which may precede them. Even in the writings of his later days, there is a truth and coarseness in his immorality, which is anything but attractive. But when such a writer as Byron expresses strongly, what he represents as his own emotions and sentiments, there are many who will adopt them, and apply his language to themselves. He has had followers, without doubt, who have affected depravity of which they were not guilty, and have bewailed their sufferings and desolation, with a resolute determination to be miserable. His verses have done something to give a poetic interest to a selfish abandonment of duty to encourage the indulgence of passions, which, in the real intercourse of life, are merely offensive; and to throw a charm over that sickly melancholy, to which the young are exposed, from too sensitive feelings, from indolence and timidity, and from desires at once too earthly and too romantic. But this is not an evil lasting in its nature. A writer like Byron becomes the founder of a new school of artificial sentiment, which has its day; but which, in time, grows as obsolete as the Euphuism of Lilly, or the gallantry of Mademoiselle de Scuderi, or the affected sensibility of Sterne. Nothing is permanent but nature and truth. The fashions of one age are the ridicule of the next. Still there is a pestilential atmosphere about the ruins of such a mind. The great injury likely to result from his writings, consists in the circumstance, that a man of powers so extraordinary, should have enlisted himself without shame in the cause of evil; that he should have presented himself before the world to avow his contempt of decency, his depravity and his impiety; and that doing this, he should have received no harsher repulse from its favour. He has given to the bad the whole countenance of his name. Strongly interesting his fellowmen, through the displays of his genius, and, at the same time, rendering himself justly exposed to reprobation by his vices, he has confused and weakened the moral sentiments of his admirers. The effect appears in some of the highly coloured eulogies, which followed his death. They have served to mark and to aggravate the evil. But the stream of time is already washing away the foundations of that factitious admiration, of which he has been the object. In another age, with other fashions and prejudices, the character of Byron will be estimated as it ought to be. The men |