But it is not this faculty of his which has been imitated by his scholars; for it is not this faculty which made him their ideal, however it may have attracted them.  All which sensible men deplore in him is that which poetasters have exalted in him.  His morbidity and his doubt have become in their eyes his differential energy, because too often, it was all in him with which they had wit to sympathise.  They found it easy to curse and complain, instead of helping to mend.  So had he.  They found it pleasant to confound institutions with the abuses which defaced them.  So had he.  They found it pleasant to give way to their spleen.  So had he.  They found it pleasant to believe that the poet was to regenerate the world, without having settled with what he was to regenerate it.  So had he.  They found it more pleasant to obey sentiment than inductive laws.  So had he.  They found it more pleasant to hurl about enormous words and startling figures than to examine reverently the awful depths of beauty which lie in the simplest words and the severest figures.  So had he.

And thus arose a spasmodic, vague, extravagant, effeminate, school of poetry, which has been too often hastily and unfairly fathered upon Byron.  Doubtless Byron has helped to its formation; but only in as far as his poems possess, or rather seem to possess, elements in common with Shelley’s.  For that conscious struggle against law, by which law is discovered, may easily enough be confounded with the utter repudiation of it.  Both forms of mind will discuss the same questions; both will discuss them freely, with a certain plainness and daring, which may range through all grades, from the bluntness of Socrates down to reckless immodesty and profaneness.  The world will hardly distinguish between the two; it did not in Socrates’ case, mistaking his reverent irreverence for Atheism, and martyred him accordingly, as it has since martyred Luther’s memory.  Probably, too, if a living struggle is going on in the writer’s mind, he will not have distinguished the two elements in himself; he will be profane when he fancies himself only arguing for truth; he will be only arguing for truth, where he seems to the respectable undoubting to be profane.  And in the meanwhile, whether the respectable understand him or not, the young and the inquiring, much more the distempered, who would be glad to throw off moral law, will sympathise with him often more than he sympathises with himself.  Words thrown off in the heat of passion; shameful self-revealings which he has written with his very heart’s blood:  ay, even fallacies which he has put into the mouths of dramatic characters for the very purpose of refuting them, or at least of calling on all who read to help him to refute them, and to deliver him from the ugly dream—­all these will, by the lazy, the frivolous, the feverish, the discontented, be taken for integral parts and noble traits of the man to whom they are attracted,