Lord there is a richness, harmony and uniform finish in the works of those masters, which are sadly wanting in Byron. So in satire, he has produced nothing to be talked of in comparison to Dryden's vigorous and bold pen, or the condensed and sententious elegance of Pope. Nothing can be more powerful and pathetic than his poetry in his loftier vein-but the same objection lies here to the want of that lima labor, which entitles a work of genius to be classed among perfect specimens of art. Byron threw off some, probably most of his compositions, with almost as much rapidity as a hackneyed writer for the daily press. Not the less instructive part of Mr. Moore's book is the insight it gives us into his manner of composing-from which the fact just mentioned appears, along with another more important, if not quite so remarkable. This is that many of the greatest beauties of those poems were put in as corrections and improvements, on second thought and with great care-the true secret of the curiosa felicitas in all times and tongues. A late writer* mentions that he saw an autograph MS. of Ariosto, at Ferrara, from which it appeared, that that great and fertile genius had actually written over sixteen different times the famous octave of the tempest. "Stendon le nube un tenebroso velo," &c. We did purpose exemplifying our criticism upon this point by a comparison between select passages of Byron, and similar ones from Milton and other classics-between some parts of Manfred, for instance, and Comus, especially the songs, or whatever they. are, of the Spirits in each. But we have left ourselves no space for doing that, which cannot be well done without a considerable degree of minuteness and prolixity. One fault or rather class of faults-which has been justly imputed to Byron's style, is, as often happens, nearly akin to its greatest virtue. Horace shall say what we mean in three words-Professus grandia, turget. His genius is, no doubt, incomparably superior to Lucan's, whose gazette ampoulée as Voltaire calls the Pharsalia, we never yet have been able to read through; but there is the same tone of emphasis and exaggeration in Childe Harold, for example, as in that poem. The famous sentence victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni, which we have always felt to be frigid and extravagant, and now believe to be so, since we find the Pére Bouhours of the same opinion, is altogether Byronian. There are too much bluster and pretension about this sort of sublimity for our taste. True grandeur is always simple, and even subdued in its tone, as we see Raphael's pictures and in the Philippics of Demosthenes. We were forcibly struck, in reading the "Prophecy of Dante," with a cer * Bombet's Life of Haydn and Mozart. tain swelling and swaggering air about the whole affair, which resembles any thing rather than the oracular and terrible brevity of that great poet. We shall give an example or two of the extravagance which we take to be Byron's besetting sin, from what is, by some critics, regarded as his master-piece, the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold-though, for our parts, we have no hesitation in assigning the honour of that distinction to Manfred. Here is a specimen of downright bombast. Above me are the Alps The palaces of nature, whose vast walls Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls Canto III. 63. Another instance of the same kind of extravagance. He is speaking of a tower— Again "Standing with half its battlements alone, "Admire, exult-despise-laugh, weep,-for here Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear." &c. Ibid. 100. Many other examples might be adduced did our limits permit; but we must observe that what we object to in Byron is not so much a frigid conceit or bombastic expression, here and there, which may be pointed out with precision, but the general tone of exaggeration a too obvious effort, running through his whole poetry, (in its sublimer strains) to be very strong and very striking. For instance, the description of the cataract, or rather cascade of Velino, in the fourth Canto, which has been much extolled, has, we confess, always appeared to us extravagant. It would be so if applied to Niagara : "The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss, To the broad column which rolls on, and shows Ibid. 66. Ibid. 71. In the 72d stanza, there is great beauty as well as power of expression, and the comparisons of the Iris of the falls to "hope upon a death-bed," and "to love watching madness," are such as could have occurred only to a man of genius, yet we think them far-fetched and not remarkably illustrative. With regard to figures of speech, in general, Byron is the most anti-classical of the romantic poets. Instead of drawing his similes, &c., from the natural world to the moral, as the ancients uniformly did, he does just the reverse. Thus, a lake "is calm as cherished hate." Zuleika was "soft as the memory of buried love." The cypress is stamped with an eternal grief, "like early unrequited love.”† Beauty or defect, this is a remarkable peculiarity of his. Of Lord Byron's heroes we have already given an account. They are almost all of them very eccentric personages, uniting the most contradictory qualities and habits. His tales are the "Sorrows of Werther" translated into Lingua Franca. His pirates are as tender as Petrarch, and his Turks, sighing for sentimental love, abjure polygamy and concubinage. But these are the privileges of poetry—they are like the recitativo of the opera. This license once conceded, every thing goes on well. Whether natural or not, Byron's heroes are the most interesting villains that can be conceived. They are just what the heroes of the drama ought to be, according to Aristotle-with "one virtue" to redeem "a thousand crimes." Byron does not strike us as a poet of very fertile invention. He composed, it is true, with considerable facility, but there is no variety either in his subjects or his style. We doubt, for this reason, whether he could have become distinguished as a dramatic poet, in the modern sense of the term. Besides this, his compositions are rather short sketches of notable objects, or occasional meditations upon them, than complete and well combined works. Still it is hard to say what the author of Manfred might not have done. One thing seems probable that had he been born at Athens, at the right time, he might have rivalled Eschylus and Sophocles, in tragedy à la Grecque. Two or three heroic dramatis persona, a simple plot, beautiful or powerful narrative and dialogue, interrupted by passionate ejaculation and choral ode-such a task would have been Byron's element. Upon the whole, excepting the two first places in our literature and Pope and Dryden who are writers of quite another stamp-we do not know who is to be placed, all things considered, above Byron. We doubt between him and Spenser-but no other name is prominent enough to present itself to us in such a competition. His greatest rival, however, was himself. We throw down his book dissatisfied. Every page reveals powers which might have done so much more for art-for glory— and for virtue! *Childe Harold, Canto IV. 173. + Bride Abyd. Canto I. 28. BYRON'S LETTERS AND JOURNALS. Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life. By THOMAS MOORE. In 2 vols. Vol. ii. New-York. J. & J. Harper. 1831. THE second volume of Mr Moore's work is one of the most interesting books in the language. The success of the author is exactly in the inverse ratio of the space which he occupies in his own pages of which he has, for this time, yielded the almost exclusive possession to the hero of his story. He has, indeed, presented us with the "Confessions" of Lord Byron, made up of the most authentic and least suspicious of all possible materials, his letters, journals, and the like relics, thrown off with the impression of ever varying mood upon them, and apparently without any intention, or even the remotest idea of giving them to the public. They exhibit, accordingly, without disguise or palliation, a view of his whole course of life during his last residence on the continent. We need not say that the life, of which the secret post-scenia and deepest recesses are thus unexpectedly laid bare to the gaze of the world, is that of a man of pleasure-dashed, it is true, with the gloom of a complexional melancholy, or more brilliantly diversified by the mingled glories of genius and literature, and abruptly and prematurely terminating in a high tragic catastrophe an atoning self-sacrifice, and a hero's grave, A book of this character, it may very well be conceived, will in spite of its attractions, or rather in consequence of them, find a place in the Index Expurgatorius of the sterner sort of censors-along with the "Mémoires de Grammont," and the "Amours des Gaules" of the Count de Bussy-Rabutin. Yet it is fit and desirable that such truths should be told. They are passages in the book of life which all would and some should read, and, although the example of such a man as Lord Byron is, no doubt, calculated to do much harm to minds of a certain stamp, we must only take care to deny it to such people, as edged tools and dangerous drugs are kept out of the way of children, and adults who are no better than children. In this naïve confession, besides, of all the infirmities and irregularities of the grandest genius, burning and bewildered with the most ungovernable passions, there is, we conceive, no artificial stimulant for the morbid appetite of sensuality. It is not addressed to the imagination, to deprave by exciting it. It is a picture of life and manners, with far more of history and philosophy in it, than of voluptuous poetry. Every thing depends, as to the effects of certain exposures, upon the associations which they have a tendency to call up. The nudities of the surgeon's cabinet, or the painter's study, are not those of the bagnio. They are "the simplicity and spotless innocence" of Milton's Paradise, to men who survey such objects with the eye of the artist or the philosopher. We repeat that we have read this book with intense interest. We do not know where the letters are to be found in any language, which better repay a perusal. Perhaps, as mere models of the epistolary style, they are not so exquisite as some that might be cited. Even of this, however, we are far from being sure. If they do not equal, for instance, in grace and elegance, those of Gray, or Lady Mary-if they are not specimens of that inimitable, ineffable bavardage, which makes those of Madame de Sévigné so entirely unique-they fully rival the best of them in spirit, piquancy, and, we venture to add, wit, while, like the epistles of Cicero, they not unfrequently rise from the most familiar colloquial ease and freedom into far loftier regions of thought and eloquence. We were particularly struck with this last peculiarity. We scarcely read one of them without being surprised into a smile--occasionly into a broad laugh-by some felicitous waggery, some sudden descent from the sublime to the ridiculous, while there is many a passage in which the least critical reader will not fail to recognize the hand that drew Childe Harold. Two other general observations have been suggested to us by the perusal of this volume: the first is that, although, as we have already remarked, it exhibits a view of Lord Byron's life when he had abjured the realm and put himself out of the pale of English society, denying its authority, defying its power, setting at nought, with foul scorn, all its conventional decencies and established opinions, he appears to us in a much more amiable and estimable light as a man, than he did in the first part of the work. We are not troubled here with any sham pleas any labored and abortive apologies of Mr. Moore, for what, he must have known to be indefensible, if he had any moral sense at all. There is none of that whining and mawkish hypocrisy which we found so peculiarly disgusting in the history of the earlier part of Byron's life. He does not tell a tale of horror, and affect to palm it off upon his reader as a candid avowal of a peccadillo-he does not charge his hero with what amounts to parricide, and then lament the unfortunate peculiarities of a parent, which, he more than insinuates, were a justification of such a monstrous perversion of nature-in short, he does not confess Byron to have been utterly heartless, by his very at |