In the concluding stanza of the last completed canto, beginning

Between two worlds life hovers like a star,

"Twixt night and morn, on the horizon's verge

we have a condensation of the refrain of the poet's philosophy; but the main drift of the later books is a satire on London society. There are elements in a great city which may be wrought into something nobler than satire, for all the energies of the age are concentrated where passion is fiercest and thought intensest, amid the myriad sights and sounds of its glare and gloom. But those scenes, and the actors in them, are apt also to induce the frame of mind in which a prose satirist describes himself as reclining under an arcade of the Pantheon: "Not the Pantheon by the Piazza Navona, where the immortal gods were worshipped -the immortal gods now dead; but the Pantheon in Oxford Street. Have not Selwyn, and Walpole, and March, and Carlisle figured there? Has not Prince Florizel flounced through the hall in his rustling domino, and danced there in powdered splendour? O my companions, I have drunk many a bout with you, and always found 'Vanitas Vanitatum' written on the bottom of the pot." This is the mind in which Don Juan interprets the universe, and paints the still living court of Florizel and his buffoons. A "nondescript and ever varying rhyme""a versified aurora borealis," half cynical, half Epicurean, it takes a partial though a subtle view of that microcosm on stilts called the great world. It complains that in the days of old " men made the manners-manners now make men." It concludes

Good company's a chess-board, there are kings,

Queens, bishops, knights, rooks, pawns; the world's a game.

It passes from a reflection on "the dreary fuimus of all things here" to the advice

But "carpe diem," Juan, "carpe, carpe!

To-morrow sees another race as gay

And transient, and devour'd by the same harpy.
"Life's a poor player,"-then play out the play.

It was the natural conclusion of the foregone stage of Byron's career. Years had given him power, but they were years in which his energies were largely wasted. Self-indulgence had not petrified his feeling, but it had thrown wormwood into its springs. He had learnt to look on existence as a walking shadow, and was strong only with the strength of a sincere despair.

Through life's road, so dim and dirty,

I have dragg'd to three and thirty.
What have those years left to me?
Nothing, except thirty-three.

These lines are the summary of one who had drained the draught of pleasure to the dregs of bitterness.

CHAPTER X.

1821-1824.

POLITICS -THE CARBONARI-EXPEDITION TO GREECE

DEATH.

IN leaving Venice for Ravenna, Byron passed from the society of gondoliers and successive sultanas to a comparatively domestic life, with a mistress who at least endeavoured to stimulate some of his higher aspirations, and smiled upon his wearing the sword along with the lyre. In the last episode of his constantly chequered and too voluptuous career, we have the waking of Sardanapalus realized in the transmutation of the fantastical Harold into a practical strategist, financier, and soldier. No one ever lived who, in the same space, more thoroughly ran the gauntlet of existence. Having exhausted all other sources of vitality and intoxication-travel, gallantry, and verse-it remained for the despairing poet to become a hero. But he was also moved by a public passion, the genuineness of which there is no reasonable ground to doubt. Like Alfieri and Rousseau, he had taken for his motto, "I am of the opposition ;" and, as Dante under a republic called for a monarchy, Byron, under monarchies at home and abroad, called for a commonwealth. Amid the inconsistencies of his political sentiment, he had been consistent in so much love of liberty as led him to denounce oppression, even when he had no great faith

in the oppressed-whether English, or Italians, or Greeks.

Byron regarded the established dynasties of the continent with a sincere hatred. He talks of the " more than infernal tyranny" of the House of Austria. To his fancy, as to Shelley's, New England is the star of the future. Attracted by a strength or rather force of character akin to his own, he worshipped Napoleon, even when driven to confess that "the hero had sunk into a king." He lamented his overthrow; but, above all, that he was beaten by "three stupid, legitimate old dynasty boobies of regular sovereigns." "I write in ipecacuanha that the Bourbons are restored." "What right have we to prescribe laws to France? Here we are retrograding to the dull, stupid old system, balance of Europe-poising straws on kings' noses, instead of wringing them off." "The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it." "Give me a republic. Look in the history of the earth-Rome, Greece, Venice, Holland, France, America, our too short Commonwealth-and compare it with what they did under masters."

His serious political verses are all in the strain of the lines on Wellington—

Never had mortal man such opportunity—

Except Napoleon-or abused it more;

You might have freed fallen Europe from the unity
Of tyrants, and been blessed from shore to shore.

An enthusiasm for Italy, which survived many disappointments, dictated some of the most impressive passages of his Harold, and inspired the Lament of Tasso and the

Ode on Venice. The Prophecy of Dante contains much that has since proved prophetic

What is there wanting, then, to set thee free,
And show thy beauty in its fullest light?
To make the Alps impassable; and we,

Her sons, may do this with one deed-Unite!

His letters reiterate the same idea, in language even more emphatic. "It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object-the very poetry of politics: only thinka free Italy!" Byron acted on his assertion that a man ought to do more for society than write verses. Mistrusting its leaders, and detesting the wretched lazzaroni, who "would have betrayed themselves and all the world,” he yet threw himself heart and soul into the insurrection of 1820, saying, "Whatever I can do by money, means, or person, I will venture freely for their freedom." He joined the secret society of the Carbonari, wrote an address to the Liberal government set up in Naples, supplied arms and a refuge in his house, which he was prepared to convert into a fortress. In February, 1821, on the rout of the Neapolitans by the Austrians, the conspiracy was crushed. Byron, who "had always an idea that it would be bungled," expressed his fear that the country would be thrown back for 500 years into barbarism, and the Countess Guiccioli confessed with tears that the Italians must return to composing and strumming operatic airs. Carbonarism having collapsed, it of course made way for a reaction; but the encouragement and countenance of the English poet and peer helped to keep alive the smouldering fire that Mazzini fanned into a flame, till Cavour turned it to a practical purpose, and the dreams of the idealists of 1820 were finally realized.