was obliged by all the rules of art to put such sentiments into his mouth as accorded with his unrepented crime and his dreadful agonies of mind and soul.  Where is the proof that they were his own agonies, remorse, despair?  Surely, we may pardon in Byron what we excuse in Goethe in the delineation of unique characters,—­the great creations which belong to the realm of the imagination alone.  The imputation that the sayings of his fallen fiends were the cherished sentiments of the poet himself, may have been one cause of his contempt for the average intelligence of his countrymen, and for their inveterate and incurable prejudices.  Nothing in Dante is more intense and concentrated in language than the malediction of Eve upon her fratricidal son:—­

     “May the grass wither from thy feet! the woods
      Deny thee shelter! earth a home! the dust
      A gravel the Sun his light! and Heaven her God!”

Yet the reader feels the naturalness of this bitter cursing of her own son by the frenzied mother.  How could a great artist like Byron put sentiments into the mouth of Cain such as would be harmless in the essays of a country parson?  If he painted Lucifer, he must make him speak like Lucifer, not like a theological professor.  Nothing could be more ungenerous and narrow than to abuse Byron for a dramatic poem in which some of his characters were fiends rather than men.  We have no more right to say that he was an infidel because Cain or Lucifer blasphemed, than to say that Goethe was an atheist because Mephistopheles denied God.

If Byron had avowed atheistical opinions in letters or conversations, that would be another thing; but there is no evidence that he did, and much to the contrary.  A few months before he died he was visited by a pious crank, who out of curiosity or Christian zeal sought to know his theological views.  Byron treated him with the greatest courtesy, and freely communicated his opinions on religious subjects,—­from which it would appear that he differed from church people generally only on the matter of eternal punishment, which he did not believe was consistent with infinite love or infinite justice.  Perhaps it would have been wiser if he had not written “Cain” at all, considering how many readers there are without brains, and how large was the class predisposed to judge him harshly in everything.  No doubt he was irreligious and sceptical, but it does not follow from this that he was atheistical or blasphemous.

There is doubtless a misanthropic vein in all Byron’s later poetry which is not wholesome for many people to read,—­especially in “Manfred,” one of the bitterest of his productions by reason of sorrows and disappointments and misrepresentations.  It was Byron’s misfortune to appear worse than he really was, owing to his unconcealed contempt for the opinions of mankind.  Yet he could not complain that he reaped what he had not sown.  Some of his biographers thought him to be at this time even morbidly desirous of a bad reputation,—­going so far as to write paragraphs against himself in foreign journals, and being filled with glee at the joke, when they were republished in English newspapers.  He despised and defied all conventionalities, and conventional England dropped him from her list of favorites.