"brother Byron," with hair shirt, and iron-spiked girdle, in some Achaian or Armenian convent. He habitually trampled on, and seems sometimes to have really despised, the opinion of the public; and yet, in some points, felt it so keenly, that, says Ebenezer Elliot, "he would have gone into hysterics had a tailor laughed at him.” And although, when the "Edinburgh Review" sought to crush him like a worm, he rose from the heel, a fiery, flying dragon; yet, to the assaults of the meaner creatures of the press, he was pervious all over, and allowed minikin arrows, which were beneath his laughter, to rouse his rage. Absurd and ludicrous the spectacle of this Laocoon, covered from head to foot with the snakes of supernal vengeance, yet bearing their burden with deep agonized silence, starting and shrieking upon the application of a thorn, which the hand of some puny passing malignant had thrust into his foot. In one respect we grant that Byron was the spirit of the age; he was the representative of its wants, its weakness, its discontents, its dark unrest-but not of its aspirations, its widening charity, and its hopeful tendencies. His voice was the deep vague moan of the world's dream-his writhing anguish, the last struggle of its troubled slumber: it has since awakened, or is awakening, and, "as a dream when one awakeneth," it is despising, too much despising, his image. He stood high yet helpless between the old and the new, and all the helpless and the hopeless rallied round to constitute him first magistrate over a city in flames-supreme ruler in a blasted and ruined realm. In one thing he was certainly a prophet; namely, a prophet of evil. As misery was the secret sting of all his inspiration, it became the invariable matter of all his song. In some of his poems, you have misery contemplating; in others, misery weeping aloud; in others, misery revolving and reproducing the past; in others, misery bursting the confines of the world, as if in search of a wider hell than that in which it felt itself environed; in others, misery stopping to turn and rend its real or imaginary foes; and in others, misery breaking out into hollow, hopeless, and heartless laughter. (What a terrible thing is the laugh of the unhappy! It is the very "echo to the seat where sorrow is throned.") But in all, you have misery; and whether he returns the old thunder in a voice of kindred power and majesty, or sings an evening song with

the grasshopper at his feet-smiles the smile of bitterness, or sheds the burning tears of anger-his voice still speaks of desolation, mourning, and woe; the vocabulary of grief labors under the demands of his melancholy genius; and never, never more, till the scene of tears and sighs be ended, shall we meet with a more authentic and profound expounder of the wretchedness of man. And as such we have deemed him to have done good service; first, because he who approaches toward the bottom of human woe, proves that it is not altogether bottomless, however deep; because, if human grief spring from human greatness, in unveiling the grief he is illustrating the grandeur of man; and, because, the writings of Byron have saved us, in this country, what in France has been so pernicious, "the literature of desperation:" they are a literature of desperation in themselves; they condense into one volume what in France has been diluted throughout many, and, consequently, our country has drained off at one gulp, and survived the experiment, the poison which our neighbors have been sipping for years to their deadly harm.

Thus, on the whole, we regard Byron neither as, in any sense, a creator, nor wholly, as a creature of his period; but rather as a stranger entangled in the passing stream of its crowd, imperfectly adjusted to its customs, indifferently reconciled to its laws-among men, but not of them—a man of the world, but not a man of the age; and who has rather fallen furiously through it-spurning its heights, and seeking its depths-than left on it any deep or definite impression. Some men are buried, and straightway forgottenshovelled out of memory as soon as shovelled into the tomb. Others are buried, and from their graves, through the hands of ministering love, arise fragrant flowers and verdant branches, and thus are they in a subordinate sense, "raised in glory." Others, again, lie down in the dust, and though no blossom or bough marks the spot, and though the timid shun it at evening-tides as a spot unblessed-yet, forgotten it can never be, for there lies the record of a great guilty life extinct, and the crown of crime sits silent and shadowy on the tombstone. This is Byron's memorial in the age. But, as even on Nero's tomb some hand unseen strewed flowers," and as "nothing dies but something mourns," let us lay a frail garland upon the sepulchre of a

ruin itself a desolation—and say Requiescat in pace, as we hurry on.

We e come, thirdly, to speak of the leading features of his artistic execution, and the materials which his genius used. And here there are less mingled feelings to embarrass the critical contemplator. Strong, direct intellect, descriptive. force, and personal passion, seem the main elements of Byron's poetical power. He sees clearly, he selects judiciously for effect from among the points he does see, and he paints them with a pencil dipped in his own fiery heart. He was the last representative of the English character of mind. His lordly independence and high-spiritedness; his fearless avowal of his prejudices, however narrow, and passions, however coarse; his constant clearness and decision of tone and of style; his manly vigor and directness; his strong unreasoning instinctive sense; his abhorrence of mysticism; and his frequent caprices-all savored of that literature which had reared Dryden, Pope, and Johnson; and every peculiarity of the English school seems to have clustered in and around him, as its last splendid specimen. Since then our higher literature is rapidly charging with the German element. Byron was ultimus Romanorum-the last, and with the exception of Shakspeare and Milton, the greatest purely English poet. His manner had generally all the clearness and precision of sculpture; indeed his clearness serves often to disguise his depth. As obscurity sometimes gives an air of mystic profundity and solemn grandeur to a shallow puddle, so, on the other hand, we have seen pools among the mountains, whose pellucidity made them appear less profound, and where every small shining pebble was a bright liar as to the real depth of the waters; such pools are many of the poems of Byron, and, we may add, of Campbell.

His dominion over the darker passions is one of the most obvious features in his poetic character. He rode in a chariot drawn, if we may use the figure, by those horses described in the visions of the Apocalypse, "whose heads were as the heads of lions, and out of their mouths issued fire, and smoke, and brimstone." And supreme is his management of these dreadful coursers. Wherever human nature is fiercest and gloomiest-wherever furnace-bosoms

have been heated seven times hotter by the unrestrained passions and the torrid suns of the east and the south— wherever man verges toward the animal or the fiendwherever misanthropes have folded their arms, and taken their desperate attitude-wherever stands "the bed of sin, delirious with its dread"-wherever devours "the worm that cannot sleep, and never dies "there the melancholy muse of Byron finds its subjects and its haunts. Driven from a home in his country, he seeks it in the mansions of all unhappy hearts, which open gloomily, and admit him as their tenant and their bard. To escape from one's self is the desire of many, of all the miserable-the desire of the drunkard, of the opium-eater, of those who plunge into the vortex of any dissipation, who indulge in any delicious dream; but it is the singularity of Byron that he uniformly escapes from himself into something worse and more miserable. His being transmigrates into a darker and more demoniac shape; he becomes an epicure even in wretchedness; he has supped full of common miseries, and must create and exhaust imaginary horrors. What infinite pity that a being so gifted, and that might have been so noble, should find it necessary perpetually to evade himself! Hence his writings abound, more than those of other authors, with lines and phrases which seem to concentrate all misery within them with texts for misanthropes, and mottoes for the mouths of suicides. "Years all winters"-what a gasp is that, and how characteristic of him to whose soul summer had not come, and spring had for ever faded! The charge of affectation has often been brought against Byron's proclamations of personal woe. But no one, we believe, was ever a constant and consistent hypocrite in such a matter as misery; and we think we can argue his sincerity, not merely from his personal declarations, but from this fact, that all the characters into whom he shoots his soul are unhappy. Tasso writhing in the dungeon. Dante prophesying evil, not to speak of imaginary heroes, such as Conrad, Alp, the Giaour, and Childe Harold, betray in what direction ran the master current of his soul; and as the bells and bubbles upon the dark pool form an accurate measurement of its depth, so his mirth, in its wildness, recklessness, and utter want of genuine gayety, tells saddest tales about

the state of a heart which neither on earth nor in heaven could find aught to cheer or comfort it.

Besides those intensely English qualities which we have enumerated as Byron's, there sprung out from him, and mainly through the spur of woe, a higher power than appeared originally to belong to his nature. After all his faculties seemed fully developed, and after critics and craniologists had formed their unalterable estimate of them, he began, as if miraculously, to grow into a loftier shape and stature, and compelled these same sapient judges, slowly and reluctantly, to amend their conclusions.-In his "Cain," his "Heaven and Earth," and his "Vision of Judgment," he exhibited the highest form of the faculty divine-the true afflatus of the bard. He seemed to rise consciously into his own region; and, certainly, for gloomy grandeur, and deep, desolate beauty, these productions surpass all the writings of the period. Now, for the first time, men saw the Pandemonian palace of his soul fully lit, and they trembled at its ghastly splendor; yet, curious it is to remark that those were precisely the poems which the public at first received most coldly. Those who shouted applause when he issued the two first elegant, but comparatively shallow, cantos of "Childe Harold," which were the reflection of other minds, shrank from him when he displayed the terrible riches of his own

We need only mention the materials on which Byron's genius fed-and, indeed, we must substitute the singular term-for his material was not manifold, but one; it was the history of his own heart that his genius reproduced in all his poems. His poetry was the mirror of himself.

In considering, fourthly, the more characteristic of his works, we may divide them into his juvenile productions, his popular, and his proscribed works. His juvenile productions testified to nothing but the power of his passions, the strength of his ambition, and the uncertainty of his aims. His "Hours of Idleness" was, in one respect, the happiest hit he ever made it was fortunate enough to attract abuse from the highest critical authority in the empire, and thereby stirred his pride, and effectually roused his faculties. It required a scorching heat to hatch a Byron! In his "English Bards" he proved himself rather