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Let this fifth canto meet with due applause,

The sixth shall have a touch of the sublime; Meanwhile, as Homer sometimes sleeps, perhaps You'll pardon to my muse a few short naps. (1)

omission to be replaced. I have read over the poem carefully, and I tell you, it is poetry. The little envious knot of parson-poets may say what they please: time will show that I am not, in this instance, mistaken."]

(1) Blackwood says, in No. LXV., for June, 1822, "These three Cantos (III. IV. V.) are, like all Byron's poems, and, by the way, like every thing in this world, partly good and partly bad. In the particular descriptions they are not so naughty as their predecessors: indeed, his lordship has been so pretty and well-behaved on the present occasion, that we should not be surprised to hear of the work being detected among the thread cases, flower-pots, and cheap tracts that litter the drawing-room tables of some of the best regulated families. By those, however, who suspect him of "a strange design

"Against the creed and morals of the land,

And trace it in this poem every line,”

it will be found as bad as ever. He shows his knowledge of the world too openly; and it is no extenuation of this freedom that he does it playfully. Only infants can be shown naked in company; but his lordship pulls the very robe-de-chambre from both men and women, and goes on with his exposure as smirkingly as a barrister cross-questioning a chambermaid in a case of crim. con. This, as nobody can approve, we must confess is very bad. Still, it is harsh to ascribe to wicked motives what may be owing to the temptations of circumstances, or the headlong impulse of passion. Even the worst habits should be charitably considered, for they are often the result of the slow but irresistible force of nature, over the artificial manners and discipline of society- the flowing stream that wastes away its embankments. Man towards his fellow man should be at least compassionate; for he can be no judge of the instincts and the impulses of action, he can only see effects.

"Tremble, thou wretch,

That hast within thee undivulged crimes,

Unwhipp'd of justice: Hide thee, thou bloody hand;

Thou perjured, and thou simular man of virtue

Thou art incestuous: Caitiff, to pieces shake,

That under covert and convenient seeming

Hast practised on man's life!- Close pent-up guilts,

Rive your concealing continents, and cry

These dreadful summoners grace." - Lear.]

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(1) "Ordered Fletcher (at four o'clock this afternoon) to copy out seven or eight apophthegms of Bacon, in which I have detected such blunders as a schoolboy might detect, rather than commit. Such are the sages! What must they be, when such as I can stumble on their mistakes or mis-statements? I will go to bed, for I find that I grow cynical."- B. Diary, Jan. 5. 1821.

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(1) [" If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined,

The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind."— POPE.]

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Having stated that Bacon was frequently incorrect in his citations from history, I have thought it necessary in what regards so great a name (however trifling), to support the assertion by such facts as more immediately occur to me. They are but trifles, and yet for such trifles a schoolboy would be whipped (if still in the fourth form); and Voltaire for half a dozen similar errors has been treated as a superficial writer, notwithstanding the testimony of the learned Warton: "Voltaire, a writer of much deeper research than is imagined, and the first who has displayed the literature and customs of the dark ages with any degree of penetration and comprehension." (1) For another distinguished testimony to Voltaire's merits in literary research, see also Lord Holland's excellent Account of the Life and Writings of Lope de Vega, vol. i. p. 215. edition of 1817. (2)

(1) Dissertation I.

(2) [Till Voltaire appeared, there was no nation more ignorant of its neighbours' literature than the French. He first exposed, and then corrected, this neglect in his countrymen. There is no writer to whom the authors of other nations, especially of England, are so indebted for the extension of their fame in France, and, through France, in Europe. There

Voltaire has even been termed "a shallow fellow," by some of the same school who called Dryden's Ode "a drunken song; "a school (as it is called, I presume, from their education being still incomplete) the whole of whose filthy trash of Epics, Excursions, &c. &c. &c. is not worth the two words in Zaïre, "Vous pleurez," (1) or a single speech of Tancred: - a school, the apostate lives of whose renegadoes, with their tea-drinking neutrality of morals, and their convenient treachery in politics-in the record of their accumulated pretences to virtue can produce no actions (were all their good deeds drawn up in array) to equal or approach the sole defence of the family of Calas, by that great and unequalled genius— the universal Voltaire.

I have ventured to remark on these little inaccuracies of "the greatest genius that England or perhaps any other country ever produced," (2) merely to show our national injustice in condemning generally, the greatest genius of France for such inadvertencies as these, of which the highest of England has been no less guilty. Query, was Bacon a greater

intellect than Newton?

CAMPBELL. (3)

Being in the humour of criticism, I shall proceed, after having ventured upon the slips of Bacon, to touch upon one or two as trifling in the edition

is no critic who has employed more time, wit, ingenuity, and diligence in promoting the literary intercourse between country and country, and in celebrating in one language the triumphs of another. Yet, by a strange fatality, he is constantly represented as the enemy of all literature but his own; and Spaniards, Englishmen, and Italians vie with each other in inveighing against his occasional exaggeration of faulty passages; the authors of which, till he pointed out their beauties, were hardly known beyond the country in which their language was spoken. Those who feel such indignation at his misrepresentations and oversights, would find it difficult to produce a critic in any modern language, who, in speaking of foreign literature, is better informed or more candid than Voltaire; and they certainly never would be able to discover one, who to those qualities unites so much sagacity and liveliness. His enemies would fain persuade us that such exuberance of wit implies a want of information; but they only succeed in showing that a want of wit by no means implies an exuberance of information. LORD HOLLAND.]

(1)

-"Il est trop vrai que l'honneur me l'ordonne, Que je vous adorai, que je vous abandonne,

Que je renonce à vous, que vous le désirez,

Que sous une autre loi... Zaïre, VOUS PLEUREZ?"

Zaïre, acte iv. sc. ii.

(2) Pope, in Spence's Anecdotes, p. 158. Malone's edition.

(3) ["Read Campbell's Poets. Corrected Tom's slips of the pen. A good work, though-style affected- but his defence of Pope is glorious. To be sure, it is his own cause too, but no matter, it is very good, and does him great credit."-B. Diary, Jan. 10. 1821.]

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