Excerpt from Life of Lord Byron: And Other Sketches

He chose a great and honourable work, and laboured to bring it to perfection. - thales or miletus.

HE coincidences of life are so curious, that the work of combined calculation will assimilate better than the product of improvised circumstances. Castelar, whose meridional imagination is one of the most exalted of this century, under the melan choly influence of the heavy atmosphere which hangs over the Saxon city, turned his thoughts to Lord Byron - a genuine descendant of that race; and having confided some of these reflections to a native of New Castile, eighteen hundred leagues from his own country, under the ardent rays of the sun; which bathes in its light the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics, the writer of these lines sent across distant seas a greeting of affectionate admiration to the author of those brilliant pages, which are worthy of being immortalized in gold and marble.

He does not, however, think himself entitled on this account to write a prologue to the work of the most daring and brilliant literary colourist of our times - like the announcement of a shopkeeper painted on the drop-scene of a theatre. Nor does he fall into the folly of wishing to unite an obscure name without any literary pretension to that of the universally-celebrated Republican author - an orator unparalleled in this age for eloquence and poetic power; for feigned modesty is more offensive than ostentatious arrogance. Obscurity has its honours in a prudent silence, and in the precise and just estimation of things at their proper value.

But from all places, and in all times and' circum stances, one friend may salute another, and send him in his salutation a share of his joy or of his sorrow; thus helping him to withstand the moral changes of his feelings or his ideas, often as fatal as the currents of winds and of rivers, and of all that is agitated in this manifold and living nature, in which the great and the little are mingled, and complete that marvel lous conjunction which we call harmony.

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