Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/383

 NOTES BY THE WAY.

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��wrong road, from the early days of his own great success in ' English Bards.' I cannot but regret his waste of power on his later satires, the ' Hints from Horace,' the attacks on Elgin (to whom the world owes the preservation of the matchless ' Elgin Marbles,' which were in imminent danger of destruction), the 'Age of Bronze,' and ' The Blues ' all of which combined can well be spared from reproduction after this complete Library issue, and one cannot avoid a fear that much of the other work whereon Byron incessantly tried to relieve his restless mind, like a caged lioness angrily traversing the space behind the bars of her prison, is more likely to prove a cumbersome burden to damage his continuous fame than by any means a help, except only as manifestations of his feverish activity and versatility. As it has been exemplified in the career of our late admirable Laureate, Tennyson, dramatic genius was conspicuously wanting. The true work which shows him at his highest and best must ever remain pre-eminent, the ' Don Juan.' I detest the silly infatuation of his virtual suicide in adven- turing for the factious and rebellious Greek insurgents, because each new canto of ' Don Juan ' would have been greater gain. Byron in the (prematurely final) cantos xv. and xvi. was Byron unequalled. In forbidding him to continue ' Don Juan ' his mistress the Guiccioli slew him."

��Guiccioli.

��SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER.

" I can venture to boast that I knew Gardiner as intimately as he cared to be known. In our political views we were dia- metrically opposed, and in his shifty religionism, flitting through almost every conceivable phase of Nonconformity and antagonism to the Church of England, so that I expected he might finally gravitate towards Romanism, or still more probably to agnosticism and unavowed atheism, but that his political anti-Cavalierism outweighed the force of his co-called religious enthusiasm .... It is, I believe, simply impossible to avoid partisanship in con- sidering those days of the Stuarts. The old contests so live anew in the squalid prejudices of our own intemperate controversialists that no genuine historian could hold the readers' attention if he perpetually obtruded the pretence of declared but fallacious ' im- partiality.' Certainly, such tame indifferentism would be detest- able. Every one is summoned to be in earnest, and to strike boldly for the cause he holds the just.

" He had the personal right to choose his standard, and to habitually aim at exalting his anti-monarchical ideal, of plotting and warfare. As for the criticism of the day, that he sought merely for truth, and found it merely on the Cromwellian or pre-Crom-

u 2

��1902, Mar. 1.

Samuel

Rawson

Gardiner.

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