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LORD BYRON'S Ccompositions do not entitle him to be called the best of our present poets; but his personal character, and the history of his life have clearly rendered him the most interesting and remarkable of the persons who now write poetry. If he is not, as we have said of another, "the author we would most wish to be," he is certainly the living author who is chiefly "the marvel, and the show" of our day and generationleaving the word "boast" out of the quotation, as leading to premature discussion. Whatever general judgment we may pronounce on his qualities as a writer, guiding ourselves by the rules of criticism, there can be no doubt of his standing a towering object in the moral and intellectual

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least, has that which is properly called notoriety been so intimately united with the more noble essence of true fame, as it is in the case of this writer; and, what strikes us as more strange still, he even reconciles those dubious and questionable qualities, which fall under the head of empirical, with the acquirement of sterling renown. The personal interest, we believe, has always been above the poetical in Lord Byron's compositions; and, what is much worse, they appear to have been, in almost every instance, studiously calculated to produce this effect. It is true, the noble author has never distinctly offered us a professed portrait of himself in any of his heroes; but his plan, we think, has been a more objectionable one. While he has introduced, in most of them, features so odious and antisocial, that self-exposure in such a light might be regarded as an unnatural offence, and one more directly insulting to moral feeling than the bare practice of vice, he has boldly and bare-facedly coupled the histories of his bravoes and villains with the incidents of his own life; mingled their feelings with even affectedly open disclosures of his own ;-nay, he has sketched from the most sacred recesses of his own privacy, to the injury of other sensibility than his own, accompaniments to the scenes of debauchery, despair, and violence of which he has chiefly formed his poetical representations. Rousseau's confessions were avowedly of himself: whatever may be their absolute truth, they are most curiously true as an exhibition of character: their minute moral anatomy is as stupendous as the system of the blood-vessels and capillary tubes of the body; and, though indecent and offensive as a piece of self-exposure, they are coupled, all the way through, with so much evidence of actual personal responsibility, that the fancy kept in subordination to the moral judgment of the reader, and the usual rules of social intercourse and human duty are not respited in his mind. Lord Byron's creations, however, are addressed to the poetical sympathies of his readers, while their main interest is derived from awakening a recollection of some fact of the author's life, or a conviction of an

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analogy to the author's own character. A confusion is thus occasioned, in the breast of him whose attention is captivated by the productions in question, unfavourable altogether to right and pure feeling. The impression left on the mind, is neither strictly that of a work of art, to be pronounced upon according to the rules applicable to art,-nor of a matterof-fact, appealing to the principles of sound judgment in such cases;-but what is striking in poetry is made a set-off against what is objectionable in morals, while that which would be condemned as false, theatrical, or inconsistent, according to the laws of poetical criticism, is often rendered the most taking part of the whole composition by its evident connection with real and private circumstances, that are of a nature to tickle the idle, impertinent, and most unpoetical curiosity of the public. This sort of balancing system is not fair:-Lord Byron should either give us Childe Harold, Conrad, &c. as what painters call historical portraits of himself, or he should leave us free to judge of them as we would judge of a statue, or of a picture, or of any strictly poetical personage. As it is, the literary imperfections of the Childe, &c. merge in the personal peculiarities of the author;—and again, where it might be useful to hold the latter to answer personally for certain licences, rendered stimulating and seductive by irregular and unfit allusions, he escapes from this responsibility into the fictitious hero-after perhaps mortally corrupting principle by touching the sensiblity with traits that derive all their force from his own history. The unsoundness of this style of composition, is of a double nature: it depraves the taste as well as taints the purity of the moral feeling.

A personal interest of this nature by no means enters legitimately amongst the qualities that form poetical power and beauty: if the reflection of the author's character must be seen in such compositions as profess to be imaginative, it too should take an imaginative hue, and lie deep and dim in the heart of the strain, going, shadow-like, with all the variations of its current. Lord Lord Byron's egotism, therefore, we

consider to be one of those properties displayed in his works, which we alluded to at the commencement as partaking of an empirical nature. Its effect is to give a prodigious interest to his compositions with the common run of the readers and buyers of books: it forms admirable matter for table-talk-not such as that in the LONDON MAGAZINE, but such as is to be heard about the west-end of the town-to be enabled, on his lordship's own authority, to discuss his lordship's remorse, and misanthropy, and withered feelings, and youthful disappointments, and faded hopes!-Lord Byron's genius should be above supplying matter for such heartless gossip:-if he really have (as we earnestly hope he has not) genuine cause for melancholy reminiscences, approaching to the horror of despair, he should "instruct his sorrows to be proud;" otherwise his own fine verse tells against himself

The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe

Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.

Griefs revolting in their cause, and poisonous and cureless in their effects, ought to be kept as secret as a mortal cancer,-which no one who pines under it ever thinks of displaying to company, to have its gangrenous colours admired, and made a theme for the exclamations of silly wonder. Sufferings calculated to excite deep commiseration and kind pity, when sustained with dignity, and expressed with reserve, are justly regarded as public nuisances when they court display and are obtruded on our senses,-not merely as offensive spectacles, but as dangerous causes of the deformity of others by operating on susceptible dispositions with their diseased and monstrous influence. Besides, there is but too much reason for suspecting, that there is more of trick than calamity in many of these exhibitions: the seemingly infirm object, who painfully limps on crutches before the passengers in the street, calling their attention to his old, but unhealed wounds; his festering sores which he

must carry about with him to his dying day,-is often known to join the merry dance in the evening, with other active cripples, and healthful bed-ridden! In the pauses of the fiddle they count the gains which they owe to their afflictions,—and chirp over their cups on the strength of the supply which their agonies have procured to them.

Is there no ground for suspicion that Lord Byron's grief, and despair, which are for ever at the end of his pen, except when he is writing notes to his poems, and those New Moralities, Beppo and Don Juan, are in a good measure feelings of ceremony. They are certainly excellent prompters of phrase; they supply solemn poetical apparel for public occasions; and invest the person of the author, in the imaginations of the daughters of noblemen, and the wives of tradesmen, with the charm of a melancholy air,--set off by a cap-and-feather look of desperation, and gestures of gentlemanly ferocity. The first play we ever saw, or at least that we recollect seeing, was Lewis's Castle Spectre; and, that the exhibition might lose nothing of its full effect on our minds, it was not at Covent Garden or Drury Lane, but in a town far north of the Tweed. We remember well the impression then made on our fancy by the gentleman who played Osmyn: his complexion was very sallow, his brows were corked to appear large and black, his physiognomy was sad, and shaded by an ostrich-plume. Now, from what we hear young ladies, and younger gentlemen, sometimes say of Lord Byron, we are inclined to think they contemplate him as presenting just such another image of theatrical woe.

Seared in heart, and lone, and blighted More than this, I scarce can die :thus concludes Lord Byron's Farewell, on the occasion of his leaving England, and we have had good reason since to admire the strength of the vivacious principle in his breast. His subsequent productions have seemed to intimate that dying was as far from his own thoughts, as his death is far from the wishes of booksellers, and book-readers, and the admirers of genius, and they who desire to see one of England's most dis

tinguished children restored to her under circumstances in every way satisfactory. But it absolutely makes one angry, in the midst of high-toned strains of energetic feeling, sounding a requiem over departed glory, or a celebration of immortal genius, or a hymn to natural beauty, glowing and enkindling as the rays of morning, to have our touched sympathies interrupted by the stage-trick of a displayed pocket-handkerchief, or the strut of theatrical magnanimity in martyrdom.

Meantime I seek no sympathies, nor need; The thorns which I have reaped are of the

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I planted: they have torn me,—and 1 bleed ;

I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.

Childe Harold, Canto 4. This is weak if sincere, and weak if affected. Indeed, affected it is, whether it be sincere or not. What we chiefly object to, is the mawkishness of such passages: their decency as confessions, and their consistency with self-respect, and the respect of others, in the mouth of a fashionable nobleman of these days, who writes elsewhere of "lobster sallad" and "champaign punch," are matters we leave to his lordship's own reflection. If Lord Byron has ever appeared in Rotten-row on horseback, he seems to us precluded from talking, even in his own poetry, in such a strange ranting sort of way of his sorrows and errors. His station in society, and his manners as an English gentleman, turn the laugh against his sombre heroics. We dare say he has done nothing sufficiently worse than other people, if all were known, to justify, or even render excusable, his rhymed remorse. If we are too severe in saying this, we are sorry for it; but really our own strong suspicion is, however mortifying it might be to his lordship to know it, were he ever likely to see this article, that he has by no means outdone many of us in improprieties;—that, notwithstanding his numerous hints, which have set his admirers on hunting out deeds without names to lay to his door, he is not distinguished by one unpardonable or abominable vice; that, his private history is by no means enriched with crimes of deep dye; and that, were he now to return VOL. III.

to his native land, and sit down as chairman of a bench of justices at the quarter sessions, he might discharge the duties of his office, with an easy conscience, against all offenders. likely to be placed at the bar-with the exception of those very unfor tunate persons, who have to an swer to their parish officers for "loving not wisely, but too well."We repeat, that our regret would be most sincere were we to be con vinced, hereafter, that we had dealt. too hardly by his lordship, in expressing this disbelief: but, though he chooses to tell us that his "springs. of life are poisoned," and that he "must bear what time cannot abate," and that he may justly have incurred a mortal wound" for his ancestral faults, or his own,"-we persist in discrediting that there is any thing in the past necessarily calculated to throw a shadow over the future por tion of his lordship's life. What his ancestors have done amiss we can forgive and forget, when we know what it is: whatever it may be, we can overlook Lord Byron's share of the guilt committed by his fore fathers, were it only in gratitude for the following lines, in which he so exquisitely introduces us to one of his mothers :

Dear Nature is the kindest mother still, Though always changing in her aspect mild;

From her bare bosom let me take my fill, Her never wean'd, though not her favoured child!

Childe Harold, Canto 2.

His own sin-roll, we have no doubt, he over-estimates, as well as the criminal horrors of his ancestors: the fuss he has made about his faults we dare say would turn out their worst feature. It was a foolish and a very wrong thing to write the Farewell; and not a well-judged thing to write the Sketch from pri vate life: but it was also foolish and wrong in the public to raise such an outcry in a matter that would not at all have concerned them, but for these unlucky publications, and which they made much more of than even these publications warranted.

To say the truth, then, we long to see Lord Byron once more amongst us, stripped of all the adventitious, and, we must call them, surreptitious advantages, as an author, which

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