have been, did represent a generally prevailing characteristic among men of excessive sensibility at a time of stir and tumult in the world around them; it was not a mere unnatural invention, though we must leave to the psychologist the task of tracing a connection between this mental attitude and the circumstances that generated it. But the self-occupied mind has no dramatic power, and so their repertory contained one single character, a reproduction of their own in different attitudes and situations. Chateaubriand may be said never to have dropped his mask; whereas Byron, whose English sense of humour must have fought against taking himself so very seriously, relieved his conscience by lapses into epigram, irony, and persiflage. Thus in the same year (1818), and from the same place (Venice), he produced the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_, full of deep longing for unbroken solitude: 'There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and Music in its roar;' and also _Beppo_, a satirical sketch of the loose and easy Venetian society in which he was actually living. Here, again, his somewhat ribald letters from Venice do his romantic poetry some wrong; but in fact he had a diabolic pleasure in betraying himself, and his _Memoires d'Outre Tombe_, if they had been preserved, would have been very different from Chateaubriand's elaborate autobiography. It was the spectacle of Christians groaning under Turkish oppression, and of their heroic resistance, that inspired three of Byron's finest poems, the _Giaour_, the _Bride of Abydos_, the _Siege of Corinth_. On this subject he was so heartily in earnest that he could even lose sight of his own woes; and notwithstanding the exuberance of colour and sentiment, these tales still hold their place in the first rank of metrical romance. Their construction is imperfect, even fragmentary; yet while Scott could put together and tell his story much better, not even Scott could drive it onward and sustain the verse at a high level with greater energy, or decorate his narrative with finer description of scenery, or give more intensity to the moments of fierce action. The splendid apostrophe to Greece in the _Giaour_-- 'Clime of the unforgotten brave! Whose land from plain to mountain cave Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave'-- has forty lines of unsurpassed beauty and fire, written in the manuscript, as a note tells us, in a hurried and almost illegible hand--an authentic example of true improvisation which the elaborate poets of our own day may match if they can. The tumid phrase and melodramatic figuring-- 'Dark and unearthly is the scowl That glares beneath his dusky cowl'--