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HESE two volumes of letters, obviously designed to supplement the great Prothero and Coleridge edition of Byron published by John Murray from 1898 to 1904, complete, presumably, all the world's available records of that poet. Already, in 1914, death had released these documents from the curious claims of personal reticence; a further delay of eight years carries us over the war and, conveniently enough, almost to the gates of those centenary stirrings of 1924, when Byron, as Keats and Shelley, will become the property of those proud fools who inherit the ages.

Interlarded with letters from various correspondents, by far the most interesting of whom is Shelley, these long and jealously guarded manuscripts flutter down to earth as the last tattered shreds of tinsel from some gay-starred rocket. For many the main question always is the fate of the stick. These persons will be disappointed. Byronites who hoped for some counterblast adequate to the excavations of our own Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1869, and Ralph Lovelace's Astarte in 1905, will be cruelly vexed at finding almost nothing. More particularly Americans, if ever they be led so far afield as the hate and scandal following Byron's marriage, may happen on a curious parallel to the moral activities of Mrs Stowe in Mark Twain's vitriolic outpourings in praise of Harriet Westbrook. But even in clean Yankee hands these spades rarely turn up anything to excuse the stench of tombs. If Murray found evidence, he chose to suppress it. For his house these books are a last séance with the ghost of Byron.

But there remains a second and more genuine disappointment. Actually, few of these letters seem to justify the long-lived mystery with which Lady Dorchester enveloped them. Readers will inevitably compare them with those already published years ago. One wonders what has been gained to offset the inconvenience of having the correspondence printed out of its natural order. From five hundred letters written chiefly to Hobhouse, Kinnaird, and Lady Mel-