"The Disdar, who beheld the mischief, took his pipe from his mouth, dropped a tear, and, in a supplicating tone of voice, said to Lusieri, Téλos!-I was present."DR. CLARKE.

LONDON:

LIFE AND GENIUS

OF

LORD BYRON.

LORD BYRON is no more! That mighty genius, which hewed out for itself a path as terrible as it was new,-which arose in circumstances far from the most propitious,-which tumbled critics of all schools and all creeds in the dust, and made their most deadly rancor alike the butt of its ridicule and the basis of its power,-which took the understandings and the applauses of men, against the most vehement resistance, and yet apparently without an effort on its part,-has ceased to be a creating energy, and exists only in the majestic and indestructible fabrics of its ownraising. The death of such a man produces feelings and suggests reflections, not produced nor suggested by that of any other man; and though Byron had lived to the very extreme bourne of human life, though his ardor had been cooled by time, and his faculties blunted by the progress of decay, the death of Byron would still have been an event of painful contemplation. But that he has been cut off just when he had reached the full vigor of manhoodat the very point when his genius may have been presumed to become firm through experience,-when he was applying that genius to an exposure of hypocrisy and cant the most complete and the most daring that had ever been undertaken,-and when, in addition to this, he had gone to excite by his presence, and aid with his fortune, the descendants of those who had first shown how noble a thing freedom is, and how admirable are the works of genius and fancy which it can create,-the sorrow of every admirer of the majesty of man swells to its largest extent, and the public calls aloud for every notice, however hasty or however slight, of one having such talents, turning them to such an account, and being cut off from the world at a moment so very critical.

Hence the public would willingly question the truth of the

report brought by the courier from Missolonghi; they will trace back their memories to the nineteenth day of April, eager to call to mind whether that was a day of more than ordinary gloom,whether Nature, by some sad omen, gave signs that she was losing her own, her favorite son; and they will take up the last fragment of his works as they would a death-bed token from a dear friend, and say, with sad looks and sickening heart, "And is this the last, the very last instance in which we shall trace the wayward but wonderful hand of him, who has so often made our blood alternately boil and curdle; who has laid bare every passion of the human heart, and done more to expose and explode cant and hypocrisy than any other man of whom there is a trace upon record?" It is to satisfy in some measure this intense interest, to gratify to a certain extent the wish that the bard had been as immortal as his writings; that his body had been of the same indestructible matter as his mind, that we have drawn up this hasty sketch;-a sketch which though it be by no means perfect, is yet made with feeling and not without knowledge of the subject.

Before proceeding to trace the pedigree and conduct of Lord Byron, and give a few touches of his character as a man and an author, we cannot refrain from spending a few minutes in the contemplation of himself; and here the first thing that strikes us is the vast power of his genius. This power appears, not so much in his works-although, between them and those of any other writer of the age the distance be not only immense but absolutely immeasurable as in the incapability of circumstances to draw him from his favorite pursuit. Born to no immediate expectation of fortune, allowed to wander in his infant years among the mountains of the remote North, sent thence to the unobtrusive Grammar-school of Aberdeen, there to toil at his lessons without distinction and without notice,-carried round the forms of that school the one morning, for the purpose of being whipped for a fault which he had not committed, and called out in the catalogue of that school the very next by the epithet of " Dominus de Biron," -sent while yet a raw boy to a public school, and thence to college, retiring at a very early age to a splendid mansion of which he was sole lord, being courted and caressed by the great, and having riches which to him must have seemed boundless,these were temptations which almost no other young man could have withstood, and which would have certainly led most young men to confirmed foppery or vulgar dissipation. Upon Byron, however, they had no such effect: true, he did indulge openly in those things which the most saintly of the same rank and circumstances do in private; but there was a stamina within which ever put him in mind, that, high as was the rank to which he had been VOL. XXIV. NO. XLVII. M

Pam.

elevated, and seductive as were the temptations with which he was beset, he was more mighty as a man than as a peer, and as a poet than as a lover of pleasure. Perhaps, indeed, there never was a more complete triumph of the individual arm of gigantic intellect over the combined and unprovoked rancor of (they would be very angry if called pigmy) critics, than in his reply to the abuse of the Edinburgh Review. No doubt the reviewers laid themselves most wofully open, and, whether it was from some momentary hallucination, or from some individual and personal hostility which has never been explained, they never were so gratuitously severe, or so egregiously wrong. The youth of the author, the many inducements which he had to spend his time in every other manner rather than in chastising even the literary Minoses of the North, the rapidity with which the retort came, and the admirable skill with which it was given, all tended to prove in the most public and palpable manner, not only that the Edinburgh Reviewers were most lamentably in the wrong, but that those subsequent critics, of much renown and little truth, who have found out (haply by an analogical process) that Lord Byron was a careless student, and by consequence an ignorant man, blundered every jot as much.

An answer which he made to a fellow scholar, in the Grammarschool of Aberdeen, who questioned him as to the cause of the honorary addition of " Dominus de Biron" to his name, served at that time, when he was only ten years of age, to point out that he would be a man who would think, speak, and act for himself; who, whatever might be his sayings or his doings, his vices or his virtues, would not condescend to take them at second-hand. This happened on the very day after he was menaced with the flogging round the school; and when the question was put to him, he replied: "It is not my doing. Fortune was to whip me yesterday for what another did, and she has this day made me a lord for what another has ceased to do. I need not thank her in either case; for I have asked nothing at her hands."

Now this desire to stand alone, in his opinions as well as in his actions, appears to have grown with the growth and strengthened with the strength of the noble bard; and though perhaps not the sole cause, it is at least one cause, both of the celebrity which he attained, and the opposition, abuse, and misrepresentation with which he was assailed.

Whether at Harrow School or at Trinity College, Byron did not choose to pursue his studies in the beaten track, in which dunce follows dunce, with the same regularity as the sails of a windmill course one another in their revolution; and, therefore, those who ever judge of study only from the hours and modes in which a man appears to be studying, would have it that he did not study at all;

very

but let any unprejudiced man look at his works, and the fact will be evident, that he was not merely a student,-but a student of the highest class; that while these afford every evidence of a close and correct acquaintance with mere book-learning, they prove at the same time that in the study of human nature he was superior to any other man of his time; and if this was the result of a neglect of the prescribed scholastic exercises, then, the more that these are neglected the better.

The celebrity which Byron attained depended much-upon the originality of the views which he took of men and of events. Νο doubt, when once those views were studied, their correctness made their currency permanent, and they would not have given so much pleasure to the world generally, or created so much alarm among those whose interest it is to keep the world in the dark, had they not been as faithful in likeness as they were forcible in colouring; but still it was to their novelty and their boldness that they owed that notice which they drew at once... It has been complained of Byron that he has sketched only dark pictures of human nature; that his principal characters are fiends in human shape, who either do not exist, or ought not to be described. But in this objection lies the very quintessence of the vice which it is the main end of all Byron's writings to lash ;-that disposition that exists on the part of hireling sycophants and hackneyed scribblers to compound for a certain quantity of vice, provided the exerciser of that vice be possessed of a certain quantity of office;-and the independence of Lord Byron's station in society conspired with the independence of his mind, in enabling him to do that to a far greater extent than any previous writer had ventured to attempt. To carry this properly into effect; to begin and make great progress in a work at which no other man had dared to hint, it was necessary that Lord Byron should separate himself from all the small systems and wrangling parties of ordinary men. He was not a champion for kings against republics, or republics against kings; he joined not in the Tory cry to keep in office, or in the Whig cry to get into it; he was not for the ambition of one church, the restlessness of another, or the fanaticism of a third as little did he confine his comprehension within the narrow circumference of the would-be philosopher, who first brands all the other would-be philosophers with heresy and error, and then, pulling his own little book from his bosom, says, with matchless and selfcomplacent modesty, "There is but one oracle of truth in the world, -There!" Now, if Byron had declared himself as being under the banners, or even swaying the sceptre of any of those factions, literary, political, or religious, which divide the every-day world, the scope of his satire must have been thereby confined, and, in spite of him, there would have been, as it were, a home preserve of vice