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New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14222, 19 November 1909, Page 6

It is not man in the elemental sense, so much as the man of the'world, whom we find reflected in a magnificent way, in Bryon, for whom (like the novelists, and unlike all other poets) society exists as well as human nature. No man of the world would feel ashamed of himself for writhig poetry like "Don Juan," if he could write it. .-- . . It is the poetry of middle-age (premature with Bryon, "ennuye at nineteen," as he assures us), and it condenses all the .temporary wisdom, old enough to be a little sour, a»d not old enough to have recovered sweetness, of, perhaps, the least profitable period of life. It is sad and cynical with experience, and is at the stage between storm and peace; it doubts everything, as everything must be doubted before it can be understood rightly, and rightly apprehended ; it regrets youth, which lies behind it, and hates the thought of age, which lies before it with a kind of passionate self-pity; it has knowledge rather than wisdom, and is a little mirror of the world, turned away from the sky, so that only earth is visible in it.—Arthur Symohd*. ~,