The bad taste of the execution does not

Misery

Lord

much injure the effect of this picture. produces strange companionship. Byron, attending the funeral of one of his few associates, who was still more an outcast from society than himself; the gloomy circumstances of Shelley's death; the solitude of the scene; the commencement of decay in the body, still clothed in the dress worn while in life; Leigh Hunt dissolved in sentimental tears in the back ground, and Byron himself endeavouring to escape from all thought, braving the melancholy, which must have forced itself upon him; and, the next morning, found" quite domestic" with the wife of another man, who was his mistress.

A few months before the event mentioned in the last extract, Lord Byron received a letter from a Mr. Sheppard. It contained

a prayer of intercession for him, written in the year 1814, by Mrs. Sheppard, which her husband had discovered among her papers, more than two years after her death. This lady was not personally acquainted with Lord Byron; she had only seen him, and had been interested like the rest of the world in his poetry. The circumstances Lord Byron

were adapted to affect any one. was touched at once through his vanity and his better feelings. His reply to Mr. Sheppard, defective as it is in sentiment and reasoning, is more creditable to him in a moral point of view, than any other composition of his which has been published. We will give it entire.*

It was originally published in a work entitled, Thoughts chiefly designed as a Preparative or Persuasive to private Devotion, by JOHN SHEPPARD. This book we have not seen; but copy the above from the English Monthly Repository, No. 229.

"Pisa, December, 1821.

"Sir,--I have received your letter.-I need not say that the extract which it contains has affected me, because it would imply a want of all feeling to have read it with indifference. Though I am not quite sure that it was intended for me, yet the date, the place where it was written, with some other circumstances which you mention, render the allusion probable. But for whomsoever it was meant, I have read it with all the pleasure, which can arise from so melancholy a topic. I say pleasure, because your brief and simple picture of the life and demeanor of the excellent person whom, I trust, that you will again meet, cannot be contemplated without the admiration due to her virtues, and her pure and unpretending piety. Her last moments were particularly striking; and I do not know,

L

that in the course of reading the story of mankind, and still less in my observations upon the existing portion, I ever met with anything so unostentatiously beautiful! Indisputably, the firm believers in the gospel have a great advantage over all others, for this simple reason, that if true, they will have their reward hereafter, and if there be no hereafter, they can be but with the infidel in his eternal sleep, having had the assistance of an exalted hope through life, without disappointment, since (at the worst for them) 'out of nothing, nothing can arise,' not even sorrow! But a man's creed does not depend upon himself. Who can say, I will believe this, that, or the other, and least of all that which he least can comprehend? I have, however, observed, that those who have begun life with extreme faith, have in the

end greatly narrowed it, as Chillingworth, Clarke, (who ended as an Arian,) Bayle and Gibbon, (once a Catholic,) and some others; while, on the other hand, nothing is more common than for the early sceptic to end in a firm belief, like Maupertuis and Henry Kirke White. But my business is to acknowledge your letter, and not to make a dissertation. I am obliged to you for your good wishes, and more than obliged by the extract from the papers of the beloved object, whose qualities you have so well described in a few words. I can assure you that all the fame, that ever cheated humanity into higher notions of its own importance, would never weigh in my mind against the pure and pious interest, which a virtuous being may be pleased to take in my welfare. In this point of view, I would not exchange the