namely, that there is an absolute and eternal law in the heart of man which sophistries of his own or of other beings may make him forget, deny, blaspheme; but which exists eternally, and will assert itself.  If this be not the meaning of “Manfred,” especially of that great scene in the chamois hunter’s cottage, what is?—­If this be not the meaning of “Cain,” and his awful awakening after the murder, not to any mere dread of external punishment, but to an overwhelming, instinctive, inarticulate sense of having done wrong, what is?

Yes; that law exists, let it never be forgotten, is the real meaning of Byron, down to that last terrible “Don Juan,” in which he sits himself down, in artificial calm, to trace the gradual rotting and degradation of a man without law, the slave of his own pleasures; a picture happily never finished, because he who painted it was taken away before he had learnt, perhaps when he was beginning to turn back from—­the lower depth within the lowest deep.

Now to this whole form of consciousness, poor Shelley’s mind is altogether antipodal.  His whole life through was a denial of external law, and a substitution in its place of internal sentiment.  Byron’s cry is:  There is a law, and therefore I am miserable.  Why cannot I keep the law?  Shelley’s is:  There is a law, and therefore I am miserable.  Why should not the law be abolished?—­Away with it, for it interferes with my sentiments—­Away with marriage, “custom and faith, the foulest birth of time.”—­We do not wish to follow him down into the fearful sins which he defended with the small powers of reasoning—­and they were peculiarly small—­which he possessed.  Let any one who wishes to satisfy himself of the real difference between Byron’s mind and Shelley’s, compare the writings in which each of them treats the same subject—­namely, that frightful question about the relation of the sexes, which forms, evidently, Manfred’s crime; and see if the result is not simply this, that Shelley glorifies what Byron damns.  “Lawless love” is Shelley’s expressed ideal of the relation of the sexes; and his justice, his benevolence, his pity, are all equally lawless.  “Follow your instincts,” is his one moral rule, confounding the very lowest animal instincts with those lofty ideas of might, which it was the will of Heaven that he should retain, ay, and love, to the very last, and so reducing them all to the level of sentiments.  “Follow your instincts”—­But what if our instincts lead us to eat animal food?  “Then you must follow the instincts of me, Percy Bysshe Shelley.  I think it horrible, cruel; it offends my taste.”  What if our instincts lead us to tyrannise over our fellow-men?  “Then you must repress those instincts.  I, Shelley, think that, too, horrible and cruel.”  Whether it be vegetarianism or liberty, the rule is practically the same—­sentiment which, in his case, as in the case of all sentimentalists, turns out to mean at last, not the sentiments of mankind