[Footnote 132: Wordsworth's Works, 7 vols. 1849, VII. book 9; "Discourse of the Wanderer," opening verses, 315.] [Footnote 133: Ibid. VII; "The Excursion," book 4; "Despondency Corrected," 137.] [Footnote 134: Ibid, VII; "The Excursion," book 4; "Despondency Corrected," 149.] [Footnote 135: Ibid, last lines of book 5, "The Pastor," 20.] [Footnote 136: See also the novels of Godwin, "Caleb Williams" and others.] [Footnote 137: "Queen Mab," and notes. At Oxford Shelley issued a kind of thesis, calling it "On the Necessity of Atheism."] [Footnote 138: Some time before his death, when he was twenty-nine, he said, "If I die now, I shall have lived as long as my father."] [Footnote 139: See in Shelley's Works, 1853, "The Witch of Atlas, The Cloud, To a Sky-lark," the end of "The Revolt of Islam, Alastor," and the whole of "Prometheus."] [Footnote 140: "The Cloud," c. III. 502.] [Footnote 141: Ibid. c. IV. 503.] [Footnote 142: Shelley's Works, 1853, "The Sensitive Plant," 490.] [Footnote 143: "Our life is turned out of her course, whenever man is made an offering, a sacrifice, a tool, or implement, a passive thing employed as a brute mean."--Wordsworth, "The Excursion."] CHAPTER SECOND LORD BYRON Section I.--His Life and Character I have reserved for the last the greatest and most English of these literary men; he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest put together. His ideas were proscribed during his life; it has been attempted to depreciate his genius since his death. Even at the present day English critics are hardly just to him. He fought all his life against the society from which he was descended; and during his life, as after his death, he suffered the penalty of the resentment which he provoked, and the dislike to which he gave rise. A foreign critic may be more impartial, and freely praise the powerful hand whose blows he has not felt. If ever there was a violent and madly sensitive soul, but incapable of shaking off its bonds; ever agitated, but yet shut in; predisposed to poetry by its innate fire, but limited by its natural barriers to a single kind of poetry--it was Byron's.