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erary revolutionists. Coleridge did something, Scott did much, towards deposing the school of Pope; but the victory destined to be consummated by Wordsworth was still in the distance, for the voice of the Lyrical Ballads and their prefaces had reached only a few ears, and though the seed fell on good ground, the harvest was not at hand.

but in their room a crew of losels who made night hideous with their songs, who teased a wolf instead of galloping after a fox, and who it was thought, in Nottinghamshire, by decorous parents and guardians, were little better than the once famous monks of Medmenham Abbey. We learn from the volumes before us that the lord of Newstead was a just and kind landlord, going so far in his justice as to insist upon a tenant's (on pain of losing his farm) repairing by marriage a wrong he had done to a neighbour's daughter. But, on the other hand, we do not find that he was in the commission of the peace

in which case the matter might have been settled differently- and we know that he spoke and wrote against "the first gentleman in Europe."

We will now glance at Byron's position in the London world, as it is not fully stated in these volumes, and perhaps cannot well be understood by a foreign biographer. A young nobleman, bearing a name not of the best odour, and upon whom the sins of his fathers were occasionally visited, published two years before attaining his majority, a volume of poems. Now it is very proper, and not unprecedented, for young noblemen to print their verses, especially if they Nor did it mend matters that he was for a have distinguished themselves at school or time the idol of the London season; that he college by proficiency in Latin elegiacs or baffled match-making mothers; that, like Greek iambics. But Byron had been an Charles Surface, he gave many worthy idle lad at Harrow, and at Cambridge had men uneasiness," while he did not, like rather bewildered than edified the guard- Joseph Surface, soothe their alarm by his ians of sound learning and religious educa-"noble sentiments." Despite lameness and tion. In the poems themselves there was a habit of biting his nails, his were the bust not any remarkable merit, but there was a and the head of an Antinous, and when perpromise of power, if not of excellence, in sonal beauty is married to successful verse, some of them which the Edinburgh Reviewer the ordinary "curled darlings" of salons failed to detect. How entirely the critic and coteries are most provokingly distanced had mistaken the standard of the debutant in their usual pursuits- the chase of beauty was very speedily made manifest. Since or money. Not content with victory, Byron the Vanity of Human Wishes attracted the appears to have courted animosities with as praise of Pope, or the Rosciad had "ruffled much zeal as better regulated youth court the Volscians" of the stage, no satire, not favours. His vices and his virtues were even Mason's, had been comparable for alike peculiar to himself, and, unluckily also melody of verse or force of invective to the for himself, his vices were those which sociEnglish Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Sat-ety most deeply resents, and his virtues were a weapon that Byron seldom those for which society does not greatly care. wielded without signal success. Here was The polite world likes its comets to be rega novice, not wielding his sword like a ular and its Whartons to be plain; whereas dancer, but cutting and thrusting like Shaw | Byron seems to have been determined to the Life-guardsman. His "severity was move in an orbit of his own, and to weigh not conciliating" to either old or young mankind in the scales of Rochefoucault. poets. It embroiled the author, for a time, Could he have condescended to be a little with no few of the most famous wits then in coarser in his ways—a boon companion, a England. Moore and Scott soon forgave political or religious bigot-could he have the attack on them, and became Byron's paid to virtue a little more of the homage fast friends for life. Coleridge and Words- which she is popularly said to demand, not worth were less easily reconciled, and nev-a tithe of the barbs which struck him, and er really forgave the assault; while Southey increased his perversity, would perhaps have avenged it, on their and his own behalf, been levelled at his name in life or after his after a fashion which, to say the least of it, death. did not greatly redound to his credit.

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Then Byron, although his verses made him famous in all the literary and social circles of the United Kingdom, did not walk in the ways of noble youth in Britain. He was a landowner, but he was not a strict gamepreserver; he did not follow, neither subscribe to, the hounds. He did not entertain the county magnates at Newstead Abbey,

To the foregoing another cause may be added for the hostility provoked by Byron, but this was independent of merit or demerit on his part. His peculiarities, personal and poetical, hatched a brood of imitators. His misanthropy and his shirt-collars were aped by young versifiers; for, as Master Stephen thought, to be melancholy was gentlemanlike under the Regency. It might not be

given to all to swim across the Hellespont, Moore exhibits him as eccentric and selfbut it was possible for many to swim across willed, but not more so than parallels might the Thames; wolves, since the proscription be found for in the lives of other poets and of their race by Edward the Confessor, authors. Is the life of Alfieri, as narrated were difficult to obtain in Britain, but a by himself, anything but a tissue of eccendog-fight or a rat-hunt was feasible. It is tricities? Was Cicero a consistent man? curious, if not altogether edifying, to mark Is there any particular satisfaction in followByron's influence in disseminating the af- ing the career of Coleridge? Might it not fectation of despair. For ordinary mortals be possible, with the aid of such distorted devoid of gifts, poetic or prosaic, its mani- and exaggerated media as have been emfestations were curling lips and drooped eye-ployed in representing Byron, to depict any lids, biscuit and soda-water in place of beef one of the three in colours surpassing the and beer, with inversion of the usual hours liberty of fiction? Again, in these volumes of meals and sleep. These were the mutum as well as the servum pecus of Byronists. The versifiers and the novelists, practising the same arts, added to them proclamations of" blighted existence," "weariness of life," "falsehood of women," and other incentives to chronic gloom. Their "one friend" is dead, faithless, or a dog; a tent in the desert, or a lone island in the sea, with of course "one sweet spirit" for a companion, is the proper habitation for man-ever the sport of destiny and the victim of disappointment. By grave and decorous persons the copies were confounded with the supposed original, and Pope's complaint, accommodated to other times and circumstances, might have been repeated by Byron :

the belief is combated with almost wearisome repetition that the poet himself was the original from which his heroes, from Childe Harold to Don Juan, are drawn. Byron always disavowed the imputation, and we see no reason for doubting his sincerity. That his Pilgrim, his Corsair, his Renegades have a strong family likeness to one another, is not to be questioned. But the truth is that Byron's genius was anything rather than dramatic, and that although he had seen, like another celebrated wanderer, many men and many cities, his acquaintance with mankind was very restricted. The impression that one remarkable man made upon him gave colour and form to several of his most popular poems. Ali Pasha of Yanina is the model of Conrad and Lambro, and espeThere are, who to my person pay their court: cially of Giaffir. This is not the fertility of I cough like Horace, and tho' lean, am short, the dramatic poet, nor that of an epic one, Ammon's great son one shoulder had too high, like Scott; but the want of it will account Such Ovid's s nose, and "Sir! you have an eye." for Byron's scanty repertoire without assumGo on, obliging creatures, make me see ing that he sat for the portraiture of his own All that disgraced my betters, met in me. heroes. Yet even this defect in the art of Say for my comfort, languishing in bed, Just so immortal Maro held his head: individualizing must be stated with some And when I die, be sure you let me know qualification. It is true that the principal Great Homer dy'd three thousand years ago. characters of the Byronic poems are cast in the same mould. They have been wronged These volumes would have possessed a by their fellow-men, and they become wrongfar more vital interest for readers than they doers in requital. Either they are solitary do if the writer, instead of deploring and Timons, like Manfred; or exhausted vocombating the misrepresentations of others, luptuaries, like Sardanapalus; or they sahad imparted to us her own personal knowl-vour, like Alp and the Giaour, of Karl Moor edge of Lord Byron. We had reason to expect from such a quarter much that would be new; but we find little that is so, except a re-arrangement of existing materials, or fresh contradictions of lightly made or rash, and perhaps wholly groundless, assertions. The authoress is justly indignant at the reiterated attempts made in Byron's lifetime and since, by English and foreign writers, by some who knew him a little, and by many who did not know him at all, to represent him as an awful and anomalous being, of mystery all compact. But such illusions his dramatic force was expended upon his were dispersed by the admirable narrative verse and prose romances. of Moore, his friend, and by the unworthy Again, it is objected to Byron, by no less and unscrupulous disclosures of Leigh Hunt. a critic than the late Lord Macaulay, that

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and Kotzebue. Yet the pencil which sketched Marino Faliero and Werner, Israel Bertuccio and Ulric, Angiolina and Josephine, was capable, had it been turned seriously to dramatic composition, of very distinct and powerful stage portraiture. And indeed, if they are compared with contemporary productions, Byron's dramas are not alone defective in this respect. What dramatic power is displayed by Coleridge, Wordsworth, or Southey, each of whom dis malignis wrote a play? As for Scott,

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means a slight one in substance, will set such curiosity in its proper light. The real drift of the anxious inquirers is, what was the creed, or perhaps the Church, of these illustrious men ? We have read all that the authoress has to say on this subject, but we do not find ourselves much the wiser for her arguments or her information.

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even in descriptive and meditative verse, in which he excelled, the descriptions and the meditations were accessories to one dark and melancholy figure in the background that of the poet himself. We think that this observation will apply to Lucretius and Virgil, and even to Cowper, with as much propriety as to Byron. For what is it that gives such absorbing interest That one so richly endowed as Byron was to many passages in the profound wail of intellectually, so impulsive, so susceptible Lucretius, but the felt though invisible pres- of the beautiful in nature and in art, should ence of its author; one while tossed and have been wholly devoid of religious feelbewildered upon a shoreless ocean of matter, ings is highly improbable. He is a careless at another resting upon some green islet of and incompetent reader of Shelley's writings content, heedless of the storm which drove who takes from them the impression that him thither, or of the storm that will soon the poet was irreligious, as well as unsweep him from it? What is it affects us Christian; and he is equally in the wrong 'most deeply in the tender and meditative who, after studying Spinosa, fails to see verse of the Georgics, but the presence of that he was a devout, as well as a just, man. Virgil's spirit beside the winding Mincius Byron has been judged in this respect inor amid the white herds of Clitumnus? It considerately, if not harshly. On the eviis because Cowper is "in the background" dence of some grave and many flippant that we derive pleasure from such humble passages in his poetry- some of which are elements of description as slow-winding assigned to the speakers in his dramas, and, Ouse," the peasant's nest, Olney-bridge, taken out of their context, are bad or misthe maze at Weston Underwood, a garden leading witnesses against him- he has been and a greenhouse. And it is so also with charged with the infidelity of a Diderot or the pictures of Parnassus and Albania, the Holbach. A sounder and fairer inference white marbles of Pentelicus, and with that is that Byron's indifference was confined to most expressive of all symbols of departed creeds and formularies of religion, and that majesty, the Colisseum; the unseen, but not his acquaintance with theology was as unfelt, presence of their poet clothes them slender as is that of many a country squire with a grandeur and a beauty investing their who goes regularly to his parish church. own with fresh radiance. Byron's latest But he seems never to have relished Sheldefender has dwelt with befitting earnest- ley's metaphysical speculations, and to have ness on his presence among the scenes he shared in none of his incredulity as to the describes, with a clearer perception of its worth and wisdom of either the Hebrew or influence than the critic of thirty years ago. Christian Scriptures. In this, as in other Byron's religion, again, was at the time a instances, he was his own enemy; his unsubject of much, though not very profitable, lucky propensity to banter and mystify curiosity. It was said, we believe, by Fon- those he came in contact with confirmed the tenelle, that all wise men are of one reli- impression engendered by his irregular and gion, but what that religion is no wise man eccentric life; and he paid in full the penwill tell another." The authoress of "By-alty of affectation by being reputed and reron, judged by contemporary testimony," ported to be worse than he was. is naturally eager, being doubtless a good Catholic herself, to show that, if far from being what might be wished in respect of either his faith or his works, he was yet imbued with strong religious susceptibility, and uniformly treated with respect all who, like Mr. Kennedy or Mrs. Shepherd, strove to put him in the right path. Such curiosity displays the strong interest which Byron, and all concerning him, excited in his contemporaries; nor is such interest altogether peculiar to him, for similar inquiries have been made about Shakspeare's and Bacon's religion. We incline to think that in all these cases the question ought to be differently worded; and a very slight verbal change in the form of it, though by no

If we had been asked, before Lord Byron, jugé par les Témoins de sa Vie, came into our hands, what we regarded as his capital error throughout life, we should have replied, "affecting to be what he was not "; and this opinion is strengthened by the Marquise de Boissy's account of him. We find in him the seed of many virtues, but the harvest of many vices. At school he was the generous protector of the weak; in early manhood and throughout his life he was deeply attached to his friends; his sympathies with the oppressed of the earth ended only with his days, and nothing in his life was so creditable or hopeful as were the closing scenes of it at Missolonghi. He had sought and he had found that which, earlier

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possessed, might have kept him from many merit of being mostly intelligible; in fact,
follies, and rescued him from many vices. it seems to have been constructed by the
Even those who differed from him in his author to prove that he has the power when
policy for the Greeks acknowledged his he likes of discharging his style from the
clear vision, his firm purpose, his devotion rugged affectations and irritating freaks in
to the cause, his generosity to the objects which he indulged himself in his essays on -
of it. But all these gifts, and the promise representative men. The view that he
of even greater gifts than these, were takes might at first be thought an encour-
marred by his perversity. He had the fatal agement to those whom Coleridge com-
weakness of preferring singularity to sin- pared to sponges, creatures of low organi-
cerity. In his search of singularity he was zation with a power of absorption, who re-
unfortunately successful both at home and produce what they take in, discoloured;
abroad; but it cooled his friends, it heated but in reality he gives a definite position to
his enemies, it stained and enfeebled an ori- the mere spoilers of the dead on the field
ginally noble nature, and it made shipwreck, of letters. His great object is to show
before youth had entirely departed from that genius is more human than people
him, of a gallant vessel. He might have think. He does not say so in terms, for it
been added to the list of "mighty poets in would directly contradict statements pre-
their misery dead," by the great poet whom viously made by him, but that is his mean-
he misunderstood, and who also misappre-ing, plainly enough implied. There is al-
hended him; and should some future Dante most as much superstition talked of genius
portray the assemblage of poets in the as there is of religion. The word seems
shades, the group in which the author of provocative of a kind of rhetorical frenzy
Childe Harold will be the central light may when it drops from the pen. Shakespeare
well be formed by Lucretius, Marlowe, did some mischief when he gave us that pic-
Chatterton, and Percy Shelley.
turesque description of the poet's eye roll-
ing about and taking in the heavens; Shake-
speare, who probably had on his desk at
the time scraps of English folk-lore and
notes of Greek names, and was making a
play out of them and his head, just as Mr.
Boucicault might compose an original sixty
thousand-pounder from the half-forgotten
novel of a defunct Irishman. To be sure,
the mental processes which the two men
whom we have put together could bring to
bear on the stuff in hand differ considera-
bly; but are they essentially unlike, or is
the difference only in degree? That is just
the point the reader of Mr. Emerson's es-
say will find discussed. He appears to
think that our greatest men of letters have
been the boldest adapters, and goes further
in stating in substance that they could not
possibly do anything but work up old forms.
He makes use of a felicitous phrase which
critics will find serviceable. There is, he
says, an "assimilating power." We might
add, yes, and an assimilating trick; and
one makes your Shakespeare, and the other
makes your clever fellow. But in this con-
nection why does Mr. Emerson state-

So many questions, handled or suggested in these volumes, still remain for examination, that we must defer our comment upon them to another time. At present we content ourselves with remarking that, although we can understand why this narrative has been eagerly expected, we cannot see why it has been so long delayed. The work of composition may well and properly be tardy, but that of compilation and arrangement needs not be so. Of composition, in the sense of a just ordonnance of parts in their relation to one another or to a whole, there is absolutely none. Even the arrangement of the chapters is very arbitrary and lax; many portions of the first volume being equally suitable to the second, and many sections of each volume being, for anything appearing to the contrary, put where they stand, either because the manuscript was ready for the printer, or because the authoress desired that her book should follow the course of free conversation rather than the rules which usually regulate biography or even panegyrical discourses.

From the London Review.
MR. EMERSON ON QUOTATION AND
ORIGINALITY.

THE current number of the North Ameri-
can Review contains a remarkable paper by
Mr. Emerson, touching the question of
originality in literature. It has the special

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we value in Coleridge his excellent knowledge and quotations perhaps as much, possibly more, than his original suggestions?" Who that has read the Friend" will agree with this? Coleridge, of all English writers, was the greatest seeker for new things. When he took an idea into his mind, it went, so to speak, through a chemical change at once, and the precipitate was another substance. Burton is the most enjoyable

quoter in our language. Coleridge was even affectedly and often wearisomely independent; we do not believe he ever kept another man's thought by him in its first shape.

lished.

"Genius is, in the first instance, sensibility, the capacity of receiving just impressions from the external world, and the power of co-ordinating these after the laws of thought." This is a clear and a fine definition, but does In making out his case Mr. Emerson does it not extinguish that word "create"? Mr. not embarrass himself much by studying Emerson knows well that we have nothing the genealogical tree of a notion, although to do with creating, that the phrase is loosehe cannot resist the temptation of bringing ly and absurdly used; he knows it so well Plato and Baron Munchausen together. that he writes this essay in point of fact to This sort of exercise belongs to the or- prove that "assimilation" is all we can der of inquiry which institutes a search justly speak of, and yet he must jar the after things not generally known. But whole tone of a harmonious and symmetrithere is one amazing inconsistency in the cal essay in order to introduce a characterarticle. After we have read of the "assimi-istic flourish of grand nonsense. We are, lating power," and begin to understand that however, glad to see such a paper pubgenius is fed, and requires to be fed that it cannot intellectually survive on air, and Mr. Emerson does good in casting a that it must necessarily be indebted, as stone at a superstition. Spontaneous geneverything on this earth is indebted, to its eration of ideas is just as impossible a thing surroundings, we come across such a sen- as endeavouring to form live creatures by tence as this a Bulwerian sentence orna- sending electric shocks through water. mented with capital letters, "The divine Genius is neither more nor less than what resides in the new. The divine never quotes, Mr. Emerson has well expressed in the senbut is, and creates. The profound appre-tence we have quoted above. It is a pity hension of the Present is Genius, which he did not stop there, for we are sorry to makes the Past forgotten." We don't know find him again in the clouds at the finish, or what the "divine" is here, and as for the conundrum hidden between the two large P's of Past and Present, it must be given up; but, if there is a gleam of sense in the passage, it discloses an idea which is altogether inconsistent with what follows.

rather, knocking about the ceiling of his own brown study, like Mr. Home in his drawing-room on a certain occasion, now historical; yet the first portion of Mr. Emerson's paper shows that his tendency to defy the laws of gravitation is not chronic.

THE sum expended in publishing the fac-simile of "Domesday Book" has been £3,556, and the receipts from the sale of copies have been £1,938. There being, however, 4,947 copies in store, which, when sold, will produce £1,900, and for which there is a steady demand, it is expected that the publication of this work will more than cover the cost of its production.

THE sale of M. Brunet's library, at the Hotel Druôt, has produced the sum of 305,825 francs. A copy of "Gargantua" in two volumes, edition 1535, was sold for 8,750 francs; and "Le Premier Livre du Discours de l'Estat de Paix et de Guerre," a translation of Machiavelli, edition of 1544, and which copy had belonged to Francis the First, was run up to 5,000 francs.

MR. THOMAS WRIGHT is compiling another collection of Anglo Saxon and early English vocabularies for Mr. Joseph Mayer, of Liverpool.

the Lord Chamberlain and Miss Burdett Coutts, artists will no longer have the privilege of using that lady's house for the purpose of giving concerts.

Ir appears that the splendid old organ at St. Bartholomew-the-Great, West Smithfield, has been lost. During the rocent extensive restorations of that edifice this well-known instrument was consigned to the care of an organ-builder, who for preservation "warehoused" it, and, marvellous to relate, it cannot be found. So the parish authorities have contented themselves with £40 as compensation, and have put up a small instrument in its place.

Ir is said that the original scores of most, if not all, of Handel's Oratorios are or were in the Queen's Library at Buckingham Palace.

THOSE who are admitted to intimate personal intercourse with the Pope say that he is not only a good singer for a man of his years, but an ex

In consequence of a correspondence between cellent violoncello player.

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