which, till this day, he conceives to be his own private property-just as are all the three Northern Counties of England-and he will now suffer no other man, not even Byron, so much as to mention Mont Blanc. Coleridge, that delightful dreamer of bright and obscure delusions, yet lovely all, go where he will, to Malta, Rome, or Vienna, is still Metropolitan Bishop of "cloudland, gorgeous land." Sir Walter never lost the smell of peat reek out of his noble nostrils till he was upwards of two-score-because "Scotia, his auld respected mither," had sworn to the rising sun from the top of Cairngorm, that her Poet should never see other glens and mountains till he had immortalized all her own, and brightened the Highland heather with more than Hybla bloom-so that her wild bees are happy now on Benledi as ever winged creatures were that once murmured on Hymettus. But let us hear Mr Moore on Byron's Pilgrimage. He speaks like a philosopher and a poet, and nothing can be more beautiful than his style. "As his mind began to disclose its resources, this feeling grew upon him; and, had his foreign travel done no more than, by detaching him from the distractions of society, to enable him, solitarily and freely, to commune with his own spirit, it would have been an all-important step gained towards the full expansion of his faculties. It was only then, indeed, that he began to feel himself capable of the abstraction which self-study requires, or to enjoy that freedom from the intrusion of others' thoughts which alone leave the contemplative mind master of its own. In the solitude of his nights at sea, in his lone wanderings through Greece, he had sufficient leisure and seclusion to look within himself, and there catch the first glimpses of his glorious mind.' One of his chief delights, as he mentioned in his Memoranda,' was, when bathing in some retired spot, to seat himself on a high rock above the sea, and there remain for hours gazing upon the sky and waters, and lost in that sort of vague reverie, which, however formless and indistinct at the moment, settled afterwards on his pages into those clear, bright pictures, which will endure for ever. "Were it not for the doubt and diffidence that hang round the first steps of genius, this growing consciousness of his own power, these openings into a new domain of intellect where he was to reign supreme, must have made the solitary hours of the young traveller one dream of happiness. But it will be seen that, even yet, he distrusted his own strength, nor was at all aware of the height to which the spirit he was now calling up would grow. So enamoured, nevertheless, had he become of these lonely musings, that even the society of his fellow-traveller, though with pursuits so congenial to his own, grew at last to be a chain and a stood, companionless, on the shore of the burden upon him, and it was not till he little island in the Ægean that he found his spirit breathe freely. If any stronger proof were wanting of his deep passion for solitude, we shall find it, not many years after, in his own written avowal, that even when in the company of the woman he most loved, he not unfrequently found himself sighing to be alone. "It was not only, however, by afford ing him the concentration necessary for this silent drawing out of his feelings and powers that travel conduced so essentially to the formation of his poetical character. To the East he had looked, with the eyes of romance, from his very childhood. Before he was ten years of age, the perusal of Rycaut's History of the Turks had taken a strong hold of his imagination, and he read eagerly, in consequence, every book concerning the East he could find. In visiting, therefore, those countries, he was but realising the dreams of his childhood; and this return of his thoughts to that innocent time gave a freshness and purity to their current which they had long wanted. Under the spell of such recollections, the attraction of novelty was among the least of the scenes, through which he wandered, presented. Fond traces of the past-and few have ever retained them so vividly-mingled themselves with the impressions of the objects before him; and as, among the Highlands, he had often traversed, in fancy, the land of the Moslem; so memory, from the wild hills of Albania, now 'carried him back to Morven.' "While such sources of poetic feeling were stirred at every step, there was also in his quick change of place and scenein the diversity of men and manners surveyed by him-in the perpetual hope of adventure, and thirst of enterprise, such a succession and variety of ever-fresh excitement, as not only brought into play, but invigorated, all the energies of his character. As he, himself, describes his mode of living, it was To-day in a palace, tomorrow in a cow-house-this day with the Pacha, the next with a shepherd.' Thus were his powers of observation quickened, and the impressions on his imagination multiplied. Thus schooled, too, in some of the roughness and privations of life, and, so far, made acquainted with the flavour of adversity, he learned to enlarge, more than is common in his high station, the circle of his sympathies, and became inured to that manly and vigorous cast of thought, which is so impressed on all his writings. Nor must we forget, among these strengthening and animating effects of travel, the ennobling excitement of danger, which he more than once experienced, having been placed in situations, both on land and sea, well calculated to call forth that pleasurable sense of energy which perils, calmly confronted, never fail to inspire. "The strong interest which, in spite of his assumed philosophy on this subject, in Childe Harold, he took in every thing connected with a life of warfare, found frequent opportunities of gratification, not only on board the English ships of war in which he sailed, but in his occasional intercourse with the soldiers of the country. At Salora, a solitary place on the Gulf of Arta, he once passed two or three days, lodged in a small miserable barrack. "Here he lived the whole time, familiarly, among the soldiers! and a picture of the singular scene which their evenings presented of those wild, half-bandit warriors, seated round the young poet, and examining, with savage admiration, his fine Manton gun and English sword, might be contrasted, but too touchingly, with another and a later picture of the same Poet dying, as a chieftain, on the same land, with Suliotes for his guards, and all Greece for his mourners. "It is true, amid all this stimulating variety of objects, the melancholy which he had brought from home still lingered around his mind. To Mr Adair and Mr Bruce, as I have before mentioned, he gave the idea of a person labouring under deep dejection; and Colonel Leake, who was, at that time, resident at Joannina, conceived very much the same impression of the state of his mind. But assuredly, even this melancholy, habitually as it still clung to him, might, under the stirring and healthful influences of his roving life, have become a far more elevated and abstract feeling than it ever could have expanded to within reach of those annoyances whose tendency was to keep it wholly concentrated round self. Had he remained idly at home, he would have sunk, perhaps, into a querulous satirist. But, as his views opened on a freer and wider horizon, every feeling of his nature kept pace with their enlargement; and this inborn sadness, mingling itself with the effusions of his genius, became one of the chief constituent charms, not only of their pathos, but their grandeur. For, when did ever a sublime thought spring up in the soul, that melancholy was not to be found, however latent, in its neighbourhood?" The few letters written by Byron from abroad, given in this volume, are, though perhaps characteristic enough, not uncommonly interesting; but perhaps we wish for nothing but the two First Cantos of Childe Harold. without a home-at least none that At the end of two years he returned deserved that endearing name. "A fond, family circle, to accompany himwith its prayers, while away, and drawn round him, with listening eagerness, on his return, was what, unluckily, he never knew, though with a heart, as we have seen, by nature formed for it. In the absence, too, of all that might cheer and sustain, he had every thing to encounter that could distress and humiliate. To the dreariness of a home without affection, was added the burden of an establishment without means, and he had thus all the embarrassments of domestic life without its charms. His affairs had, during his absence, been suffered to fall into confusion, even greater than their inherent tendency to such a state warranted. There had been, the preceding year, an execution in Newstead, for a debt of £1500, owing to the Messrs Brothers, upholsterers; and a circumstance, told of the veteran, Joe Murray, on this occasion, well deserves to be mentioned. To this faithful old servant, jealous of the ancient honour of the Byrons, the sight of the notice of sale, pasted up on the Abbey door, could not be otherwise than an unsightly and intolerable nuisance. Having enough, however, of the fear of the law before his eyes, not to tear the writing down, he was at last forced, as his only consolatory expedient, to paste a large piece of brown paper over it." Byron's only great feat before his departure from England, had been his Satire. Flushed with a fortnight of success and triumph he had set sail; and it is not to be wondered at that far from London, and in the midst of scenes in themselves well calculated to dash and dissipate both sweet and bitter memories, he tenaciously clung to some of them, and would not let them go even when gazing from the rock of Sunium across a stormy sea. Accordingly, he took to the composition of a satire in the shape of an imitation or paraphrase of Horace's Art of Poetry. Some not very felicitous extracts are given-flowing enough, and not altogether much amiss in their own humble way, but sadly deficient in condensation-and entirely without fire. He seems to have exhausted his inspired indignation in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; and unexcited now and unsupported by any strong personal feelings, his satire sometimes sank to a low level, seems from the specimens never to have reached a high one—and, on the whole, to have been a mediocre elaboration of commonplace sarcasms. This weak if not rickety bantling he preferred to Childe Harold! But Mr Dallas, heaven knows how, immediately saw the transcendent excel. lence of the Two Cantos-and beseeched Byron to publish them without delay. Some other booby, less fortunate in his judgment, had "found very little to commend, and much to condemn, in them;" and thus the Poem was like a bundle of hay between two asses-one of them turning his long ears away from it in disdain over the " pivot of his skull," and beating it with his fore-hoofsthe other bringing his still longer ears with a fine natural sweep from his shoulders where they had lain hushed in brown repose, till they absolutely overshadowed it-his jaws all the while yawning over it a panegyrical and portentous bray. All this was very puzzling-as well it might be to the proprietor; but he was finally induced-we scarcely know how-to send the Poem to Mr Murray-and Gifford, having ratified the judgment of the Vicar of Bray-L.600 were given for the copyright, which Byron handed over to the delighted donkey. That Dallas could enjoy such a poem in manuscript, seems a belief irreconcilable with the laws of nature; but our knowledge of nature's laws are indeed limited and imperfect, and a clearer and wider insight into the frame of our being might suffice to account for the phenomenon. That Byron himself set little store by those Two Cantos, is nothing very surprising; for though he had a high opinion and deep feeling of his own powers, he was singularly, and, we must think, nobly distinguished by a deferential spirit towards the judgments of minds he admired, on each particular achievement of those powers; and that too, even after he had become famous throughout the world. The fate of his first volume he had not forgotten-and the fear of the Edinburgh Reviewers was yet before his eyes, even after he had scotched one snake, and killed it too-for how could he know that out of the same rank dunghill might not come a cockatrice? But in satire he had shewn strength-and therefore his trust was naturally in satire still; although we do not find it recorded that he flung it away unwillingly-and therefore, after all, his belief of the excellence of the Paraphrase, like that of the worthlessness of the Two Cantos, was extremely superficial and unimpassioned, and they both melted at a breath. Mr Moore seeks to solve the difficulty by telling us, that while the imaginative powers of Byron's mind had received such an impulse forward, the faculty of judgment, slower in its developement, was still immature, and that of self-judgment, the most difficult of all, still unattained. But that explanation, as Mr Jeffrey said of the Excursion, will never do; for it appears that his judg ment became mature in about a week afterwards, when he saw that the cantos were first-rate cantos, and began to believe that he was upon the eve of being hailed a poet. Besides, the two cantos are as much distinguished for judgment as for imagination, if not more; the parts being most skilfully combined, and the adaptation of different styles perfect. Self-judgment, as Mr Moore here speaks of it, is precisely the same as judgment of the poem-for what is his poem but a manifestation of his mind? Mr Moore speaks better when he qualifies his meaning, and says, that it would be fairer to conclude that this erroneous valuation arose rather from a "diffidence in his own judgment, than from any deficiency of it." All Byron's poetry is distinguished by judgment-from first to last; but a thousand feelings may induce poets of the strongest and clearest judgment to over-rate, or under-rate, their own productions-for they are all floated over by dreams, and each hangs in an atmosphere of its own, rare or dense, that causes haply-various optical deceptions or delusions; and what is all poetry together but delusion-since assuredly it is not-truth? But hear Mr Moore, who never leaves a discussion in the dark, although during the progress of it he sometimes seems fond " now of glimmer, and now of gloom," that he may have the satisfaction of dissipating them with one bold flare of his torch. "To his college companions, almost all of whom were his superiors in scholarship, and some of them even, at this time, his competitors in poetry, he looked up with a degree of fond and admiring deference, for which his ignorance of his own intellectual strength alone could account; and the example, as well as tastes, of these young writers being mostly on the side of established models, their authority, as long as it influenced him, would, to a certain de gree, interfere with his striking confidently into any new or original path. That some remains of this bias, with a little leaning, perhaps, towards school recollections, may have had a share in prompting his preference of the Horatian Paraphrase, is by no means improbable;-at least, that it was enough to lead him, un tried as he had yet been in the new path, to content himself, for the present, with following up his success in the old. We have seen, indeed, that the manuscript of the two Cantos of Childe Harold had, previously to its being placed in the hands of Mr Dallas, been submitted by the noble author to the perusal of some friend the first and only one, it appears, who at that time had seen them. Who this fastidious critic was, Mr Dallas has not mentioned; but the sweeping tone of censure in which he conveyed his remarks was such as, at any period of his career, would have disconcerted the judgment of one, who, years after, in all the plenitude of his fame, confessed, that the deprecia. tion of the lowest of mankind was more painful to him, than the applause of the highest was pleasing.' Alluding to Byron's strong desire to publish the Satire instead of Childe Harold, Mr Moore remarks, that it is often not a little curious to observe how often the course of a whole life has depended on one single step. Had he persisted in his original purpose of giving that poem to the world instead of Childe Harold, it is more than probable, says Mr Moore, "that he would have been lost as a great poet to the world!" "Ne quid nimis," one is apt to exclaim, on reading that sentence. The Satire would have fallen still-born from the press, and people would have wondered at the abortion; but that "his former assailants would have resumed their advantage over him" we see no reason to believe, for men who have been flayed alive do not like to wrestle. The first satire was not forgotten; and though the dunghills might have cackled, they would not have crowed- much less have shewn fight. "In the bitterness of his mortification," continues Mr Moore, "he would have flung Childe Harold into the fire!" The deuce he would?-no Trust Byron. He would have instantly written another Satire-and as "facit indignatio versus," it would have been a red-hot bar of iron, and then, on his second triumph, he might have indulged old Dallas by publishing Harold. We cannot sympathize with the summary process of flinging it into the fire-unless it had been bound in asbestos. Mr Moore, as usual, backs out of this strong assertion, by saying that even if Byron had afterwards summoned up sufficient conHarold,) its reception, even if suffifidence to publish that poem, (Childe cient to retrieve him in the eyes of the public and his own, " could never have at all resembled that explosion of success-that instantaneous and universal acclaim of admiration, into which, coming as it were fresh from the land of song, he now surprised the world, and in the midst of which he was borne buoyant and self-assured along, through a succession of new triumphs, each more splendid than the last." No doubt there is something-or may be somethingin that elegant and graceful qualification of by far too sweeping an opinion; yet, we cannot believe that the power of a mighty Poet could have been palsied by a single stumble, however inopportune; or that the world would not have hailed Byron as a mighty poet, unless he had suddenly shone upon them like a new star from the East, without a single astronomer to predict its rising, and without a single cloud to obscure its effulgence. He was fortunate in the time he did shine forth from the "heaven of invention;" but let us not so degrade the character of his worshippers as to attribute their devotion as much to the crisis or juncture of his appearance, as to the native and resistless influence of that "bright particular star." Meanwhile the months passed on -and Byron seems to have spent his time from his arrival in England, in June 1811, till the publication of Childe Harold, in March 1812, pretty equally between Newstead and London. Soon after his arrival he lost that strange mother of his-without having seen her alive-and his friend Mathews, who was drowned in the Cam. Both events wrung his heart with anguish ;-but after the first emotions of natural pity and grief for his mother, necessarily transient, how could he long cherish much sacred sorrow for her sake? Her deaththough awhile bitterly lamented, must have been a relief and a release at last from thoughts in which there was both torment and degradation. As for Mathews, he seems to have been a man of extraordinary powers --but Byron was fast growing out of a state of pupillage-he would soon have seen that he was a head and shoulders taller than that giantthe warmth of his friendship would have cooled with the decrease of his admiration-and that his admiration must have decreased, is as certain as that it is more glorious to be elected a poet by the whole world, than a Downing scholar, by the collective wisdom of the most illustrious college in Cambridge. But Byron now formed what we must think a more congenial friendship-for 'twas with a kindred spirit -a true son of genius-Thomas Moore. They took to each other as soon as they met; and, no doubt, Byron opened his heart more generously to Moore, because that he had in his Satire given circulation to a senseless and vulgar jest about that gentleman's hostile meeting with Mr Jeffrey; while Mr Moore, as ready with forgiveness as Byron was with reparation, rejoiced to accept the proffered friendship of one, whose character and situation had so much that was interesting and impressive, before they were encircled-as they soon were-but as Mr Moore had no reason to foresee-with a blaze of glory. The friendship then formed was afterwards more strongly cemented-and continued, we doubt not, in both bosoms, till "cracked that noble heart"-and Byron was but dust. But before blazing forth a poet, Byron sported orator. His first speech, and we may almost say his last, in the House of Lords, seems to have been about the Nottinghamshire frame-breakers. It is to be found in Dallas, printed from his own manuscript, and Mr Moore well says, that the same sort of interest that is felt in reading the poetry of Burke may be gratified perhaps by a few specimens of the oratory of Byron. We forget Burke's poetry-but Byron's oratory is mortal bad. We do not believe he cared a farthing about the matter-though he tries to hug himself on having made a successful debut, and quotes Lord Grey and Sir Francis Burdett as his panegyrists. "I spoke," says he, “ very violent sentences with a sort of modest impudence; abused every thing and every body; and put the Lord Chancellor very much out of humour." But he was on the eve of a very different kind of triumph. There was a "sugh" through London of a great Poem. Fame or Rumour from the tops of steeples foretold an event that "cast its shadow before" "At times a warning trumpet blown, At times a stifled hum, Told England from his mountain throne "Shot upward like a pyramid of fire." Moore writes nobly on this theme. "There are those who trace in the peculiar character of Lord Byron's genius, strong features of the relationship to the times in which he lived; who think that the great events which marked the close of the last century, by giving a new impulse to men's minds; by habituating them to the daring and the free; and allowing full vent to the flash and outbreak of fiery spirits,' had led naturally to the production of such a poet as Byron ; and that he was, in short, as much the child and representative of the revolution in poesy, as another great man of the age, Napoleon, was in statesmanship and warfare. Withit will at least be conceded, that the free out going the full length of this notion, loose which had been given to all the passions and energies of the human mind, in the great struggle of that period, together |