BYRON, Lord George Gordon, the only son of Captain Byron, and Catharine, sole child and heiress of George Gordon, Esq. of Gight, in Scotland, was born on the 22d January 1788, in Holies Street, London. His father, a man of dissolute and extravagant habits, died in 1791, at Valenciennes, leaving his widow, who was then residing at Aberdeen, to support herself and her son on a pittance of L.135 per annum. In 1794 his cousin, the grandson of the fifth Lord Byron, died in Corsica, and he became the presumptive heir to the peerage. The fifth Lord Byron died in 1798, and he succeeded to tho title; and in the autumn of that year removed with his mother from Aberdeen to Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire, which since the reign of Henry VIII. had been in the possession of the ancient family of Byron. Lord Byron had received the first rudiments of education at a grammar-school in Aberdeen. He was next sent in 1799 to the school of Dr Glennie at Dulwich, and in 1801 to Harrow, which he quitted in 1805. He is described by the head master of the latter school, the Rev. Dr Drury, as sensitive in disposition, intractable except by gentle means, shy, defectively educated, and ill prepared for a public school; but exhibiting the germs of considerable talent, though it does not appear to have been then foreseen in what mode his talents would display themselves. He excelled in declamation; and oratory, rather than poetry, was thought to be the prevailing bent of his genius. He seems to have been an active and spirited boy, at first unpopular, but finally a favourite; ardent in his school friendships, and jealous of the attachment of those whom he preferred. Among these the most learned were Lords Clare and Delawarr, the Duke of Dorset, Mr Harness, and Mr Wingfield. He was on friendly but less intimate terms with the most distinguished of his school-fellows,· the present Sir Robert Peel. In classical scholarship Lord Byron acknowledged himself very inferior to Peel; but he was thought superior to him and to most others in general information. This was indeed extensive to a very unusual degree; and he has left on record an almost incredible list of works, in many various departments of literature, which he had read before the age of fifteen.

In October 1805 he was removed to Trinity College, Cambridge. He slighted the university, neglected its studies, and rebelled against its authority. Meanwhile he had commenced his poetical career, but at first feebly and with faint promise of future excellence. He first attempted poetry as early as 1800, under the inspiration of a boyish attachment to his young cousin, a daughter of Admiral Parker. In November 1806 he caused to be printed by Ridge, a bookseller at Norwich, for private circulation, a small volume of poems, among which one, written at the age of fifteen, is remarkable as containing a presage of his future fame. Some of the poems in this collection were of too licentious a character; and, on the advice of Mr Becker, a gentleman to whom the first copy had been presented, it was with praiseworthy promptitude suppressed, and replaced by a purified edition. In 1807 appeared his first published work, The Hours of Idleness; a collection of poems little worthy of his talent, and chiefly remembered through the castigation which it received from the Edinburgh Review. To this critique, which galled but did not depress him, we owe the first spirited outbreak of his talent, the satire entitled English Hards and Scotch Reviewers, which was published in March 1809. The length of this poem was increased, and many changes made in it, during its progress through the press. Censures of individuals were turned into praises, and praises into censures, with all the fickleness and precipitance of his age and character. It contained many harsh judgments, of which he afterwards repented; and able and vigorous as the satire was, and creditable to his talents, the time soon arrived when he was laudably anxious to suppress it. A few days previous to the publication of this [7:5:757] satire, on the 17th of March 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords. He seems on that occasion to have keenly felt the loncliness of his position. He was almost unknown to society at large; there was no peer to introduce him; and his mortification led him to receive with ungracious coldness the welcome of the lord chancellor. His unfriended situation inspired him with disgust, and chilled his incipient longing for parliamentary distinction; and even a few days after taking his seat he retired to Newstead Abbey, and engaged with his friend Mr (now Sir J. C.) Hobhouse to travel together on the Continent. About the end of June the friends sailed together from Falmouth to Lisbon; travelled through part of Portugal and the south of Spain to Gibraltar; sailed thence to Malta and afterwards to Albania, in which country they landed on the 29th of September. From this time till the middle of the spring 1811, Lord Byron was engaged in visiting many parts of Greece, Turkey, and Asia Minor; staying long at Athens, Constantinople, and Smyrna. He touched again, on his return, at Malta, quitted it on the 2d of June, and early in July, after two years absence, landed in England. His affairs during this period had fallen into disorder, and it became advisable to sell either Roehdale or Newstead. The latter he was then most anxious to retain, and professed that it was his “only tie” to England, “and if he parted with that, he should remain abroad.” In a letter to a friend, written during his homeward voyage, he thus expresses his melaneholy sense of his condition: “Embarrassed in my private affairs, indifferent to public,— solitary without the wish to be social,—with a body a little enfeebled by a succession of fevers, but a spirit I trust yet unbroken,—I am returning home without a hope, and almost without a desire.” This gloom was still deepened by numerous afflictions. His mother died on the 1st of August, without his having seen her again since his return to England; and he was deprived by death of five other relatives and friends between that and the end of August. “In the short space of one month,” he says, “I have lost her who gave me being, and most of those who made that being tolerable.” Amongst the latter were Wingfield, and Matthews, the brother of the author of the Diary of an Invalid. At this period of distress he was approaching unsuspectingly a remarkable epoch of his fame. He had composed while abroad two poems very different in character, and which he regarded with strangely misplaced feelings; the one called Hints from Horace, a weak imitation of his former satire; the other the first two cantos of Childe Harold. The former he intended to publish immediately; but the latter he thought of so dispargingly (owing probably to the injudicious comments of the single friend who had .hitherto seen it), that it might probably have never become known to the public but for the wise advice of Mr Dallas. In compliance with the request of that gentleman, he withheld the Hints from Horace, which would have been injurious rather than beneficial to his fame, and allowed Childe Harold to be offered for publication. He received from his publisher, Mr Murray, L.600 for the copyright, which he gave to Mr Dallas. The publication was long delayed; for though placed in the publisher’s hands in August, it did not appear till the beginning of March 1812. It, however, received during this interval considerable improvements; and the fears of the author were allayed by the approbation of Mr Gifford, the translator of Juvenal, and then editor of the Quarterly Review. The success of the poem exceeded even the anticipation of this able critic; and Lord Byron emerged at once from a state of loncliness and neglect, unusual for one in his sphere of life, to be the magnet and idol of society. As he tersely says in his memoranda, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.” A few days before the publication of Childe Harold, he attracted attention, but in a minor degree, by his first speech in the House of Lords on the subject of the house-breaking bill. He opposed it, and with ability; and his first oratorical effort was much commended by Sheridan, Sir F. Burdett, and Lords Grenville and Holland. He had prepared himself, by having committed the whole of this speech to writing. It was well received, and he was extremely gratified by its success. He might perhaps have beenincited by the praises it received to seek political distinction; but the greater success which attended his poem turned his ambitious feelings into a different channel. He nevertheless spoke again about six weeks afterwards, on a motion of Lord Donoughmore, in favour of the claims of the Roman Catholics, but less successfully than before. Less clearness was displayed in the matter of his speech, and his delivery was considered as theatrical. In the autumn of this year he wrote an address at the request of the Drury-lane Committee, to be spoken at the re-opening of the theatre; and not long afterwards he became a member of that committee. The same autumn he engaged to sell Newstead for L. 140,000, of which L.60,000 was to remain in mortgage on the estate for three years; but this purchase was never completed. In May 1813 appeared his Giaour, a wildly poetical fragment, of which the story was founded on an event that had occurred at Athens while he was there, and in which lie was personally concerned. It was written rapidly, and with such additions during the course of printing as to be more than trebled in length, and swelled from about four hundred lines to upwards of fourteen hundred. On the 2d of June in this year he spoke for the last time in the House of Lords, on presenting a petition from Major Cartwright. He had now apparently ceased to regard parliamentary distinction as a primary object of ambition.

In his journal of November 1813 is the following entry: “I have declined presenting the debtors’ petition, being sick of parliamentary mummeries. I have spoken thrice, but I doubt ray ever becoming an orator; my first was liked, my second and third, 1 don’t know whether they succeeded or not; I have never set to it con amore.” In November he had finished the Bride of Abydos (written in a week), and it was published the following month. The Corsair, a poem of still higher merit and popularity, appeared in less than three months afterwards: it was written in the astonishingly short space of ten days. During the year 1813 he appears to have first entertained a serious intention of marriage, and became a suitor to Miss Millbanke, only daughter and heiress of Sir Ralph Millbanke. His first proposal was rejected; but the parties continued on the footing of friendship, and maintained a correspondence, of which, and of that lady, he thus speaks, and it may be presumed with the most perfect sincerity, in his private journal: “Yesterday a very pretty letter from Annabella, which I answered. What an odd situation and friendship is ours! without one spark of love on either side, and produced by circumstances which in general lead to coldness on one side, and aversion on the other. She is a very superior woman, and very little spoiled, which is strange in an heiress—a girl of twenty—a peeress that is to be in her own right—an only child, and a savante, who has always had her own way. She is a poetess, a mathematician, a metaphysician, and yet withal very kind, generous, and gentle, with very little pretension: any other head would be turned with half her acquisitions and a tenth of her advantages.” In September 1814 he made a second proposal by letter, which was accepted; and on the 2d of January 1815 he was married to Miss Millbanke, at Seaham, the country seat of her father. The only issue[7:5:758] of this marriage, Augusta Ada, was born on the 10th of December of that year. We cannot lift the veil of their domestic life; we can only state the unfortunate results. On the 15th of January 1816, Lady Byron left London for Kirkby Mallory, the residence of her parents, whither Lord Byron was to follow her. She had, with the concurrence of some of Lord Byron’s relatives, previously consulted Dr Baillie respecting the supposed insanity of her husband, and by the advice of that gentleman had written to him in a kind and soothing tone. Lady Byron’s impressions of the insanity of Lord Byron were soon removed, but were followed by a resolution on her part to obtain a separation. Conformably with this resolution, Sir Ralph Millbanke wrote to Lord Byron on the 2d of February, proposing such a measure. This proposal Lord Byron at first rejected, but afterwards consented to sign a deed to that effect. Dr Lushington, the legal adviser of Lady Byron, has stated in a published letter, that he “considered reconciliation impossible.” Of the circumstances which led to such an event, and on which Dr Lushington founded such an opinion, the public is at present uninformed. We are therefore, in absence of full and satisfactory evidence, bound to suspend our judgment on the merits of this melancholy case, and dismiss it with the foregoing statement of the leading facts. In the course of the spring he published the Siege of Corinth and Parisina. He also wrote two copies of verses, which appeared in the public papers, Pare thee well, and A Sketch from Private Life ; of which his separation from his wife, and the instrumentality which he imputes to an humble individual in conducing to that separation, were the themes. This private circumstance had become the subject of general comment. The majority of those who filled the circles in which Lord Byron had lately lived declared against him, and society withdrew its countenance. Lord Byron, deeply stung by its verdict, hastily resolved to leave the country; and on the 25th of April 1816 he quitted England for the last time. His course was through Flanders and along the Rhine to Switzerland, where, at a villa called Deodati, in the neighbourhood of Geneva, he resided during the summer. From thence he made two excursions, one in the central part of Switzerland, in company with Mr Hobhouse, and another shorter excursion with a celebrated poetical compeer Mr Shelley, with whom he became acquainted soon after his arrival at Geneva. He remained in Switzerland till October, during which time he had composed some of his most powerful works; the third canto of Childe Harold, the Prisoner of Chillon, Darkness, the Dream, part of Manfred, and a few minor poems. In October he quitted Switzerland in company With Mr Hobhouse, and proceeded by Milan and Verona to Venice. Here he resided from the middle of November 1816 to the middle of April 1817. During this period his principal literary occupation was the completion of Manfred, of which he re-wrote the third act. He visited Rome for about a month in the spring, and then returned to Venice, at which city, or at La Mira, in its immediate vicinity, he resided almost uninterruptedly from this time till 1816. He wrote during this period the Lament of Tasso, Beppo, the fourth canto of Childe Harold, Marino Faliero, the Foscari, Mazeppa, and part of Don Juan. The licentious character of his life while at Venice corresponded but too well with the tone of that production. His able biographer and friend Mr Moore, after adverting to his liaison with a married Italian woman, says: “Highly censurable in point of morality and decorum as was his course of life while under the roof of Madame * * it was (with pain I am forced to confess) venial in comparison with the strange headlong career of license to which, when weaned from that connection, he so unrestrainedly, and, itmay be added, defyingly, abandoned himself.” This course of unbridled libertinism received its first check from the growth of attachment which, as it was still unhallowed, not even the good which it may seem to have done in the substitution of a purer sentiment, will enable us to regard with satisfaction. In April 1819 he first became acquainted with the Countess Guiccioli, the young and newly-married wife of an elderly Italian nobleman. A mutual attachment, which appears to have commenced on the part of the lady, soon arose between Lord Byron and the Countess Guiccioli. Their passion was augmented by occasional separation, the interest excited by her severe illness during one of their forced absences, and theimprudent complaisance of the husband in leaving them much in the society of each other. They long lived together in a half-permitted state of intimacy, the lady appearing with the consent of her husband to share his protection with that of Lord Byron. But this equivocal position soon terminated in the separation of the Count and Countess Guiccioli. The lady then went to reside with her father; and under his sanction, during the next three or four years, she and Lord Byron enjoyed the intimate possession of each other’s society. In December 1819 Lord Byron quitted Venice for Ravenna, where he remained till the end of October 1821. During this period he wrote part of Don Juan, the Prophecy of Dante, Sardanapalus, a translation of the first canto of Pulci , s Mor-gante Maggiore, and the mysteries, Heaven and Earth, and Cain; the latter of which may be justly considered as among the most faulty in principle, and powerful in execution, of the productions of his genius. He also wrote a letter on Mr Bowles’s strictures on Pope, dated 7th February 1821, in which he defends the poet against his commentator; and an answer to an article in Blackwood’s Magazine, entitled “Remarks on Don Juan,” but this was never published.

During this period an insurrectionary spirit broke out in Italy; the Carbonari appeared; and secret societies began to be formed. The brother of the Countess Guiccioli, Count Pietro Gamba, .espoused the cause of the insurgents, and through his means Lord Byron became implicated in the proceedings of that party. In his private journal of 16th February 1821, Lord Byron complains of the conduct of that gentleman and others, in sending to his house, without apprising him, arms with which he had a short time previously furnished them at their request, and thereby endangering his safety, and exposing him to the vengeance of the government, which had lately issued a severe ordinance against all persons having arms concealed. In July 1821, the father and brother of Madame Guiccioli were ordered to quit Ravenna, and repaired with that lady, first to Florence, and afterwards to Pisa, where they were joined in October by Lord Byron. He remained at Pisa till September 1822, Madame Guiccioli still living with him under the sanction of her father, who, in consequence of one of the conditions of her separation from her husband, was always to reside with her under the same roof. While here he lost his illegitimate daughter Allegra, and his friend Shelley, who was drowned in July 1822 in the Bay of Spezia. The body was burned, and Lord Byron assisted at this singular rite. His principal associates during this time had been the Gambas, Shelley, Captain Medwyn, and Mr Trelawney. He had also become associated with the brothers John and Leigh Hunt, in a periodical paper called the Liberab a transaction certainly disinterested, inasmuch as it does not appear that he expected either profit or fame to accrue to himself from the undertaking; and beseems to have allowed his name to be connected with it from a desire to serve the Hunts, of whom Leigh Hunt, with his wife and family, [7:5:759]received an asylum in his house. An affray with a serjeant-major at Pisa rendered his residence in that city less agreeable; and his removal from it was at length determined by an order from the Tuscan government to the Gambas to quit the territory. Accordingly, in September 1822, he removed with them to Genoa. While at Pisa he had written, besides his contributions to the Liberal, Werner, the Deformed Transformed, and the remainder of Don Juan.

In April 1823 he commenced a correspondence with the Greek committee, through Messrs Blaquiere and Bowring, and began to interest himself warmly in the cause of the Greeks. In May he decided to go to Greece; and in July he sailed from Genoa in an English brig, taking with him Count Gamba, Mr Trelawney, Dr Burns, an Italian physician, and eight domestics; five horses, arms, ammunition, and medicine. The money which he had raised for this expedition was 50,000 crowns; 10,000 in specie, and the rest in bills of exchange. In August he arrived at Argostoli, the chief port of Cephalonia, in which island he established his residence till the end of December. His first feelings of exaggerated enthusiasm appear to have been soon cooled. Even as early as October he uses, in letters to Madame Guiccioli, such expressions as, “I was a fool to come here ;” and, “of the Greeks I can’t say much good hitherto; and I do not like to speak ill of them, though they do of one another.” During the latter part of this year we find him endeavouring to compose the dissensions of the Greeks among themselves, and assisting them with a loan of L.4000. About the end of December 1823 he sailed from Argostoli in a Greek mistico and after narrowly escaping capture by a Turkish frigate, landed on the 5th of January 1824 at Missolonghi. His reception here was enthusiastic. The whole population came out to welcome him; salutes were fired; and he was met and conducted into the town by Prince Mavrocor-dato, and all the troops and dignitaries of the place. But the disorganization which reigned in this town soon depressed his spirits, which had been raised by this reception, and filled his mind with reasonable misgivings of the success of the Greek cause. Nevertheless his resolution did not seem to fail, nor did he relax in his devotion to that cause, and in his efforts to advance it. About the end of January 1824 he received his commission from the Greek government as commander of the expedition against Lepanto, with full powers both civil and military. He was to be assisted by a military council, with Bozzari at its head. Great difficulties attended the arrangement of this expedition, arising principally from the dissensions and jealousies of the native leaders, and the mutinous spirit of the Suliote troops; with which latter, on the 14th of February, Lord Byron came to a rupture, in consequence of their demand, that about a third part of their number should be raised from common soldiers to the rank of officers. Lord Byron was firm, and they submitted on the following day. Difficulties in the civil department harassed him at the same time, aggravated by a difference of opinion between himself and Colonel Stanhope, on the subject of a free press, which the latter was anxious to introduce, and for which, on the other hand, Lord Byron considered that Greece was not yet ripe. On the 15th of February, the day of the professed submission of the Suliotes, he was seized with a convulsive fit, and for many days was seriously ill. W hile he was on a sick bed, the mutinous Suliotes burst into his room, demanding what they called their rights; and though his firmness then controlled them, it soon afterwards became necessary to get rid of these lawless soldiers, by the bribe of a month’s pay in advance,—and with their dismissal vanished the hopes of the expedition against Lepanto. After this he turned his mind chiefly to the fortification of Missolonghi, the formation of a brigade, and the composition of the differences among the Greek chieftains. Since his attack in February he had never been entirely well. Early in April he caught a severe cold through exposure to rain. His fever increased, and in consequence of his prejudice against bleeding, that remedy was delayed till it was too late to be effectual. On the 17th (the second day after he had been bled) appearances of inflammation in the brain presented themselves. The following day he became insensible, and about twenty-four hours afterwards, at a quarter past six in the evening of the 19th of April 1824, Lord Byron breathed his last. Public honours were decreed to his memory by the authorities of Greece, where his loss was deeply lamented. The body was conveyed to England, and on the 16th of July was deposited in the family vault, in the parish church of Hucknell, near Newstead, in the county of Notts. By his will, dated 29th July 1815, Lord Byron bequeathed to his half-sister, Mrs Leigh, during her life, and after her death to her children, the monies arising from the sale of all such property, real and personal, as was not settled upon Lady Byron and his issue by her. The executors were Mr Hobhouse, and Mr Hanson, Lord Byron’s solicitor.

The personal appearance of Lord Byron was prepossessing. His height was five feet eight and a half inches; his head small; his complexion pale; hair dark brown and curly; forehead high; features regular and good, and somewhat Grecian; eyes light grey, but capable of much expression. He was lame in the right foot, owing, it was said, to an accident at his birth; which circumstance seems always to have been to him a source of deep mortification, little warranted by its real importance. It did not prevent him from being active in his habits, and excelling in various manly exercises. He was a very good swimmer; successfully crossed the Hellespont in emulation of Leander; swam across the Tagus, a still greater feat; and, greatest of all, at Venice in 1818, from Lido to the opposite end of the grand canal, having been four hours and twenty minutes in the water without touching ground. In his younger days he was fond of sparring; and pistol-shooting, in which he excelled, was his favourite diversion while in Italy. In riding, for which he professed fondness, he did not equally excel. He was nervous both on horseback and in a carriage, though his conduct in Greece, and at other timfes, proved his unquestionable courage on great occasions. He had always a fondness for animals, and seemed to have preferred those which were of a ferocious kind. A bear, a wolf, and sundry bull-dogs, were at various times among his pets. The habits of his youth, after the period of boyhood, were not literary and intellectual; nor were his amusements of a refined or poetical character. He was always shy, and fond of solitude; but when in society, lively and animated, gentle, playful,and attractive in manner; and he possessed the power of quickly conciliating the friendship of those with whom he associated. He was very susceptible of attachment to women. The objects of his strongest passions appear to have been Miss Chaworth, afterwards Mrs Musters, and the Countess Guiccioli. His amours were numerous, and there was in his character a too evident ρroneness to libertinism. His constitution does not seem ever to have been strong, and his health was probably impaired by his modes of life. He was abstemious in eating, sometimes touching neither meat nor fish. Sometimes also he abstained entirely from wine or spirits, which at other times he drank to excess, seldom preserving a wholesome moderation and regularity of system. His temper was irascible, yet placable. He was quickly alive to tender and generous emotions, and performed many acts of disinterested liberality, even towards[7:5:760] those whom he could not esteem, and in spite of parsimonious feelings, which latterly gained hold upon him. He was a man of a morbid acuteness of feeling, arising partly from original temperament, and partly from circumstances and habits. He had been ill educated; he had been severely tried; his early attachments, and his first literary efforts, had equally been unfortunate; he had encountered the extremes of neglect and admiration; pecuniary distresses, domestic afflictions, and the unnerving tendency of dissipated habits, had all conspired to aggravate the waywardness of his excitable disposition. It is evident that, in spite of his assumed indifference, he was always keenly alive to the applause and censure of the world; and its capricious treatment of him more than ordinarily encouraged that vanity and egotism which were conspicuous traits of his character.

The religious opinions of Lord Byron appear, by his own account of them, to have been “unfixed but he expressly disclaimed being one of those infidels who deny the Scriptures,and wish to remain “in unbelief.” In politics he was liberal, but his opinions were much influenced by his feelings; and, though professedly a lover of free institutions, he could not withhold his admiration even from tyranny when his imagination was wrought upon by its grandeur. He would not view Napoleon as the enslaver of France; he viewed him only as the most extraordinary being of his age, and he sincerely deplored his fall.

Lord Byron’s prose compositions were so inconsiderable that they may almost be overlooked in the view of his literary character. His letters nevertheless must not pass wholly unnoticed. Careless as they are, and hastily written, they are among the most lively, spirited, and pointed specimens of epistolary writing in our language, and would alone suffice to indicate the possession of superior talent. The critical theories of Lord Byron were remarkably at variance with his practice. The most brilliant supporter of a new school of poetry, he was the professed admirer of a school that was superseded. The most powerful and original poet of the nineteenth century, he was a timid critic of the eighteenth. In theory he preferred polish to originality or vigour. He evidently thought Pope the first of our poets; he defended the unities; praised Shakspeare grudgingly; saw little merit in Spencer; preferred his own Hints from Horace to his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ì and assigned his eminent contemporaries Coleridge and Wordsworth a place far inferior to that which public opinion has more justly accorded to them.

The poetry of Lord Byron produced an immediate effect unparalleled in our literary annals. Of this influence much may be attributed, not only to the real power of his poetry, but also to the impressive identification of its principal characteristics with that which, whether truly or falsely, the world chose to regard as the character of the author. He seemed to have unbosomed himself to the public, and admitted them to view the full intensity of feelings which had never before been poured forth with such eloquent directness. His poems were as tales of the confessional, portraitures of real passion, not tamely feigned, but fresh and glowing from the breast of the writer. The emotions which he excelled in displaying were those of the most stormy character,—hate, scorn, rage, despair, indomitable pride, and he dark spirit of misanthropy. It was a narrow circle, but in that he stood without a rival.

His descriptive powers were eminently great. His works abound in splendid examples; among which the Venetian night-scene from Lioni’s balcony, Terni, the Coliseum viewed by moonlight, and the shipwreck in Don Juan, will probably rise foremost in the memories of many readers. In description he was never too minute. He selected happily, and sketched freely, rapidly, and boldly. He seized the most salient images, and brought them directly and forcibly to the cye at once. There was, however, in his descriptive talent, the same absence of versatility and variety which characterized other departments of his genius. His writings do not reflect nature in all its infinite change of climate, scenery, and season. He portrayed with surpassing truth and force only such objects as were adapted to the sombre colouring of his pencil. The mountain, the cataract, the glacier, the ruin,— objects inspiring awe and melancholy,—seemed more congenial to his poetical disposition than those which led to joy or gratitude.

His genius was not dramatic; vigorously as he portrayed emotions, he was not successful in drawing characters; he was not master of variety; all his most prominent personages are strictly resolvable into one. There were diversities, but they were diversities of age, clime, and circumstances, not of character. They were merely such as would have appeared in the same individual when placed in different situations. Even the lively and the serious moods belonged alike to that one being; but there was a bitter recklessness in the mirth of his lively personages, which seems only the temporary relaxation of that proud misanthropic gloom that is exhibited in his serious heroes; and each might easily become the other. It may also be objected to many of his personages, that, if tried by the standard of nature, they were essentially false. They were sublime monstrosities;— strange combinations of virtue and vice, such as had never really existed. In his representations of corsairs and renegades, he exaggerates the good feelings which may, by a faint possibility, belong to such characters, and suppresses the brutality and faithlessness which would more probably be found in them, and from which it is not possible that they should have been wholly exempt. His plan was highly conducive to poetical effect; but its incorrectness must not be overlooked in an estimate of his delineation of human character. In his tragedies there is much vigour; but their finest passages are either soliloquies or descriptions, and their highest beauties are seldom strictly of a dramatic nature. Many of his dialogues are scarcely more than interrupted soliloquies; many of his arguments such as one mind would hold with itself. In fact, in his characters, there was seldom that degree of variety and contrast which is requisite for dramatic effect. The opposition was rather that of situation than of sentiment; and we feel that the interlocutors, if transposed, might still have uttered the same things.

It is to be deplored that scarcely any moral good is derivable from the splendid poetry of Lord Byron. The tendency of his works is to shake our confidence in virtue, and to diminish our abhorrence of vice ;—to palliate crime, and to unsettle our notions of right and wrong. Even many of the virtuous sentiments which occur in his writings are assigned to characters so worthless, or placed in such close juxtaposition with vicious sentiments, as to induce a belief that there exists no real definable boundary; and it may perhaps be said with truth, that it would have been better for the cause of morality, if even those virtuous sentiments had been omitted. Our sympathy is frequently solicited in the behalf of crime. Alp, Conrad, Juan, Parisina, Hugo, Lara, and Manfred, may be cited as examples. They are all interesting and vicious. In the powerful drama of Cain. the heroes are Lucifer and the first murderer; and the former is depicted, not like the Satan of Milton, who believes and trembles, but as the compassionate friend of mankind. Resistance to the will of the Creator is represented as dignified and commendable; obedience and faith as mean, slavish, and contemptible[7:5:761]. It is implied that it was unmerciful to have created us such as we are, and that we owe the Supreme Being neither gratitude nor duty. Such sentiments are clearly deducible from this drama. Whether they were i those of Lord Byron is not certain; but he must be held accountable for their promulgation. (γ. γ .)

Byron’s Island, in the Pacific Ocean, discovered by Commodore Byron in the year 1765. It is about twelve miles in length, and is low, flat, and full of woods, in which the cocoa tree is predominant. It is inhabited by savages. Long. 173. 16. E. Lat. 1. 18. S.