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AND FEMALE SCRIBBLERS.

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stein, or the Modern Prometheus," &c. &c. and other disgusting compounds of unnatural conception, false taste, and rank absurdity; but that they should palm their nonsense upon a writer of established credit is monstrous, and deserves the strongest public reprehension. We want none of those fee-faw-fum writers, who task their labouring minds to invent new monsters, to degrade their species into imaginary forms of disgust and horror, and to augment the source of mental misery to themselves and others. It is from the perusal of similar productions that the minds of half our reading females are unhinged, and they are not only disqualified for the duties of wife and mother, but, like children, they are frightened at their own shadows, and only fit for meditation among the tombs and charnel-houses. There can be no more appropriate name for the writers of such works than resurrection-men, and for the readers than that of bone-pickers, as skeletons are their only delight. The proper subjects for poetical composition are the delineations of natural objects; and to pervert it to distortion, or to the creation of monsters, is a degradation of the human species, and of the human genius, and shews an utter depravation of taste, and a consciousness of inability to do justice to those matters, which are within the comprehension of every man of com

mon sense.

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ROMANCE CHARACTERISED.

"Romance! disgusted with deceit,
Far from thy motley court I fly,
Where Affectation holds her seat,
And sickly Sensibility;

Whose sickly tears can never flow
For any pangs excepting thine,
Who turns aside from real woe,

To steep in dew thy gaudy shrine.

Adieu! fond race, a long adieu !
The hour of fate is hov'ring nigh ;
Ev'n now the gulph appears in view,
Where, unlamented, you must lie;
Oblivion's black'ning lake is seen,

Convuls'd by gales you cannot weather,
Where you, and eke your gentle queen,
Alas! must perish altogether."

His Lordship, in his "Fugitive Pieces," thus takes his leave of "Romance," fit only for the " votive trains of girls and boys" as he expresses it, and resolves

"No more to tread its mystic round,
But leaves its realms for those of Truth."

See his "Ode to Romance."

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CHAPTER VIII.

Lord Byron's melancholy not dissipated by travel.-Aspersions on his character by Reviewers, and others, examined and refuted. His concern with Drury Lane Theatre introduces him amongst the Literati, Amateurs, and Patrons, Actors and Actresses, &c. &c.-Mr. Thomas Moore.-Mr. R. B. Sheridan. Mr. Kean.-Lord Byron makes one in the social circles.-Symptoms and rumours of matrimonial discordance.

THE melancholy which had gained so great an ascendancy over Lord Byron's temperament, did not appear to have been much diminished by the variety of scenes which he had witnessed abroad; it was become habitual to him; it led him to shun rather than to seek company. But, at times, as if unable to bear his own sensations, and to drive them away; but oftener, unable to resist the solicitations of his young friends to make one in their convivial circles, he would launch out with a seeming resolution to drown all his inward griefs in the care-dispelling pursuits of other young men of fortune and fashion. This course for a short time he would follow up with ardour: but he was no sooner withdrawn from the sight of all beholders, than, as if he felt remorse for those deviations, he would seclude himself with his books,

VOL. I.

225

MESSRS JEFFREY,

or at his writing-desk, and be inaccessible, until the repeated solicitations of some friends would rouse him up to exertion, and again draw him into the vortex of company. Again he would disappear, and "his Lordship is in the country," would be the answer to all inquiries for days and weeks together, at the very same time that his Lordship was shut up in his apartment, with no other company than his Muse! Thus frolic and gaiety, or gloomy seclusion held the sway alternately, and his life was a continual struggle between his passions and his judgment, dissipation and remorse, ever in extremes, and ever visibly unhappy, even in the moments of the greatest hilarity. Yet, that this disrelish for company, and the pursuits common to youth, did not proceed from morosity or misanthropy, must be evident from the friendships which he formed with several gentlemen of kindred souls and congenial manners ;— friendships which continued through life, and left a void, deeply felt and deplored by the survivors. Another strong proof is, that his Lordship, being satisfied with the chastisement which, in the moment of agony and irritation at the insult offered to the first-born of his muse, he had inflicted on the offenders in his satirical poem of "Scotch Reviewers and English Bards," he suppressed an edition, after the expense had been incurred of printing it, and cordially corresponded with Mr. Jeffrey (his first and bitterest

SCOTT, AND MOORE.

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opponent), Mr. Walter Scott, and Mr. Thomas Moore, and to the two last he dedicated some of his works in a manner that did honour to both parties. He was not to be deceived, however, by the sneaking praise of the temporising reviewers, tremblingly alive whilst the lash whistled over their heads, and which they alternately bestowed and retracted; qualifying a little good, with a greater portion of bad. Lord Byron knew his men, and the just value of their praise or censure.

They fell upon the young Lord, fancying them

selves the Churchills of the age, and that

"Bards may be Lords, but 'tis not in the cards,
Play as we will, to turn Lords into Bards."

But when the bard and the lord were evidently united, and the Edinburgh Reviewers had felt the force of his wit, they began to make overtures to draw him over to their party. It would not do, however; and his Lordship had too much sense as well as spirit to be made the tool of a hireling reviewer. However, a kind of armistice was concluded until his Lordship gave a most unpardonable offence by the publication of his "Curse of Minerva," and the accompanying notes, wherein he so grievously attacked the Plunderer of Greece, and when he added to his other remarks, that he rejoiced the plunderer was not an Englishman, but a Scot, every mouth in the pack was again opened in full cry against him; not in a

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