in our literature at least, are unrivalled, he has blended every extreme in nature and life, in style and tone, without producing the effect either of incongruity or even of impropriety. 'Don Juan' has little enough in common with the 'Odyssey,' and yet in some respects it recalls it. In both poems the similitude which at once suggests itself is the element so closely associated with the action of both-the sea. A freshness, a breeziness, a pungency as of the brine-laden air of beach or cliff seems to pervade it. Over the spacious expanse of its narrative, teeming with life and in ever-changing play, now in storm and now in calm, roll and break, wave after wave in endless succession, the incomparable stanzas on whose lilt and rush we are swept along.

The importance of Byron in English poetry is not to be estimated by ordinary critical tests; it is not by its quality that his work is to be judged. The application of perfectly legitimate criteria to his poetry would justify us in questioning whether he could be held to stand high even among the 'Dii minores' of his art; it would certainly result in assigning him a place very much below Wordsworth and Shelley, and even below Keats. Of many, nay, of most of the qualities essential in a poet of a high order, there is no indication in anything he has left us. Of spiritual insight he has nothing; of morality and the becoming, except in their coarser aspects, he has no sense. If the beautiful appealed to him, it appealed to him only in its material expression and sentimentally as it affected the passions. Of no poet could it be said with so much truth-and how much does that truth imply!-that he had not 'music in his soul.' Turn where we will in his work, there is no repose, no harmony; all is without balance, without measure, and, if we except 'Don Juan,' without unity. At his worst he sinks below Peter Pindar; at his best his accent is never that of the greatest masters. A certain ingrained coarseness, both in taste and feeling, which became more emphasised as his powers matured, not only made him insensible of much which appeals to the poet as distinguished from the rhetorician, but is accountable for the jarring notes, the lapses into grossness, and the banalities which so often surprise and distress us in his poetry.

6

As an artist, his defects are equally conspicuous. In architectonic he is as deficient as Tennyson. Childe. Harold' and 'Don Juan,' as well as his minor narratives, simply resolve themselves into a series of pageants or episodes. No eminent English poet, with the exception of Browning, had so bad an ear. His cacophanies are often horrible; his blank-verse is generally indistinguishable from prose; and his rhythm in rhymed verse is without delicacy and full of discords. Every solecism in grammar, every violation of syntax and of propriety of expression, might be illustrated from his diction and style. Nor is this all. His claim to originality can only be conceded with much modification in its important aspects, and with very much more modification in the less important.

These are large deductions to make; and yet Goethe placed Byron next to Shakespeare among the English poets; and in fame and popularity, by the consentient testimony of every nation in Europe, next to Shakespeare among Shakespeare's countrymen, he still stands. Such a verdict it is much more easy to understand than to justify. To his countrymen Byron's flaws and limitations will always be more perceptible and important than they will be to the people of the Continent; while, in all that appeals to humanity at large, his work will come more nearly home on the other side of the Channel than that of any other English poet except Shakespeare; and necessarily so. Byron's poetry originally was not so much an appeal to England as to Europe. His themes, his characters, his inspiration, his politics, his morals, were all derived from the Continent or from the East. England was little more than the incarnation of everything against which he reacted, at first with contempt and then in fury. The trumpet-voice of the world of the Revolution and of the revolt against the principles of the Holy Alliance, it was on the Continent that he found most response. And there indeed he can never cease to be popular. The laureate of its scenery, the rhapsodist of its traditions, the student and painter of almost every phase of its many-sided life, the poet of the passions which burn with fiercer fire in the South than in the colder regions of the North, he neither has nor is likely to have, with the single exception of Shakespeare, an English rival across the Channel.

The greatness of Byron lies in the immense body and mass of the work which he has informed and infused with life, in his almost unparalleled versatility, in the power and range of his influential achievement. Youth and mature age are alike his debtors. There is not a passion, scarcely an emotion, scarcely a mood, to which he does not appeal, and to which he has not given expression. Of almost every side of life, of almost every phase of human activity, he has left us studies more or less brilliant. He had, in extraordinary measure, nearly every gift, intellectually speaking, which man can possess, from mere cleverness to inspired genius; and there was hardly any species of composition which he did not more or less successfully attempt. As Goethe and Wordsworth were the Olympians, so he was the Titan of the stormy and chaotic age in which he lived; and his most authentic poetry is typical of his temper and attitude. He has impressed on our literature the stamp of a most fascinating and commanding personality, and on the literature of every nation in Europe he has exercised an influence to which no other British writer except Shakespeare has even approximated. Such is the intrinsic power and attraction of a great part of his poetry that he will always be a favourite-if not in the first rank of their favourites -with his countrymen; and, although no purely critical estimate would place him on a level with at least five, if not more, of our poets, yet it must be admitted that, next to Shakespeare, he would probably be most widely missed.

J. C. COLLINS.

Art VI.-TWO GREAT CHURCHMEN.

1. Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, D.D., sometime Bishop of London. By his Wife. Two vols. London: Longmans, 1904.

2. Life and Letters of Henry Parry Liddon, D.D. By John Octavius Johnston, M.A. London: Longmans, 1904.

By a coincidence, which is none the less impressive because manifestly undesigned, the biographies of two great churchmen have been published almost simultaneously. One was undoubtedly the greatest preacher of his age, a scholar, a divine, a saint, and essentially a priest; the other, if not the greatest prelate, was at any rate a man who, for variety of gifts, moral and intellectual, and for versatility in their application to the service of God and man, has rarely had his equal on the episcopal bench. The lives of these two men were as unlike as their natures. We shall institute no direct comparison between them. Their country and their Church are the richer for the memory and the example of both. It would be easy, and yet quite unjust, to say that, from one point of view, the one was a saint and the other a worldling. It would be quite as easy, and equally unjust, to say that, from another point of view, the one was above all things a man and the other above all things a priest. These are the superficial contrasts which naturally occur to any one according as he is more in sympathy with the one type of character or with the other. But they do not go to the root of the matter. Perhaps the root is not to be discovered. The priesthood which absorbs manhood is one type of human character, and, comparatively speaking, a common one; the manhood which transcends priesthood is another and a much rarer one. The category which includes and reconciles both has yet to be framed. Liddon's philosophy affords no clue. Creighton's would fain seek, though he never may find it.

'I admire Jowett's sermons,' he says in one of his letters. 'I admire Liddon's, but I cannot say of either of them as their admirers do, "Lo, here is the whole truth, there is nothing else." Both of them embody part of the truth,

neither of them is universal. You know my bane is hankering after a universal system; I cannot be content speculatively, though I am practically quite easily, with the best that I can see; hence my constant inconsistencies. I take what I can get, but I cannot lose myself in that and say "That is all"' (i. 122).

That is not the root of the matter, perhaps, but it is nearer to it than Liddon ever got, or than those who think and feel with Liddon are ever likely to get.

The personalities of the two men are not more sharply contrasted than the methods of their respective biographers. Liddon's biography is the life of a priest written by a priest; by one, indeed, whose religious ideals are no doubt the same as those of Liddon himself, who is in full sympathy with his ecclesiastical and theological aims, who took part in the great literary labour of his life-the biography of Pusey-and completed it after his death. These are high and rare qualifications. Nevertheless the portrait of the man within the priest, of the gentle, kindly, courteous, cultivated personality which filled the Christ Church common-room with sweetness and light, and fascinated all who came into social contact with him, is not to be found on Mr Johnston's own canvas. It is sketched, indeed, with delicate sympathy in a few pages contributed to the volume by Mr Sampson, a Christ Church colleague, and in a final appreciation of wider scope, for which Mr Johnston is indebted to the graceful pen of the Bishop of Oxford. But these appreciations, though welcome and not inadequate in themselves, are not interwoven into the texture of the biography. They stand outside and apart, and the main features remain those of the eager, combative, uncompromising ecclesiastic. There are many, perhaps, by whom this method of delineation will be held to be appropriate, satisfactory, and even inevitable. If such there are, we cannot share their views. Great indeed is the power of oratory, especially of pulpit oratory; and in this sphere of activity, in the sway exercised over men's minds and feelings by rhetoric such as his, by a pure and lofty character clothing its religious emotions in the guise of a logic uncompromising and to all seeming irresistible, Liddon had no rival; but he would never have been the great force that he was if he had not been something