by the interruption of incongruous commonplace.  He had none of the guardian delicacy of taste, or the thirst after completeness, which mark the consummate artist.  He is more nearly a dwarf Shakespeare than a giant Popo.  This defect was most mischievous where he was weakest, in his dramas and his lyrics, least so where he was strongest, in his mature satires.  It is almost transmuted into an excellence in the greatest of these, which is by design and in detail a temple of incongruity.

If we turn from his manner to his matter, we cannot claim for Byron any absolute originality.  His sources have been found in Rousseau, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Beaumarchais, Lauzun, Gibbon, Bayle, St. Pierre, Alfieri, Casti, Cuvier, La Bruyore, Wieland, Swift, Sterne, Le Sage, Goethe, scraps of the classics, and the Book of Job.  Absolute originality in a late age is only possible to the hermit, the lunatic, or the sensation novelist.  Byron, like the rovers before Minos, was not ashamed of his piracy.  He transferred the random prose of his own letters and journals to his dramas, and with the same complacency made use of the notes jotted down from other writers as he sailed on the Lake of Geneva.  But he made them his own by smelting the rough ore into bell metal.  He brewed a cauldron like that of Macbeth’s witches, and from it arose the images of crowned kings.  If he did not bring a new idea into the world, he quadrupled the force of existing ideas and scattered them far and wide.  Southern critics have maintained that he had a southern nature and was in his true element on the Lido or under an Andalusian night.  Others dwell on the English pride that went along with his Italian habits and Greek sympathies.  The truth is, he had the power of making himself poetically everywhere at home; and this, along with the fact of all his writings being perfectly intelligible, is the secret of his European influence.  He was a citizen of the world; because he not only painted the environs, but reflected the passions and aspirations of every scene amid which he dwelt.

A disparaging critic has said, “Byron is nothing without his descriptions.”  The remark only emphasizes the fact that his genius was not dramatic.  All non-dramatic art is concerned with bringing before us pictures of the world, the value of which lies half in their truth, half in the amount of human interest with which they are invested.  To scientific accuracy few poets can lay claim, and Byron less than most; but the general truth of his descriptions is acknowledged by all who have travelled in the same countries.  The Greek verses of his first pilgrimage,—­e.g. the night scene on the Gulf of Arta, many of the Albanian sketches, with much of the Siege of Corinth and the Giaour —­have been invariably commended for their vivid realism.  Attention has been especially directed to the lines in the Corsair beginning—­

  But, lo! from high Hymettus to the plain,