almost complete darkness by the wretched materials which alone have survived, and the attempt to found a dignified narrative on such scanty and imperfect authorities was hardly wise. Gibbon would have shown a greater sense of historic proportion if he had passed over this period with a few bold strokes, and summed up with brevity such general results as may be fairly deduced. We may say of the first volume that it was tentative in every way. In it the author not only sounded the public, but he was also trying his instrument, running over the keys in preparatory search for the right note. He strikes it full and clear in the two final chapters on the Early Church : these, whatever objections may be made against them on other grounds, are the real commencement of the "Decline and Fall." From this point onwards he marches with the steady and measured tramp of a Roman legion. His materials improve both in number and quality. The fourth century, though a period of frightful anarchy and disaster if compared with a settled epoch, is a period of relative peace and order when compared with the third century. The fifth was calamitous beyond example; but ecclesiastical history comes to the support of secular history in a way which might have excited more gratitude in Gibbon than it did. From Constantine to Augus'tulus Gibbon is able to put forth all his strength. His style is less superfine as his matter becomes more copious; and the more definite cleavage of events brought about by the separation between the Eastern and Western Empires, enables him to display the higher qualities which marked him as an historian.

GIBBON, in English Men of Letters.

BALDER'S FUNERAL-SHIP.

MATTHEW ARNOLD (b. 1822).

[In Scandinavian mythology, Balder, the son of Odin and Frea, is the impersonation of light, peace, and day. With his wife Nanna he lives in the palace Breidablik (wide-shining") amid the Milky Way. His blind brother Hoder, or Höder, is the god of darkness and night. At a sportive trial which the gods of the Valhalla were making of Balder's invulnerability, Hoder unwittingly slew his brother with a branch of the mistletoe, against which Balder had no charm. In his grief Hoder threw himself on his sword. On the general intercession of the gods, Balder was some time afterwards restored to life. References to this myth occur in Longfellow, Carlyle (Heroes and Hero-Worship), and other English_writers. It is the basis of Sydney Dobell's "Balder," and of Arnold's "Balder Dead." The passage here given from Arnold's beautiful poem is characterized by Bishop Alexander as 66 that matchless description of the burning of Balder's ship in the funeral."]

But when the gods and heroes heard, they brought
The wood to Balder's ship, and built a pile,

Full the deck's breadth, and lofty; then the corpse
Of Balder on the highest top they laid,

With Nanna on his right, and on his left
Hoder, his brother, whom his own hand slew.
And they set jars of wine and oil to lean
Against the bodies, and stuck torches near,
Splinters of pine-wood soaked with turpentine ;
And brought his arms and gold, and all his stuff,
And slew the dogs who at his table fed,

And his horse, Balder's horse, whom most he loved,
And threw them on the pyre; and Odin threw
A last choice gift thereon--his golden ring.
The mast they fixt, and hoisted up the sails;
Then they put fire to the wood; and Thor
Set his stout shoulder hard against the stern,

To push the ship through the thick sand;-sparks flew
From the deep trench she ploughed, so strong a god
Furrowed it; and the water gurgled in,

And the ship floated on the waves, and rocked.
But in the hills a strong east wind arose,
And came down moaning to the sea; first squalls
Ran black o'er the sea's face, then steady rushed
The breeze, and filled the sails, and blew the fire;
And wreathed in smoke the ship stood out to sea.
Soon with a roaring rose the mighty fire,
And the pile crackled; and between the logs
Sharp quivering tongues of flame shot out, and leapt,
Curling and darting, higher, until they licked
The summit of the pile, the dead, the mast,
And all the shrivelling sails; but still the ship
Drove on, ablaze above her hull with fire.
And the gods stood upon the beach, and gazed.
And while they gazed, the sun went lurid down
Into the smoke-wrapt sea, and night came on.
Then the wind fell, with night, and there was calm;
But through the dark they watched the burning ship
Still carried o'er the distant waters on,

Farther and farther, like an eye of fire.

And long, in the far dark, blazed Balder's pile ;
But fainter, as the stars rose high, it flared.
The bodies were consumed, ash choked the pile;
And as, in a decaying winter-fire,

A charred log, falling, makes a shower of sparks,
So with a shower of sparks the pile fell in,
Reddening the sea around-and all was dark.

Balder Dead, part iii.

BYRON'S PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.
JOHN NICHOL (b. 1833).

(Professor of English Literature in the University of Glasgow.)

Byron's life was passed under the fierce light that beats upon an intellectual throne. He succeeded in making himself—what he wished to be the most notorious personality in the world of letters of our century. Almost every one who came in contact with him has left on record various impressions of intimacy or interview. Those whom he excluded or patronized maligned; those to whom he was genial loved him. Mr. Southey, in all sincerity, regarded him as the principle of Evil incarnate; an American writer of tracts in the form of stories is of the same opinion to the Countess Guiccioli * he is an archangel. Mr. Carlyle considers him to have been a mere "sulky dandy." Goethe ranks him as the first English poet after Shakspeare, and is followed by the leading critics of France, Italy, and Spain.

Lord Jeffrey, at the close of a once famous review, quaintly laments: "The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber, and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth, and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our vision. The novels of Scott have put out his poetry, and the blazing star of Byron himself is receding from its place of pride." Of the poets of the early part of this century, Lord John Russell thought Byron the greatest; then Scott; then Moore. "Such an opinion," wrote a National reviewer in 1860, "is not worth a refutation; we only smile at it." Nothing in the history of literature is more curious than the shifting of the standard of excellence, which so perplexes criticism. But the most remarkable feature of the matter is the frequent return to power of the once discarded potentates. Byron is resuming his place: his spirit has come again to our atmosphere; and every budding critic, as in 1820, feels called on to pronounce a verdict on his genius and character. The present times are, in many respects, an aftermath of the first quarter of the century, which was an era of revolt, of doubt, of storm. There succeeded an era of exhaustion, of quiescence, of reflection. The first years of the third quarter saw a revival of turbulence and agitation; and,

*Pr. Gw-eet'-cho-lee.-"My Recollections of Lord Byron, and those of Eye-witnesses of his Life" (1869).

more than our fathers, we are inclined to sympathize with our grandfathers.

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Byron has no relation to the master-minds whose works reflect a nation or an era, and who keep their own secrets. His verse and prose are alike biographical, and the inequalities of his style are those of his career. He lived in a glass case, and could not hide himself by his habit of burning blue lights. He was too great to do violence to his nature, which was not great enough to be really consistent. It was thus natural for him to pose as the spokesman of two ages—as a critic and as an author; and of two orders of society—as a peer, and as a poet of revolt. Sincere in both, he could never forget the one character in the other. To the last he was an aristocrat in sentiment, a democrat in opinion. 'Vulgarity," he writes, with a pithy half-truth, "is far worse than downright blackguardism; for the latter comprehends wit, humor, and strong sense at all times, while the former is a sad, abortive attempt at all things, signifying nothing." He could never reconcile himself to the English Radicals; and it has been acutely remarked that part of his final interest in Greece lay in the fact that he found it a country of classic memories, "where a man might be the champion of liberty without soiling himself in the arena." He owed much of his early influence to the fact of his moving in the circles of rank and fashion; but though himself steeped in the prejudices of caste, he struck at them at times with fatal force. Aristocracy is the individual asserting a vital distinction between itself and "the muck o' the world." Byron's heroes all rebel against the associative tendency of the nineteenth century; they are self-worshippers at war with society; but most of them come to bad ends. He maligned himself in those caricatures, and has given more of himself in describing one whom, with special significance, we call a brother poet. Allan," he writes in 1813, "has lent me a quantity of Burns's unpublished letters......What an antithetical mind!-tenderness, roughness delicacy, coarseness sentiment, sensualitysoaring and grovelling-dirt and deity-all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!" We have only to add to these antitheses, in applying them with slight modification to the writer. Byron had, on occasion, more self-control than Burns, who yielded to every thirst or gust, and could never have lived the life of the soldier at Mesolonghi; but, partly owing to meanness, partly to a sound instinct, his memory has

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been severely dealt with. The fact of his being a nobleman helped to make him famous, but it also helped to make him hated. No doubt it half-spoiled him, in making him a show; and the circumstance has suggested the remark of a humorist, that it is as hard for a lord to be a perfect gentleman as for a camel to pass through a needle's eye. But it also exposed to the rancors of jealousy a man who had nearly everything but domestic happiness to excite that most corroding of literary passions; and when he got out of gear he became the quarry of Spenser's "blatant beast." On the other hand, Burns was, beneath his disgust at Holy Fairs and Willies, sincerely reverential-much of "Don Juan" would have seemed to him " an atheist's laugh;" and—a more certain superiority-he was absolutely frank.

We find Byron at once munificent and careful about money; calmly asleep amid a crowd of trembling sailors, yet never going to ride without a nervous caution; defying augury, yet seriously disturbed by a gipsy's prattle. He could be the most genial of comrades, the most considerate of masters, and he secured the devotion of his servants, as of his friends; but he was too overbearing to form many equal friendships, and apt to be ungenerous to his real rivals. His shifting attitude towards Lady Byron, his wavering purposes, his impulsive acts, are a part of the character we trace through all his life and work--a strange mixture of magnanimity and brutality, of laughter and tears, consistent in nothing but his passion and his pride, yet redeeming all his defects by his graces, and wearing a greatness that his errors can only half obscure.

Alternately the idol and the horror of his contemporaries, Byron was, during his life, feared and respected as "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme." His works were the events of the literary world. The chief among them were translated into French, German, Italian, Danish, Polish, Russian, Spanish. On the publication of Moore's "Life," Lord Macaulay had no hesitation in referring to Byron "as the most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth century." Nor have we now; but in the interval between 1840-1870 it was the fashion to talk of him as a sentimentalist, a romancer, a shallow wit, a nine days' wonder, a poet for "green unknowing youth." It was a reaction such as leads us to disestablish the heroes of our crude imaginations till we learn that to admire nothing is as sure a sign of immaturity as to admire everything.

BYRON, in English Men of Letters.