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books were published to allow a modern author to obtain success; both praised London as a place which helped to knock the conceit out of a man; both affirmed that one person had no more right to abuse another than to rob him or to knock him down; both considered that defending a man was the worst possible way of conciliating his enemies; both affected, more or less sincerely, to make no complaint of the world's judgment of a book of theirs; and both, quaintly enough, deemed they had a mission for reforming the bad manners of their countrymen.

Moreover, I may remark that Byron shared with Johnson such a delight in exposing cant and shams and humbug of all kinds, that he was never weary of uttering some unpalatable truth. Thus he was wont to extol the power of money just as if he were a miser, to comment on the limitations of friendship with all the cynicism of a misanthrope, to insist on "the burden of gratitude" in a manner worthy only of Swift, to revel in such stories of his duelling propensities as made him out a veritable fireeater, and, in general, to commit ever and anon in epistolary correspondence that same error of mistaking insolence for insistence and rudeness for raillery which Johnson so frequently committed in conversation.

The truth is, of course, that a man may have the best intentions in the world and yet never succeed in "clearing his mind of cant." Seeking to avoid one form of it he falls into another, and the more vociferously he protests his emancipation from common prejudice, the more likely he is to succumb to a prejudice of his own creation. So it was with Byron. His abhorrence of affectation of feeling is

BYRON NOT JOHNSON'S DISCIPLE

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proclaimed a little too loudly, rather too often, somewhat too theatrically, to seem really sincere; and even his loudly vaunted indifference to English public opinion strikes too shrill and too indignant a note to sound quite true. . . . All which means that after this long digression I am returning by a short cut to the Byron I first described the Byron who loved to pose, to "orate," to mystify, to emulate every man's accomplishment-Byron the aristocrat and actor! Let me, however, at this last stage of my preface, correct a possible misapprehension of my meaning. In tracing these points of correspondence between Byron and Johnson I have not the slightest wish to weigh Byron in the Johnsonian scales. I am among the first to admit that Byron's mental, moral, social, and political outlook-to say nothing of religious views was often diametrically divergent from that of Johnson. To lay such stress on the resemblances I have discovered as would make Byron a sort of disciple of " The Rambler," would be not only to falsify facts but to caricature my real intentions. All I wish to show is that Byron throughout his Letters pays a very fitting tribute of admiration to the moral and intellectual eminence of Johnson, and that these two great authors, the leading man of letters of the latter half of the eighteenth century and the leading man of letters of the early years of the nineteenth century, are never found in such dire antagonism as precludes their meeting one another on a common platform of love of humanity and love of truth.

W. A. LEWIS BETTANY.

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