That portion of the British public, which is styled the nobility and gentry, indignant at being stigmatised as a mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease, in the time of the Stuarts, avenged itself for a long time, by not writing at all. Since the Hanoverian succession, the catalogue of royal and noble authors has received few additions, until within a few years, when lord Holland, lord Strangford, and the writer of the production before us, appeared the most conspicuous among those of their rank who have cultivated polite literature with assiduity and success. The last nobleman, it is well known, first distinguished himself in a poetical satire, written with all the personality, though not the party spirit of Churchhill, and combining equal vigour with accumulated bitterness. For this publication, its author has since expressed his regret; and the expression would be honourable to him if regret had been followed by reformation. But the tone of his subsequent productions affords melancholy evidence, that the evil spirit which breathed those numbers, has never been finally exorcised, nor even laid for a season. Next in order to the satire to which we have alluded, was the poem of which the present canto is a continuation. On its first appearance, opinions of its merit were, as usual, various and contradictory. Its very title was not without allurement; and awakening one of those associations, by which a world of thought may be connected with a word, the name of a pilgrimage recalled the days of romance and achievement, of knights and princes, of Bruce, St. Louis, and Richard Cœur de Lion;-when a pilgrimage was undertaken to encounter peril, or to expiate offence. It was, indeed, found on procceding, that the fashion of pilgrimages, as of every thing else, had partaken the mutations of this mutable world; but the name continued, and has doubtless attracted many an ear, which might have revolted at the ordinary denomination of travels or adventures. The heaviness of the Spenser-stanza, so unsuited to our language, however congenial to that of Italy, deterred some from accompanying the "Childe" in his peregrinations. Others persevered, and though confined to the society of a most frigid churl, found some relief to its melancholy monotony from those occasional descriptions of natural scenery which diversify what otherwise were a dreary waste. Misanthropy, when resulting

from the contact of ardent feelings with the chill atmosphere of the world, from the milk of human kindness soured by ingratitude, or the visions of fancy dispelled and disappointed by the realities of experience;-misanthropy from any cause, indeed, where the sufferer is more "sinned against than sinning," is a character of mind than which few excite deeper interest, and on the stage or in the closet, it has exercised a most powerful fascination. Very different from all this is the misanthropy of Childe Harold. It is a display of sullen and proud, and morbid selfishness; an elaborate and repulsive exhibition of the worst feelings of our nature, as seen through the deforming medium of a distempered imagination. If this be, indeed, our nature, which we take leave to doubt since though there may occasionally be monsters in the moral as in the physical world, they are not in the usual order of nature, but out of it, and who cares to see them?-but, if such were our nature, we are not obliged by the unhallowed curiosity which would force it on our inspection.

"Heaven's sovereign spares all beings but himself,

That hideous sight, a naked human heart"

and the veil that we owe to the mercy of heaven, should not rashly be rent asunder by the malice of man.

Lord Byron has been at some pains to disclaim all identity with his hero, and we are willing to take him at his word; but the striking resemblance between the features of what he advances in propria persona, and what he expresses by his characters, somewhat impeaches his credit. Be this as it may, we believe the effect of the "Childe" was, to leave on its readers, friends as well as foes, a feeling of dissatisfaction with the hero, the author, and themselves. Of the gross impieties of that work, we say nothing, as they have been sufficiently exposed in the journals of the noble author's own nation; nor have the impurities of his later productions escaped the public justice, that should ever fall on offences of which genius, instead of being a palliative, is an aggravation. Of Childe Harold we expected to see no more, but he now reappears, and we are sorry to say, utterly unchanged by time or circumstance since we last met him. Far from advancing, he seems to have retrograded in interest; and-spite of the dexterous

interweaving of matters personal to the writer with the musings of his Harold, we are but little moved. Perhaps the very frequency with which this occurs has defeated its own designs. Sorrow, like piety, we know to be a sacred and secluded thing; it shuns, rather than solicits, notice, and seems eager to recal even its inadvertent complainings. Even bodily privations-the most affecting of all calamities, because obvious to all, might repel our pity if the subject of perpetual lamentation; and Milton's allusion to his blindness, and that of Cowper to his awful mental malady, would, by too constant repetition, harden rather than excite our sympathies. The example of his favourite, Jean Jacques, might have taught this lesson to the noble author. Under a sense of real or supposed injury, to renounce his kind, and hide his miseries with himself from society, was natural and therefore, touching. Far be it from us to judge lightly of such suffering, because possibly visionary. Whether actual or imaginary in its cause, it was real in its effect on the individual, and as such commands our commiseration. All we would remark is, that he did not raise the spectre of his griefs in every page like the author before us, till we most heartily exclaim with Denmark's heir,

"Rest, rest poor ghost."

Enough, and perhaps the reader may think-too much, of character-let us come now to diction. The radical and reigning defects of lord Byron's style are its inflation and obscurity-the latter being in some degree, a necessary consequence of the former; and both together forming more than a match for any ordinary reader. Nothing can supply the want of perspicuity in prose or verse; but the absence of this quality is more severely felt in the latter style of composition where we are unwilling that a recreation should be converted into a task. In no department of the muse is this a pardonable fault, except the lyric and dramatic, and there only because the instrument in the one case, and the action in the other may supply the defect of the bard. In all other instances, obscurity is a defect, and one of which this canto affords so many specimens that we select the following only because among the earliest, to gratify the amateurs of the occult.

'Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form one fancy, gaining as we give,
The life we image, even as I do now.

What am I! Nothing; but not so art thou,

Soul of my thought! with whom I treasure earth,
Invisible but gazing as I glow,

Mix'd with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,

And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings dearth."

And again,

"What deep wounds ever clos'd without a scar?

The heart's bleed longest, and but heal to wear,

That which disfigures it; and they who war,

With their own hopes, and have been vanquish'd, bear
Silence, but not submission; in his lair,

Fix'd passion holds his breath, until the hour
Which shall atone for years! none need despair:
It came, it cometh, and will come,-the power
To punish or forgive-in one we shall be slower."

Slower than what? We do not assert, that these stanzas, and many such as these, have absolutely no meaning; we say only, it is not sufficiently apparent for the purposes of poetry, and that those who readily, and without much reflection, divine it, may venture with encouraging anticipations among the mysticisms of Jacob Bemen.

On the whole, however, we suspect lord Byron has found it for his interest to adopt this manner. Opinions and sentiments but half revealed may serve as a test of public taste; and according to the reception of these "ambiguous givings out," may. their future development be pursued or renounced. Hid under the hieroglyphic of an inuendo, much may safely be hazzarded, which it were indiscreet to divulge; and hence we may account for what else might be unaccountable-how misses can read to their mamas, and quote to their admirers, the Turkish tales of the writer without hesitation, and how grave matrons to whose offspring the works of Goëthe, Godwin, or Rousseau are sealed books, can introduce and recommend to their acquaintance a far more pernicious companion. But danger, it will be remembered, is not

the less danger for being concealed. The mine to which a match has been laid, will inevitably explode under the tread of a passenger, though he may have ventured on it once and again without injury. Lord Byron is sufficiently intimate with human nature to know that the equivoques in which he deals, will accomplish his purpose surely, however slowly. If the writer draw but the outline, the reader will ultimately fill it up. Let a meaning be hinted, and there is always a powerful ally within, to interpret the whispering of the tempter without. The asp once applied, there is no necessity of renewing the application; the venom may confidently be trusted to work its own way.

We mentioned as another characteristic of his lordship, a destitution, perhaps disdain of the grace of simplicity. All is inflated, extravagant, and hyperbolical. There is no restingplace for the feelings, where one may stop and take breath before he proceeds. The author breathes only in an atmosphere of exaggeration, and you must go on and faint not, respiring as he does-if you can. Now this is evidently artificial, and therefore, repels sympathy. It cannot be natural. No man can exist long in a perpetual fever; or, if an illustration drawn from disease befits not our poet, the sea itself-no unworthy emblem of his impetuous genius, is not always "at the flood." One example may suffice in support of the charge-it is where his lordship is about to describe the impressions common to all who have ever visited the summits of a lofty mountain; the unuttered, unutterable reflections, or rather the suspension of all reflection, when, as has been finely observed, "we rather feel than think." Behold how this natural and simple emotion is bloated into bombast in the following stanza:

"Could I embody and unbosom now

That which is most within me, could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,

All that I would have sought, and all I seek,

Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe-into one word,
And that one word were light'ning, I would speak;

But as it is, I live and die unheard,

With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword."