But it is the exception, rather than the rule, when genius is linked with an apparently serene or commonplace existence. It is the fashion now-a-days to deride the notion that a man of genius is almost necessarily deficient in prudence, and consequently little fitted to steer his way securely amid the ordinary perils of life. Nevertheless, the fact remains that in the great majority of cases the most highly-gifted natures appeal as strongly to our pity or tolerance as to our admiration, that under similar circumstances their errors and misfortunes have been greater or more frequent than those of commoner natures, that with them the "inward storm and outward strife" in which the great lesson of life--"das schwer-verstandene Wort"--is learned-- Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet-- are not lighter, but more severe and destructive, than with others. And in cases where there has been a conjunction of high intellect and a fiery temperament with outward conditions equally remote from those of ordinary life, the biographer is provided with materials which the novelist would not dare to grapple with, and which the tragic writer would scarcely need to mix with any stronger element of his art. That Byron's was one of these rare cases no one will be inclined to deny. His genius, if not of the highest order, was marvellously brilliant and fertile, and almost unparalleled in the potency of its charm. His nature was chaotic, his position full of incongruities, his fame an eruption, his career meteoric. "No one ever lived," remarks Mr. Nichol, "who in the same space more thoroughly ran the gauntlet of existence." And all the experiences of his life, all the contrasts in his character and his intellect--his nobleness and his baseness, his sincerity and his affectations, his giant power and his puerile weakness--are reflected and exhibited in his works with a directness and completeness that do not belong to the self-mirrorings of any other writer, not excepting Rousseau. Never has there been a great poet who was less of an artist; never one who could so little transmute an experience or embody a thought as to give it a universal significance; never one whose productions, however diversified in form, have an equal sameness in theme and tone, or present themselves so palpably as fragments of an autobiography. We follow him in his travels, we are witnesses of his thinly veiled adventures, we find his cravings and caprices, his piercing mockeries and fantastic imaginings, in the Selims and Conrads, the Manfreds and Cains, the Harolds and Juans, whose forms he assumes as the disguises of a masquerade, we receive the outpourings of his confidence in every mood and on every topic--we gaze, in short, incessantly into the inmost recesses and watch all the wild and wayward movements of a heart that is never at rest and that never shrinks from exposure--and, if strongly impressionable,