INTRODUCTION,

ERHAPS there is nothing the public enjoys so thoroughly as getting behind the scenes. Το sit on the front benches and admire the net result of genius is tame work as compared with the exciting sensation of penetrating into the green-room, and seeing with your own eyes how commonplace after all are the materials by which the most striking effects have been obtained. And this craving to get behind the work at the man who made it, to pry into the most hidden recesses of his life and character, to analyse his motives, to dissect his emotions, and condemn him to a kind of moral vivisection, seems ever on the increase. This appetite, which savours of the morbid, may, however, be due to healthier causes; partly to the influence of the scientific method on all modern thought, and partly to the levelling tendency of democracy in literature-a tendency which must be considered of dubious value till democracy itself shall be educated by the best thought of the best minds of all ages.

Be that as it may, no books now meet with more popular favour than the lives and letters of eminent men and women. Of these there is therefore an inexhaustible supply, and the satisfaction which arises from this sort of reading, although it frequently ministers to mere vulgar curiosity and love of scandal, may, on the other hand, foster a more comprehensive sympathy by initiating the reader into the struggles and privations more or less the portion of all who do something towards increasing the intellectual or moral wealth of the world.

As the letters of great men are not, as a rule, intentionally written for publication, they are among the most valuable sources whence an authentic knowledge of their life and its surroundings may be derived. This is eminently so in the case of Lord Byron, whose correspondence is a faithful reflex of his singularly varied, brilliant, and dramatic career. Born on the 22nd of January 1788, George Gordon Byron, the inheritor of an old historic name, had the good fortune, as a letter-writer, of coming to maturity at a period precisely the most favourable to a fine epistolary style. Letters had never played so important a part in literature as in the century or two preceding his own times; so much was this the case, that the most memorable novels of the eighteenth century, Clarissa Harlowe, La Nouvelle Heloise, and Werther, had been cast in that favourite mould; while some of the most exquisite literary workmanship is to be found in the Letters of Madame de Sevigné, of Pope, of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, etc., etc. But it was inevitable that, from having been cultivated too much as a fine art, there should be a corresponding loss of spontaneity and freshness of expression. Now, in comparing Byron's epistolary style with that of his literary predecessors on the one hand, and of his successors on the other, he seems to us to hit a happy medium between the choice diction and jewel-like periods of the Queen Anne period, and the easy, dressing-gown and slipper style which has come into fashion with the penny post. Byron's letters are always unmistakably letters, never prose poems or finished essays with a superscription, and of them he might no doubt have said, more truly than he did of Don Juan, "I rattle on exactly as I'd talk

With anybody in a ride or walk."

The prose style of Byron is invariably clear, terse, and racy ; it is swift and limpid in its flow, like a full river that rolls undeviatingly to its goal, never lured aside into those exquisite little nooks and corners where flower the forget-me-nots of fancy. His is the pungent phrase, the perspicuous narrative, the piercing sarcasm; in his descriptions he seizes salient points, broad and typical effects, massing them together