ABSTRACT
Algernon Charles Swinburne's essay, 'William Wordsworth and Lord Byron', expressing his dissent from Matthew Arnold's estimate of these two poets, appeared in the Nineteenth Century for April and May 1884. Byron is as fit to be considered the rival of E. H. Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley as Offenbach to be considered a competitor with Handel and Beethoven. The enthusiasm of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on the one hand and Giuseppe Mazzini on the other should be ample and final witness to the forcible and genuine impression made by the best work of Byron upon some of the highest minds in Europe. A poet with any real insight into the depth of either comic or tragic nature could have desired no finer occasion for the display of his gift, though assuredly he could have chosen none more difficult and dangerous, than a subject as is presented by history in the figure of Catherine the Great.
