It is said, and with truth, that Byron's revolutionary politics commended him to oppressed nationalities and their sympathizers; that he was against "the tramplers"--Castlereagh, and the Duke of Wellington, and the Holy Alliance; that he stood for liberty. Another point in his favour was his freedom from cant, his indifference to the pieties and proprieties of the Britannic Muse; that he had the courage of his opinions. Doubtless in a time of trouble he was welcomed as the champion of revolt, but deeper reasons must be sought for an almost exclusive preference for the works of one poet and a comparative indifference to the works of his rivals and contemporaries. He fulfilled another, perhaps a greater ideal. An Englishman turns to poetry for the expression in beautiful words of his happier and better feelings, and he is not contented unless poetry tends to make him happier or better--happier because better than he would be otherwise. His favourite poems are psalms, or at least metrical paraphrases, of life. Men of other nations are less concerned about their feelings and their souls. They regard the poet as the creator, the inventor, the maker _par excellence_, and he who can imagine or make the greatest _eidolon_ is the greatest poet. _Childe Harold_ and _The Corsair_, _Mazeppa_ and _Manfred, Cain_ and _Sardanapalus_ were new creations, new types, forms more real than living man, which appealed to their artistic sense, and led their imaginations captive. "It is a mark," says Goethe (_Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahreit_, 1876, iii. 125), "of true poetry, that, as a secular gospel, it knows how to free us from the earthly burdens which press upon us, by inward serenity, by outward charm.... The most lively, as well as the gravest works have the same end--to moderate both pleasure and pain through a happy mental representation." It is passion translated into action, the pageantry of history, the transfiguration into visible lineaments of living moods and breathing thoughts which are the notes of this "secular gospel," and for one class of minds work out a secular redemption.