is not surprising that the lash of correc

This early and signal discomfiture of

tion deservedly applied to the one, the Goliaths of literature, though achievshould, sometimes, inflict an unmerited ed by a stripling, with little more than stripe on the other. It is not, however, a pebble, was enough to deter less probably, the first instance in which his doughty champions from hazarding a lordship has suffered from an impru- conflict. Nor was the effect of this dent connexion.

exploit merely to avert the danger of We have said that his lordship had attack. Whilst the few who had felt long enjoyed an exemption from the his force, or feared his vigour, were Scourge of criticism; but it was not al- awed at least into respectful silence, the ways so; nor was the lenity of the many who rejoiced in the defeat of the critics owing to the humility with vanquished, conspired to extol the which he, at any time, kissed the rod. prowess of the victor:-and, unfortuThe Edinburgh Reviewers frowned nately, bis lordship was weak enough to terribly at the peccadillos of his lord- measure his desert by the scale of their ship's lisping muse. The venial pue- gratitude. rilities of some juvenile performances, which that eagerness for notoriety that has been the bane of his life, impelled him to print, drew down upon him, from those obdurate censors, a denunciation that might have daunted a veteran. So far, however, from inspiring his lordship with diffidence in his powers, or operating to dissuade him from his favourite pursuits, this severity of reprehension, whilst it inflamed his ire, suggested a means of appeasing his His retort in the satire of the

เ

wrath.

The noble author did not repose long upon his laurels. He soon made a bold experiment upon the strength of his reputation; which unhappily bore him out. in it. He was able, and his very temerity and extravagance were accessary to his success, to bring into vogue a new style of poetry, compared with which every thing that had preceded it was tame. He placed himself at the head of a new school; and the Stagirite never had more disciples. The votaries of the system, of which Lord Byron was English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,' the propagator, have ravaged every reafforded him, at once, the gratification of revenge and the eclat of triumph, Its influence was not confined to producing a change in public sentiment; but strange as it may seem, it wrought a prodigious revolution in the minds of his adversaries. However it may be accounted for, certain it is, that they. suddenly relaxed the austerity of their features, and have, ever since, continued to smile on his lordship with the most condescending complacency.

gion of fancy, and have erected the
high places of their monstrous idolatry
in groves sacred to the musès.
Is there a parson much bemused in beer,
A maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer,

A clerk foredoom'd his father's soul to cross,

Who pens a stanza when he should engross?
Is there who lock'd from ink and paper scrawls,
With desperate charcoal,round hisdarken'd walls.

All, all are imitators of Byron. But one may mimic the contortions of the Sybil,' without catching her inspiration.' Such is the fate of most of the herd

་

ness."

On the whole, his lordship's productions leave an impression on the mind, (which we cannot but suspect that they were designed to create,) that the author is capable of more than he has performed. It would seem as if one who could do so well, might do better.-We sincerely hope he may.

of Byron's followers. In his lordship's lordship seems to think it is as much wildest incoherence, there is something beneath him to attend to the melody of of poetic frenzy; and there are inter- his numbers, as it would be below a vals in his raving:-even his absurdi- great general to step to the air of a ties are rarely ridiculous, and there march. He sacrifices on all occasions, is sometimes, method in his mad- without hesitation, both rhyme and rythm to piquancy of phrase. He is But his lordship has entirely lost sight teazing us constantly, too, with hints of the true end of poetry. He has and innuendos at ideas which he cannot stripped her of her dignity. He has define, simply because he does not comdivorced her from reason, and prosti- prehend them. Mystery is a source of tuted her to passion. It used to be the sublime, but not a convertible term considered the province of poetry to for sublimity. inculcate useful truths by pleasing fictions; to instil moral lessons by impressive illustrations; to assign, with 'poetic justice,' to virtue its reward, and to vice its punishment; to excite horror at crime, and sympathy for suffering; in short, to refine the manners, to raise the genius, and to mend the heart.' Not one of these objects has his lordship ever His lordship is not destitute of amproposed to himself. He has selected bition; but it is not of the right sort. traitors, seducers, pirates, robbers, mur- He has an inordinate appetite for popuderers, and atheists, as the heroes of larity; but is satisfied with the coarsest bis plots, and has held them up, if not kind of it. As long as he can procure to the approbation, at least to the com- his daily bread of praise, in return for miseration of his readers. He has, by his fragments of epic and fritters of an incongruous assemblage of inconsist- song, we have no hope of his addicting ent qualities in the creatures of his himself to more worthy exertions. The imagination, and by throwing into his only chance is, that his readers will pictures an artful and deceptive mix- at last be surfeited with his trash. ture of light and shade, endeavoured As they become fastidious, he will proto dazzle our sight and mislead our bably mend; but whilst he can get even judgment. He has laboured to enlist crumbs of encomium in exchange for our best feelings on the worst side, and to the crudities with which he crowds the entice us to applaud the expression of market, there is no prospect of imsentiments which it would be impious provement in the manufacture of his materials. His 'Third Canto of Childe But laying aside the moral of his fa- Harold,' with its giblets and garnishes, bles, we have objections of no trivial forcibly reminded us of Peter Pindar's mature to his lordship's manner. His exclamation,

to entertain.

1

Some folks are fond of hearing themselves chat

ter,

Promising wine, and giving milk and water,
Or that most mawkish mess call'd water-gruel,
This is not fair, my lord-'tis very cruel.

It came

use.

His friends, indeed, have said that the noble author appropriates no portion of these sums to his own We know not how the fact may bethough we should never have thought of reproaching any man with receiving the reward of his labours, had he not

Another motive than vanity might, indeed, be suggested for the incontinence of his lordship's muse. out in evidence, in a recent trial before himself endeavoured to render it opthe Lord Chancellor, on an application probrious. The world, we imagine, for an injunction to restrain the sale of would much more easily forgive his certain poems, to which the publisher lordship for subsisting on the products had taken the liberty to prefix his lord- of his literary toil, than for squandership's name to give them currency, that ing the inheritance of his family. The his lordship had received 2000l. from humiliation of vending his verses is his Bookseller, Mr. MURRAY, for the but the consequence of the dilapidation copy-right of the little volume before of his patrimony, and no disgrace in us, and 5000l. at different times, on ac- comparison with the alienation of the count of works purchased by him of the venerable monuments of the feudal noble author. This huckstering does grandeur of his house. not exactly correspond with the lofty strain of his indignant apostrophe to

To yield thy muse just half-a-crown per line?
No, when the sons of song descend to trade,
Their bays are sear, their former laurels fade.
Let such forego the poets' sacred name,
Who rack their brains for lucre, not for fame;
Low may they sink to merited contempt,
And scorn remunerate the mean attempt;
Such be their meed, such still the just reward,
Of prostituted muse, and hireling bard!
For this we spurn Apollo's venal son,
And bid a long Good-night to Marmion.'

If his lordship have incurred his own anathema, it is but an exemplification of the old adage.

These spurious poems, which have been reprinted in this country under Lord Byron's name, are Lord Byron's Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the Tempest, &c. We notice them to guard our readers against the impestufe.

But we shall gaze, in vain, on the galaxy of his lordship's virtues, for any glimmering of consistency. His character is a compound of contrarietiesand his course has been as chequered as his character. It is amusing to trace his meanderings. To-day, he offers some fruit of his fecundity as a tribute of gratitude and a testimony of regard to a noble relative ;*-to-morrow, disaVows the acknowledgment; and the third day, recants his revocation. Sometimes the process is reversed, and he begins with reviling and ends with a dedication. In one breath, he stigmatizes a man as a dunce, or an ass,§ and

the Earl of Carlisle, his guardian; ridiculed him His lordship dedicated his juvenile poems to in his Satires; and confesses, in his third canto of Childe Harold, that he wronged him.

+ Lord Holland and Thomas Moore were dealt with after this manner.

Mr. Jeffrey, the leading editor of the Edinburgh Review, to abuse whom, he wrote his Satire, and to gratify whom, he afterwards bought up the whole edition, and suppressed it.

Mr. Coleridge: this sentimental ballad

in the next, admits him to be a scholar, or commends him as a poet.

Perhaps it will be thought unnecessary to have lacerated his lordship so deeply, in the dissection of his works. But the noble author has so identified himself with his theme, that it is next to impossible to sever him from his subject. Besides, we had an object in making an anatomy of his lordship. It has been said, by one whose opinion deserves consideration, that none but a good man can be a good orator.' If the axiom be equally applicable to the poet, perhaps we have detected the secret of his lordship's failure !—and it may be useful to point it out.

We have protracted, beyond our intention, what we designed merely as

an introduction to a review which we have extracted from the British Critic.

of Lord Byron and of his muse, we should have heard no more, till time, at least, and meditation, should have mellowed the power of his song. But enlarged the soul of the poet, and a very few months since his Lordship and the public parted in no very pleasant mood; he called them forth not as arfeuds; they obeyed the summons, but bitrators, but as parties in his domestic 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 show some signs of lassitude on the endless repetition of the same tedious and disgusting strain. And yet his Lordship informs 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."

In resuming the exercise of those rights which she seemed for a time to "This is all vastly indignant and have abdicated, Criticism enters on the vastly grand; yet we have now two duties of her office in sullen state, and different language, and we find ten more witnesses before us who speak a very proceeds to arraign his lordship for a in Mr. Murray's catalogue, who tell the Tong arrearage of offences. We would same tale. The man who sends out not be understood as entirely accord- into the world a single poem, the labour ing with the decisions of the reviewer, pretence of probability, to scorn the perhaps of years, may affect, with some though we think them nearly as dis- voice of public censure or approbation; passionate, and quite as just, as such but he who, at intervals only of a few sentences generally are. months, shall continue to court the excessive fruits of his poetic talent, not pectations of the world with the sucbut lives even from hand to mouth upon only exists a pensioner upon public fame, popular applause. Every poem which bows to the idolatry of the world a he publishes is a living witness that be patient knee, and that he worships the very echo which he professes to scorn. "The first publication of the noble

"We had cherished a hope, that

anger, besides being honoured with the epithet above alluded to, is thus coupled in a stanza with

another worthy of the same school,

Let simple Wordsworth chime his childish

verse,

And brother Coleridge lull the babe at nurse. And yet in return for some paltry compliment, his lordship has christened the Christabel,' the most puling and drivelling of all baby-nurse,' Lord which claims our attention is the Coleridge's bantlings, that wild and singularly third part of Childe Harold. As the original and beautiful poem."

.

first and second parts of this poem ap- vastly superior both he and his genius peared before we commenced our criti- are to the common herd of mankind; cal labours, we shall pass no opinion on that he is a being of another and higher their merits, except that they were too order, whose scowl is sublimity, and generally over rated by the fashion of whose frown is majesty. We have the the day. The poem before us is much noble Lord's word for this and for a more likely to find its level. The no- great deal more, and if he would have ble Lord has made such draughts upon been content with telling us so not more public partiality, that little is now left than half a dozen times, to please him, him but the dregs of a cup which he we would have believed it. But he once fondly thought to be inexhaustible. has pressed so unmercifully, that we The hero of the poem is, as usual, him- now begin to call for proof, and all self: for he has now so unequivocally the proof we can find is in his own asidentified himself with his fictitious hero, sertion. The noble Lord has written that even in his most querulous moods, a few very fine, and a few very pretty he cannot complain of our impertinence verses, which may be selected from a in tracing the resemblance. We really heap of crude, barsh, unpoetical strains; wish that the noble Lord would suppose farther than this we neither know nor that there was some other being in the wish to know of his Lordship's fame. world besides himself, and employ his His Lordship's style, by a fortunate hit, imagination in tracing the lineament of caught the favourable moment in the some other character than his own. One turn of the public taste; his gall was would have imagined that in twelve mistaken for spirit, his affectation for several and successive efforts of his feeling, and his harshness for originality. muse, something a little newer than this The world are now growing tired of same inexhaustible self might have been their luminary, and wait only for the invented. Wherever we turn, the same rise of some new meteor, to transfer portrait meets our eye. We see it now their admiration and applause. The glaring in oils, now sobered in fresco, noble Lord had talents, which if they now dim in transparency. Sometimes had been duly husbanded, might have it frowns in the turban of the Turk, ensured him a more permanent place sometimes it struts in the buskins and in their estimation. His Lordship never cloak of the Spaniard, and sometimes could have been a Milton, a Dryden, a it descends to fret in its native costume; Pope, or a Gray, but he might have but frown, strut, or fret where it will, been a star of the third or fourth magthe face is still but one, and the features nitude, whose beams would have shown are still the same. 66 Mungo here, even upon posterity with no contemptiMungo there, Mungo every where." ble lustre. As the matter stands, he We are ever ready to listen with all will now be too late convinced that he due patience to a long story, provi- whose theme is only self, will find at ded it be not too often repeated, but last that self his only audience. there is really a limit beyond which "The first sixteen stanzas of the Poem human patience ceases to be a virtue. before us are dedicated to this one We must come at last to the question, everlasting theme, and contain, like a What is Lord Byron to us, and what repetition pye, nothing, more than the have we to do either with his sublimity scraps of his former strains, seasoned or his sulks? It is his poetical not his rather with the garlic of misanthropy "Self-exiled personal character which is the subject than the salt of wit.

of our criticism, and when the latter is Harold" reaches the plain of Waterloo, so needlessly obtruded upon our atten- but with a step not more auspicious tion, it betrays at once poverty of in- than that of preceding poets, who have vention and lack of discretion. The trod that bloody plain. We know not what Doble Lord is ever informing us how strange fatality attends a theme so sa