In a more recent generation Byron prolonged the Wertherism of Werther, Byron being thus a grandson of Rousseau, while he borrowed his form, and borrowed it very ill, from what Scott borrowed of Coleridge. The genius of Byron is not contested by the sane, but except in satire it seldom found clear and adequate, because it sought hurried, heedless, and tumultuous, expression. Scott had a better ear and was not so reckless an _improvisatore_. Poems that can endure are not written like Byron’s, in the brief leisure of fashionable industry. We admire the native impetus of Byron, his gift of satire, his sensitiveness to elemental force in nature and in man, but we cannot understand the furore which was so much the child of his title, his beauty, his recklessness, and his studiously cultivated air of mystery. Mr. Lenville, as reported by Mr. Folair, said that Nicholas Nickleby was “a regular stick of an actor, and it’s only the mystery about him that has caused him to go down with the people here, though Lenville says he don’t believe there’s anything at all in it.” A later age must partly adopt the same theory of Byron’s original and unparalleled success in Europe as well as in England. He was mysterious Manfred, he was Childe Harold, he was the Corsair; a hero of Mrs. Radcliffe’s, with an Oriental air and a gloomy secret and a heart burning with indignation against the unworthy species of men. What had Byron done? Even Goethe was curious, believing wild anecdotes; now we really do not care what Byron did, recognizing in him, his genius, and his pose, not so much the “Satanic,” as the result of hysteria and madness in his race. Satanism, from of old, has been mainly hysteria. The element of personal _reclame_ in Byron has faded, and with it fades his reputation as an earth-shaking poet. Attempts to revive that fame in our day, attempts to bring us back to “the noble poet,” are respectable, being based on loyalty to the taste of our great-grandfathers and grandmothers in all civilized countries. But the efforts are futile. “Byron,” says Mr. Saintsbury, “seems to me a poet distinctly of the second class, and not even of the best kind of second, inasmuch as his greatness is chiefly derived from a sort of parody, a sort of imitation of the qualities of the first. His verse is to the greatest poetry what melodrama is to tragedy, what plaster is to marble, what pinchbeck is to gold.” Such, however unpopular they may be, are my own candid sentiments, for though from childhood I could and did read all our great poets with pleasure, it was not with the kind of pleasure which Byron in his satire and his declamation could occasionally give me. He is monotonous, he is rhetorical, his versification is often incredibly bad, and he is more obscure, mainly by dint of hurry, bad printing, and bad grammar, than Mr. Browning. Thus Byron leaves us impressed as with a vast, even volcanic, yet dandified force, untrained and often misdirected.