That he was one of the new romantic poets, with, however, a considerable tincture of the transition school, may be readily discerned in his works:  his earlier poems are full of the conceits of the artificial age.  His English Bards and Scotch Reviewers reminds one of the MacFlecknoe of Dryden and The Dunciad of Pope, without being as good as either.  When he began that original and splendid portrait of himself, and transcript of his travels, Childe Harold, he imitated Spenser in form and in archaism.  But he was possessed by the muse:  the man wrote as the spirit within dictated, as the Pythian priestess is fabled to have uttered her oracles. Childe Harold is a stream of intuitive, irrepressible poetry; not art, but overflowing nature:  the sentiments good and bad came welling forth from his heart.  His descriptive powers are great but peculiar.  Travellers find in Childe Harold lightning glimpses of European scenery, art, and nature, needing no illustrations, almost defying them.  National conditions, manners, customs, and costumes, are photographed in his verses:—­the rapid rush to Waterloo; a bull-fight in Spain; the women of Cadiz or Saragossa; the Lion of St. Mark; the eloquent statue of the Dying Gladiator; “Fair Greece, sad relic of departed worth;” the address to the ocean; touches of love and hate; pictures of sorrow, of torture, of death.  Everywhere thought and glance are powerfully concentrated, and we find the poem to be journal, history, epic, and autobiography.  His felicity of expression is so great, that, as we come upon the happy conceptions exquisitely rendered, we are inclined to say of each, as he has said of the Egeria of Muna: 

                         ... whatsoe’er thy birth,
    Thou wert a beautiful thought and softly bodied forth.

Of his dramas which are founded upon history, we cannot say so much; they are dramatic only in form:  some of them are spectacular, like Sardanapalus, which is still presented upon the stage on account of its scenic effects.  In Manfred we have a rare insight into his nature, and Cain is the vehicle for his peculiar, dark sentiments on the subject of religion.

Don Juan is illustrative not only of the poet, but of the age; there was a generation of such men and women.  But quite apart from its moral, or rather immoral, character, the poem is one of the finest in our literature:  it is full of wonderful descriptions, and exhibits a splendid mastery of language, rhythm, and rhyme:  a glorious epic with an inglorious hero, and that hero Byron himself.

As a man he was an enigma to the world, and doubtless to himself:  he was bad, but he was bold.  If he was vindictive, he was generous; if he was misanthropic and sceptical, it was partly because he despised shams:  in all his actions, we see that implicit working out of his own nature, which not only conceals nothing, but even exaggerates his own faults.  His antecedents were bad;—­his father was a villain; his grand-uncle a murderer; his mother a woman of violent temper; and himself, with all this legacy, a man of powerful passions.  If evil is in any degree to be palliated because it is hereditary, those who most condemn it in the abstract, may still look with compassionate leniency upon the career of Lord Byron.