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But thee, I should have been an unopposed Monarch of honouring nations. To what gulphs

A single deviation from the track Of human duties leads even those who claim

The homage of mankind as their born due, And find it, till they forfeit it themselves!"

We add not a syllable of comment. -The story of "The Two Foscari" is "brief as woman's love," and it is quite unnecessary for us to be more tedious. The son of a Doge of Venice, suspected of murder, and banished for his imputed crime; returning home, was again tortured, and again sent forth to exile, where he died. Lord Byron's tragedy embraces only the latter part of this tragic tale, and it's only incidents are Jacopo Foscari's renewed tortures, his second doom of banishment, and the deposing and death of his aged father, who is indeed the principal character of the drama. Like Sardanapalus, this tragedy very far exceeds any reasonable acting length, though it is certainly in every respect a far preferable poem; and as we have space for but a few quotations, we select the best; commencing with the Doge's reply to his daughter-in-law's reproaches of apa

thy:

"Doge. I am what you behold. Marina.

And that's a mystery. Doge. All things are so to mortals; who. can read them

Save he who made? or if they can, the few And gifted spirits, who have studied long That loathsome volume-man, and pored

проп

Those black and bloody leaves, his heart and brain,

But learn a magic which recoils upon
The adept who pursues it: all the sins
We find in others, nature made our own;
All our advantages are those of fortune;
Birth, wealth, health, beauty, are her
accidents,

And when we cry out against Fate, 'twere

We should remember Fortune can take nought

Save what she gave, -the rest was nakedness,

And lusts, and appetites, and vanities,
The universal heritage, to battle
With as we may, and least in humblest
stations,

Where hunger swallows all in one low want,

And the original ordinance, that man Must sweat for his poor pittance, keeps all passions

Aloof, save fear of famine! All is low, And false, and hollow,-clay from first to last,

The prince's urn no less than potter's vessel. Our fame is in men's breath, our lives upon

Less than their breath; our durance upon days, Our days on seasons; our whole being on Something which is not us! So, we are slaves, The greatest as the meanest,-nothing Upon our will; the will itself no less Depends upon a straw than on a storm; And when we think we lead, we are most led,

rests

comes as much

that

And still towards death, a thing which
Without our act or choice, as birth, so
Methinks we must have sinn'd in some old
world,
And this is hell: the best is, that it is not
Eternal."

The soliloquy of the son, Jacopo, in his dungeon, is equally or more pathetic:

"No light, save yon faint gleam, which
Which never echoed but to sorrow's
The sigh of long imprisonment, the step
Of feet on which the iron clank'd, the'
Of death, the imprecation of despair !
And yet for this I have return'd to
Venice,

with some faint hope, 'tis true, that
time, which wears
The marble down, had worn away the
Of men's hearts; but I knew them not,

Must I consume my own, which never
beat

For Venice but with such a yearning as
The dove has for her distant nest, when
wheeling
High in the air on her return to greet
Her callow brood. What letters are these

well

shows me walls

sounds,

groan

hate

and here

which

Are scrawl'd along the inexorable wall? Will the gleam let me trace them? Ah! the names

his own feelings must, or he woefully belies them, be directly the reverse:

Of my sad predecessors in this place,
The dates of their despair, the brief

"That melody, which out of tones and

tunes

words of

A grief too great for many. This stone
page
Holds like an epitaph their history,
And the poor captive's tale is graven on
His dungeon barrier, like the lover's re-

cord

Upon the bark of some tall tree, which
bears

His own and his beloved's name. Alas!
I recognize some names familiar to me,
And bfighted like to mine, which I will
add,

Fittest for such a chronicle as this,

Which only can be read, as writ, by [He engraves his name."

wretches.

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From the rough deep, with such identity
To the poor exile's fever'd eye, that he
Can scarcely be restrain'd from treading
them."

This, however, is a false illustration. The calenture is not a maladie du pays, but a disease of climate incident to sailors after long voyages; and it is curious enough to hear the author in his dramatic creation mourning the absence from country in such good set terms as the following, when in reality

sorrow

Collects such pasture for the longing
Of the sad mountaineer, when far away
From his snow canopy of cliffs and clouds,
That he feeds on the sweet, but poison-
ous thought,

And dies. You call this weakness! It is
strength,

I say, the parent of all honest feeling,
He who loves not his country, can love
nothing!"

The Foscari die of grief, and it is with sorrow we say that we can select nothing more which seems needful for

our Review. There are no doubt many other speeches and descriptions of considerable merit, but they would only crowd our pages from a book which is in general circulation, and it's slight inaccuracies are not worth pointing out.-Lord Byron's long note about Politics and the Poet Laureate, is too little to our taste, and too unconnected with our present subject, to demand much notice. His Lordship appears to writhe with considerable uneasiness

under Mr. Southey's meritorious attack upon "The Satanic School," and retorts in a way very unbecoming the peerage; to which Mr. S. has replied in the newspapers, certainly far more coolly than his Right Honourable antagonist, and has summed up his arguments with this stinging conclusion:-" I have held up that School to public detestation, as enemies to the Religion, the Institutions, and the domestic morals of their country. I have given them a designation to which their founder and leader answers. I have sent a stone from my sling which has smitten their Goliah in the forehead. I have

fastened his name upon the gibbet, for reproach and ignominy, as long as it shall endure. Take it down who can!" -Leaving Lord Byron to digest and answer this as he best may, we now come to the most powerful, but at the same time the worst portion of the Volume, as giving it's every claim to being a most legitimate offspring of the Satanic School, the fearful mystery of "Cain."

We have seen many books in our time, aimed by the infidel philosopher and the atheistical bard at the strong holds of the Christian faith; which

,

however, have rather confirmed us in the better doctrines of the wise and the good of all ages; but a more direct, more dangerous, or more frightful production, than this miscalled Mystery, it has never been our lot to encounter. God forbid that we should impute it to the Author that his intention was to aim at the subversion of all religious principle; but we must say, if such had been his purpose, he could not have laboured with greater ingenuity, diligence, and perversion to effect his object:

""Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis, 'tis true." Lord Byron either was sensible of this, or had some kind of presentiment that such would be the impression on a large proportion of readers; for in his preface he tries to palliate the offence in a way peculiar to himself, that is, by an apology so like a jest, that it may be taken according to the dictates of fancy, as an excuse or as an aggravation. He tells us

"With regard to the language of Lucifer, it was difficult for me to make him talk life a Clergyman upon the same subjects; but I have done what I could to restrain him within the bounds of spiritual

politeness."

Milton, a master genius among the brightest of immortal bards, -Milton, into the opposite scale with whom Lord Byron has had the boldness to thrust himself. upon this occasion, did not try to make his Lucifer "talk like a. Clergyman," or to "restrain him within the bounds of spiritual politeness;" and why? because he felt the loftiness of his theme; because he khew it would be not merely derogatory but contemptible to make the "Archangel fallen" approach in language to so paltry an idea; and finally, because his imagination grasped the grandeur and immensity of his subject, and his elevated draught of the character was consonantly splendid: while that of his successor presents only the portrait of a miserable fiend, resembling a mortal sinner in his sophistry, his impiety, and his blasphemy. In the one it is the Prince of Darkness who speaks and acts in a manner becoming his still mighty though degraded nature; and in the other, except in one solitary passage, it is the quibbling demon," the least erected spirit that fell from Heaven," who repeats the stale arguments of Eur. Mag. Vol. 81. Jan. 1822,

mortal sceptics, on the original cause of evil, and the punishment of inherited sin. Milton was indeed a Levite worthy to touch the altar, a priest whose officiating prevented, and did not bring down, plague upon the peo ple; Byron is the stranger forbidden to meddle with holy things, the Uzzah to be smitten for daring but to put forth his hand into the Ark.--We are well aware of the ready apology for words and thoughts which man ought not to utter: we are told that a Devil or an Apostate are the Dialogists, and that they are made to say what is consistent with their attributes and characters, But this is a false position,-it cannot -it ought not to be tolerated, that any fictitious personage should, as Cain does, in broad and horrible language, directly curse not only the earthly author of his being, but the Almighty God himself, in language which we dare not extract. Lord Byron has indeed given to Cain the sentiments and words of hell, but from whom do they come?-from a writer, who to impart verisimilitude and energy to his lines, puts himself in the place of a Lucifer, and is for a season that which he imagines. It must certainly be confessed that the poet has succeeded beyond conception in assuming these shapes, for neither Satan, nor the First of Murderers in their own form, could have delivered more shocking profanations and more diabolical blasphemies. Aberrations the more lamentable in a poem in which there are, abstractedly, many beauties and proofs of genius, which might adorn the noblest and the purest themes.

The noble writer's daring opinions are, unhappily, so well known, that while every well regulated mind must lament over the debasement of his mighty talents, as displayed in this series of heartless and indefensible tirades against the Almighty;-every idle sceptic eptic will seize with avidity on the language of fiction, and interpret it as a text to his pernicious creed, Lord Byron is thus not likely to con ciliate public opinion, which may be affected to be sneered at, but can never be despised, by this effort; and though the work doubtless boasts many beauties that are common to it's noble lineage, we are yet of opinion that considered as a whole it cannot contribute to his fame, His Lord

K

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ship's genius is essentially romantic, aud, when attempted to be confined by the trammels of truth, he is too apt to break forth into long metaphysical disquisitions, usually combining at once all that is most dry in prose, most pernicious in morals, and most aburd in poetry.

Throughout the whole of the Preface, his Lordship shews a most industrious anxiety to assure us that he has not read Milton since he was twenty, nor Gesner's Abel since he was eight; thus anticipating any charges of plagiary with respect to which the Noble Poet appears most woefully sore and sensitive. We are much disposed indeed on internal evidence to credit his assertion of

general ignorance of our great Poet, for the first family of Byron bear as little resemblance to our first parents of Milton, as to a modern family of the present day. The drama opens with a sacrifice offered up by Adam and his assisting family, in which Cain alone withholds the expression of gratitude, and is made at once to display the discontent and moroseness of a churlish ill-regulated spirit.-His following soliloquy speaks the temper of a mind well prepared for the baneful workings of the Prince of Darkness: and unfortunately speaks volumes also of the tenets of it's author:

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He is all-powerful, must all-good too, follow:

I judge but by the fruits, and they are bitter,Which I must feed on for a fault not

mine.

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I live, But live to die: and, living, see no thing To make death hateful, save an innate clinging, A loathsome and yet all invincible Instinct of life, which I abhor, as I Despise myself, yet cannot overcome, And so I live. Would I had never lived!"

There is great impetuosity of sentiment and lofty daring in the opening speech; and the concluding passage, though not very new, is given with great vigour and felicity of expression.

Lucifer subsequently leads Cain to Hades, and shews him visions of a former world, which have the effect of rendering him yet more impious, and of inducing the fatal catastrophe of Abel's murder. However we may dissent from the entire aim and object of this piece, we must not, therefore, deny it the merit of containing much brilliant poetry, and the following dialogue certainly boasts considerable poetic splendour :

"Aduh.

Our father

is sporting with him, and that his silence is mockery, is very happy; and had he passed from this delu'sion, by slow gradations, to the dreadful certainty that what he saw was death, the grandeur of the scene must have been considerably heightened. There is little dignity in the reproaches which the primitive family subsequently shower on Abel, when Zillah enters, and her grief brings the other human personages to the scene, amongst whom Eve pronounces a

Saith that he has beheld the God himself dreadfully emphatic curse on Cain.

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So beautiful, unnumber'd, and endearing,
Not dazzling, and yet drawing us to them,
They fill my eyes with tears, and so dost
thou.

Thou seem'st unhappy; do not make us so,
And I will weep for thee."

The idea of resembling Lucifer to stars, which look as if they would be suns, though highly fanciful, is not, perhaps, strictly appropriate ; as it conveys a sense of the ambition of the fallen angel, far beyond the ken of Adah. The murder of Abel is also represented with remarkable infelicity; there is too much short and smart dialogue, a sort of wordy contest thrown about the act of blood; by which the fine opportunity for Lord Byron to have described the operation of the hue and aspect of Death on the first murderer is comparatively lost, by the injudicious expedient of making Abel speak to forgive his murderer, so long after he has been struck to the ground; and thus interrupting the grand and imposing contemplation of death on the part of Cain, so well adapted to call forth Lord Byron's best powers. The idea of Cain's conceiving that his brother

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May all the curses
Of life be on him! and his agonies
Drive him forth o'er the wilderness, like us
From Eden, till his children do by him
As he did by his brother! May the swords
And wings of fiery cherubim pursue him
By day and night,-snakes spring up in
his path,-

Earth's fruits be ashes in his mouth,-the
leaves

On which he lays his head to sleep be strew'd

With scorpions! May his dreams be of his
victim !

His waking a continual dread of death!
May the clear rivers turn to blood as he
Stoops down to stain them with his raging
lip !

May every element shun or change to him!
May he live in the pangs which others die
with!

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