The Arkansas advocate., 1834-10-03
 AN ESSAY. .


 By member of the Lille Rock Debating
 Society, upon ihe conparatioe genius of
 SHAKESPEARE and ByRoN-read at c
 meeting ef the Society.
 For some few of the thoughts in the following essay the author acknowledges himself indebted to the 's England and the English" of Bulwer.
 have been ill doubt whether I should not decline complying with the will of the Society, by neglecting to write the following essay. It must seem like presumption in me to attempt to delineate the genius of two men, and to mark down and express their difference ;--incompetent as l am, and as every common man Is, to comprehend and to grasp in his conception their power and magnificence. The thrush who sits brood- ing in the valley, or even singing humbly on the housetop, among the ivy, cannot expect to decide upon the towering flight of two eagles, as they soar towards the sun, over 1 the stlmnlits Of the icy mountains, spurning them with their broad wings. Nor IS this all-is is impossible to do any thing like justice to this subject-to give the nearer any adequate idea of the relative characters of these two masters of the human mind, without extending this essay to a length perhaps unwarrantable. A broad, brief and general sketch, would be both useless and unsatisfactory to this society. They will bear with me, therefore, if should ex- tend this essay to an uncommon and per- haps, tedious length, and will attempt by their own recollectons and impressions, to make up for the inability of the essayist.
 There are three points in which we must consider the works of these mighty men. The delineation of characteristic imagina- ton and fancy, in which of course IS inclu- ded the whole consideration of their merely poetic charaeter-and their diction, which is indeed only portion of the last. First then, we are to compare them with reference ' to tbAie noAer of delinaatiagg the character and passions of humanity.
 Character is the great charm of all imag- inative writing. The delineation of the passions of the human heart-the laying bare of the feelings, the motives, tile writf- ings of the mind, is the great criterion by . which we ever judge of the power of the novelist, or the poet. It Is the most diff cult part of his art, and few, very few have succeeded in 1t to any extent. The poets whose names have been handed down to us from antiquity, written in the scrolls of im- mortality, are notremarkabIe in this respect. Homer. it IS true, discriminates wonderful ly well between his characters, and has marked some of them with single stroke of the pen, so as to be known forever--but :. there IS nothing of the breathing reality about them, that there is in the characters ol Shakspe speare-nothing of that which trans- forms the statue to life, and makes of it an old and familiar acquaintance. The great trag gedians are inferior even to him; aud Virgil, deservedy celebrated as he is, has little, we may almost say, nothing of char- acter in his works. This, however, is fo- reign to our purpose. We turn from them, therefore, and open the pages of Shaks- peare and Byron, and we are immediately struck with one great difference between these two men. When Shakespeare deli neates passion, he carries us step by step from its commencement to its consequen- ces. He traces inch by inch, as it were, the workings of jealousy, the progress of guilt, the bangs of remorse, the struggles of conscience, and the gradual progress of the passions which make the paradise of the human heart hell. Byron On the contrary, takes us into the heart, when 1t IS stained most deeply with guilt, and buried most deeply in agony; he shows us the passions in their full force and intensity, and with his tremendous power of language and imagination, he presents us with their most fearful workings. Shakespeare shows us the scorpions at their birth, in the cells of the heart, and carries us along with them as they grow and increase there-Byron opens their cells and we see them at once, writhing and stinging in their full strength. Shakespeare points to us the elements which are to produce conyulsons and throes and misery there--he mixes them, and when the eruption comes we are prepared for it. Byron grasps US after the earth quake has broken out, and places us among the shattered ruins. Take. for example, the character of 0thello; we see him when jealousy has no abode in his mind-we see him generous, open and unsuspecting.- The tempter begins his work, and to his first suggestions 0thello answers:
 s.Think'st thou I'd make a life of ieal- o.isy,
 To follow still the changes of the moon With fresh suspicious l''
 But still the tempter works on, and we can see, as plainly as though the whole were ha forn o,,r e,,as inc noisna of szn,snicion and