This sense of moral accountability Byron seems never to have had, in regard to anybody or anything, his self-indulgence culminating in an egotism melancholy to behold.  He would go where he pleased, say what he pleased, write as he pleased, do what he pleased, without any constraint, whether in opposition or not to the customs and rules of society, his own welfare, or the laws of God.  It was moral madness pursuing him to destruction,—­the logical and necessary sequence of unrestrained self-will, sometimes assuming the form of angelic loveliness and inspiration in the eyes of his idolaters.  No counsellor guided him wiser than Moore or Shelley.  Even the worldly advice of Rogers and Madame de Stael was thrown away, whenever they presumed to counsel him.  Nobody could influence him.  His abandonment to fitful labors or pleasures was alike his glory and his shame.  After a day of frivolity he would consume the midnight hours in the intensest studies, stimulated by gin, to awake in the morning in lassitude or pain,—­for work he must, as well as play.  The consequence of this burning the candle at both ends was failing health and diminished energies, until his short race was run.  He had produced more poetry at thirty-four years of age than any other English poet at the age of fifty,—­some of almost transcendent merit, but more of questionable worth, though not of questionable power.  Aside from the “Childe Harold,” the “Hebrew Melodies,” the “Prisoner of Chillon,” and perhaps the “Corsair,” the “Bride of Abydos,” “Lara,” and the “Siege of Corinth,” the rest, excepting minor poems, however beautiful in measure and grand in thought, give a shock to the religious or to the moral sentiments.  “Cain” and “Manfred” are regarded as almost blasphemous, though probably not so meant to be by the poet, in view of the stirring questions of Grecian tragedy; while the longest of his poems, “Don Juan,” is an insult to womanhood and a disgrace to genius; for although containing some of the most exquisite touches of description and finest flights of poetic feeling, its theme is along the lowest level of human passion.

Whatever Byron wrote was unhesitatingly published and read, whether good or evil, whatever were those follies and defiances which excluded him from the best society; and it is a matter of surprise to me that any noted and wealthy publisher could be found, in respectable and conventional England, venal enough to publish perhaps the most corrupting poem in our language,—­worse than anything which Boccaccio wrote for his Italian readers, or anything which plain-spoken Fielding and the dramatists of the reign of Charles II. ever allowed to go into print; for though they were coarser in their language, they were not so seductive in their spirit, and did not poison the soul like “Don Juan,” the very name of which has become a synonym for extreme depravity.  That abominable poem was read because Lord Byron wrote it, and because its immorality was slightly veiled by the beauty of the