dividual, or an outré fabrication. Those who think they can discover the original, will acknowledge him for a very good copy; others will set him down for an egregious fop, more top full of affected sensibility, and pitiful inconsistencies than any being they ever met in this breathing world. Our opinion of him is pretty well expressed in the following passage of the soi-disant editor; which in spite of its acrimony, we confess, has not the effect of silencing the suspicions we ventured to hint as to the real history of the volume.

"La grande question dans la vie, c'est la douleur que l'on cause, et la métaphysique la plus ingénieuse ne justifié pas l'homme qui à dechiré le cœur que l'aimait. Je hais d'ailleurs cette fatuité d'un esprit qui croit excuser ce qu'il explique. Je hais cette vanité qui s'occupe d'elle-même en racontant la mal qu'elle à fait qui à la pretention de se faire plaindre en se décrivant et qui planant indéstructible au milieu des ruines s'analyse au lieu de se repentir. Je hais cette faiblesse qui s'en prend toujours aux autres de sa propre impuissance et qui ne voit pas que le mal n'est point dans ses alentours mais qu'il est en elle." P. 227.

A very simple man avoids the most distant allusion to the besetting sin of which he is conscious, just as a young thief runs away from the bill which offers a reward for his apprehension; a very subtle one selects that frailty to decry most loudly and zealously; just as an experienced rogue places himself opposite a description of his person, to avoid the possibility of suspicion. Which of these characters best fits M. Constant, our readers will decide, and judge of the above passage accordingly.

ART. V. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto III. By' Lord Byron. 8vo. pp. 80. 53. Od. Murray. 1816. ART. VI. Prisoner of Chillon, and other Poems. By Lord Byron. 8vo. pp. 60. 5s. 6d. Murray. 1816.

WE had cherished a hope, that of Lord Byron and of his muse, we should have heard no more, till time, at least, and meditation should have enlarged the soul of the poet, and mellowed the powers of his song. But a very few months since his Lordship and the public parted in no very pleasant mood; he called them forth not as arbitrators, but as parties in his domestic feuds; they obeyed the summons, but the cause which they espoused was not that of his Lordship; they gave their sentence with justice and enforced it with spirit; and from that decision, after a vain, and,

in our opinion, a paltry appeal to their worst passions, he fled. We little thought that his Lordship would again have wooed so disdainful a mistress, especially when that mistress had begun to shew some signs of lassitude on the endless repetition of the same tedious and disgusting strain. And yet his Lordship in

forms us

"I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bow'd
To its idolatries a patient knee-

Nor coined my cheek to smiles-nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo."

This is all vastly indignant and vastly grand, yet we have now two witnesses before us who speak a very different language, and we find ten more in Mr. Murray's catalogue, who tell the same tale. The man who sends out into the world a single poem, the labour perhaps of years, may affect, with some pretence of probability, to scorn the voice of public censure or approbation, but he who, at intervals of only a few months, shall continue to court the expectations of the world with the successive fruits of his poetic talent, not only exists a pensioner upon public fame, but lives even from hand to mouth upon popular applause. Every poem which he publishes is a living witness that he bows to the idolatry of the world a patient knee, and that he worships the very echo which he professes to scorn.

The first publication of the noble Lord which claims our attention is the third part of Childe Harold. As the first and second parts of this poem appeared before we commenced our critical labours, we shall pass no opinion upon their merits, except that they were too generally over-rated by the fashion of the day, The poem before us is much more likely to find its level. The noble Lord has made such draughts upon public partiality, that little is now left him but the dregs of a cup which he once foudly thought to be inexhaustible. The hero of the poem is, as usual, himself for he has now so unequivocally identified himself with his fictitious hero, that even in his most querulous moods, he cannot complain of our impertinence in tracing the resemblance. We really wish that the noble Lord would suppose that there was some other being in the world besides himself, and employ his imagination in tracing the lineament of some other character than his own. One would have imagined that in twelve several and successive efforts of his muse, something a little newer than this same inexhaustible self might have been invented. Wherever we turn, the same portrait meets our eye. We see it now glaring in oils, now sobered in fresco, now dim in transparency. Sometimes it frowns in the turban of the Turk, sometimes it struts in the buskins and

cloak

cloak of the Spaniard, and sometimes it descends to fret in its native costume; but frown, strut or fret where it will, the face is still but one, and the features are still the same. “ Mungo here, Mungo there, Mungo every where." We are ever ready to listen with all due patience to a long story, provided it be not too often repeated, but there is really a limit beyond which bumau patience ceases to be a virtue. We must come at last to the question, What is Lord Byron to us, and what have we to do either with his sublimity or his sulks? It is his poetical not his personal character which is the subject of our criticism, and when the latter is so needlessly and so unsparingly obtruded upon our attention, it betrays at once poverty of invention and lack of discretion. The noble Lord is ever informing us how vastly superior both he and his genius are to the common herd of mankind; that he is a being of another and a higher order, whose scowl is sublimity, and whose frown is majesty. We have the roble Lord's word for this and for a great deal more, and if he would have been content with telling us so not more than half a dozen times, to please him, we would have believed it. But he has pressed us so unmercifully, that we now begin to call for proof, and all the proof we can find is in his own assertion. The noble Lord has written a few very fine, and a few very pretty verses, which may be selected from a heap of crude, harsh, unpoetical strains; farther than this we neither know nor wish to know of his Lordship's fame. His Lordship's style, by a fortunate hit, caught the favourable moment in the ton of the public taste; his gall was mistaken for spirit, b.s affectation for feeling, and his harshness for originality. The world are now growing tired of their luminary, and wait only for the rise of some new meteor, to transfer their admiration and applause. The noble Lord had talents, which if they had been duly husbanded, might have ensured him a more permanent place in their estimation. His Lordship never could have been a Milton, a Dryden, a Pope, or a Gray, but he might have been a star of the third or fourth magnitude, whose beams would have shone even upon posterity with no contemptible lustre. As the matter stands, he will now be too late convinced that he whose theme is only self, will find at last that self his only audience.

The first sixteen stanzas of the Poem before us, are dedicated to this one everlasting theme, and contain, like a repetition pye, nothing more than the scraps of his former strains, seasoned rather with the garlic of misanthrophy than the salt of wit. "Selfexiled Harold" reaches the plain of Waterloo, but with a step not more auspicious than that of preceding poets, who have trod that bloody plain. We know not what strange fatality attends a theme so sacred, so sublime; whether it be that the grandeur of

reality

reality overpowers the faint gleam of fiction, or that there are deeds too mighty to be sung by living bards, the plains of Waterloo will live in the records of history not in the strains of poetry. The description of the dance preceding the morning of the battle is well imagined, and excepting the fourth flat and rugged line, is happily expressed,

XXI.

"There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium's capital had gathered then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright

The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men ;
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

Music arose with its voluptuous swell,

Soft eyes look'd love to eyes which spake again,

And all went merry as a marriage bell;

But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell !

XXII.

"Did ye not hear it ?-No; 'twas but the wind,
Or the car rattling o'er the stony street;
On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when youth and pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet-
But, hark!-that heavy sound breaks in once more,
As if the clouds its echo would repeat;

And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before!

Arm! Arm! it is—it is—the cannon's opening roar!" P. 13.

The noble Lord, as may easily be imagined, is very indignant that order, peace, and legitimate sovereignty should have been restored to Europe. The reflections which succeed partake as little of patriotism as of poetry; let us take the following stanza for an example.

XXXVI.

"There sunk the greatest, nor the worst of men,
Whose spirit antithetically mixt

One moment of the mightiest, and again

On little objects with like firmness fixt,

Extreme in all things! hadst thou been betwixt,
Thy throne had still been thine, or never been;
For daring made thy rise as fall: thou seek'st
Even now to re-assume the imperial mien,

And shake agam the world, the thunderer of the scene!" P. 21.

If this be philosophy, it is uninteliigible; if it be sentiment, it is unbearable; if it be poetry, it is unreadable. When we come to "spirits antithetically mixed, our only idea is that of a" Cordial compound." The whole of the address to Buona

parte

parte is at once crude and common place. In one stanza the noble Lord has clearly been a plagiarist from W. Scott.

f

LI.

"A thousand battles have assail'd thy banks,
But these and half their fame have pass'd away,
And Slaughter heap'd on high his weltering ranks;
Their very graves are gone, and what are they?
Thy tide wash'd down the blood of yesterday,
And all was stainless, and on thy clear stream
Glass'd with its dancing light the sunny ray;
But o'er the blackened memory's blighting dream

Thy waves would vainly roll, all sweeping as they seem. P. 28. Our readers will readily call to mind the following beautiful. lines in the Lay of the Last Minstrel.

"Sweet Teviot, on thy silver tide
The glaring bale fires blaze no more,
No longer steel clad warriors ride
Along thy wild and willowed shore.
As if thy waves since time was born,
Since first they roll'd their way to Tweed,
Had only heard the shepherd's reed,
Nor started at the bugle horn.
Unlike the tide of human time

Which though it change in ceaseless flow,
Retains each grief, retains each crime,
Its earliest course was doom'd to know;
And darker as it downward bears

Is stained with past and present tears."

Here we have precisely the same idea, but far better expressed; we scarcely know six better lines than those which close the simile. But when we read of "waves rolling o'er the blighted dream of a blackewed memory," we are lost in the mazes of metaphorical confusion.

The noble Lord cannot find it in his heart to pay the tribute even of a passing line to the heroic commander, who stands confessed, even by his very foes, the sword of Britain, and the shield of Europe. The poetry of Byron stands in far greater need of the name of Wellington, than the name of Wellington does of the poetry of Byron.

From Waterloo the noble Lord travels by Coblentz down the Rhine to Switzerland. The magnificent scenery which the banks of that river present is but tamely and ruggedly drawn: he is attended with better success when he enters the territories of the Swiss. The following description of a night sail on the Lake of Lausanne is perhaps the most brilliant passage in the poem.

"Clear,