Selections from the poetry of Lord Byron Author:George Gordon Byron Byron Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 1878. Castelar's Life of Byron is mainly a rhapsody and of little worth. For periodical literature on Byron, see Poole's Index and continuations. For criti... more »cism of Byron, by far the most just, adequate, and authoritative estimate is to be . found in Matthew Arnold's essay (published as introduction to his '' Selections from Byron ''; also in his "Essays in Criticism," zd series); see also Matthew Arnold's " Memorial Verses," 11. 6-14. Excellent also is the shorter study by J. A. Symonds, prefixed to the selections from Byron in Ward's "English Poets," Vol. IV. Perhaps third in value should be named the admirable summary of Byron's present position by Paul E. More in "The Atlantic Monthly " for December, 1898. The several criticisms upon Byron by A. C. Swinburne are curiously contradictory and unequal. They contain some of the best things that have been written about Byron, with some of the worst. The critic attacks Arnold's judgment and violently denies Byron all purely poetic power. See his "Essays and Studies," 214-216, 238-258, 304-307; and his "Miscellanies," 63-156. The poet's historical position is judiciously weighed in John Morley's essay on Byron (in his " Miscellanies," I, 203-251). Slighter, but of charming quality, are the essay on Byron in W. E. Henley's "Views and Reviews," 56-62, and (in verse) in Andrew Lang's '' Letters to Dead Authors.'' Macaulay's essay, brilliant but borne, must still be read; as also should the utterances on Byron of distinguished critics and poets of an earlier day, likeWilliam Hazlitt, Jeffrey, Goethe, Mazzini (eloquent yet admirable: see his Essays, in the Camelot Series, London, 1887, pp. 83-108), Scott, Shelley, Ste.-Beuve, Tennyson ("Memoirs"), Ruskin (" Prgeterita"), Lamartine, Washington Irving, and others. A valuable contem...« less