poems, he wrote three dramas, Remorse, Zapolya, and the Fall of Robespierre; translated the two principal parts of Schiller's Wallenstein; and was, for a time, one of the editors of the Morning Post. His Biographia Literaria contains valuable discussions of various literary matters, and his Lectures on Shakespeare are still considered important. He wrote many miscellaneous essays on morals, politics, and religion.

George Noel Gordon Byron was born in London, January 22, 1788. He was the son of Captain Byron, of the English army, and the grandson of Admiral Byron, of the English navy. His father was a man of dissolute habits, who married an heiress, squandered her fortune and then deserted her; his mother, reared in luxury, was proud and imperious in her temperament; and the son inherited qualities of both parents.

When he was ten years old, his granduncle died, leaving him the title Lord Byron, and the considerable estate of Newstead, in Nottingham. After a term in one or two minor schools, he went to Harrow. Here he was prepared for Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1805. While at college, he manifested many eccentricities, doing little studying, devoting himself, though lame, to athletic sports, and keeping savage wild animals for pets. His "first dash into poetry," he himself tells us, was in 1800, and was

inspired by a boyish love for his first cousin, Margaret Parker. A year or two later, other verses came from a similar attachment for Mary Chaworth, whose father had been killed in a duel by the Lord Byron whom the poet succeeded in the title. This attachment was mutual, and, years afterward, Byron wrote of the lady in his exquisite poem, the Dream. His first published poems, however, were a collection entitled Hours of Idleness (1807). These contained hardly any hint of the future greatness of their writer; but they still had an important bearing upon his career, for they fell into the hands of Henry Brougham (afterward Lord Brougham), who reviewed them in the Edinburgh in a merciless article beginning, "The poesy of this young lord belongs to the class which neither gods nor men permit." Byron, imagining that Jeffrey was the writer of the review, assailed him two years later in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, perhaps the most caustic satire in the language. Not only Jeffrey, but other reviewers, and almost the whole list of contemporary authors, came in for a share of Byron's wrath. Brougham escaped almost scot-free.

Almost immediately afterward, Lord Byron set out for a tour over southern Europe. He was absent about two years, and, upon his return, published the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), in

which he detailed some of the scenes, incidents, and impressions of his tour. The Pilgrimage has the note of gloom that characterizes most of Byron's poetry and gives it some of its charm; but it displays a depth of feeling and a power of description that placed its author at once in the front rank of English poets. The third canto appeared in 1816, the fourth (and last) in 1818. From the very first, the Pilgrimage was wonderfully popular, and it was the favorable reception of the first two cantos that caused the author's oft-quoted remark, "I awoke one morning and found mysel famous." In 1813, he published the Giaour and the Bride of Abydos, and the next year the Corsair and Lara, four Turkish tales, full of gorgeous oriental coloring and the deepest of passion. Of the parting of Conrad and Medora, in the first canto of the Corsair, Jeffrey well says, "We do not know of anything in poetry more beautiful or touching than this picture."

Byron married a Miss Milbanke in 1814, but their married life was unhappy, and they separated at the end of a year. The exact cause of their trouble is not known, but English society, which had petted and caressed Byron up to this time, now sided with his wife. Perhaps the wildness and lawlessness of his Turkish tales also caused some revulsion of feeling. At all events he was severely condemned on all hands, and, in 1816, he left his native land, to be brought

back dead eight years later. Beginning with his unfortunate married life and the censure it brought upon him, his succeeding poems show an increase of bitterness, gloom, and defiance to all the laws of God and man. In reviewing some of his poems, later, Jeffrey thus interprets them, "Religion, love, patriotism, valor, devotion, constancy, ambition, all are to be laughed at, disbelieved in, and despised"; and his friend Thomas Moore, at a banquet in 1818, thus speaks of him: "Can I name to you a Byron, without recalling to your hearts recollections of all that his mighty genius has awakened there; his energy, his burning words, his intense passion, that disposition of fine fancy to wander only among the ruins of the heart, to dwell in places which the fire of feeling has desolated, and, like the chestnut tree, that grows best in volcanic soils, to luxuriate most where the conflagration of passion has left its mark?" Byron's nature was a proud one, stung to the quick by wrongs real or fancied, and in his later poems we must yet find something of the cry and writhing of a great soul suffering intense pain. Of his later works the most important are the Prisoner of Chillon, Mazeppa, the Lament of Tasso, Don Juan, besides the dramas, Manfred, Heaven and Earth, Cain, the Two Foscari, and Sardanapalus.

When the Greeks began their struggle for liberty,

in 1822, Byron was at once interested in their cause; and, late in 1823, he entered their revolutionary army. A short time afterward he fell ill, dying at Missolonghi, April 23, 1824.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was, like Byron, a spirit impatient of restraint. He was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet with the title On the Necessity of Atheism, and a little later he came into conflict with English ideas on the subject of marriage and divorce. The strictness and conservatism of England became so distasteful to him that he left his native country, in 1818, to reside on the continent. He was drowned in the Bay of Spezzia, Italy, in 1822. Among his earliest productions is Queen Mab, very fanciful and very exquisite, but atheistical in its tone. His Alastor (1816) is quite as exquisite and quite as intangible. The Revolt of Islam is longer and more ambitious, detailing the search of a pure, human intelligence for the Ideal Good. He wrote two dramatic poems, the Cenci (1819), dealing with the sad mediæval story of Beatrice Cenci; and Prometheus Unbound, dealing symbolically with the freedom of mankind. His fame, however, rests chiefly upon his almost flawless little lyrics, like the Cloud, the Skylark, the West Wind, and the Sensitive Plant. The Witch of Atlas and Epipsychidion have always been