by finding that he, too, has the same doubts and struggles as themselves, that he has a voice and art to be their spokesman.  And hence arises confusion on confusion, misconception on misconception.  The man is honoured for his dishonour.  Chronic disease is taken for a new type of health; and Byron is admired and imitated for that which Byron is trying to tear out of his own heart, and trample under foot as his curse and bane, something which is not Byron’s self, but Byron’s house-fiend, and tyrant, and shame.  And in the meanwhile that which calls itself respectability and orthodoxy, and is—­unless Augustine lied—­neither of them, stands by; and instead of echoing the voice of Him who said:  “Come to me ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” mumbles proudly to itself, with the Pharisees of old:  “This people, which knoweth not the law, is accursed.”

We do not seek to excuse Byron any more than we do Shelley.  They both sinned.  They both paid bitter penalty for their sin.  How far they were guilty, or which of them was the more guilty, we know not.  We can judge no man.  It is as poets and teachers, not as men and responsible spirits; not in their inward beings, known only to Him who made them, not even to themselves, but in their outward utterance, that we have a right to compare them.  Both have done harm.  Neither have, we firmly believe, harmed any human being who had not already the harm within himself.  It is not by introducing evil, but by calling into consciousness and more active life evil which was already lurking in the heart, that any writer makes men worse.  Thousands doubtless have read Byron and Shelley, and worse books, and have risen from them as pure as when they sat down.  In evil as well as in good, the eye only sees that which it brings with it the power of seeing—­say rather, the wish to see.  But it is because, in spite of all our self-glorifying paeans, our taste has become worse and not better, that Shelley, the man who conceitedly despises and denies law, is taking the place of Byron, the man who only struggles against it, and who shows his honesty and his greatness most by confessing that his struggles are ineffectual; that, Titan as he may look to the world, his strength is misdirected, a mere furious weakness, which proclaims him a slave in fetters, while prurient young gentlemen are fancying him heaping hills on hills, and scaling Olympus itself.  They are tired of that notion, however, now.  They have begun to suspect that Byron did not scale Olympus after all.  How much more pleasant a leader, then, must Shelley be, who unquestionably did scale his little Olympus—­having made it himself first to fit his own stature.  The man who has built the hay-rick will doubtless climb it again, if need be, as often as desired, and whistle on the top, after the fashion of the rick-building guild, triumphantly enough.  For after all Shelley’s range of vision is very narrow, his subjects few, his reflections still fewer, when compared, not only with such a poet as Spenser, but with his own contemporaries; above all with Byron.  He has a deep heart, but not a wide one; an intense eye, but not a catholic one.  And, therefore, he never wrote a real drama; for in spite of all that has been said to the contrary, Beatrice Cenci is really none other than Percy Bysshe Shelley himself in petticoats.