as far beyond the stretch of Pope, as Pope is in “worth and wit and sense” removed above his mimics.  The point of the paradox is not merely that he deserted, but that he sometimes imitated his model, and when he did so, failed.  Macaulay’s judgment, that “personal taste led him to the eighteenth century, thirst for praise to the nineteenth,” is quite at fault.  There can be no doubt that Byron loved praise as much as he affected to despise it.  His note, on reading the Quarterly on his dramas, “I am the most unpopular man in England,” is like the cry of a child under chastisement; but he had little affinity, moral or artistic, with the spirit of our so-called Augustans, and his determination to admire them was itself rebellious.  Again we are reminded of his phrase, “I am of the opposition.”  His vanity and pride were perpetually struggling for the mastery, and though he thirsted for popularity he was bent on compelling it; so he warred with the literary impulse of which he was the child.

Byron has no relation to the master-minds whose works reflect a nation or an era, and who keep their own secrets.  His verse and prose is alike biographical, and the inequalities of his style are those of his career.  He lived in a glass case, and could not hide himself by his habit of burning blue lights.  He was too great to do violence to his nature, which was not great enough to be really consistent.  It was thus natural for him to pose as the spokesman of two ages—­as a critic and as an author; and of two orders of society—­as a peer, and as a poet of revolt.  Sincere in both, he could never forget the one character in the other.  To the last, he was an aristocrat in sentiment, a democrat in opinion.  “Vulgarity,” he writes with a pithy half-truth, “is far worse than downright black guardism; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong sense at times, while the former is a sad abortive attempt at all things, signifying nothing.”  He could never reconcile himself to the English radicals; and it has been acutely remarked, that part of his final interest in Greece lay in the fact that he found it a country of classic memories, “where a man might be the champion of liberty without soiling himself in the arena.”  He owed much of his early influence to the fact of his moving in the circles of rank and fashion; but though himself steeped in the prejudices of caste, he struck at them at times with fatal force.  Aristocracy is the individual asserting a vital distinction between itself and “the muck o’ the world.”  Byron’s heroes all rebel against the associative tendency of the nineteenth century; they are self-worshippers at war with society; but most of them come to bad ends.  He maligned himself in those caricatures, and has given more of himself in describing one whom with special significance we call a brother poet.  “Allen,” he writes in 1813, “has lent me a quantity of Burns’s unpublished letters....  What an antithetical mind!—­tenderness, roughness—­delicacy,