For Byron (Swinburne shouts) has never woven One honest thread of life within his song; As Offenbach is to divine Beethoven So Byron is to Shelley (_This_ is strong!), And on Parnassus’ peak, divinely cloven, He may not stand, or stands by cruel wrong; For Byron’s rank (the examiner has reckoned) Is in the third class or a feeble second. “A Bernesque poet” at the very most, And “never earnest save in politics,” The Pegasus that he was wont to boast A blundering, floundering hackney, full of tricks, A beast that must be driven to the post By whips and spurs and oaths and kicks and sticks, A gasping, ranting, broken-winded brute, That any judge of Pegasi would shoot; In sooth, a half-bred Pegasus, and far gone In spavin, curb, and half a hundred woes. And Byron’s style is “jolter-headed jargon;” His verse is “only bearable in prose.” So living poets write of those that _are_ gone, And o’er the Eagle thus the Bantam crows; And Swinburne ends where Verisopht began, By owning you “a very clever man.” Or rather does not end: he still must utter A quantity of the unkindest things. Ah! were you here, I marvel, would you flutter O’er such a foe the tempest of your wings? ’Tis “rant and cant and glare and splash and splutter” That rend the modest air when Byron sings. There Swinburne stops: a critic rather fiery. _Animis cælestibus tantæne iræ_? But whether he or Arnold in the right is, Long is the argument, the quarrel long; _Non nobis est_ to settle _tantas lites_; No poet I, to judge of right or wrong: But of all things I always think a fight is The _most_ unpleasant in the lists of song; When Marsyas of old was flayed, Apollo Set an example which we need not follow. The fashion changes! Maidens do not wear, As once they wore, in necklaces and lockets A curl ambrosial of Lord Byron’s hair; “Don Juan” is not always in our pockets— Nay, a New Writer’s readers do not care Much for your verse, but are inclined to mock its Manners and morals. Ay, and most young ladies To yours prefer the “Epic” called “of Hades”! I do not blame them; I’m inclined to think That with the reigning taste ’tis vain to quarrel, And Burns might teach his votaries to drink, And Byron never meant to make them moral. You yet have lovers true, who will not shrink From lauding you and giving you the laurel; The Germans too, those men of blood and iron, Of all our poets chiefly swear by Byron.