listener to be under the wand of the magician,' spellbound by his wonderful affluence of talk, such as that of the fairy whose lips dropped rubies and diamonds."

De Quincey's abundant humor must not be passed by. "Both Lamb and myself," he says, "had a furious love for nonsense headlong nonsense.' This is readily granted by all who know his letters and that excellent piece of extravagance, Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. But he was capable, too, of the subtle turn worthy of Lamb himself. In describing the advantages of Grasmere he writes to Knight: "New potatoes of celestial earthiness and raciness, which with us last to October; and finally milk, milk, milk-cream, cream, cream (hear it, thou benighted Londoner!), in which you must and shall bathe; "a letter doubly humorous when one remembers how rarely De Quincey himself could eat anything even approximating a meal. In writing to an old schoolfellow in 1847, he said that he had had no dinner since parting from him in the eighteenth century.

The pathos in De Quincey's life, however, even more than in Lamb's, outweighs the humor. His affection for children is very touching. "Mr. Kinsey" was always welcome to the Wordsworth children, and long after Kate Wordsworth's death he saw her, he says, walking among the hills. It was particularly hard on such an affectionate nature to lose one son in 1833, another in 1835, and his wife in 1837. Still more, he was by no means well off; friends, chief among them Coleridge, had long ago used up most of his patrimony, and he continued to give away the chief part of what he earned. "His presence at home," says his daughter, "was the signal for a crowd of beggars, among whom borrowed

babies and drunken old women were sure of the largest share of his sympathies." His poverty, in fact, is the one thing in De Quincey's life easy to explain.

In 1840 he took a cottage, Mavis Bush, near Lasswade, with his daughters. He was a great walker, and, though now seventy, frequently trudged to Edinburgh and back even after dark, a distance of fourteen miles. Sometimes he disappeared for weeks at a time. His daughters knew his habits, how when a change of scene was necessary there was no holding him, knew also that he was with kind friends in Edinburgh, and that he would some day turn up at home. Towards the end of his life he spent most of his time in lodgings in Lothian Street, Edinburgh. Late in 1859 he was very low, rather from old age than from sickness, and on December 8 he died. He was buried in the West Churchyard of Edinburgh. In his last hours there was some delirium, during which he was heard to cry, "Sister! Sister! Sister!"-calling thus in his last words on his little sister Elizabeth, of whom he had written: "Pillar of fire, that didst go before me to guide and to quicken pillar of darkness, when thy countenance was turned away to God, that didst too truly reveal to my dawning fears the secret shadow of death, by what mysterious gravitation was it that my heart was drawn to thine?"

GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON

SCHERER says Byron "posed all his life long," and Matthew Arnold, catching Swinburne's phrase, speaks of Byron's "splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity and strength." There is plenty of evidence to support both judgments. Byron himself, on looking in a mirror just after he had been sick, remarked to a friend, "How pale I look! I should like, I think, to die of a consumption; because then the women would all say, See that poor Byron, - how interesting he looks in dying!'" Almost whenever he got a chance he exposed his suffering heart to a compassionate humanity and talked of himself without modesty or reticence; hence what the Hon. Roden Noel has called his " gaudy charlatanry, blare of brass, and big bow-wowishness; - hence, too, when the suffering was real, what the Germans have aptly called Weltschmerz. There was, on the other hand, a dauntless Viking spirit in Byron's breast, a sincere opposition to tyranny and bigotry. This very characteristic, which was his deepest and most abiding, which made him hate the sham and falseness of himself as well as of others, is in both his life and his work the predominant note. It is on this, in fact, that his fame depends; and, by strange irony, it was by this vigorous, defiant spirit, which scorned and resented correction, that he wrought his own downfall.

No man in the whole history of English literature has become so suddenly famous as Byron did on the publication of Childe Harold, and no poet has had

heaped upon him such wrathful denunciation by the virtuous and the zealous misinformed. As a result, he has figured in exaggerated, superlative terms. Because he was a peer, because he wrote excellent verses, because he was beautiful, he has received absurd adulation. Because he made certain very serious moral and social slips, because he had the grim humor to pretend he was much worse than he really was, because scandal-mongers spread almost unimaginable lies about him, he was practically driven from England and has been, since his death, the victim of unjustified calumny.

A further consequence of the exaggerated attitude towards Byron has been the falsification of the mere facts of his life, as well as of the inferences in regard to his character. He has been pictured, for instance, as a beautiful, black-haired Adonis, albeit with a club-foot, reclining, as he wrote verses, on a tombstone at Harrow, while his fellow scholars formed an admiring circle about him. As a matter of fact, however, when Byron was at Harrow, as Mr. Jeaffreson has pointed out, he was fat and shy, his hair was auburn, and he did not have, literally, a club-foot. Further, biographers have spoken of his vigorous, manly appearance when they could have found all sorts of proof that he was robust only in his arms and shoulders, that his legs were weak, and that his face, far from having the rugged vigor they imagine, was beautiful rather than handsome, femininely delicate in outline and expressive of feminine sensibilities. In later life he was accused of the blackest crimes in the calendar. Unfortunately he could not have cleared himself wholly if he had tried, but it must be kept in mind that he did not do half the things, good or bad, attributed to him.