‘A Bernesque poet’ at the very most,
  And never earnest save in politics—­
 The Pegasus that he was wont to boast
  A blundering, floundering hackney, full of tricks,
 A beast that must be driven to the post
  By whips and spurs and oaths and kicks and sticks,
 A gasping, ranting, broken-winded brute,
 That any judge of Pegasi would shoot;

 In sooth, a half-bred Pegasus, and far gone
  In spavin, curb, and half a hundred woes. 
 And Byron’s style is ‘jolter-headed jargon;’
  His verse is ‘only bearable in prose.’ 
 So living poets write of those that are gone,
  And o’er the Eagle thus the Bantam crows;
 And Swinburne ends where Verisopht began,
 By owning you ‘a very clever man.’

 Or rather does not end:  he still must utter
  A quantity of the unkindest things. 
 Ah! were you here, I marvel, would you flutter
  O’er such a foe the tempest of your wings? 
 ’T is ‘rant and cant and glare and splash and splutter’
  That rend the modest air when Byron sings. 
 There Swinburne stops:  a critic rather fiery.
 Animis caelestibus tantaene irae?

 But whether he or Arnold in the right is,
  Long is the argument, the quarrel long;
 Non nobis est to settle tantas lites;
  No poet I, to judge of right or wrong: 
 But of all things I always think a fight is
  The most unpleasant in the lists of song;
 When Marsyas of old was flayed, Apollo
 Set an example which we need not follow.

 The fashion changes!  Maidens do not wear,
  As once they wore, in necklaces and lockets
 A curl ambrosial of Lord Byron’s hair;
  ‘Don Juan’ is not always in our pockets
 Nay, a NEW WRITER’s readers do not care
  Much for your verse, but are inclined to mock its
 Manners and morals.  Ay, and most young ladies
 To yours prefer the ‘Epic’ called ‘of Hades’!

 I do not blame them; I’m inclined to think
  That with the reigning taste ’t is vain to quarrel,
 And Burns might teach his votaries to drink,
  And Byron never meant to make them moral. 
 You yet have lovers true, who will not shrink
  From lauding you and giving you the laurel;
 The Germans too, those men of blood and iron,
 Of all our poets chiefly swear by Byron.

 Farewell, thou Titan fairer than the gods! 
  Farewell, farewell, thou swift and lovely spirit,
 Thou splendid warrior with the world at odds,
  Unpraised, unpraisable, beyond thy merit;
 Chased, like Oresres, by the furies’ rods,
  Like him at length thy peace dost thou inherit;
 Beholding whom, men think how fairer far
 Than all the steadfast stars the wandering star!

Note Mr. Swlnburne’s and Mr. Arnold’s diverse views of Byron will be found in the Selections by Mr. Arnold and in the Nineteenth Century.

XXI.