Page:Papers on Literature and Art (Fuller).djvu/94

78 that world, which seems at times so deformed by evils and endless contradictions,

Grief loses half its charm when we find that others have endured the same to a higher degree, and lived through it. Nor do I believe that the misanthropy of Byron ever made a single misanthrope; that his scepticism, so uneasy and sorrowful beneath its thin mask of levity, ever made a single sceptic. I know those whom it has cured of their yet half-developed errors. I believe it has cured thousands.

As supplying materials for the history of opinion, then, Byron’s poems will be valuable. And as a poet, I believe posterity will assign him no obscure place, though he will probably be classed far beneath some who have exercised a less obvious or immediate influence on their own times; beneath the noble Three of whom I am yet to speak, whose merits are immortal, because their tendencies are towards immortality, and all whose influence must be a growing influence; beneath Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth.

Before proceeding to discuss these last, for which there is hardly room in the present paper, I would be allowed to conclude this division of my subject with a fine passage in which Shelley speaks of Byron. I wish to quote it, because it is of kindred strain with what Walter Scott and Rogers (in his “Italy”) have written about their much abused compeer. It is well for us to see great men judging so gently, and excusing so generously, faults from which they themselves are entirely free; faults at which men of less genius, and less purity too, found it so easy and pleasant to rail. I quote it in preference to any thing from Scott and Rogers, because I presume it to be less generally known.

In apostrophizing Venice, Shelley says,