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Excerpt from A Hero of Nowadays
Now that the Victorian Age is rapidly getting out of sight round a corner of the road, and that Byron's greatness may be expected to regain at home the recognition which he has never lacked abroad, this may, perhaps, serve as a first claim to engage the British reader's interest. Then there are some fanciers to whom a poet's prose is always a delicacy, like a colourist's occasional exercises in black and white. Add to these, as a third, a nationalist consideration, that Lermontov, as his name betrays, was partly of Scottish origin. Fate would have it that within a few hours of his end he should be dancing at a Scottish party in Piatigorsk. I dare say some will recognize a Scottish type of face in the drawing of him which was made the day after his death. Be this fanciful or no (let physiognomists and ethnologists settle it), the Scottish strain in his genius is unmistakable. He is a signal instance of the fine-edged self-consciousness which commonly marks the literary Scot - the quality which is seen in various degrees in Carlyle and Stevenson, and the lamented author of "The House with the Green Shutters" (to say nothing of lesser modern lights), and which Byron himself so conspicuously inherited from his Scottish mother.
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