sympathise. They found it easy to curse and complain, instead of
helping to mend. So had he. They found it pleasant to confound
institutions with the abuses which defaced them. So had he. They
found it pleasant to give way to their spleen. So had he. They
found it pleasant to believe that the poet was to regenerate the
world, without having settled with what he was to regenerate it. So
had he. They found it more pleasant to obey sentiment than inductive
laws. So had he. They found it more pleasant to hurl about enormous
words and startling figures than to examine reverently the awful
depths of beauty which lie in the simplest words and the severest
figures. So had he.

And thus arose a spasmodic, vague, extravagant, effeminate, school of
poetry, which has been too often hastily and unfairly fathered upon
Byron. Doubtless Byron has helped to its formation; but only in as
far as his poems possess, or rather seem to possess, elements in
common with Shelley's. For that conscious struggle against law, by
which law is discovered, may easily enough be confounded with the
utter repudiation of it. Both forms of mind will discuss the same
questions; both will discuss them freely, with a certain plainness
and daring, which may range through all grades, from the bluntness of
Socrates down to reckless immodesty and profaneness. The world will
hardly distinguish between the two; it did not in Socrates' case,
mistaking his reverent irreverence for Atheism, and martyred him
accordingly, as it has since martyred Luther's memory. Probably,
too, if a living struggle is going on in the writer's mind, he will
not have distinguished the two elements in himself; he will be
profane when he fancies himself only arguing for truth; he will be
only arguing for truth, where he seems to the respectable undoubting
to be profane. And in the meanwhile, whether the respectable