song of the night's carousal, the dreadful note of preparation that succeeds to the light intercourse of love and compliment, and the gay and jocund scene shifted with a sort of magical surprise to the bloody field of Waterloo, are subjects managed with considerable animation, brilliance, and pathos. We have great pleasure in exhibiting the specimen which has this cordial eulogy.

called from us

"Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay,
The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife,
The morn the marshalling in arms,—the day
Battle's magnificently-stern array !

The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent
The earth is covered thick with other clay,

Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent,
Rider and horse, friend, foe,-in one red burial blent!

"Their praise is hymn'd by loftier harps than mine;
Yet one I would select from that proud throng,
Partly because they blend me with his line,
And partly that I did his sire some wrong,
And partly that bright names will hallow song;
And his was of the bravest, and when shower'd
The death-bolts deadliest the thinn'd files along,
Even where the thickest of war's tempest lower'd,
They reached no nobler breast than thine, young, gallant

Howard!

“There have been tears and breaking hearts for thee,
And mine were nothing, had I such to give;
But when I stood beneath the fresh green tree,

Which living waves where thou didst cease to live,
And saw around me the wide field revive
With fruits and fertile promise, and the Spring
Come forth her work of gladness to contrive,
With all her reckless birds upon the wing,

I turn'd from all she brought to those she could not bring.” (P. 17.)

Lord Byron seems to think that we have gained nothing by the victory of Waterloo except that military renown which it suits either his poetical or philosophical spleen magnanimously to despise. Not being up to his standard of feeling we shall hold to our prejudices in favour of the importance of national glory; but we must also, with the leave of this sententious poet, consider the blood spilt at Waterloo as the price of our national safety; nor can we deem that victory vain, which has rescued us from the deadly enmity of the man who, in the words of Lord Byron himself, held the world in chains. Can Lord Byron think that any thing less than the victory of Waterloo would have done

this? or, if not done, can he say when Great Britain might have hoped for repose, or what was to save her from final exhaustion?

For our own part if we were in circumstances that cast us poor and friendless upon the compassion of men, those tender-hearted mourners for the fate of our enemies, whether at Copenhagen, Washington, Waterloo, or Algiers, are the last to whom we should resort: the Christian precept commands us to love our enemies, but not out of spite to our friends.

In the thirty-fourth stanza we are pathetically put in mind of the very contracted compass into which enjoyment in this life is confined. Lord Byron doubts whether any man can say that, in his own case, it has filled the space of three-score hours. To make that which is necessarily relative in its nature the subject of an absolute predication is unphilosophical enough; and we dispute the right of Lord Byron to hypothecate a certain description of enjoyment as that alone of which man is capable, because he himself may know no other, and then challenge us to show that it has covered the space of sixty hours. Dr. Paley, a man as wise as Lord Byron, has made a very different estimate of human happiness; and Cowper, surely not his Lordship's inferior in propriety of feeling, and the delicacy of moral tact, has told us how cheap and natural is gaiety of spirits where the head and heart are sound.

"Whom call we gay? that honour has been long
The boast of mere pretenders to the name:

The innocent are gay-the lark is gay,

That dries his feathers saturate with dew,
Beneath the rosy cloud, while yet the beams
Of day-spring overshoot his humble nest.
But save me from the gaiety of those,
Whose head-aches nail them to a noon-day bed.
From gaiety, that fills the bones with pain,

The mouth with blasphemy, the heart with woe."

We really thought to have no more to say on Lord Byron's views of the fortune and character of Buonaparte, but the shamefully distorted picture which he gives of his treatment by his conquerors must not escape its merited reprobation.

"Yet well thy soul hath brook'd the turning tide
With that untaught innate philosophy,

Which, be it wisdom, coldness, or deep pride,

Is gall and wormwood to an enemy.

When the whole host of hatred stood hard by,

To watch and mock thee shrinking, thou hast smiled
With a sedate and all-enduring eye;-

When Fortune fled her spoil'd and favourite child,
He stood unbowed beneath the ills upon him piled."

(P. 22:)

That the world has been advancing with a steady step in moral dignity is not doubted by us; but we think we may safely assert that, for compassionate tenderness towards enormous criminality amounting almost to patronage, no age has been so distinguished as the present. The clemency of those northern conquerors who entered triumphant into the rich and guilty capital of France, after suffering from its arms all that rapacity and cruelty could inflict, a clemency without an example and which is intelligible only to the discerning eye of faith, passes with little regard from the cold hearts and shallow wisdom of worldly men; while the undeserving object of that clemency, the author of more mi sery to man than any of his former oppressors, finds in man a palliator of his crimes, a commiserator of his too happy lot, and a severe upbraider of his falsely imputed indignities. In no one instance have we seen character so misrepresented, facts so perverted, or the principles of moral taste and feeling so violently distorted, as in the stanza last quoted. Oh cruel compassion! hard-hearted sensibility! What have been the "ills piled" upon this much-enduring man. Does he pine in subterraneous imprisonment, in cold, and damp, and darkness, and disease, and hunger, and sorrow, and pain; or does he eat and drink, and talk, and laugh, and swear, and swagger, as bad men usually do who are on good terms with themselves, and know themselves to be much better off than they had any right to expect. Toussaint and his sons, victims of the treachery and cruelty of this man, languished and died in a dungeon, and his unhappy memory has found no muse; but Buonaparte, such as he has been and is, and: we need not describe him, after strutting upon the deck of a British man of war, respected, complimented, admired, recorded, finds a residence prepared for him in a healthy island with every arrangement for his personal convenience, and finds in Lord Byron a poet to celebrate his " innate philosophy," his "sedate and all-enduring eye," and to complain in moving strains of "the host of hatred" that "watched and mocked him shrinking" and of the "ills upon him piled." In the name of common sense, common feeling, and common honesty, and if there is any other vulgar tie which gives truth and decency a hold upon the heart-in the name of policy and interest, and sober self-love, we call upon our countrymen to keep themselves from the pollution of this philosophical charity, fit only for a colony of convicts, where all are rogues alike, and only fit for such a community in its first establishment.

Baneful as is the moral tendency of this as well as most of the other poems of Lord Byron, we confess, and it is melancholy to confess, that much of the composition is very attractive by its

richness of description, vigour of thought, a wild luxuriance of expression, and, in particular, by a certain appearance of génuine seriousness and cordial sincerity, which win an easy entrance into young and unsuspecting bosoms. unsuspecting bosoms. Some few of the passages to which these reflections belong are so beautiful in sentiment, that virtue alone, and the view of her internal loveliness, could have furnished the pattern. Vice, in her dark interior, has no such captivating forms; and the muse of Lord Byron has known where to go for the colours and ornaments that become her best. But, alas! how could she see so much, and not covet the whole! How has it been possible for a mind which has felt "how awful goodness is," and "virtue in her own shape how lovely;" which has visited the Scripture at least for its poetical treasures; which, amidst green pastures and golden groves, has seen and confessed the ministering hand that imparts his bounties unseen; which, under the blue sky, or on the mountain top, or amidst the darkness of the storm, or in the still scenery of the forest, has so often recognized, for who can help it, the 'great and only Potentate' whom all these things testify and obey; how has it been possible for the mind of the poet who has felt so just an admiration of these things, to stop at so mean a point in its moral theory as to present us with nothing in human cha racter, but dangerous and delusive models of anti-christian virtues and dazzling crimes.

We are glad to point out in this poem passages of merit, which are untainted with the poet's personal peculiarities of sentiment, and which those can feel and enjoy whose school has been that of general nature. The banks of the Rhine, with their broken piles and ruined masses of antique grandeur, blended with the smiling products of recent culture, a variegated scene of beauty and sublimity, are depicted in three or four stanzas of great excellence. We have therefore extracted them for our readers.

"Away with these! true Wisdom's world will be
Within its own creation, or in thine,

Maternal Nature! for who teems like thee,
Thus on the banks of thy majestic Rhine?
There Harold gazes on a work divine,

A blending of all beauties; streams and dells,

Fruit, foliage, crag, wood, corn-field, mountain, vine,
And chiefless castles breathing stern farewells
From gray but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells.

"And there they stand, as stands a lofty mind,
Worn, but unstooping to the baser crowd,
All tenantless, save to the crannying wind,
Or holding dark communion with the cloud.

There was a day when they were young and proud,
Banners on high, and battles pass'd below;
But they who fought are in a bloody shroud,
And those which waved are shredless dust ere now,
And the bleak battlements shall bear no future blow.

"Beneath these battlements, within those walls,
Power dwelt amidst her passions; in proud state
Each robber chief upheld his armed halls,
Doing his evil will, nor less elate

Than mightier heroes of a longer date.

What want these outlaws conquerors should have?
But History's purchased page to call them great?
A wider space, an ornamented grave?

Their hopes were not less warm, their souls were full as brave.
"In their baronial feuds and single fields,

What deeds of prowess unrecorded died!

And Love, which lent a blazon to their shields,
With emblems well devised by amorous pride,
Through all the mail of iron hearts would glide;
But still their flame was fierceness, and drew on
Keen contest and destruction near allied,

And

many a tower for some fair mischief won,
Saw the discoloured Rhine beneath its ruin run." (P. 26.)

To these spirited and pleasing lines a good deal more succeeds about Harold's scorn of man, disdain of worldlings, love of babies, his solitary seraphic affection for some one particular female, above what simple matrimony can produce, and other phenomena of this picturesque young gentleman, which, to men of our mediocrity and old English habits, seem nothing but vanity and vapour. We love our wives and babies too, are content to live at home, cultivate good neighbourhood, assist our poor brethren, and pay our bills; and therefore cannot follow the poet with a poet's feeling through the fretful moods and sentimental impertinence of this man of straw.

The verses which celebrate the virtue of the French revolutionary general Marceau are very insipid. The poet represents him as having a "white soul: " peace to his manes! he is gone where Lord Byron's absolution will avail him little, to give such account as those soldiers can give of themselves who died on the bloody field in the cause of French liberty, in the fourth year of the French Republic. After this funereal tribute to the "white soul" of the French general, who thus fought, and thus finished his spotless career, we have again a short truce from sentiment, during which the powers of the poet's descriptive pencil again transport us to the majestic scenery of the Rhine, and again, in some measure, compensate for his