Sever 11 was well filled last night when Mr. Charlton Black delivered his lecture on Byron.

Europe received the news of Byron's death in 1824 with consternation. Carlyle and Lord Tennyson felt his death very keenly.

In judging Byron it is impossible to separate his personal from his literary character. And yet a critic's view is very different from that of a moralist. Byron's power was in his personality. He was born into an evil inheritance. His father was Mad Jack of the Guards. His mother, a lioness of a woman, was deserted by her husband, and left with her "lame brat." She was the worst kind of woman to bring up such a child. He succeeded his father as Lord Byron in his eleventh year. In 1803 he met the Mary of his poems, whose marriage with another later saddened his life but inspired his genius.

His first work, while at Trinity College, Cambridge, was so severely criticized by Lord Brougham in the Edinburgh Review that he was stung into power. His Satire published the next year brought him recognition.

He then traveled abroad and wrote his first two Cantos of Childe Harold. He found himself famous. He now became the darling of fashion. His affectation and cynicism were intensified. He married a Miss Millbank. The disunion which followed caused such indignation that he was driven from England.

Then came Manfred, Tasso and several songs inspired by friendship for Shelley and his exile. In Venice were written Don Juan; then his dramas, none of them masterpieces, and the Vision of Justice, which caused great consternation. Don Juan is a picture of the world as Byron saw it; he had drunk the cup of pleasure and had found all vanitus vanitatum.

When the crisis came he met it gloriously. In 1823 he sailed for Greece, in three months restored order and died of the fever, far beyond the blame of Britain or the praise of Greece.

His passionate sympathy with his own time won the Continent to him, while his artistic defects turned England aside. Examined critically Byron's verse is full of flaws, but has above all other verse of this century the force lent by passion. He was a passionate foe of cant.