into a play or a novel such a Wharton | dialogue, and to become soliloquy. The as the Wharton of Pope, or a Lord scenes between Manfred and the ChaHervey answering to Sporus, would mois-hunter, between Manfred and the fail in the same manner. It is hardly too much to say, that Lord Byron could exhibit only one man, and only one woman, a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection: a woman all softness and gentleness, loving to caress and to be caressed, but capable of being transformed by passion into a tigress. Witch of the Alps, between Manfred and the Abbot, are instances of this tendency. Manfred, after a few unimportant speeches, has all the talk to himself. The other interlocutors are nothing more than good listeners. They drop an occasional question or ejaculation which sets Manfred off again on the inexhaustible topic of his personal feelings. If we examine the fine passages in Lord Byron's dramas, the description of Rome, for example, But to return to Lord Byron; his women, like his men, are all of one breed. Haidee is a half-savage and girlish Julia; Julia is a civilised and matronly Haidee. Leila is a wedded Zuleika, Zuleika a virgin Leila. Gulnare and Medora appear to have been intentionally opposed to each other. Yet the difference is a difference of situation only. A slight change of circumstances would, it should seem, have sent Gulnare to the lute of Me-in Manfred, the description of a Venedora, and armed Medora with the tian revel in Marino Faliero, the condagger of Gulnare. cluding invective which the old doge pronounces against Venice, we shall find that there is nothing dramatic in these speeches, that they derive none of their effect from the character or situation of the speaker, and that they would have been as fine, or finer, if they had been published as fragments of blank verse by Lord Byron. There is scarcely a speech in Shakspeare of which the same could be said. No skilful reader of the plays of Shakspeare can endure to see what are called the fine things taken out, under the name of "Beauties," or of "Elegant Extracts," or to hear any single passage, “To be or not to be," for example, quoted as a sample of the great poet. "To be or not to be" has merit undoubtedly as a composition. It would have merit if put into the mouth of a chorus. But its merit as a composition vanishes when compared with its merit as belonging to Hamlet. It is not too much to say that the great plays of Shakspeare would lose less by being deprived of all the passages which are commonly called the fine passages, than those passages lose by being read separately from the play. This is perhaps the highest praise which can be given to a dramatist. Even these two characters, his only two characters, he could not exhibit dramatically. He exhibited them in the manner, not of Shakspeare, but of Clarendon. He analysed them; he made them analyse themselves; but he did not make them show themselves. We are told, for example, in many lines of great force and spirit, that the speech of Lara was bitterly sarcastic, that he talked little of his travels, that if he was much questioned about them, his answers became short, and his brow gloomy. But we have none of Lara's sarcastic speeches or short answers. It is not thus that the great masters of human nature have portrayed human beings. Homer never tells us that Nestor loved to relate long stories about his youth. Shakspeare never tells us that in the mind of Iago everything that is beautiful and endearing was associated with some filthy and debasing idea. It is curious to observe the tendency which the dialogue of Lord Byron always has to lose its character of a On the other hand, it may be doubted whether there is, in all Lord Byron's plays, a single remarkable passage which owes any portion of its interest or effect to its connection with the characters or the action. He has written only one scene, as far as we can recol lect, which is dramatic even in manner, | nent in his poetry. The proverb of the scene between Lucifer and Cain. old Hesiod, that half is often more The conference is animated, and each of than the whole, is eminently applicable the interlocutors has a fair share of it. to description. The policy of the But this scene, when examined, will be Dutch, who cut down most of the prefound to be a confirmation of our re- cious trees in the Spice Islands, in order marks. It is a dialogue only in form. to raise the value of what remained, It is a soliloquy in essence. It is in was a policy which poets would do reality a debate carried on within one well to imitate. It was a policy which single unquiet and sceptical mind. no poet understood better than Lord The questions and the answers, the Byron. Whatever his faults might be, objections and the solutions, all belong he was never, while his mind retained to the same character. its vigour, accused of prolixity. A writer who showed so little dramatic skill in works professedly dramatic was not likely to write narrative with dramatic effect. Nothing could indeed be more rude and careless than the structure of his narrative poems. He seems to have thought, with the hero of the Rehearsal, that the plot was good for nothing but to bring in fine things. His two longest works, Childe Harold and Don Juan, have no plan whatever. Either of them might have been extended to any length, or cut short at any point. The state in which the Giaour appears illustrates the manner in which all Byron's poems were constructed. They are all, like the Giaour, collections of fragments; and, though there may be no empty spaces marked by asterisks, it is still easy to perceive, by the clumsiness of the joining, where the parts for the sake of which the whole was composed end and begin. His descriptions, great as was their intrinsic merit, derived their principal interest from the feeling which always mingled with them. He was himself the beginning, the middle, and the end, of all his own poetry, the hero of every tale, the chief object in every landscape. Harold, Lara, Manfred, and a crowd of other characters, were universally considered merely as loose incognitos of Byron; and there is every reason to believe that he meant them to be so considered. The wonders of the outer world, the Tagus, with the mighty fleets of England riding on its bosom, the towers of Cintra overhanging the shaggy forest of cork-trees and willows, the glaring marble of Pentelicus, the banks of the Rhine, the glaciers of Clarens, the sweet Lake of Leman, the dell of Egeria with its summer-birds and rustling lizards, the shapeless ruins of Rome overgrown with ivy and wall-flowers, the stars, the sea, the mountains, all were mere accessories, the background to one dark and melancholy figure. It was in description and meditation that Byron excelled. Description," as he said in Don Juan, "was his forte." His manner is indeed peculiar, Never had any writer so vast a comand is almost unequalled; rapid, mand of the whole eloquence of scorn, sketchy, full of vigour; the selection misanthropy, and despair. That Mahappy, the strokes few and bold. In rah was never dry. No art could spite of the reverence which we feel sweeten, no draughts could exhaust, its for the genius of Mr. Wordsworth we perennial waters of bitterness. Never cannot but think that the minuteness was there such variety in monotony as of his descriptions often diminishes that of Byron. From maniac laughter their effect. He has accustomed him-to piercing lamentation, there was not self to gaze on nature with the eye of a single note of human anguish of a lover, to dwell on every feature, and which he was not master. Year after to mark every change of aspect. Those year, and month after month, he conbeauties which strike the most negli- tinued to repeat that to be wretched is gent observer, and those which only a the destiny of all; that to be eminently close attention discovers, are equally wretched is the destiny of the eminent; familiar to him and are equally promi-that all the desires by which we are M 2 feigned. He was naturally a man of great sensibility; he had been ill educated; his feelings had been early exposed to sharp trials; he had been crossed in his boyish love; he had been mortified by the failure of his first literary efforts; he was straitened in pecuniary circumstances; he was unfortunate in his domestic relations; the public treated him with cruel injustice; his health and spirits suffered from his dissipated habits of life; he was, on the whole, an unhappy man. He early discovered that, by parading his unhap cursed lead alike to misery, if they are not We are far, however, from thinkgratified, to the misery of disappointing that his sadness was altogether ment, if they are gratified, to the misery of satiety. His heroes are men who have arrived by different roads at the same goal of despair, who are sick of life, who are at war with society, who are supported in their anguish only by an unconquerable pride resembling that of Prometheus on the rock or of Satan in the burning marl, who can master their agonies by the force of their will, and who to the last defy the whole power of earth and heaven. He always described himself as a man of the same kind with his favourite creations, as a man whose heart had been withered,piness before the multitude, he produced whose capacity for happiness was gone and could not be restored, but whose invincible spirit dared the worst that could befall him here or hereafter. How much of this morbid feeling sprang from an original disease of the nind, how much from real misfortune, how much from the nervousness of dissipation, how much was fanciful, how much was merely affected, it is impossible for us, and would probably have been impossible for the most intimate friends of Lord Byron, to decide. Whether there ever existed, or can ever exist, a person answering to the description which he gave of himself may be doubted; but that he was not such a person is beyond all doubt. It is ridiculous to imagine that a man whose mind was really imbued with scorn of his fellow-creatures would have published three or four books every year in order to tell them so; or that a man who could say with truth that he neither sought sympathy nor needed it would have admitted all Europe to hear his farewell to his wife, and his blessings on his child. In the second canto of Childe Harold, he tells us that he is insensible to fame and obloquy : "Ill may such contest now the spirit move, Which heeds nor keen reproof nor partial praise." Yet we know on the best evidence that, a day or two before he published these lines, he was greatly, indeed childishly, elated by the compliments paid to his maiden speech in the House of Lords. an immense sensation. The world gave him every encouragement to talk about his mental sufferings. The interest which his first confessions excited induced him to affect much that he did not feel; and the affectation probably reacted on his feelings. How far the character in which he exhibited himself was genuine, and how far theatrical, it would probably have puzzled himself to say. There can be no doubt that this remarkable man owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry. We never could very clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing; or how it is that men who affect in their compositions qualities and feelings which they have not, impose so much more easily on their contemporaries than on posterity. The interest which the loves of Petrarch excited in his own time, and the pitying fondness with which half Europe looked upon Rousseau, are well known. To readers of our age, the love of Petrarch seems to have been love of that kind which breaks no hearts, and the sufferings of Rousseau to have deserved laughter rather than pity, to have been partly counterfeited, and partly the consequences of his own perverseness and vanity. What our grandchildren may think of the character of Lord Byron, as exhibited in his poetry, we will not pre thropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbour, and to love your neighbour's wife. tend to guess. It is certain, that the interest which he excited during his life is without a parallel in literary history. The feeling with which young readers of poetry regarded him can be This affectation has passed away; conceived only by those who have ex- and a few more years will destroy perienced it. To people who are un- whatever yet remains of that magical acquainted with real calamity, "nothing potency which once belonged to the is so dainty sweet as lovely melan- name of Byron. To us he is still a choly." This faint image of sorrow man, young, noble, and unhappy. To has in all ages been considered by our children he will be merely a young gentlemen as an agreeable ex-writer; and their impartial judgment citement. Old gentlemen and mid- will appoint his place among writers; dle-aged gentlemen have so many without regard to his rank or to his real causes of sadness that they are private history. That his poetry will rarely inclined to be as sad as night undergo a severe sifting, that much only for wantonness." Indeed they of what has been admired by his conwant the power almost as much as the temporaries will be rejected as worthinclination. We know very few persons less, we have little doubt. But we engaged in active life who, even if they have as little doubt that, after the were to procure stools to be melancholy closest scrutiny, there will still remain upon, and were to sit down with all much that can only perish with the the premeditation of Master Stephen, English language. would be able to enjoy much of what somebody calls the "ecstasy of woe." SAMUEL JOHNSON. (SEPTEMBER, 1831.) The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. In- Among that large class of young persons whose reading is almost entirely confined to works of imagination, the popularity of Lord Byron was unbounded. They bought pictures of him; they treasured up the smallest relics of him; they learned his poems by heart, and did their best to write like him, and to look like him. Many of them practised at the glass in the hope of catching the curl of the upper lip, and the scowl THIS work has greatly disappointed of the brow, which appear in some of his us. Whatever faults we may have portraits. A few discarded their neck-been prepared to find in it, we fully cloths in imitation of their great leader. expected that it would be a valuable For some years the Minerva press addition to English literature; that it sent forth no novel without a myste- would contain many curious facts, and rious, unhappy, Lara-like peer. The many judicious remarks that the number of hopeful under-graduates and style of the notes would be neat, clear, medical students who became things and precise; and that the typograof dark imaginings, on whom the fresh-phical execution would be, as in new ness of the heart ceased to fall like dew, editions of classical works it ought to whose passions had consumed them- be, almost faultless. We are sorry to selves to dust, and to whom the relief be obliged to say that the merits of of tears was denied, passes all calcula- Mr. Croker's performance are on a par tion. This was not the worst. There with those of a certain leg of mutton was created in the minds of many of on which Dr. Johnson dined, while these enthusiasts a pernicious and ab- travelling from London to Oxford, and surd association between intellectual which he, with characteristic energy, power and moral depravity. From the pronounced to be "as bad as bad poetry of Lord Byron they drew a could be, ill fed, ill killed, ill kept, and system of ethics, compounded of misan-ill dressed." This edition is ill com piled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed. of Marmion. Every school-girl knows the lines: "Scarce had lamented Forbes paid The tribute to his Minstrel's shade; Nothing in the work has astonished us so much as the ignorance or carelessness of Mr. Croker with respect to facts and dates. Many of his blunders are such as we should be surprised to hear any well educated gentleman commit, even in conversation. The In one place, we are told, that Allan notes absolutely swarm with misstate-Ramsay, the painter, was born in 1709, ments, into which the editor never and died in 1784*; in another, that would have fallen, if he had taken the he died in 1784, in the seventy-first slightest pains to investigate the truth year of his age. † of his assertions, or if he had even been well acquainted with the book on which he undertook to comment. We will give a few instances. In one place, Mr. Croker says, that at the commencement of the intimacy between Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, in 1765, the lady was twenty-five years Mr. Croker tells us in a note that old. In other places he says, that Derrick, who was master of the cere- Mrs. Thrale's thirty-fifth year coinmonies at Bath, died very poor in cided with Johnson's seventieth. § 1760. * We read on; and, a few Johnson was born in 1709. If, therepages later, we find Dr. Johnson and fore, Mrs. Thrale's thirty-fifth year Boswell talking of this same Derrick coincided with Johnson's seventieth, as still living and reigning, as having retrieved his character, as possessing so much power over his subjects at Bath, that his opposition might be fatal to Sheridan's lectures on oratory. † And all this is in 1763. The fact is, that Derrick died in 1769. she could have been only twenty-one years old in 1765. This is not all. Mr. Croker, in another place, assigns the year 1777 as the date of the complimentary lines which Johnson made on Mrs. Thrale's thirty-fifth birth-day. || If this date be correct, Mrs. Thrale In one note we read, that Sir Her-must have been born in 1742, and could bert Croft, the author of that pompous have been only twenty-three when and foolish account of Young, which her acquaintance with Johnson comappears among the Lives of the Poets, died in 1805. Another note in the same volume states, that this same Sir Herbert Croft died at Paris, after residing abroad for fifteen years, on the 27th of April, 1816. § five years old when Johnson was seventy, appear to us utterly frivolous. menced. Mr. Croker therefore gives us three different statements as to her age. Two of the three must be incorrect. We will not decide between them; we will only say, that the reasons which Mr. Croker gives for thinkMr. Croker informs us, that Siring that Mrs. Thrale was exactly thirtyWilliam Forbes of Pitsligo, the author of the Life of Beattie, died in 1816. || A Sir William Forbes undoubtedly died in that year, but not the Sir William Forbes in question, whose death took place in 1806. It is notorious, indeed, that the biographer of Beattie lived just long enough to complete the history of his friend. Eight or nine years before the date which Mr. Croker has assigned for Sir William's death, Sir Walter Scott lamented that event in the introduction to the fourth canto Again, Mr. Croker informs his readers that "Lord Mansfield survived Johnson full ten years." Lord Mansfield survived Dr. Johnson just eight years and a quarter. Johnson found in the library of a French lady, whom he visited during his short visit to Paris, some works which he regarded with great disdain. "I looked," says he, "into the books in the lady's closet, and, in contempt, showed them to Mr. Thrale. Prince + V.281. || III. 463. • IV. 105. + I. 510. TII. 151. |