Every letter he wrote to his agents in England, urged upon them the necessity of making any sacrifice to obtain, by the sale of his estates, &c., money for the cause. The space allotted to this brief memoir renders it impossible to give any account of the revolution itself, but Mr. Moore thus describes the task Lord Byron undertook: "To convince the government and chiefs of the paralysing effects of these dissensions,—to inculcate that spirit of union among themselves which alone could give strength against their enemies,—to endeavour to humanize the feelings of the belligerents on both sides, so as to take from the war its character of barbarism," &c. "Lord Byron," says Colonel Napier, "judged the Greeks fairly. He knew that half-civilized men are full of vices, and that great allowance must be made for emancipated slaves. He proceeded, therefore, bridle in hand, not thinking them good, but hoping to make them better." On the 5th of January he arrived at Missolonghi, and was appointed commander-in-chief of a proposed expedition against Lepanto. On the 22d he wrote the lines "On Completing his Thirty-sixth Year." The climate of Missolonghi, against which he had been most urgently warned, proved fatal to him. On February 15, he was seized with a convulsive fit, from the effects of which he never completely recovered. On the 9th of April he became seriously ill, and on the 12th he took to his bed, never to rise again. On the 14th he was urged to be bled, but refused, and only submitted on the 16th, and as it proved, too late. He was worse afterwards, and appearances of inflammation of the brain induced the medical men to let blood a second and third time without avail. His gentleness and kind thought for his attendants moved them to tears; he "feared they should be ill from sitting up day and night." Aware that he was dying, he attempted to send messages to his sister and Lady Byron, but was inarticulate. His last words, during his intervals of reason, were "Augusta," "Ada," and "Greece." At a quarter-past six on the morning of the 19th April he expired. All the public offices, even the tribunals, were closed for three days. A general mourning of twenty-one days was ordered by the Greek government, and prayers and a funeral service were offered in all the churches. His body was sent to England, and after a funeral ceremony performed in London, conveyed to Hucknall church, Notts, and buried near his mother in the vault of his ancestors. The tablet over the grave was placed by his beloved sister Augusta.—Not unfitting season, perhaps, at which a grand and stirring spirit should pass away;—the eve of a fierce and mighty struggle! Nevertheless, there was in Byron's death at such a juncture, a touch of profoundest tragedy. On the point of entering on a course of manly action, of taking the lead in momentous practical affairs, and being hailed by all men as a beneficent and practical power in Europe, how much of weakness, how much of imperfection might soon have been strengthened, perfected, and refined! Perhaps it is true, what Goethe said—"Byron could, in a certain sense, go no further. He had reached the summit of his creative power, and—whatever he might have done in the future—he would have been unable to exceed the boundaries of his talent." But there is a higher sense in which he might have gone much farther, and for which the opportunity seemed to have just come. If even now—notwithstanding the brilliancy of his genius—it is the life and character of the Man that chiefly rivets our attention and constrains our affections, what might Byron not have become to England and the World and all Time, had he been permitted through aid of that purifier—Action, to ascend from the stage of doubt, contradiction, and strife, to that of "self-reverence, self-knowledge, and self-control!" His course has been compared to that of a meteor: indeed it was fierce and fast. But when the intelligence of its close arrived, Europe felt that a Sun had set.
As a poet. Lord Byron will take rank with those second only to Shakspeare and Dante. The great critic of Germany indeed, recommended a student, on one occasion, to acquire English, mainly that he might read these wonderful writings. At the time of their publication they attained a popularity, and exerted an influence never surpassed, either in extent or intensity, by those of any writer retaining a place in the annals of literature; and if this influence has partly diminished, it is chiefly because the intellectual wants of England have changed. Byron possessed in a paramount degree many of the richest qualities of an immortal poet—a keen eye, a fine sense of harmony, an exquisite susceptibility, and the utmost fluency of language; but the grand source of his power is that fullness of life which gave greatness to the Man. Instead, therefore, of being a mere artist, he felt that he was more than an artist, and flung out his verses carefully or carelessly as he listed. "Do you fancy," he said once to Trelawney, "that I am to subside into a poet?" Hence, these abundant verses will not bear to be taken to pieces, or his poems judged of line by line, as is pre-eminently the case with Keats, and to a certain extent with Shelley; they are by no means free from commonplace phrases, prosaic images, and other faults of detail; but who has surpassed their force and fire? Some one has remarked of Byron's head, that it gave him the impression of being at a higher temperature than that of other men:—the same might be said of his poetry. As a dramatist he cannot be called pre-eminent. His characters are selected from within a narrow range, and are too correct reflections of the moods of the writer to have an adequate individuality. The scenes are often stilted, and the plots cramped; but the majestic and gorgeous passages which abound in them will cause these plays to retain a higher place in general estimation than far more correct and artistic structures. The lyrics, especially those in "Manfred" and the "Deformed Transformed," are models almost inapproachable. The third and fourth cantos of "Childe Harold" alone, place their author in the foremost rank of descriptive writers; but it is as a satirist that he soars highest—above all the poets of our century. The genius of Byron, with its wonderful power to blend pathos, humour, wit, scorn, saturnine gloom, and exuberant vitality, is better represented in "Don Juan," than perhaps by all his other poems put together.—The tendency of his writings, and especially of this his last and greatest work, has been the subject of much dispute. The majority of critics have followed in the wake of Southey, Bowles, &c., and denounced him as an immoral and irreligious writer: but it is a question whether the accusation did not originate in great part in an incomplete appreciation of his writings as a whole, and of the age in which he lived. The immorality and scepticism which sully portions of Lord Byron's writings are not of his personal creation; they are the reproduction of what was the very atmosphere of the tainted society of his day: a society, which idolized the incarnation of its worst vices in the "First Gentleman in Europe," would readily cry anathema on the plain-spoken poet who snatched the mask from its brow, and held, as it were, the mirror up to its evil nature. Byron was born to overthrow, to pull down: and his mission of destruction was rendered sacred by the suffering of the destroyer. This may be said more or less of all his poems, but of none so truly as of "Don Juan." The offspring of reaction, and needlessly offensive to good taste as this poem too often is, it is not, if rightly read, immoral. It is a crusade against cant, fought with the weapon of a matchless irony. Cant in all its shapes—in religion, in morals, in politics—the poet flagellates with the stinging scourge of his pitiless wit.
" With or without offence to friends or foes,
To sketch the world exactly as it goes,"
he finds "prolific of melancholy merriment." He laughs, but it is not the laugh of Voltaire; there is in it no enjoyment, only bitterness—
" And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep."
And the cries of anguish that follow, redeem the poet; for, unlike the laugh that preceded them, they spring from the very depths of his heart. In the midst of the mocking scepticism by which it is disfigured, "Don Juan" abounds in noble passages, prophetic of, and aspiring ardently towards a coming era of truth and justice. An eminent continental writer has stated what English critics have too often overlooked—the European rôle given by Lord Byron to English literature, and the appreciation of English he induced upon the continent. "From him dates our continental study and knowledge of English literature, and to a great extent of England. His poetry, and his readiness to devote himself to the cause, first of Italian and then of Greek freedom, have made of him a sort of apostle of England in the countries through which he passed. Before he came amongst us, all we knew of English literature was the French translation of Shakspeare, and the anathema hurled by Voltaire against your 'intoxicated barbarian.' Since Byron we have learned to study Shakspeare, and all your poets and other writers. We felt what must be the land from which such a soul was sprung.
