Macaulay's judgment, that "personal
taste led him to the eighteenth century, thirst for praise to the
nineteenth," is quite at fault. There can be no doubt that Byron loved
praise as much as he affected to despise it. His note, on reading the
_Quarterly_ on his dramas, "I am the most unpopular man in England," is
like the cry of a child under chastisement; but he had little affinity,
moral or artistic, with the spirit of our so-called Augustans, and his
determination to admire them was itself rebellious. Again we are reminded
of his phrase, "I am of the opposition." His vanity and pride were
perpetually struggling for the mastery, and though he thirsted for
popularity he was bent on compelling it; so he warred with the literary
impulse of which he was the child.
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 is 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.
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