ABSTRACT
Byron, Childe Harold, I-II (1812); review by George Ellis, Quarterly Review, VII (March 1812), 180-200. Ellis (1753–1815), a political figure and gentleman-poet of the late eighteenth-century school (and, like Byron, an alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a member of the Alfred Club), was one of the principal founders of the Quarterly and a mainstay of the review until his death. Notice the genteel reverence for social decorum in Ellis’ remark that “the common courtesy of society has . . . very justly proscribed the intrusive introduction of such topics [religious beliefs] into conversation” (p. 198). The urbane tone of good breeding represented in this review was forsaken by those born later who grew up in the ideological storms generated by the French Revolution. These younger men, more vitally involved in religious and political conflicts, were not content either in their poetry or their criticism to treat as lapses of taste what might be considered moral perversions or to say with Ellis: “These joys of a triumph, it may be said, are mere illusions; but for the sake of such illusions is life chiefly worth having” (p. 195).
