at our feet in the last stage of human wretchedness, and be not half so much affected, as by a well managed relation of his sufferings it is the power of painting the past and poisoning every recollection that constitutes impassioned eloquence. Heartrending emotion never yet reached the heart of man at onceour judgment requires a sort of explanatory evidence that the emotion we see is well founded, and if well founded sincere.

Fools only are affected by seeing others laugh or weep without knowing the cause. A man of great fancy may even fancy feeling, and act emotion until he excite a corresponding pulse in our hearts. Absolute suffering may groan with truth enough at its depth to excite a temporary participation, but we are all anxious to get released from the obligations of sympathy, from such rehearsals of the passions; and we forget such excitement, when the object disappears. But it is memory, unrelenting memory, past feeling, whose tremendous power is so absolute, and so irresistible. Every groan, and throb, and tear, is dwelt uponand our sufferings are magnified like the virtues of those we have lost. They are in the mist of other days, and who can say how much they deceive us? Byron addresses his wife, his child, and his home-and the world, knowing how much he had felt on less worthy occasions, believed he felt then in the same proportion. They sympathise with the exile, who is a husband and a father, and forget the poet.

Indeed these odes contain but feeble evidences of sorrow; show them to any man who knows nothing of the author's "family history"-and if he really knows Byron, he will declare them to be spurious-but if he does not, he will probably call them very pretty and very affecting, and never look at them again, or inquire for the author.

We are satisfied of the justice of these observations, and the conclusion would be irresistible, that as these last poems contain evidence of feeling, their author did not feel: what then could induce him to publish such poems? We reply, that lord Byron did feel keenly, terribly-and he would have bled to death in silence-but he felt resentment, and that is the key to this whole system of contradictions.-While feeling urged his silence, resentment drove him to a publick appeal-he would enlist the sympathies of others for his sorrows:-resentment could make

him write in spite of his heart, but it could not make him write well. That ungovernable ambition was roused, he would make a people the judges of his family sorrows; and this brought lord Byron to the degrading indelicacy of opening his fire side to vulgar curiosity. That ambition will never die in his lordship's bosom, but it will assume a nobler form; the time will come, when resentment will fail to support him, beneath the overwhelming consciousness of having rendered his wife and himself a spectacle for impertinent pity, and a subject for coffee house gossip. Then he will feel, and he will deserve to feel. The sanctity of family grievances should never be penetrated by the unpitying eye of the publick-nothing will justify-nothing excuse it.

Admit that these sorrows were dragged before a mob of sarcastick fashionables; but Byron, himself should have stood there, the husband of his wife and the father of his child-and have defended the altar of family confidence, from pollution: if any other hand had dared to raise the veil, and bring his shrinking family before such ruffian censors, he should have exacted a retribution worthy of himself. But Byron, the husband, the father, should never have been seen hanging his "farewell" labels on her he loved, for the unfeeling curiosity of a cold world to sneer at.

We now come to the last and LEAST of all his poems.-We will commence with his Curse of Minerva: he has taken one of the most beautiful dresses of another of his poem, and thrust into it an awkward, and incongruous satire. He makes Minerva, the patron Goddess of Athens, descend from heaven with abundance of pomp-to devote a Scotchman to the furies. There are not twenty of the new lines in this poem that are worthy of Byron -two of them we shall give-of devoted Ireland, he says the furies

"Wring her vitals with their fiery hands."

And the column of flame, with which this exasperated automaton, threatens London that

"Shakes his red shadow o'er the startled Thames."

The ode to St. Helena seems a sort of atonement for the triumphant shout he uttered over Buonaparte in Elba, when his vic

tim was bound and bleeding. We say let such tyrants "eat their hearts away." But poesy should not shake her plumes over such prey; it is exquisitely beautiful. "Lines to his daughter," are very pretty because a father wrote them. The "Lily of France," is no better than some of his earliest poems, which he affects to lament so seriously. We would gladly leave the subWho would ject, but Byron, Byron must not be spared.

believe that a man who could write the "Corsair," "Childe Harolde," and "British Bards," could ever stoop to such ribaldry, such contemptible doggerel, as the "Adieu to Malta," and the "Triumph of the Whale?"

How fortunate for the admirers of genius, that Byron had nothing so superlatively contemptible as either, in his childish poems. They would never have been reviewed, and lord Byron might never have been stung into excellence. But for the honour of Poets and Poesy, we say from our hearts, before that great man shall add another blot to his glorious reputation, may he be gathered to his fathers!-If his friends publish such poems without his knowledge, may Apollo find some punishment proportioned to their offence! We can wish them none greater, than that they may have their understandings so enlightened as to comprehend his beauties.

There is a "pungent reply" too, at the end of the volume, which, we confess, nearly disheartened us. We looked at it again and again-we consulted our friends-some suggested it was probably an acrostick-some a riddle, some one thing, and some another. At length we have discovered it to be only a pungent "quiz"-Stupid as the lines of Fitzgerald are, they are the spirit of wit, to lord Byron's reply. The joke it seems is this: Fitzgerald has an unhappy habit of rehearsing his wit in Beerhouses, and Byron very clumsily tells him so.-Fitz says, 'I don't read what you write,' and Byron, with amazing readiness, retorts And I don't read what you write."

In the name of Apollo, and dignity, and decency, let not lord Byron stoop to such disgraceful, grovelling, straw-fencing as this-Let him imagine his own Conrad cheating at all-fours, for a mug of beer, and he has a fair picture of himself.

Byron has a constitutional sullenness about him that would keep him respectable, was not his ambition so unbounded, so licentious. He has made one part of mankind his admirers by his genius-another by sympathy with his family sorrows, and now he would endear himself to the very vulgar by familiarity. He has left the path assigned him by the muses, in pursuit of common reputation, disputing with ballad-mongers and epigrammatists; and this is like the ambition of Goldsmith to imitate the tricks of the monkey.

Byron has not an uncommon FANCY, but he has uncommon FEELING. There are no wandering beams of the God dancing on the surface of his thoughts-his rays are concentrated, and they burn in the very core of his heart.

Byron's fall has been as unexpected as his ascent. Had he made his attack on the Edinburgh Reviewers with the desperate ferocity of Rhoderic Dhu, he would have met with the same fate-but now, in a most intemperate manner, with "might unquestioned," he descends to the ignoble amusement of branding a woman with eternal infamy.

Byron should never trifle, his imagination is not light and luxuriant enough for flowers-but it can produce the eternal mountain plant, whose arms can prop the heavens, and confine the storm.

Byron appears frequently to abandon himself to his feelings, but there is never an instant when he is not completely their master-in their wildest moments his thoughts find ther wantonness trammelled by a mighty though invisible constraint. There are moments when he strikes upon our morality and it almost crumbles beneath his touch-We get to approve crime, it is made so dazzingly glorious by his magick. He has a supernatural power over us, but its existence still depends in a great measure upon ourselves; we are willing to be enslaved, for we never feel half so free and bouyant as when lifted along by the tempest of his Genius-with no will but his, we feel FREE. But if he once suffers us to regain a firm foothold, whence Criticism may lift her eye keenly and steadily upon him, undazzled by the halo of reputation, her glance will be unwearied and searching She may acknowledge his supremacy again, but she will first be satisfied that

it exists.

Nothing but long silence can save Byron for this age; the next will have forgotten his foibles and his faults, while his glories and beauties will be hourly recording themselves on their hearts with imperishable effect.

A.

FOR THE PORTICO.

Elizabeth, Queen of England, once more.

H. Y. S. tendering his most respectful compliments to the Editors of the Portico, and their correspondents, begs leave, briefly to offer some remarks on the subject in controversy, between S. and himself. In so doing, while he declines taking notice of any remarks of his adversary, which might be suspected of conveying an "invidious implication;" he disclaims, for himself, any design of insinuating any thing invidious, concerning a gentleman, to whom he is necessarily indifferent, as his very name is unknown to, and unconjectured by him. That Elizabeth's danger was not enhanced, by the life of Mary, is an assertion which it appears to him, cannot be "proved wholly unfounded;" on the contrary, he is of opinion, that the whole history of her reign goes to prove the truth of the proposition. Whether the assertion is true or not, is, however, for the present purpose, wholly immaterial. H. Y. S. is not the advocate of Mary, he admits, because he cannot deny, (nor does he wish to deny,) that she was an adultress, and a murderess. He is not advanced in life, nor much "hacknied in the ways of men;" yet he has seen enough of the world to have learned, that of two contending parties, it is very possible both may be in the wrong; and though without pretensions to science, he has made sufficient progress in ethical knowledge to know, that even the criminal has rights which it is criminal to violate. He meant to deny that Mary's life increased Elizabeth's danger, but if it did, that circumstance alone gave Elizabeth no right over the life of Mary.

Such right she could only acquire through extreme necessity, or by means of a state of just war. For H. Y. S. avers again, that Mary was not amenable to the laws of England, she was not subject to them by birth, she could only become subject to