the romance of travel, the picturesque aspects of foreign scenery, manners, and costumes.  It is instructive of the difference between the two ages, in poetic sensibility to such things, to compare Byron’s glowing imagery with Addison’s tame Letter from Italy, written a century before. Childe Harold was followed by a series of metrical tales, the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, Lara, the Siege of Corinth, Parisina, and the Prisoner of Chillon, all written in the years 1813-1816.  These poems at once took the place of Scott’s in popular interest, dazzling a public that had begun to weary of chivalry romances with pictures of Eastern life, with incidents as exciting as Scott’s, descriptions as highly colored, and a much greater intensity of passion.  So far as they depended for this interest upon the novelty of their accessories, the effect was a temporary one.  Seraglios, divans, bulbuls, Gulistans, Zuleikas, and other oriental properties deluged English poetry for a time, and then subsided; even as the tide of moss-troopers, sorcerers, hermits, and feudal castles had already had its rise and fall.

But there was a deeper reason for the impression made by Byron’s poetry upon his contemporaries.  He laid his finger right on the sore spot in modern life.  He had the disease with which the time was sick, the world-weariness, the desperation which proceeded from “passion incapable of being converted into action.”  We find this tone in much of the literature which followed the failure of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.  From the irritations of that period, the disappointment of high hopes for the future of the race, the growing religious disbelief, and the revolt of democracy and free thought against conservative reaction, sprang what Southey called the “Satanic school,” which spoke its loudest word in Byron.  Titanic is the better word, for the rebellion was not against God, but Jupiter; that is, against the State, Church, and society of Byron’s day; against George III., the Tory cabinet of Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington, the bench of bishops, London gossip, the British constitution, and British cant.  In these poems of Byron, and in his dramatic experiments, Manfred and Cain, there is a single figure—­the figure of Byron under various masks—­and one pervading mood, a restless and sardonic gloom, a weariness of life, a love of solitude, and a melancholy exaltation in the presence of the wilderness and the sea.  Byron’s hero is always represented as a man originally noble, whom some great wrong, by others, or some mysterious crime of his own, has blasted and embittered, and who carries about the world a seared heart and a somber brow.  Harold—­who may stand as a type of all his heroes—­has run “through sin’s labyrinth,” and feeling the “fullness of satiety,” is drawn abroad to roam, “the wandering exile of his own dark mind.”  The loss of a capacity for pure, unjaded emotion is the constant burden of Byron’s lament;