“Many advantages attended his birth; he spurned them all when balanced with what he considered his duties. He was generous to imprudence--devoted to heroism. These characteristics breathe throughout his poetry. The struggle for human weal; the resolution firm to martyrdom; the impetuous pursuit; the glad triumph in good; the determination not to despair.... Perfectly gentle and forbearing in manner, he suffered a great deal of internal irritability, or rather excitement, and his fortitude to bear was almost always on the stretch; and thus, during a short life, he had gone through more experience of sensation than many whose existence is protracted. ‘If I die to-morrow,’ he said, on the eve of unanticipated death, ‘I have lived to be older than my father.’ The weight of thought and feeling burdened him heavily. You read his sufferings in his attenuated frame, while you perceived the mastery he held over them in his animated countenance and brilliant eyes. “He died, and the world showed no outward sigh; but his influence over mankind, though slow in growth, is fast augmenting; and in the ameliorations that have taken place in the political state of his country we may trace, in part, the operation of his arduous struggles.... He died, and his place among those who knew him intimately has never been filled up. He walked beside them like a spirit of good to comfort and benefit--to enlighten the darkness of life with irradiations of genius, to cheer with his sympathy and love.”[245] * * * * * With the name of Shelley is usually connected that of his more popular contemporary, Byron (1788-1824). The brother poets, it already has been noted, met in Switzerland; and, afterwards, they had some intercourse in Italy during Shelley’s last years. Excepting surpassing genius, and equal impatience of conventional laws and usages they had little in common. The one was first and above all a reformer, the other a satirist. To assert, however, the author of _Childe Harold_ to have been inspired solely by cynical contempt for his species is unjust. A large part of his poems is pervaded apparently with an intense conviction of the evils of life as produced by human selfishness and folly. But what distinguishes the author of _Prometheus Unbound_ from his great rival (if he may be so called) is the sure and certain hope of a future of happiness for the world. Thus, that belief in the all-importance of humane dietetics, as a principal factor in the production of weal or woe on earth, is far less apparent in Byron is matter of course. Yet, that in moments of better feeling, Byron revolted from the gross materialism of the banquets, of which, as he expresses it, England “Was wont to boast--as if a Glutton’s tray Were something very glorious to behold.”[246]