This verdict of the Olympian as against the verdict of the Titan is interesting in itself, and as being the verdict of the whole continental world of letters.  “What,” exclaims Castelar, “does Spain not owe to Byron?  From his mouth come our hopes and fears.  He has baptized us with his blood.  There is no one with whose being some song of his is not woven.  His life is like a funeral torch over our graves.”  Mazzini takes up the same tune for Italy.  Stendhal speaks of Byron’s “Apollonic power;” and Sainte Beuve writes to the same intent, with some judicious caveats.  M. Taine concludes his survey of the romantic movement with the remark:  “In this splendid effort, the greatest are exhausted.  One alone—­Byron—­attains the summit.  He is so great and so English, that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and his age than from all the rest together.”  Dr. Elze, ranks the author of Harold and Juan among the four greatest English poets, and claims for him the intellectual parentage of Lamartine and Musset in France, of Espronceda in Spain, of Puschkin in Russia, with some modifications, of Heine in Germany, of Berchet and others in Italy.  So many voices of so various countries cannot be simply set aside:  unless we wrap ourselves in an insolent insularism, we are bound at least to ask what is the meaning of their concurrent testimony.  Foreign judgments can manifestly have little weight on matters of form, and not one of the above-mentioned critics is sufficiently alive to the egregious shortcomings which Byron himself recognized.  That he loses almost nothing by translation is a compliment to the man, a disparagement to tho artist.  Very few pages of his verse even aspire to perfection; hardly a stanza will bear the minute word-by-word dissection which only brings into clearer view the delicate touches of Keats or Tennyson; his pictures with a big brush were never meant for the microscope.  Here the contrast between his theoretic worship of his idol and his own practice reaches a climax.  If, as he professed to believe, “the best poet is he who best executes his work,” then he is hardly a poet at all.  He is habitually rapid and slovenly; an improvisatore on the spot whore his fancy is kindled, writing currente calamo, and disdaining the “art to blot.”  “I can never recast anything.  I am like the tiger; if I miss the first spring, I go grumbling back to my jungle.”  He said to Medwin, “Blank verse is the most difficult, because every line must be good.”  Consequently, his own blank verse is always defective—­sometimes execrable.  No one else—­except, perhaps, Wordsworth—­who could write so well, could also write so ill.  This fact in Byron’s case seems due not to mere carelessness, but to incapacity.  Something seems to stand behind him, like the slave in the chariot, to check the current of his highest thought.  The glow of his fancy fades with the suddenness of a southern sunset.  His best inspirations are spoilt