nothing deserving the name of conversation; and he is just about as right in thinking so as an ape grossly misbehaving himself, with his little red bleary eyes, in every possible way in his cage, high up in the attic story of Pidcock or Wombwell, is right in testifying his contempt for the taciturnity of the lion on the ground-floor, who keeps gazing on the admirers of the forest-king, as silent as Pythagoras. Conversational talents are, no doubt, occasionally the source of considerable satisfaction to social parties of a mixed kind; but more frequently are they the source of discomfort, annoyance, wearisomeness, and disgust. There is a distinction perhaps, but to us it often seems a distinction without a difference, between speakers and talkers-the former, we understand, being to be preferred, and of course listened to with all due deference and respect. But then, they insist on admiration, and admiration includes silence, and silence is shameful to men with tongues in their mouths and brains in their heads, as long and as large, it may be, as those of their eloquent neighbours. The truth is, that the man who shews off in company, is ipso facto a poor creature; and cannot be a gentleman. Exuberance of animal spirits, a passion for sympathy, or a confidential affection for the pensive Public, will instigate men to pour themselves out at table, to decant themselves as they might a bottle of frothy small beer, or other more potent liquor, "sans peur et sans reproche." We do not call that shewing off; for the root of their copiousness, their great "verbosity of words," as we t'other day heard such fluency well called by a country gentleman, is benevolence-legitimate or spurious; and such is the wickedness of this world, that we like even a bastard benevolence. But your studied "malice prepense" haranguer, who gets up his string of speeches out of his pile of commonplace books, and absolutely comes prepared, like a Chancellor of the Exchequer on opening the Budget, or a barrister about to address a jury on a case of railroads, river-embankments, or encroachment-of-tide, deserves death without benefit of clergy, except indeed a roasting from Sydney Smith. The selfish sinner spouts but for himself; nor sees the loathing which his vulgar lips inspire, his pompous enunciation, and the glazed fixtures of his unintellectual eyes. "Pity he is not in Parliament," some stuckpig ninny whispers to the brother at his elbow-and pity 'tis indeed-in parliament-in prison-or in the stocks. Only see how he shines !Feeding his little tin-lamp with the oil of vanity-till all at once the wick goes out with a stink, and the would--be illuminé cannot see the length of his nose. For somebody has changed the talk upon him, insinuated a topic on which our friend has not been crammed like a Cambridge wrangler or a Norfolk turkey, and the shallow stream, as if stricken by sudden frost, is dumb. The company begins to revive under the unhoped abatement of the nuisance. There is a sweet, still, Sabbath-feeling in the air, now that the "dizzy mill-wheel rests," and mine host calls on Davy Wylie for a song-the Ewie wi' the crooked horn, or Jenny's bawbee. The orator remembers, or feigns, an engagement to a Rout; and flies off to have his dry well fanged (see Dr Jamieson) by an effusion from the bucket of some Fashionable Blue. Men of genius, even, are not always innocent of this sin. They are betrayed into it by the "moods of their own minds," which are sometimes perverse enough; and seem suddenly seized with a desire to shine-idle ambition indeed—in stars that by their very being are lustrous. But stars, it would appear, are sometimes impatient of being behind a cloud-and are unhappy in heaven unless gazed at from earth. Poets thus become prosy; Coleridge himself, whose speech usually resembles the music of the spheres, then hums like a spinning-wheel or a dorhawk; Wordsworth's Much-ado-about-Nothing reminds his hearers of the cataract of Lodore, bouncing in dry summer-weather over a precipice some hundred feet high, with about some six or eight gallons in the minute of a continuous flow of foamy froth. Sir Walter gets so unrelent ingly anecdotical on the doomed man sitting under the fascination of his shaggy eyebrows, that the ghost of Joe Miller would seem to bring relief from Elysium to that "storied urn and animated bust;" and as for Bowles, we never shall cease won dering how he can bring himself to have the wickedness sometimes to deliver, at one Saturday sitting, as many sermons as would suffice the congregation of Bremhill church for a series of Sabbaths. Now, all this being the case, more or less, one may easily suppose the scene when a batch of tip-top talkers are met together, each determined to put his best foot foremost, and to gabble the other down, till the air of the room is like the hollow of the sky, during the transit of a flock of wild-geese emigrating under the conduct of a chief, with a bill almost as loud and long as Wilmot Horton's. Byron suffered much in this way; and seems to have had a horror of certain soirées, where every mouth was at work like a power-loom. At no time loquacious,—at such time he was silent. What cared he whether the "Epicene" had the ball at her own foot,-or Sir James Mackintosh, (talker in ordinary at Holland-House,)—or Mr Richard Sharpe, or Brownstout Whitbread, the brewer, or Smallbeer Rogers, the banker, or Playwright Colman, the licenser, or any other" old man or old woman eloquent"-what mattered all this to Childe Harold, self-withdrawn into some glorious dream of Greece, flying, eagle-like, o'er the Peaks of Parnassus? His ambition was made of sterner stuff." He knew that one of his Spenserian stanzas was worth all the talk-tea-and-turn-out that ever was dribbled; nor does he seem to have taken the trouble of seriously admiring for an hour any of those spouters, except De Stael and Sheridan, -and She, indeed, was almost of as high an order of mind as Byron, although, unlike Eve with Adam, from "her lips words alone pleased us;" while He was lustrous even when lachrymose, with the hues of wit turning his maudlin tears into diamond sparks, and while smiles and sighs were a-struggle, "set the table on a roar." Byron was often mute-that is, his thought was so-but his forehead always spoke, and so did the eloquent light-and the sunshiny shadows of his eyes, whether " in dim suffusion veiled" of melancholy, or 'brightly beautifully blue," as the VOL. XXVII. NO. CLXIV. heavens without a cloud, in the summer-light of the Joy of Genius, which-to look on its expression— seemeth indeed to be "bliss beyond compare!" It would be extremely impertinent in us to despise the Fashionable and Philosophical and Literary Society of London, composed as it is, in no inconsiderable part, of very brilliant persons, male and female,-and containing, no doubt, its due proportion both of wit and wisdom. Yet Byron does not seem, from his Journals, to have either much admired or much enjoyed it; and we confess, that sometimes we have experienced a feeling of pity,-almost a little like a leaning towards contempt,-in reading not a few of the trifling details with which the middle portion of this volume is too much occupied. Small sketches, or rather scratches of character, jests stale and vapid, “quips and cranks," without the "wreathed smiles" that should accompany them anecdotes not exactly scandalous, but gossipy-badinage and persiflage, of which the affected heartlessness is not carried off by the real fancyand certain airs of assumption, entirely alien from Byron's native character, but breathed over its surface by the exclusive spirit of what is called, and no doubt often is, High Life, though it sometimes looks like the lowest of the low; such annoyances have rather too frequently met us in Mr Moore's Narrative, and Byron's Journals, of the two years and a half between the publication of Childe Harold and the "Fatal Marriage." It is hard to say in what kind of element Byron would most freely have breathed; but it does not seem to have been the atmosphere of London. During the depression of spirits which he laboured under while printing Childe Harold, he would frequently, says Mr Dallas, talk of selling Newstead, and of going to reside in Naxos, or the Grecian Archipelago, to adopt the Eastern costume and customs, and to pass his time in studying the Oriental languages and literature. The excitement of the triumph that soon after ensued, and the scenes which, in other pursuits besides those of literature, attended him, again diverted, says Mr Moore, his thoughts from these migratory projects. But 2 F the roving fit soon returned; and we find, from one of his letters to Mr William Bankes, that he looked forward to finding himself, in the course of the spring of 1813, once more among the mountains of his beloved Greece. For a time that plan was exchanged for the more social project of accompanying his friends, the family of Lord Oxford, to Sicily; but on that design being by him relinquished, he again thought of the East, and proceeded so far in the preparations for the voyage, about the middle of summer, as to purchase snuff-boxes as presents for some of his old Turkish friends. Thus he writes to Mr Moore:-" Rogers is out of town with Madam de Stael, who hath pub lished an Essay against Suicide, which, I presume, will make some body shoot himself,-as a sermon by Blenkinsop, in proof of Christianity, sent a hitherto most orthodox acquaintance of mine out of a Chapel of Ease, a perfect Atheist. I am still in equipment for going away," &c. Mr Croker had procured for him a passage to Greece in a king's ship; but the scheme went off, and he had to interest himself in correcting and adding to the fifth edition of the Giaour, which was about this time reviewed in the Edinburgh, in an article "so very mild and sentimental, that," quoth his Lordship, "it must be written by Jeffrey in love." "Mr Jeffrey has done the handsome thing by me, and I say nothing. But this I will say,if you and Ï" (he is writing to Mr Moore)" had knocked one another on the head in his journal, how he would have laughed, and what a mighty bad figure we should have cut in our posthumous works!" Towards the close of this year, (1813,) he "scribbled another Turkish story," the Bride of Abydos,which scribbling occupied, he tells us, four days; and, in good truth, there are too many feeble or illwritten passages in the poem, which is the least successful of all his productions, either in design or execution. But Lord Holland liked it,and so did Lady Holland,-although on reading the proofs, they disliked it; but taste is a very variable feeling, and 'twas all right at last. “The Bride of Abydos," says Mr Moore, was struck off, like its predecessor the Giaour, in one of those paroxysms of passion and imagination, which adventures such as the poet was now engaged in were, in a temperament like his, calculated to excite. As the mathematician of old required but a spot to stand upon, to be able, as he boasted, to move the world, so a certain degree of foundation in fact seemed necessary to Byron, before that lever which he knew how to apply to the world of the pas sions, could be wielded by him. So small, however, was, in many instances, the connexion with reality which satisfied him, that to aim at tracing, through his stories, these links with his own fate and fortunes which were, after all, perhaps visible but to his own fancy, would be a task as uncertain as unsafe; and this remark applies not only to the Bride of Abydos, but to the Corsair, Lara, and all the other beautiful fictions that followed, in which, though the emotions expressed by the poet may be, in general, regarded as vivid recollections of what had, at different times, agitated his own bosom, there were but little grounds,-however he might himself occasionally encourage such a supposition,-for connecting him personally with the ground-work or incidents of the story." Byron had now been for two years Lord of the Ascendant. Admiration of one man seldom lasts so long in the fluctuating soul of the World, and still seldomer in the fickle soul of the Town. It cannot sustain itself in the air of fancy, having little or no foundation in the intellect. Byron was a great poet; but a great poet has many small idolaters; London is a large city, but it contains some hundred thousand very little inhabitants; and though we would not offend such a metropolis for the universe, we humbly presume to doubt if the Wen be the Power which presides over the dominions of poetry, if the Fame whom she sends "flying all abroad," be the Immortal Öne, or a Simulacrum, which, in the very midst of her towering flight, feels her wing flagging, and descends plumpdown to the dust. Be that as it may -The Town began to tire of Byron -to ron-to get fierce and ferocious upon grow sulky and sullen with ByByron-and, like other gluttons, "With besotted, base ingratitude Cram and blaspheme its feeder." In April, 1814, we hear of him in a strange mood. "A resolution was, about this time, adopted by him, which, however strange and precipitate it appeared, a knowledge of the previous state of his mind may enable us to account for satisfactorily. He had now, for two years, been drawing upon the admiration of the public with a rapidity and success which seemed to defy exhaustion, having crowded, indeed, into that brief interval, the materials of a long life of fame. But admiration is a sort of impost from which most minds are but too willing to relieve themselves. eye grows weary of looking up to the same object of wonder, and begins to exchange, at last, the delight of observing its elevation, for the less generous pleasure of watching and speculating on its fall. The reputation of Lord Byron had already begun to experience some of these conse quences of its own prolonged and constantly renewed splendour. Even among that host of admirers who would have been The the last to find fault, there were some not unwilling to repose from praise; while they who had been, from the first, reluctant eulogists, took advantage of these apparent symptoms of satiety, to indulge in blame. "The loud outcry raised, at the begin. ning of the present year, by his verses to the Princess Charlotte, had afforded a vent for much of this reserved venom; and the tone of disparagement in which some of his assailants now affected to speak of his poetry, was, however absurd and contemptible in itself, precisely that sort of attack which was the most calculated to wound his, at once, proud and diffident spirit. As long as they confined themselves to blackening his moral and social character, so far from offending, their li bels rather fell in with his own shadowy style of self-portraiture, and gratified the strange inverted ambition that possessed him. But the slighting opinion which they ventured to express of his genius, seconded as it was by that inward dissatisfaction with his own powers, which they whose standard of excellence is highest, are always the surest to feel, mortified and disturbed him; and, being the first sounds of ill augury that had come across his triumphal career, startled him, as we have seen, into serious doubts of its continuance. "Had he been occupying himself at the time with any new task, that confidence in his own energies, which he never truly felt but while in the actual exercise of them, would have enabled him to forget these humiliations of the moment, in the glow and excitement of anticipated success. But he had just pledged himself to the world to take a long farewell of poesy had sealed up that only fountain from which his heart ever drew refreshment or strength, and thus was left, idly and helplessly, to brood over the daily taunts of his enemies, without the power of avenging himself when they insulted his person, and but too much disposed to agree with them when they made light of his genius. I am afraid,' he says, in noticing these attacks in one of his letters, 'what you call trash is plaguily to the purpose, and very good sense into the bargain; and, to tell the truth, for some little time past, I have been myself much of the same opinion.'" In this sensitive state of mind, which he but ill disguised or relieved by an exterior of gay defiance or philosophic contempt, we can hardly feel surprised, continues Mr Moore, "that he should have all at once come to the resolution not only of persevering in his determination to write no more in future, but of purchasing back the whole of past copy-rights, and suppressing every page and line he had ever written!" Sic transit gloria mundi! This insane resolution he communicated to Mr Murray, who soon restored him to his senses by a simple statement of the impracticability of such a scheme. He at once submitted, and talked no more of buying back copy-rights and of incremation of stock. Now, what were all the other poets about during this First Era of Byron's reign? We really forget. Did not Scott publish Rokeby? And but we must not expose our ignorance, which we confess is deplorable. Why, all Poets, one and all of them, were, during those two years, as cleanly swept out of existence in the mind of the Read or was ing Public, as if the Old Lady had, from infancy, addicted herself exclusively to pap and prose. "Byron -Byron- Byron". "BirronBirron Birron" still the watch-word and reply. Even the star of Scott waned in the cloudy roofs of Blue-Stocking Coteries. Crabbe sidled backwards out of them with a discontented crawl, like a parten peevish at low-water. Moore, who had not then reached his zenith,twinkled and tinkled less like a harmonious or melodious sphere, which he has since become, than a tambourine in the airily-brandished hands of a dancing Savoyard girl, of whose measures, in some grass-grown square, no man taketh heed. Even Campbell, though uneclipsed, was ungazed at; and Gertrude allowed to read Shakspeare in the Pennsylvanian woods, all unbeloved and unadmired, -while all eyes wept for Medora watching the bark of her Pirate,-and opening her bosom to the pressure of hands red with murder and blood. As for Wordsworth and Southey, they were entombed-the one among the glooms of Helvellyn, the other, among the glooms of Glaramara, as in the incommunicable depths of the grave. Even that "singularly wild and original Poem Christabel," was blown by derision into oblivion, as if a satyr had hissed away a Sibylline leaf, and Coleridge-as well he might-burst into tears! That all the living-that is to say, the dead poets-did not abhor Byron, speaks volumes in their praise; yet some of them, we fear, growled like thunder, that at times seems loath to leave its cloud, yet sullen in confinement there, and that sends, ever and anon, short fitful gleamings out, which you can scarcely call lightning, till-gracious heavens!-what a burst of fire! -one far-shooting, wide-wavering, wrathfully-rustling moment of the Last Day, in which the earth, with all her mountains, seems to heave up into the sky, and though steadfast still, then to dissolve away in the night of utter darkness that falls over them from the grim regions of the exhausted heavens which, in that one electrical blaze, seem to have poured out their very heart. That simile seems not so much amiss as a description of a natural phenomenon; but unluckily it is not at all applicable to the poets, whose dissatisfaction it was meant to illustrate. With the exception of Wordsworth, who boldly asserted in all societies, that Byron-though a young man of some talent-had no genius, and was not a poet even of the third class (why will great men make themselves ridiculous, and worse than ridiculous-contemptible?) the other bards seem to have borne their temporary obscuration with much stoicism-supported, we presume, by that happy self-esteem which is -we verily believe-in some sense, the source and solace of all genius. Each of them comforted himself with the hope," there's a braw time coming;" and 'twas pleasant to hear some of them, with a look most magnanimous and forlorn, eulogizing the Childe, and declaring with a proud humility, which, in most cases, passed for hypocrisy of the lowest grade of that vice, " Byron is the best of us all-the best of us all must yield the palm to Byron;" and as each was, of course, in his own estimation, "the best of us all," 'twas thus that "Pride, in the garb of Humility," found victory even in defeat, and exulted even to be dragged in chains at the wheels of Byron's triumphal chariot-for that degradation-they proudly opined-was reserved only for kings or princes. Now Byron was too proud-too noble a spirit, to like all this-and his perfect knowledge that this delusion of his worshippers respecting the worthlessness of other poets of the highest order grew out of their delusion respecting himself, inspired him at times with absolute disgust for the judgments of such a tribunal as that which now decided the comparative claims of genius. That disgust was deepened by the discovery soon forced upon him, that even his genius was beginning to lose its miraculous virtue; and that the reading Public had begun to doubt or disbelieve the mystery of that animal magnetism, which had so frequently, during a period of two years, thrown her into convulsions not always decorous; such were the exhibitions of both of the old lady's legs up to the garter-or "Honi soit qui mal y pense" which she always wears, we are credibly informed, above knees in symmetry similar to those of the late amiable Durham-ox. No wonder, "Fame is the spur which the clear spirit doth raise"-but 'tis not worn on the heel of the swinish multitude. And who are the swinish multitude? Not those whom Burke meant to include within that very Christian designation. People of fashion are the swinish multitude. Now and then a white doe is seen gliding through the park, or forest-chase, "beautiful exceedingly;" but the gross amount is made up of grunters. Yes-'tis a sty-a pig-sty; and it shews itself |