nought

Save what she gave,-the rest was nakedness,

"Zarina!

I must pay dearly for the desolation Now brought upon thee. Had I never loved

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 apathy:

"Doge. I am what you behold. Marina. And that's a mystery. Dage. All things are so to mortals; who ean 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

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

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

hate

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

which

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

the names

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

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 blighted like to mine, which I will add,

Fittest for such a chronicle as this,

Which only can be read, as writ, by

wretches.

[He engraves his name."

His yearnings for Venice are also of the purest poetry :

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

"That melody, which out of tones and

tunes

Collects such pasture for the longing

sorrow

Of the sad mountaineer, when far away From his snow canopy of cliffs and clouds, That he feeds on the sweet, but poisonous 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 an tagonist, 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 hini 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 knew 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," abo 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 wo 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 suc-' ceeded 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 arc, 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 will seize with avidity ou the language of fiction, and interpret it as a text to his pernicious creed, Lord Byron is thus not likely to conciliate 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 LordK

ship's genius is essentially romantic, and, when attempted to be contined 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 :"Cain.

And this is

Life!-Toil! and wherefore should I toil?

Whom have we here?-A shape like to

the angels,

Yet of a sterner and a sadder aspect
Of spiritual essence: why do I quake?
Why should I fear him more than other
spirits,

Whom I see daily wave their fiery swords
Before the gates round which I linger oft,
In twilight's hour, to catch a glimpse of
those

Gardens which are my just inheritance, Ere the night closes o'er the inhibited walls

And the immortal trees which overtop
The cherubim-defended battlements?
If I shrink not from these, the fire-arm'd
angels,

Why should I quail from him who now approaches?

Yet he seems mightier far than them, nor
less
Beauteous, and yet not all as beautiful
As he hath been, and might be: sorrow

Which speaks within you.

Cain.

What immortal part? This has not been reveal'd: the tree of life

Was withheld from us by my father's folly,

While that of knowledge, by my mother's

haste,