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a distinction which involved its perils. His heart was one which was wel worth the winning, and one which might have been won and kept too but the event showed that the heiress and only daughter of Sir Ralph either had not powers equal for the task, or did not apply them in the proper manner. The cause of the dispute and separation has never been fully explained and the less that it is inquired into the better, now that Death has interposed his bar to reconciliation; but if anguish of feeling and depth of power in the expression of it, be any proofs of the strength or the sincerity of affection, it must be admitted that, whatever may have been his faults or his indiscretions, the affection, even after the rupture appears to have been strongest on the part of Byron. The verses whic he wrote upon this occasion are well known and generally remembere his “Farewell ” to her, whom he still loved, being one of the most tenders and his strictures upon her, whom he considered at least a principal caus of the separation, were amongst the most severe that ever have bee given to the world. The noble bard, ejected, as it were, from scene: which once had promised him the sweets of domestic peace, appeare again upon the wide world an accomplished candidate for more extende and imperishable renown. He left England; traversed the battle-scene o Waterloo ere the bones of all the warriors who had fallen in that dread ful field were hidden in the earth, or deprived of their freshness an their sap. He ascended by the banks of the Rhine, contemplated the ma jesty of the Alps, and the beauty of the lake of Geneva; and soon after the third canto of the pilgrimage of Harold made its appearance. Thi was one of the most splendid of his works, and one in which the supe riority of his genius over that of every other writer of the time triumphe in great and unapproachable splendour. About this time, he had, beside some minor pieces, favoured the world with the "Prisoner of Chillon. "Manfred," and the "Lament of Tasso." During his residence in Ital Byron completed the pilgrimage of the Childe in a poem of the mo tender feeling, and the most exquisite taste. Under the genial sky Italy his mind became a little playful, and he published, in a new an lighter stanza, the tale of Beppo, and the more wild and romantic on of Mazeppa. Here too, he planned that, which, had he lived to complet it, must have been considered as the most daring and the most wonderf of all his works, - Don Juan. General in its satire, and warm and glow ing in its colouring, it excited a great deal of clamour, especially amon those upon whom, in the execution of it, the hand of the poet had bee heavy. Don Juan was the most singular and the most original poem the had ever appeared in England. It was made up of the most cutting an searching satires, mixed with dissections of the human heart, and delinea tions of human passion and frailty which were drawn both to and wit the life, and therefore threw all those who dreaded exposure into th most serious alarm. There was much more both of politics and of per sonality in this poem than in any of his former ones, and upon this accoun the outcry against it was more loud and general. The stuff of immor tality was, however, in the poem, and not a few of those who wer offended at its appearance will probably find (if indeed they shall live a long) their only memorials in it, after all which, good or bad, they hav done for themselves, shall be forgotten.

Alternately with Don Juan a new species of writing, or at least on which was new to Lord Byron, made its appearance, in the shape o dramatic poems, and "mysteries,"-that is, sacred dramas. These, with continuation of Don Juan, as far as sixteen cantos, were the last poetica

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works of the illustrious bard. His attention was soon directed into a new, and perhaps more glorious channel than ever,-a desire to lend the whole influence of his powers to the freeing of the struggling Greeks from the | ignominy and thraldom of bondage. Greece had been dear to him from the first moment that he had landed upon her shores, seen her beauty and felt her degradation; from his own energy and the esteem in which he was held by the leading patriots among the Greeks, there is little doubt that, had his life been preserved, his fame, as a hero of the most pure and independent kind, would have stood as high in the estimation of the present and of future ages, as his fame as a poet; but it seemed that in the mighty name, which he had acquired in the latter capacity, his destiny was complete; and lest any one man should overtop all the world in two of the most admirable and admired attributes of human intellect and exertion, he was cut off in the prime of life, and at the very commencement of his heroic career. The circumstances which induced him to embark in the Greek cause it would be idle to investigate; the advantages which they would have derived from his aid, it would be in vain to guess; those who knew his heart can easily estimate the former; and the sorrow of those to whom he is thus prematurely lost is the best commentary upon the latter. Lord Byron, while entering with much ardour, and with well organized assistance, into the service of his favourite people, then engaged in a struggle for liberty, to which every well constituted mind wished success, as seized with a rheumatic fever at Missolonghi (a place where he had Gace before been seriously indisposed) on the ninth day of April 1824, and sher ten days of severe indisposition, he yielded to the universal lot of man, upon the 19th day of the same month, to the unspeakable grief of his friends, both old and new, and the irreparable loss of the literary world. No man could have been more lamented than he was by the leading men among the Greek patriots; and the death of no individual could have caused such a sensation in his own country. When the sad tidings arrived, it was circulated from man to man in whispers barely audible; upon the following day, so great was the avidity to take a fresh glance the writings of that transcendent genius, who was never more to astothem by his boldness and sublimity, melt them with his tenderness, please them by his wit, or delight them with his beauty, that, by mid-day, scarcely a volume of his works could be borrowed in any of the libraries. Although Byron has been cut off in the midst of his days, and at the Commencement of a new branch of his career-a branch of it, which, had it been allowed to grow to its full extent, would have caused monuments to be raised and peans sung to his memory, wherever the light of genius dawned or the foot of freedom came; yet no man of the age has put in NO strong and so successful claims to immortality; and had he lived to see Liberty enthroned anew in his beloved Greece, and Science and Song dwelling again in his adored Athena, the pleasure and the triumph would have been too exquisite and too great for mortal man. It was enough that the voice of his inspiration breathed upon the dry bones of that land of ay wonders and of long slavery,-that he traversed the whole of Greece, aching his crusade of freedom, not in the cold words of the lip, but the warm breathings of the heart, against her barbarian rulers,-and that, when his own eye closed, it closed in sight of a people among whom Was his heart living and dead. The world will envy Greece in this; every one will wish that his own air had fanned the burning cheek of the bard, when his heart gave its last throb for the deliverance of man from the trammels of civil and intellectual slavery. But Greece was the land ap

!

pointed by Heaven for this high honour. Let her sons catch, keep, an exercise to its full extent, that mighty spirit which proved too vast fo dwelling more than thirty-six brief years in the frame of Byron. Losin him in his bodily presence, let them keep him in their minds. Let ther carry on and complete the work of their deliverance; let them buil Athens anew, and people her again with the chosen spirits of the earth and when they have done this, let them raise upon the loftiest summ of the Acropolis, the monument of Lord Byron, bearing the chiselle likeness of a head, which found no superior among their own models, an left no equal among living men.

A CHARACTER OF LORD BYRON.

BY SIR WALTER SCOTT.

AMIDST the general calmness of the political atmosphere, we have bee stunned from another quarter by one of those death-notes which ar pealed at intervals, as from an archangel's trumpet, to awaken the sou of a whole people at once. Lord Byron, who has so long and so ampl filled the highest place in the public eye, has shared the lot of humanity His Lordship died at Missolonghi on the 19th of April. That might genius which walked amongst men as something superior to ordinary mor tality, and whose powers were beheld with wonder, and something ap proaching to terror, as if we knew not whether they were of good or o evil, is laid as soundly to rest as the poor peasant whose ideas never wen beyond his daily task. The voice of just blame and of malignant censur are at once silenced; and we feel almost as if the great luminary o heaven had suddenly disappeared from the sky, at the moment when ever telescope was levelled for the examination of the spots which dimmed it brightness. It is not now the question what were Byron's faults, what hi mistakes? but, how is the blank which he has left in British literatur to be filled up? Not, we fear, in one generation, which, among man highly gifted persons, has produced none who approach Byron in origin ality, the first attribute of genius. Only thirty six years old :-so much already done for immortality,-so much time remaining, as it seems to u short-sighted mortals, to maintain and to extend his fame, and to aton for errors in conduct and levities in composition; who will not grieve tha such a race has been shortened, though not always keeping the straigh path such a light extinguished, though sometimes flaming to dazzle and to bewilder? One word on this ungrateful subject ere we quit it for ever The errors of Lord Byron arose neither from depravity of heart,— fo nature had not committed the anomaly of uniting to such extraordinary talents an imperfect moral sense,-nor from feelings dead to the admira tion of virtue. No man had ever a kinder heart for sympathy, or a mor open hand for the relief of distress; and no mind was ever more formed for the enthusiastic admiration of noble actions, provided he was con vinced that the actors had proceeded upon disinterested principles. Lord Byron was totally free from the curse and degradation of literature,-it jealousies, we mean, and its envy. and its envy. But his wonderful genius was of

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nature which disdained restraint even when restraint was most wholesome. When at school, the tasks in which he excelled were those only which he undertook voluntarily; and his situation as a young man of rank, with strong passions, and in the uncontrolled enjoyment of a considerable fortune, added to that impatience of strictures or coercion which was natural to him. As an Author, he refused to plead at the bar of criticism; as a man, he would not submit to be morally amenable to the tribunal of public opinion. Remonstrances from a friend, of whose intentions and kindness he was secure, had often great weight with him; but there were few who could venture on a task so difficult. Reproof he endured with impatience, and reproach hardened him in his error, so that he often resembled the gallant war-steed, who rushes forward on the steel that wounds him. In the most painful crisis of his private life he evinced this irritability and impatience of censure in such a degree, as almost to resemble the noble victim of the bull-fight, which is more maddened by the squibs, darts, and petty annoyances of the unworthy crowds beyond the lists, than by the lance of his nobler, and, so to speak, his more legitimate antagonist. In a word, much of that in which he erred was in bravado and scorn of his censors, and was done with the motive of Dryden's despot,

"To show his arbitrary power.”

It is needless to say that his was a false and prejudiced view of such 1 contest; and if the noble Bard gained a sort of triumph, by compelling the world to read his poetry, though mixed with baser matter, because it his, he gave in return an unworthy triumph to the unworthy, besides deep sorrow to those whose applause, in his cooler moments, he most valued. was the same with his politics, which on several occasions assumed tone menacing and contemptuous to the constitution of his country; hile, in fact, Lord Byron was in his own heart sufficiently sensible, not ly of his privileges as a Briton, but of the distinction attending his high birth and rank, and was peculiarly sensitive of those shades which conate what is termed the manners of a gentleman. Indeed, notwithstanding having employed epigrams and all the petty war of wit, when such d have been much better abstained from, he would have been found, had a collision taken place between the aristocratic parties in the State, rting all his energies in defence of that to which be naturally belonged. His own feeling on these subjects he has explained in the very last canto Don Juan; and they are in entire harmony with the opinions which expressed in his correspondence, at a moment when matters appeared to approach a serious struggle in his native country.

we have seen

We

what

are not, however, Byron's apologists, for now, alas! he needs none. His excellencies will now be universally acknowledged, and his faults (let hope and believe) not remembered in his epitaph. It will be recollected a part he has sustained in British literature since the first appearance Childe-Harold,a space of nearly sixteen years. There has been no for posing under the shade of his laurels, no living upon the resource of art reputation; none of that coddling and petty precaution, which little

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ore

red

hors call "taking care of their fame." Byron let his fame take care of itself. His foot was always in the arena, his shield hung always in the st; and although his own gigantic renown increased the difficulty of the ggle, since he could produce nothing, however great, which exceeded the public estimates of his genius, yet he advanced to the honourable its contest again and again and again, and came always off with distinction, always with complete triumph. As various in composition as

ord

f

almost

Shakspeare himself (this will be admitted by all who are acquainted with his Don Juan) he has embraced every topic of human life, and sounded every string on the divine harp, from its slightest to its most powerful and heart-astounding tones. There is scarce a passion or a situation which has escaped his pen; and he might be drawn, like Garrick, between the weeping and the laughing Muse, although his most powerful efforts hav certainly been dedicated to Melpomene. His genius seemed as prolific a various. The most prodigal use did not exhaust his powers, nay, seemed rather to increase their vigour. Neither Childe Harold, nor any of the most beautiful of Byron's earlier tales, contain more exquisite morsels o poetry than are to be found scattered through the cantos of Don Juan amidst verses which the author appears to have thrown off with an effor as spontaneous as that of a tree resigning its leaves to the wind. Bu that noble tree will never more bear fruit or blossom! It has been cu down in its strength, and the past is all that remains to us of Byron. W can scarce reconcile ourselves to the idea-scarce think that the voice i silent for ever, which, bursting so often on our ear, was often heard with rapturous admiration, sometimes with regret, but always with the deepest interest:

All that's bright must fade,
The brightest still the fleetest.

With a strong feeling of awful sorrow we take leave of the subject Death creeps upon our most serious as well as upon our most idle em ployments; and it is a reflection solemn and gratifying, that he found ou Byron in no moment of levity, but contributing his fortune, and hazardin, his life, in behalf of a people only endeared to him by their past glories and as fellow-creatures suffering under the yoke of a heathen oppressor To have fallen in a crusade for freedom and humanity, as in olden time it would have been an atonement for the blackest crimes, may in th present be allowed to expiate greater follies than even exaggerate calumny has propagated against Byron.

GOETHE UND BYRO N.

Zwischen den beiden Dichtern bestand ein Verhältniss, durch desse zarte Andeutung der Ueberlebende dem Abgeschiedenen ein würdige Denkmal gesetzt hat.

"Der deutsche Dichter, bis ins hohe Alter bemüht die Verdienst früherer and mitlebender Männer sorgfältig und rein anzuerkennen indem er dies als das sicherste Mittel eigener Bildung von jehe betrachtete, musste wohl auch auf das grosse Talent des Lords, bal nach dessen erstem Erscheinen, aufmerksam werden, wie er denn auch die Fortschritte jener bedeutenden Leistungen und eines ununterbrochene Wirkens unablässig begleitete. Hierbei war denn leicht zu bemerken, das die allgemeine Anerkennung des dichterischen Verdienstes mit Vermehrung und Steigerung rasch auf einander folgender Productionen in gleichen Maase fortwuchs. Auch wäre die diesseitige frohe Theilnahme hierar, höchst vollkommen gewesen, hätte nicht der geniale Dichter durch leiden schaftliche Lebensweise und inneres Misbehagen sich selbst ein so geist reiches als gränzenloses Hervorbringen und seinen Freunden den reizender