we yield to the spell, accept the magic, echo the cry, undergo the same sensations, and identify ourselves with the being that has taken possession of us by this strange and violent egotism. One thing more must be remembered in accounting for the intensity of Byron's influence on his contemporaries, the wideness of its diffusion and the suddenness of its decline: this personality, which seems at once so peculiar and so self-engrossed, is nevertheless the child of an epoch, itself full of agitations and contradictions, feverish and tumultuous yet wearied and disgusted with its past excesses, ardent and aspiring yet scornful of its ideals, lavish of its energies yet unable to concentrate them, in revolt against conventional and outworn forms, but powerless to create fit ones for the inrushing life that seems, for lack of them, to spend its force in vain. Had Byron's been a loftier, clearer, calmer spirit, it would not have so well represented the age or impressed it so strongly: its sway would have been less transitory, but not so absolute. Happily, the period of fascination and that of the inevitable reaction are now both past, and we can examine the phenomenon that was once thought so transcendent and afterward so trivial and delusive with an unbiased judgment. To the question whether the magic that riveted the gaze and enthralled the minds of so many and diverse observers was real or false, we find the reply easy, that it was both. It seems to us difficult to dispute the dictum of Mr. Carlyle, that "no genuine productive thought was ever revealed by Byron to mankind." It is just as undeniable, as Mr. Nichol freely allows, that his gift of expression, with its almost matchless sweep and facility, never embraces that exquisite phraseology, that suggestive and untranslatable diction, that perfect marriage of words to thought, which is of the very essence of poetry. Furthermore, no writer not palpably imitative ever betrayed in such a degree the influence of his great contemporaries, or culled more unsparingly from books to enrich his own compositions. His total lack of the dramatic faculty is admitted on all hands. It would seem impossible, therefore, to assign him a place in the creative order of minds, or to rank him, as some continental critics still do, with the great masters of poetry. Judged by the strictest tests and soundest canons, one is in doubt whether he should be reckoned as a poet: with the Romans he would have been one, no doubt, but scarcely with the Greeks. But if not a son of heaven, he is a chief among the sons of earth. His intellect is of the keenest, his wit of the sharpest, his passion of the strongest. Every scene, every event, every thought, every feeling, strikes him with electric force and is reproduced with the vividness and intensity of the original impression. His imagery has the effect of physical sensations. His descriptions do not merely represent or suggest, but steep us in