natural objects, it is beyond the privilege of any poet, still borrowing our image from the painter's art, to present himself in the foreground of every landscape. We should enjoy Lord Byron's poetry much more if it were not for Lord Byron himself he obstructs others and himself also: he stands full in his own light, we will not say, by turning his back upon heaven, but certainly by placing himself in a wrong position for seeing or displaying the truth.

Of the melancholy of this poem, we have said enough, as far as it arises out of the circumstances of the poet. Where it is suggested by the locality and features of the scene described, it is still neither a sublime nor a moral melancholy. It is far from that spiritual mood

"Which wings the soul and points her to the skies."

The feelings which it incorporates are more like the stings of an unrepentant conscience than the depressions of benevolent sensibility. It seems to be of a sort, that, if it wins us from ourselves, brings us no nearer to God: it leaves us bleeding from the rupture of the ligament which associates us to the world, without carrying us where alone the balsam is supplied that can cure the wound.

The taste of this poem is classical, and sufficiently informed by learning, without being disfigured by pedantry; and though we have it upon his own confession, that the poet suffered the time spent at school to pass without much profit, yet it appears sufficiently clear that he has so availed himself of subsequent opportunities, as to make up for his early neglect. His descriptions of the Venus and Apollo, those purest and most perfect remains of ancient sculpture, glow with the fervours of classic enthusiasm, and leave behind, in the general vigour of the sketch, however exceptionable on certain grounds some parts of it may be thought, all the tributes which we have seen paid by poetry to its sister art. The broken piles and scattered fragments of the eternal city, her rivers, and sites, and hills,-all that remains to remind us of what once was deemed imperishable, and now has nothing but a name, or a trace, and that dubious, Lord Byron has touched with such admirable force and feeling, as to leave us nothing to wish, except that he would wake for ever from the feverish dreams of a morbid temperament, and consign his faculties to subjects more agreeable to the lofty vocation of his genius.

Of the harmony of the verse we cannot help observing that it suffers but too often either from an incorrectness of ear, or from a strange affectation in the poet. We have said much, in our former reviews, of the advantages and disadvantages of

the Spenser stanza, of its loose and luxuriant harmony, and the play it allows for the dilatation of thought and imagery, as well as its tendency to debilitating expansion; but there is a difficulty in the structure and modulation of this verse which has scarcely been enough noticed. The flow of the lines must have a certain briskness imparted to them, or they will be continually settling into prose; and whenever they assume this heavy and interrupted motion, there is no style which poetry can assume more disagreeable in its effect on the ear. Lord Byron is occasionally, and not unfrequently, entirely negligent of measure, and this neglect is oftenest shown in the concluding line, in which the thought is finished and condensed, and which therefore requires the greatest assistance from majesty of sound. A pretty strong illustration of this remark occurs in the 12th stanza, which runs as follows:

"The Suabian sued, and now the Austrian reigns-
An Emperor tramples where an Emperor knelt;
Kingdoms are shrunk to provinces, and chains
Clank over sceptred cities; nations melt
From power's high pinnacle, when they have felt
The sunshine for a while, and downward

go

Like lauwine loosen'd from the mountain's belt;
Oh for one hour of blind old Dandolo !

Th' octogenarian chief, Byzantium's conquering foe." (P. 9.) The two last lines of the stanza just cited are in the worst possible taste, and surely the recollection of the exclamation of the Highlander, "Oh for an hour of old Dundee!" affords no apology, as the learned commentator appears to think in the note in page 118, to these two miserable lines. The 31st stanza ends thus:

"Than if a pyramid form'd his monumental fame."

And the 139th as follows:

"Both are but theatres where the chief actors rot;"

which is again immediately followed by a line still more impracticable:

"I see before me the gladiator lie."

The 19th stanza thus begins:

"I can re-people with the past-and of."

Some few vulgarisms occasionally occur, as "Awake thou shalt and must." Again,

"But France got drunk with blood to vomit crime."

In aiming at strength it is not uncommon to drop into vulgarity; but as the attempt is laudable, criticism ought not to be

7

severe; we shall therefore exhibit no more of these failures, which are not numerous enough to affect the general character of the poem. Upon the whole, though we do not think that after a few years shall have passed, this greatest work of Lord Byron will often be taken down from the shelf, yet we have no doubt of its having obtained that immortality for the poet which sometimes, alas! is the poet's supreme and solitary hope.

To the notes and illustrations which have been added by Mr. Hobhouse we are indebted for some useful information; and if we judge of his accuracy by the blame he casts upon other travellers through the same region, who have communicated their observations to the public, we must esteem it very highly. The late Mr. Eustace, the author of the Classical Tour through Italy, comes in for the largest share of this liberal distribution of cenThe principal attack upon him is made in the last note

sure.

contained in the same volume with the fourth canto. Should we at any time change our literary position, and from critics become authors, we think we should be desirous that all whose critical wrath we should happen to fall under, should give vent to that wrath in compositions on a par with this note. Mr. Eustace's book has been discovered by this annotator to be written in a bad style, and, to evince his own competency to decide on such a subject, he thus expresses his opinion:

"The style which one person thinks cloggy and cumbrous, and unsuitable, may be to the taste of others, and such may experience some salutary excitement in ploughing through the periods of the Classical Tour. It must be said, however, that polish and weight are apt to beget an expectation of value. It is amongst the pains of the damned to toil up a climax with a huge round stone." (Note to stanza clxxiv. p. 230, 231.)

In attacking the deficiencies of style in another, we should be specially careful of our own; and if our utmost pains are incapable of reaching either correctness or grace, our next care should be to repress our own pruriency towards criticism. Mr. Hobhouse is an ingenious and entertaining traveller; and we recollect with gratitude the pleasure with which we read and reviewed his Tour through Albania, and other provinces of Turkey; but as a critic, and arbiter of taste in composition, we must confess ourselves to entertain of him a low estimate. passage which we have above extracted, from his note on the 174th stanza, is of an inferior standard in sense and expression; and it moreover indicates that sort of comfortable self-complacency which is but too apt to issue in the ridiculous. The salutary excitement of ploughing, and the cloggy substances which the plough encounters, begetting an expectation of value by polish

The

and, weight, and the damned toiling up a climax with a huge round stone, are phrases forming by their assemblage one of the most difficult passages in English literature, and we should think. scarcely translatable into any other language without the loss of much of its vernacular strength. The play upon the words “took" and "mistook," in the same note, is very trivial, and is moreover incorrect, as the disjunctive " or between the words supposes a difference in their meaning as there applied; whereas those words must necessarily, in the place they occur, have the same force. There are other inelegances and faults very visible in this hostile note. "The Classical Tour," says Mr. Hobhouse," has every characteristic of a mere compilation of former notices, strung together upon a very slender thread of personal observation, and swelled out," &c. Mr. Hobhouse also talks of "the enticing method of instruction conveyed by the perpetual introduction of some Gallic Helot to reel and bluster before the rising generation," which enticing method he imputes to poor Mr. Eustace. The note we have been animadverting upon may be taken as a pretty fair specimen of the general. style of the annotations and illustrations which Mr. Hobhouse has accumulated upon the Childe Harold: it is extremely ponderous and spiritless, with a certain air of gaiety, and affectation of smartness, which become habitual in most men who have begun at a beardless age to make discoveries of great errors in the rest of the world, and have learned stoutly to decide against all the opinions of their grandfathers. With respect to Mr. Eustace, though we are far from subscribing to his general sentiments, either in religion or politics, yet so superior do we think his manner of writing to that of Mr. Hobhouse, that though we are not tempted to say of him as Tully did of Plato, that we had rather err with him than think rightly with Mr. Hobhouse; yet we will say, that notwithstanding he may have mistaken a cypress for a pine, or even covered the cupola of St. Peter's with lead instead of copper, we would still infinitely rather read over again the Classical Tour through Italy, than the Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of the Childe Harold.

Mr. Eustace is admitted by Mr. Hobhouse to be a person attached to virtue and liberty, and of a gentlemanly spirit; and yet in the very page before he had observed, that Mr. Eustace is very seldom to be trusted even when he speaks of objects which he must be presumed to have seen. And again, "His errors, from the simple exaggeration to the downright mistatement, are so frequent as to induce a suspicion, that he had either never visited the spots described, or " (and here again is the disjunctive without any alternative sense)" had trusted to the fidelity of former writers."

But is Mr. Hobhouse quite sure that Mr. Eustace's "Antigallican Philippics "have produced no feeling in his mind unfavourable to a fair judgment on his merits. Mr. Eustace, to be sure, has evinced a very hearty hatred of the French and of Buonaparte; and so contrary is this sentiment to that of Lord Byron and Mr. Hobhouse, that the latter gentleman seems hardly capable of forgiving him, notwithstanding he has decided, in his chapter on Florence, in favour of a republican form of government. The meaning, indeed, of these gentlemen would be quite inexplicable, if we were to regard them at once as the lovers of liberty, and the advocates of the usurper of the French throne; but when we consider Buonaparte as the "champion and child of Jacobinism," the two professions are reconciled. A man may reasonably embrace the principles of the French revolution, and the tyranny to which it conducted. If this has been the effect of the new mind created among us (for we must say it is quite new,-that turn of thought which has induced British-born subjects to look upon the victory of Waterloo as disastrous is quite new,-it has never existed before the French revolution in the ancient or modern history of man,) it is impossible to say how far the perversion of sentiment may extend itself, and whether any moral or even literary subject is clear of its contaminating influence.

Mr. Hobhouse does not give us the trouble of inferring and conjecturing his political principles. But we do not know whether the term "principles " is properly descriptive of what passes in this gentleman's mind on the great question of government. From the manner in which he expresses himself we are quite sure that ten years more will not pass over his head without effecting a great change in his politics; for an effusion more puerile, more untempered, more rash, more empty of thought, we scarcely have met with among scholars of the first year at Oxford or Cambridge than the passage which follows:

"No civil tranquillity can compensate for that perpetual submission, not to laws but persons, which must be required from the subjects of the most limited monarchy. The citizens of the worst regulated republic must feel a pride, and may indulge a hope superior to all the blessings of domestic peace, and of what is called established order, another word for durable servitude. The struggles for supreme though temporary power amongst those of an equal condition, give birth to all the nobler energies of the mind, and find space for their unbounded exertion. Under a monarchy, however well attempered, the chief motive for action must be altogether wanting, or feebly felt, or cautiously encouraged. Duties purely ministerial, honours derived from an individual, may be meritoriously performed, may be gracefully worn; but, as an object of ambition, they are infinitely below the independent control of our fellow-citizens, and perhaps scarcely fur