at a time when, in the words of George Augustus Scala, the public had to
choose between "the clever (but I cannot say moral) Mr. Swinburne, and
the moral (but I cannot say clever) Mr. Tupper?" [Footnote: See E.
Gosse, _Life of Swinburne,_ p. 162.] What is one to say of a period
wherein the figure of Byron, with his bravado and contempt for accepted
morality, towers above most of his contemporaries?

Whatever its justification, the excuse for the poets flaunting an
addiction to immorality lies in the obnoxiousness of the philistine
element among their enemies. When mass feeling, mass-morality, becomes
too oppressive, poets are wont to escape from its trammelling
conventions at any cost. Rather than consent to lay their emotions under
the rubber-stamp of expediency, they are likely to aver, with the
sophists of old, that morality is for slaves, whereas the rulers among
men, the poets, recognize no law but natural law.

Swinburne affords an excellent example of this type of reaction. Looking
back tolerantly upon his early prayers to the pagan ideal to

Come down and redeem us from virtue,

upon his youthful zest in leaving

The lilies and languors of virtue
For the roses and raptures of vice,

he tried to dissect his motives. "I had," he said, "a touch of Byronic
ambition to be thought an eminent and terrible enemy to the decorous
life and respectable fashion of the world, and, as in Byron's case,
there was mingled with a sincere scorn and horror of hypocrisy a boyish