declaration that he would wish to renew his lease of marriage for ninety and nine years, "the pilgrim of eternity" showed many signs of restiveness, being continually haunted by visions of foreign travels-visions which, apparently, did not include his bride. This seems to have been the first apple of discord between them. But here is not the place to enter into the rights and wrongs of this much-vexed question.

In the letters belonging to the period which succeeded the rupture with his wife and with English society, the violent animosity which he now felt towards his countrymen shows itself in the most opposite ways. Sometimes we may recognise it in the sardonic pleasure with which, in letters addressed to his publisher, he dwells on the vicious connections he formed with a low and degraded class of women, expatiating on their ways with an utter disregard of social decorum, evidently in the expectation of these missives being largely circulated among friends and acquaintances. At other times, again, the same feeling finds vent in a mixture of indignation and pathos, as when he writes to Murray, in June 1819-" І afterwards went to the beautiful cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls, and found, besides the superb burial-ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded me of the grave-digger in Hamlet. He told me that he had himself planted all the cypresses in the cemetery; that he had the greatest attachment to them and his dead people; that since 1801 they had buried fifty-three thousand persons. In showing some older monuments, there was that of a Roman girl of twenty, with a bust by Bernini. She was a Princess Bartorini, dead two centuries ago; he said that, on opening the grave, they had found her hair complete, and 'as yellow as gold.' Some of the epitaphs at Ferrara pleased me more than the more splendid monuments at Bologna; for instance :

...

""MARTINI LUIGI

IMPLORA PACE.'

""LUCREZIA PICINI

IMPLORA ETERNA QUIETE.'

Can anything be more full of pathos? Those few words say all that can be said, or ought; the dead had had enough of life: all they wanted was rest, and that they implore! There is all the helplessness, and humble hope, and deathlike prayer that can arise from the grave-'implora pace.' I hope, whoever may survive me, and shall see me put in the foreigners' buryingground at the Lido, within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see those two words, and no more, put over me. I trust they won't think of 'pickling and bringing me home to Clod or Blunderbuss Hall.' I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on my death-bed, could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back to your soil. I would not even feed your worms if I could help it."

In spite of the vehement bitterness of this protest, the outcast poet was destined to rest in his native earth. But at that date his feelings towards his country had softened, as in turn had that of Englishmen towards himself. In the few following years, that is from the beginning of his liaison with the Countess Guiccioli to the time of his departure for Greece, so noticeable a change had taken place in Lord Byron's life that Shelley, seeing him again in 1821, after an interval of some years, found him greatly improved "in genius, in temper, in moral views, in health and happiness."

All his life Byron had felt a glowing sympathy with oppressed nations, and a hatred of their oppressors. To make out, as some of his biographers have done, that his enthusiasm for Greece and active efforts in her behalf were the result of a morbid craving for producing a theatrical effect, is to misapprehend the finest side of a character, which, however mixed its elements, was largely responsive to whatever is best and most glorious in human destinies. Nothing proves more conclusively the genuine nature of his love of liberty than his staunch advocacy of Irish claims-a far more crucial test of true liberalism as applied to this English nobleman in 1820 than even his participation in Carbonari risings and revolutions in Greece. Then, his bitter

indignation at the Austrian occupation of Italy is like a smouldering fire whose flames burst forth in an hundred letiers, as when he exclaims, "As for news, the Barbarians are marching on Naples, and if they lose a single battle all Italy will be up. It will be like the Spanish row, if they have any bottom. Letters opened?-to be sure they are, and that's the reason why I always put in my opinion of the GermanAustrian scoundrels. There is not an Italian who loathes them more than I do, and whatever I could do to scour Italy and the earth of this infamous oppression would be done con amore." And again, "Here I have my hands full with tyrants and their victims. There never was such oppression, even in Ireland, scarcely!" Indeed, he was ready to do whatever he could, either by money, means, or person; and there can be no doubt that had war then broken out in Romagna, he would have taken part in it.

To any candid reader who will fairly study Byron's letters the expedition to Greece, so far from being the spasmodic clutching at notoriety which it has become the fashion of comfortable home-keeping book-makers to call it, was the crowning sequence of a long chain of previous efforts, all tending in the same direction. It is true that to the superficial observer the casual eddies of the poet's shifting moods might seem to indicate doubt and vacillation, whereas in reality, deep underneath, his whole life's current was steadily setting in one direction. And that was to help in the deliverance of a people to whom literature and art had owed their greatest glories; to whom he himself had owed his first burst of splendid inspiration. And what if, as is hinted, but may be doubted nevertheless, he felt that his energies were sapped, his health impaired, his days numbered? Surely so much the greater the daring and "pluck" of his enterprise. Men are not usually eager to rush into difficult and dangerous undertakings because they feel a diminution of health and strength. But in the eyes of some of his biographers this supposititious fact apparently detracts from the glory of his venture. How coolly Byron surveyed the political situation when once settled at Missolonghi, and how unmoved he was, in spite of harassing dissensions and complications, and although his instinct seems but too truly to have foretold that the end was near, the following letter, written some two months before his death, on February 5, 1824, seems to indicate :

"It is perhaps best that I should advance with the troops, for if we do not do something soon we shall only have a third year of defensive operations, and another siege, and all that. We hear that the Turks are coming down in force, and sooner than usual, and as these fellows do mind me a little, it is the opinion that I should go-firstly, because they will sooner listen to a foreigner than to one of their own people, out of native jealousies; secondly, because the Turks will sooner treat or capitulate (if such occasion should happen) with a Frank than a Greek; and thirdly, because nobody else seems disposed to take the responsibility-Mavrocordato being very busy here, the foreign military men too young or not of authority enough to be obeyed by the natives, and the chiefs (as aforesaid) inclined to obey any one except, or rather than, one of their own body. As for me, I am willing to do what I am bidden, and to follow my instructions. I neither seek nor shun that nor anything else they may wish me to attempt. As for personal safety, besides that it ought not to be a consideration, I take it that a man is on the whole as safe in one place as another; and, after all, he had better end with a bullet than bark in his body. If we are not taken off with the sword, we are like to march off with an ague in this mud-basket, and to conclude with a very bad pun, to the ear rather than to the eye, better martially than marsh-ally;-the situation of Missolonghi is not unknown to you. The dykes of Holland when broken down are the deserts of Arabia for dryness in comparison."

And with an ague, sure enough, Byron was marched off on the 19th of April 1824, at the age of thirty-six, having compressed within that comparatively short space an incredible amount of life-work, and adding by his death a fresh consecration to the Greek cause, whose success he had so much at heart. That the glory of his name did much to form public opinion on that subject, and so eventually helped in bringing about that combination of European powers at Navarino, without which Greece could not have effected her liberation, there is little cause to doubt.

Now if, bearing in mind the general tone of Byron's correspondence, we ask ourselves what are its most salient characteristics, we should answer, a manly vigour of tone, sound common sense, and unerring gifts of observation, a generous impulsiveness of disposition contrasted with a corroding cynicism, an ineradicable yearning for what is great, good, and beautiful at war with a mocking spirit of negation within; in fact, nothing short of the problem of Faust tied to Mephistopheles, moments of devoutest awe still checkmated by the fiend's reminder that man is after all but "an abortion of filth and fire." It is this painful discord of a spirit divided against itself"imploring peace," yet ever impelled to revolt against all constituted authorities of heaven and earth-that seems the clue to Byron's defiance and despair. Yet this despair is not of the whining sort. And Carlyle never blundered more lamentably than, when sneering at the author of "Cain," he says, "A strong man of recent times fights little for any good cause anywhere, works weakly as an English lord, weakly delivers himself from such working, with weak despondency endures the cackling of plucked geese at St. James', and sitting in sunny Italy in his coach-and-four, writes over many reams of paper the following sentence with variations, 'Saw ever the world one greater and unhappier ??"

Truly it would be instructive to institute a comparison between the letters of this weak English lord and those penned by the strong Scotch peasant's son. The result, perhaps, would be surprisingly different from what might have been anticipated. Where shall we look for the expression-in all possible and impossible forms of fulminant eloquence of the very genius of grumbling, groaning, and gnashing of teeth over private and public grievances, if not in the voluminous correspondence of the apostle of silence? Whereas in Byron, if there is a haunting world-sorrow, an all-pervading sense of the power of evil in the world, a fiery scorn for the unctuous hypocrisies of the respectable classes by whom he has been spurned, and whose vice and wickedness he unsparingly lashes in Don Juan-if there is all this wrath, gloom, and indignation, it has, at least, something