There remains a poet over whom opinion is more sharply divided than it is about any other writer in English.  In his day Lord Byron was the idol, not only of his countrymen, but of Europe.  Of all the poets of the time he was, if we except Scott, whose vogue he eclipsed, the only one whose work was universally known and popular.  Everybody read him; he was admired not only by the multitude and by his equals, but by at least one who was his superior, the German poet Goethe, who did not hesitate to say of him that he was the greatest talent of the century Though this exalted opinion still persists on the Continent, hardly anyone could be found in England to subscribe to it now.  Without insularity, we may claim to be better judges of authors in our own tongue than foreign critics, however distinguished and comprehending.  How then shall be explained Lord Byron’s instant popularity and the position he won?  What were the qualities which gave him the power he enjoyed?

In the first place he appealed by virtue of his subject-matter—­the desultory wanderings of Childe Harold traversed ground every mile of which was memorable to men who had watched the struggle which had been going on in Europe with scarcely a pause for twenty years.  Descriptive journalism was then and for nearly half a century afterwards unknown, and the poem by its descriptiveness, by its appeal to the curiosity of its readers, made the same kind of success that vividly written special correspondence would to-day, the charm of metre super-added.  Lord Byron gave his readers something more, too, than mere description.  He added to it the charm of a personality, and when that personality was enforced by a title, when it proclaimed its sorrows as the age’s sorrows, endowed itself with an air of symbolism and set itself up as a kind of scapegoat for the nation’s sins, its triumph was complete.  Most men have from time to time to resist the temptation to pose to themselves; many do not even resist it.  For all those who chose to believe themselves blighted by pessimism, and for all the others who would have loved to believe it, Byron and his poetry came as an echo of themselves.  Shallow called to shallow.  Men found in him, as their sons found more reputably in Tennyson, a picture of what they conceived to be the state of their own minds.

But he was not altogether a man of pretence.  He really and passionately loved freedom; no one can question his sincerity in that.  He could be a fine and scathing satirist; and though he was careless, he had great poetic gifts.

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The age of the Romantic Revival was one of poetry rather than of prose; it was in poetry that the best minds of the time found their means of expression.  But it produced prose of rare quality too, and there is delightful reading in the works of its essayists and occasional writers.  In its form the periodical essay had changed little since it was first made popular by Addison and Steele.  It remained, primarily,