language, even when a copy could not be found on the table of any respectable drawing-room, and the name of the author was seldom mentioned except with stern and honest censure.  It is perhaps fair to quote Murray’s own words, throwing the responsibility on the public:  “They talked of his immoral writings; but there is a whole row of sermons glued to my shelf.  I hate the sight of them.  Why don’t they buy those?” A fair enough retort; and yet, like the newspaper purveyors of the records of vice in our own day, the publisher was responsible for making the vile stuff accessible, and thus debasing the public taste.

How different was Byron’s painting of Spanish life from that of the immortal Cervantes, whom Lowell places among the five master geniuses of the world!  In “Don Quixote” there is not a sentence which does not exalt woman, or which degrades man.  A lofty ideal of purity and chivalrous honor permeates every page, even in the most ludicrous scenes.  The whole work blazes with wit, and with the wisdom of a proverbial philosophy, uttered by the ignorant squire of a fanatical and bewildered knight; but amidst the practical jokes and follies of all the characters in that marvellous work of fiction, we see also a moral beauty, idealized of course, such as was rivalled only in Spanish art in the Madonnas of Murillo.  I believe that in the imaginary sketches of Spanish life as portrayed by Byron, slanders and lies deface the poem from beginning to end.  Who is the best authority for truthfulness in the description of Spanish people, Cervantes or Byron?  The spiritual loftiness portrayed in the lives of Spanish heroes and heroines, mixed up as it was with the most ludicrous pictures of common life, has made the Spaniard’s work of fiction one of the most treasured and enduring monuments of human fame; whereas the insulting innuendoes of the English poet have gone far to rob him of the glory which he had justly won in his earlier productions, and to make his name a doubt.  If, in the course of generations yet to come, the evil which Byron did by that one poem alone shall be forgotten in the services he rendered to our literature by other works, which cannot die, then he may some day be received into the Pantheon of the benefactors of mind.

I would speak with less vehemence in reference to those poems which are generally supposed to be permeated with defiance, scorn, and misanthropy.  In “Manfred” and “Cain,” it was with Byron a work of art to describe the utterances of impious spirits against the sovereign rule of God.  Had he not fallen from high estate as an interpreter of the soul, the critics might have seen here nothing more to condemn than in some of the Grecian tragedies, many passages in the “Paradise Lost,” and in the general spirit of “Faust.”  It is no proof that he was a blasphemer in his heart because he painted blasphemy.  To describe a wanderer on the face of the earth, driven hither and thither by pursuing vengeance as the first recorded murderer, the poet