh, but they choose the Man Christ Jesus as their Friend and Guide, and follow the life he urged, and the life he led. They proclaim Christ's sayings in the face of a world given to amusement, seeking for more than daily bread, piling up wealth by making many poor, and having no belief in the Brotherhood of men because they have no belief in the Fatherhood of God. And Shelley, whom the world called anti-Christian, stands with them in this-and he says that he stands by Christ.

Indeed, there is no more magnificent embodiment of the noblest doctrine of Jesus on these matters even to the redemption of the world by faithful suffering in the cause of truth and love-than the "Prometheus Unbound"; which the more we know and love the better for us. The character of Prometheus is partly built on the character of Christ. His moral position towards mankind, and towards Jupiter, is the position of Christ towards suffering man, and towards the powers of the world, who crucified Jesus because he would not yield to their policy and their priestcraft, nor back up their power, exercised for their own advantage over the bodies and souls of men. The means of Prometheus are the means of Jesus-nothing but enduring love. His triumph is the triumph of perfect Love, which brings

about the regeneration of the whole world of man and the freedom and the glory and beauty of the world of Nature a new Heaven and a new Earth.

It is the very faith of Jesus concerning the future translated into another form, and this essay on Christianity proclaims that Shelley thought it was the faith of Jesus. All that he says Jesus held concerning the equality of man and the proper means of attaining it are described and declared in magnificent song in the "Prometheus." To accuse Shelley of violence is to accuse Tolstoy of violence. Both desire the same things, and desire them in the same way. Both repudiate, with Jesus, the use of any force for their winning, except the forces of stern rejection of wrong-doing-of love, of forgiveness, of endurance, in trust in the certainty of the victory of everlasting love. I close with the closing lines of the "Prometheus," which embody this view:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite,
To forgive wrongs darker than death and night,
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;

To love and bear, to hope, till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;

This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, Victory.

CHAPTER XI

THE POETRY OF BYRON

ORD BYRON was born 22nd January, 1788, and

LO

at the age of nineteen in 1807 published his first volume of poems-the "Hours of Idleness." They were pretty, empty, butterfly lyrics, but they had a melody and a command of verse which one would scarcely expect from a boy of nineteen and a fashionable young fellow. The "Edinburgh Review" thought it worth its while, probably because its author was a peer, to take up this little book, and to break it on the wheel. But the "Edinburgh Review" caught a Tartar. Though the book was smashed, the writer was not. A boy extremely sensitive, as Byron was, might have been crushed by this brutality. But Byron was not only as sensitive as a cat to praise or blame, he had also, with the sensitiveness, the power of the great cats. He turned upon his foe like a tiger, and the Edinburgh reviewer felt like Sir Andrew Aguecheek-"If I had known he had been so cunning of fence, I had been damned ere I had meddled with him." In March, 1809, appeared "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," a satire as vigorous as it was unfair-unfair save to the reviewers-for in it he lashed, with the unsparing mercilessness and blindness of youth, all the poets also of his time. No one can read it without laughter, it is so full of wit; no one can read it without admiration, it is so full of power; no one can read it without regret, it is so full

of savagery and injustice. But Byron was stung to the bone. He was very young, and with that frankness of repentance which was so charming in him, he expressed afterwards his profound sorrow for all that he had unjustly or coarsely said, and in such terms that those whom he abused forgave him. With all his follies, with all his reckless crimes against himself, with all his crimes against others-and some of these were meanwith all his worldliness, with all his selfishness-and it was great-Byron was a lovable person, and no one can fairly criticise his work who has not felt some affection for him, who has not seen, behind his faults and sins, the good which he so often laboured to conceal. He was a boy almost to the end of his life; boyish in his passions, in his capacity for reasoning or for serious thought, in the want of fine art in his work, in his illregulated life, and in his ill-finished verse. And we forgive much to the boy which we do not forgive to the man.' But with these failings of the boy, he had in him the power of a young giant, and when a rush of impulse came upon him, he was like the youthful Hercules. Reynolds' picture of Hercules in his cradle, strangling the serpents, may well stand for Byron and the Scotch Reviewers. It is this which characterises the

'Yet in saying this we still blame Byron severely, for he had no business to remain a boy. When he became in years a man he ought to have put away the thoughts, the understanding, and the actions of a young barbarian. Yet even here he was heavily weighted. He was a peer of the realm, a dreadful position for a young man unless he has the genius for politics. He was involved in all the stupidities, in all the false position, in all the ignorance of the world and of the ideas that rule mankind which fashionable society creates. It is to his credit that he broke away from it, but its atmosphere, and that of his aristocratic position, hung around him for nearly all his life, and was as lead upon his wings, and as a mist before his eyes.

poem and the man and his work-power, and power which easily sprang into passion, and which under the wind of passion was marked by sincerity, except when he was speaking about himself. Yet even when he began to write about himself he was often sincere, and we hear that note in some of the domestic pieces and in certain portions of "Childe Harold." It was, however, his fate, whenever he dwelt on himself, to pass after a time into insincerity, either to mock at his own self-revelation, or to overlay it with false sentiment, so much did his worldliness, that is his bravado-fear of the world's opinion, spoil his nature. A boy's character, a man's force in his work, sincerity when moved by passion, but which glided into insincerity when the passionate feeling was succeeded by a return to selfconsciousness, these are elements in the man and his poetry, but they are not all of which we shall have to speak.

That poetry is not now read as it once was. There have been almost two generations which have not known Joseph. So much laughter was raised over the Corsairs that appeared amongst undergraduates, over the blighted clerks and medical students whom Macaulay sketched with so ponderous a hand, so much moral indignation was spent on what he calls in his hippopotamus style, "the pernicious and absurd association between intellectual and moral depravity, misanthropy and voluptuousness," that Byron's poetry was shelved. Again, the new outburst of poetry after 1832, representing the actual interests of the age, in direct opposition to the Byronic mood which would extend the dramatic sentimentalism of youth over the whole of manhood, and in direct assertion that all morbidness was irreligious, all self-introspection selfish, all misanthropy