went to practice pistol-shooting, a trooper rode rather roughly through them and nearly unhorsed an Irishman, one Taafe, who indignantly called Byron's attention to the insult. Byron put spurs to his horse and chased the offender through the gates of Pisa. As the trooper clattered past the Palazzo Lanfranchi one of the servants rushed out and wounded him with a stable fork. The poet, on returning to the gates, found that the guard had mustered before the rest of his party could get through, and that in the ensuing scuffle Shelley had received a sabre-cut on the head, and Taafe, well in the rear, the reproaches of the Countess and Mrs. Shelley.

In 1822 began Byron's connection with Leigh Hunt's Liberal. Byron had long felt a desire for a periodical at his command. It was to start this venture that he invited Hunt to Italy. Byron was to own the paper; Hunt, well known for his daring liberalism, was to edit it. Hunt arrived at Leghorn in the summer of 1821, just before Shelley's death by drowning, and, together with Mrs. Hunt and many little Hunts, took up his dwelling on the ground floor of the Palazzo Lanfranchi. From the first, however, the two writers did not get along well. Hunt was by this time a querulous, mercenary champion of liberty, and the cockney of him exasperated Byron. The Liberal proved to be unsuccessful and short-lived. Its best contributions were from Byron : The Vision of Judgment (1822), Heaven and Earth (1822), and Morgante Maggiore (1823).

In the Villa Saluzzo, at Albaro, about a mile outside of Genoa, Byron wrote a great deal. Cantos iv-xvi of Don Juan were published in 1823 and 1824. To the former year also belong: Werner, The Age of Bronze, and The Island; to the latter, The Deformed Trans

formed and his Parliamentary Speeches made in

1809.

...

Byron was, however, distinctly a spirit of action. He often spoke of his writing as mere play, to be given up when serious work began. "Do people think," he said to Trelawny in Greece, "that . . . I came to Greece to scribble more nonsense? I will show them I can do something better. I wish I had never written a line, to have it cast in my teeth at every turn. Let's have a swim." In 1823 the struggle of the Greeks against the Turks attracted him. They needed money, which he went about raising, giving unsparingly of his own, and they needed brave, intelligent leaders. He dreamed perhaps of great glory in this last enterprise of his; he could rarely forget himself and the spectacular. Still, when his whole life is taken into account, this effort to redeem his shattered character is greatly to his credit. He had little to sacrifice, to be sure, and much to gain,

but it is perhaps fairer to say that he felt, in the bottom of his vigorous heart, that he had still a high ideal to serve. How near he came to great gain may be guessed from Trelawny's remark that "had Byron lived to reach Salona as commissioner of the [English] loan, the dispenser of a million crowns would have been offered a golden one."

Setting out with Trelawny and the younger Gamba in July, 1823, Byron went first to Cephalonia, where he spent six months, to make sure how and where he should lend his services. It was during this time that, on a visit to Ithaca, he was taken with such violent indigestion, while he was being done especial honor as chief guest at a monastery, that he seized a torch, cursed the Abbot in virulent Italian, and rushed from the hall.

Later, in his fury, he threw furniture at his friends who sought to pacify him.

On arriving at Missolonghi on January 4, 1824, he was received with honor by Mavrocordatos, the Greek chieftain, and was made Archistrategos (commanderin-chief) of Marco Bozzaris's Suliotes. He did not see actual fighting in Greece, but the record of his services there does him great credit. He kept in good control a very rebellious band, the Suliotes, and did, besides, many little acts of kindness to prisoners and friends. There must have been something both magnificent and lovable about his appearance and manner. The same man who had captivated London society and played havoc with a dozen hearts inspired soldiers with zeal and affection and filled all who came in touch with him latterly, from the poet Shelley to the fighter Trelawny, with unbounded admiration. Hardened warriors wept by his death-bed, and all Greece went into mourning.

The story of Byron's last days can be briefly told. On February 15 began a series of epileptic fits; on April 11 he was taken with fever; on the 18th he spoke his last words, "Now I shall go to sleep; " and on the 19th he died, in his thirty-seventh year. His remains were taken to England; but, since the Dean of Westminster refused them burial in the Abbey, they were placed in the family vault of Hucknall - Torkard Church, near Newstead. The small gentry of Nottingham drew their prudish skirts about them, but Byron's friends, the poor, flocked in crowds to his grave.

In looking back over the life of Byron one feels that he was just beginning to find himself to live down the sentimental poseur in him and to reveal the strong, sincere spirit underneath when he was cut short.

In the shipwreck of his life there rises, as in Don Juan,

"the bubbling cry

Of some strong swimmer in his agony."

It must be admitted that Byron was always an imagebreaker; he was strong only in destruction; he had no hopeful theory. "When he thinks," said Goethe, "he is a child." Byron himself wrote in 1813: "I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments." But his defiance, it must be remembered, was at its best splendidly sincere, full of "imperishable strength," and the images he shattered were often idols of Baal. "To tell him not to fight," says Professor Nichol, "was like telling Wordsworth not to reflect, or Shelley not to sing." In his nobler moments and at what he finally achieved, Byron was the better self of his heroes: Harold, Don Juan, Cain, Manfred, Bonnivard the

"Eternal spirit of the chainless mind."

His friend Shelley, who understood what was best in him, called him "the Pilgrim of Eternity."

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

"MAD SHELLEY," "the immortal child," "a creature of impetuous breath," "a beautiful and ineffectual angel," these are some of the epithets that have been applied to Shelley. And in them lies what is most striking in his personality: his visionary idealism, his ingenuous earnestness, his passionate love of beauty and truth, his high ethereal spirit, unconscious of bodily existence. He described himself as "A pardlike spirit beautiful and swift." His poetry is similarly individual; it has been called a "lyrical cry." He himself is his "Cloud," who sings,

"I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone,

And the moon's with a girdle of pearl ;

The volcanoes are dim and the stars reel and swim,
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl."

He himself is the leaf borne along the "Wild West Wind;" he is his "Skylark" — an "unbodied joy

"In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun."

It is the coursers of his own Promethean mind who are "wont to respire

"On the brink of the night and the morning,"

and to drink of "the whirlwind's stream."

On August 4, 1792, Percy Bysshe Shelley, the son of Sir Timothy Shelley and Elizabeth Pilfold, was born at Field Place, near Horsham, in Sussex. His father, a stanch Whig in the House of Commons, was fairly