"I never do', said the lady simply; 'at least, at dinner'".

"He must be a man of genius', said Mr. Pole; 'he is so unlike everybody; the very tie of his cravat proves it. And his hair, so savage and dishevelled; none but a man of genius would not wear powder. Watch him to-day, and you will observe that he will not condescend to perform the slightest act like an ordinary mortal'.

"Dear me!' said the lady. him; and yet I hope that I dinner'".

'I am delighted to see shall not sit by him at

She did sit by him, and he was the most entertaining member of the party. "Lady Monteagle" was the hostess she stands, in Venetia, for Caroline Lamb; and Lady Monteagle was "quite delighted", for now "everybody would circulate throughout the world that it was only at her house that Lord Cadurcis condescended to be amusing".

Mr. Horace Pole's sardonic comments were not unjustified. Moore describes Byron's "air and port" as "those of one whose better thoughts were elsewhere, and who looked with melancholy abstraction on the gay crowd around him". He attributes it in part to shyness; but admits that a "love of effect and impression" may also have contributed. In the Diary for 1813, Byron records a criticism of his demeanour made by Mme de Staël. "She told Lewis

. . that I was affected, in the first place; and that, in the next place, I committed the heinous offence of sitting at dinner with my eyes shut, or half-shut. I wonder if I really have this trick. I must cure myself of it, if true. One insensibly acquires awkward habits, which should be broken in time. If this is

Thus

one, I wish I had been told of it before". we see that an apparent affectation of a peculiarly irritating kind was quite unconscious. The truth is, I think, that the Byronic poise suffered from an excess of the qualities both of poises and poses. It was at once too sincere and too effective. Precisely as Byron looked, he felt-alone in a crowd; but then self-consciousness arrived to show him how "sublime" he appeared in this betrayal of his feeling, and thenceforth, though sincerity survived, it was sincerity under the limelight-hardly, like a good actor in a similar plight, to be recognised for the thing it was.

"Nothing", says Moore, "could be more amusing and delightful than the contrast which his manners afterwards when we were alone, presented to his proud reserve in the brilliant circle we had just left. It was like the bursting gaiety of a boy let loose from school, and seemed as if there was no extent of fun or tricks of which he was not capable. Finding him thus invariably lively when we were together, I often rallied him on the gloomy tone of his poetry, as assumed ; but his constant answer was (and I soon ceased to doubt of its truth) that, though thus merry and full of laughter with those he liked, he was, at heart, one of the most melancholy wretches in existence".

"Most of his life", observes Mr. Arthur Symons1 in a penetrating analysis of his mind, "he was a personality looking out for its own formula. . . . Byron was at once the victim and the master of the world. [he] and the world seem to touch at all points, and to maintain a kind of equilibrium by the equality of their strength. Never, in English verse, has a man been seen who was so much a man and so much an

.

1 Arthur Symons, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry. Constable, 1909.

Englishman. It is not man in the elemental sense, so much as the man of the world, whom we find reflected . . . in this poet for whom (like the novelists, and unlike all other poets) society exists as well as human nature".

Beside that profound explanation of him, a shallower one may blush to place itself; but this has its small excuse for existence. There is an everyday side to everything-even to Byron. When he got away with Moore or another intimate, he turned into a merry, happy boy; and the reason for it was that he was a Man's Man. Where women ruled, he was a blighted being-in a meaning different from the usual meaning of that phrase. Everything that was delightful, even (one might go so far as to say) everything that was good in him, emerged for men alone. A woman, perceiving this, becomes aware of a stirring of envy. He would have been so well worth loving "like that"; but like that, no woman, of all those in his life, ever knew him. We are more fortunate nowadays; men show us the man's side sometimes; and hence it is that one often finds the modern woman "in love with Byron's ghost". She is persuaded-and not without justification-that if Byron had lived to-day, he would have liked women better, and that women, liking him better, would more wisely and more happily have loved him. However that may be, it is the "man's side" to which, in this chapter, I wish to draw attention.

His letters are its best exposition. By this time they had become incomparable, in their kind, with any but his own later ones. Vivid, witty-with a sort of unconscious wit that comes of their amazing gustospontaneous, human, they vibrate with the sound of him as his first reckonable verse does, but far more