coarseness—­ sentiment, sensuality—­soaring and grovelling—­dirt and deity—­all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!” We have only to add to these antitheses, in applying them with slight modification to the writer.  Byron had, on occasion, more self-control than Burns, who yielded to every thirst or gust, and could never have lived the life of the soldier at Mesolonghi; but partly owing to meanness, partly to a sound instinct, his memory has been more severely dealt with.  The fact of his being a nobleman helped to make him famous, but it also helped to make him hated.  No doubt it half spoiled him in making him a show; and the circumstance has suggested the remark of a humourist, that it is as hard for a lord to be a perfect gentleman as for a camel to pass through the needle’s eye.  But it also exposed to the rancours of jealousy a man who had nearly everything but domestic happiness to excite that most corroding of literary passions; and when he got out of gear he became the quarry of Spenser’s “blatant beast.”  On the other hand, Burns was, beneath his disgust at Holy Fairs and Willies, sincerely reverential; much of Don Juan would have seemed to him “an atheist’s laugh,” and—­a more certain superiority—­he was absolutely frank.

Byron, like Pope, was given to playing monkey-like tricks, mostly harmless, but offensive to their victims.  His peace of mind was dependent on what people would say of him, to a degree unusual even in the irritable race; and when they spoke ill he was, again like Pope, essentially vindictive.  The Bards and Reviewers beats about, where the lines to Atticus transfix with Philoctetes’ arrows; but they are due to a like impulse.  Byron affected to contemn the world; but, say what he would, he cared too much for it.  He had a genuine love of solitude as an alterative; but he could not subsist without society, and, Shelley tells us, wherever he went, became the nucleus of it.  He sprang up again when flung to the earth, but he never attained to the disdain he desired.

We find him at once munificent and careful about money; calmly asleep amid a crowd of trembling sailors, yet never going to ride without a nervous caution; defying augury, yet seriously disturbed by a gipsy’s prattle.  He could be the most genial of comrades, the most considerate of masters, and he secured the devotion of his servants, as of his friends; but he was too overbearing to form many equal friendships, and apt to be ungenerous to his real rivals.  His shifting attitude towards Lady Byron, his wavering purposes, his impulsive acts, are a part of the character we trace through all his life and work,—­a strange mixture of magnanimity and brutality, of laughter and tears, consistent in nothing but his passion and his pride, yet redeeming all his defects by his graces, and wearing a greatness that his errors can only half obscure.