unknown, and the same may be said of Wordsworth and Southey. As for the modern rhymsters!—really, it is very regrettable, but the benighted Continent really knows nothing of the verse powers of Mr. Lewis Morris, par exemple, or Sir Edwin Arnold, or Mr. Edmund Gosse, or Alfred Austin, or Austin Dobson, or Andrew Lang, or any of this interesting, and of course immortal, group! But they have "The Isles of Greece" translated into every tongue, and many a patriot in many a land knows its glorious strophes by heart, and can recite it with such fervour as shall stir the soul of the dullest listener. Browning lies dead in Westminster Abbey; but that dreary, ancient, Dean-controlled fane was too small to hold Byron! For the largest part of the European thinking world has offered itself as his shrine; the blue bright skies of Greece, Italy, and Andalusia blend harmoniously together to form as it were a perpetual cathedral dome for his memory; the intelligent people of all art-loving lands claim some heritage in his genius.

It is no small triumph for an English-born poet to thus hold unrivalled sway over the cultured Continent of Europe-and it is no small disgrace to England's literary critics that their pigmy hands should be the first to throw mud at his name. There is no poetry written now-a-days that can bear an instant's comparison with Byron's best work-not a line-not a verse! What "minor" or "major" poet living can be found to

match the "Storm at Night" in Childe Harold, and suggest such concentrated, pent-up power as is found in the closing stanza of that immortal passage?—

"Could I embody and unbosom now

That which is most within me-could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel and breathe-into one word,
And that one word were Lightning-I would speak!
But as it is, I live and die unheard,

With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword!"

Nothing finer than this last line could be imagined to imply the impotence of even the strongest poet's soul to find expression in moments of intense fervour and feeling. Hundreds of quotations, unsurpassable for beauty, could be made from even his less refined work, most of which is purity itself compared with the pruriency of Swinburne and the novels of Emil Zola. Manfred is a masterpiece of mind-analysis; so is Cain. There is such heart, fire, and manly vigour even in some of the less perfect lines and stanzas, that our own hearts when not made of the stone critic stuff, respond naturally and involuntarily to the sheer inspiration of the man.

The metaphysical, pessimistic, passionless verse of to-day moves us not at all; we tolerate it passively; some of us yawn over it, and wonder why it was written; few of us, if any actually love it. But we do

The Hired Baby, etc.

17

love, we who have read for ourselves his burning verse, the "slain" Byron, who is infinitely beyond all power to be "slain". -we cherish his fame in spite of the little attacking pens of the period-and if narrow England cannot glory in him, wide Europe can and does!

Pity 'tis that the busy scribes who find it such a congenial task to try and cheapen a poet's reputation when he is no longer here to answer or defend the charges made against the quality of his work, do not endeavour to quash the petty envy and jealousy that can alone move them to such despicable labours, and seek to do something on a slightly higher level—something, at least, that shall entitle them to the respect, and not expose them to the scorn of those great, artendowed, and intellectual nations with whom the name of BYRON is, and will continue to be, a lifted sign of unselfish heroism, an imperishable music; as well as a beloved and familiar household word.

LITERARY LONDON.

THE great metropolis! The roaring rushing riotous crowd made up of suffering men and women, who, whether young or old, rich or poor bear on their brows the marks of care, from which none escape, no, not even little children. Glance only at the ragged boys and girls selling matches in the streets,-look at their drawn and pinched features, look at their miserable garments their naked swollen feet-their pleading sorrowful eyes!-you cannot call them children. No! the joys of childhood are luxuries for the rich, the poor cannot afford to be young. But there are those in this cruel city of ours for whom poverty is worse than death, I mean the struggling and deserving author, born and bred as a gentleman, who, cursed with a fatal sensitiveness of disposition, shrinks from degradation, The man who has been accustomed to a hovel from his birth, dreams not of dwelling in a palace, but he who is possessed with the terrible "cacoethes scribendi" has high thoughts, original ideas, grand aims mayhap-but the end thereof is the bitterness of death. It is an old story, that of disappointed literary ambition, and yet so

new is it, that were an author of even small reputation, to die in a garret of starvation there would be an outcry of astonishment and incredulity. "With his talent, if he had tried, he could surely have found employment!" Not so, gentle friends-not so, charitable readers of journals, newspapers, magazines and novels coined out of the flesh and blood of human beings;-nothing is more difficult than to find literary work in London. For every vacant post there are a hundred or more candidates, and those who write books in the expectation of being paid for them, live on a forlorn hope-for now-a-days there are wealthy scribblers who pay for the publication of their productions, whether good or otherwise-, and is not this more advantageous for the publishers? What can a man with a poetical genius do, but go and knock his dreamy head against the hard wall of the people's cynicism;-they have Tennyson, they say, what need of more poets, especially when Shakespeare's and Byron's complete works can be purchased for a shilling each. And for novels-good Lord deliver us! Have we not enough to make a fortification of three-volumed sensationals all round London if need were,-novels of all sorts,-tame novels for goody people, lascivious novels for the pretended saints of society, and slangey, horsey, novels for men who bet on a woman's "points" and admire the way she is "groomed" especially in the arrangement of her "mane."