manners. But the account of the luxury which Don Juan contrives to introduce into this lonely island, is outrageously improbable, and extravagantly overcharged. Among other attendants upon the lord and lady of this rocky domain, is a poet or minstrel, of whom it is said, that

"He praised the present, and abused the past,
Reversing the good custom of old days;

An eastern anti-jacobin at last

He turn'd, preferring pudding to no praise-
For some few years his lot had been o'ercast
By his seeming independent in his lays;

But now he sung the Sultan and the Pacha,
With truth like Southey, and with verse like Crashaw.

"He was a man who had seen many changes,

And always changed as true as any needle,
His polar star being one which never ranges,
And not the fix'd-he knew how to wheedle;
So vile he 'scap'd the doom which oft avenges;
And being fluent (and indeed when fee'd ill)
He lied with such a fervour of intention-

There was no doubt he earn'd his laureat pension."

The noble satirist, not satisfied with this keen stroke, afterwards returns to the same object, laying

on the lash with increased severity, and introducing a burlesque ode in imitation of the "pensioned and laureated Orpheus." In the same vein of sarcastic humour he digresses from his tale to attack some other writers:

"All are not moralists, like Southey, when
He prated to the world of Pantisocrasy;
Or Wordsworth unexcised, unhired, who then
Season'd his pedlar poems with democracy;
Or Coleridge, long before his flighty pen

Let to the Morning Post its aristocracy ;
When he and Southey, following the same path,
Espoused two sisters, (milliners of Bath.)"

Now if this episodical cutting and slashing does not savour very strongly of personal resentment; the least that can be said of it is, that it is shamefully scurrilous, and in some respects cruelly ill-natured. Of the parties so grossly abused in these lines, it does not appear that two of them ever gave any offence whatever to the noble lord; and with regard to Coleridge, he had not long before received from the author of Don Juan a very high encomium. But consistency and sincerity could not be expected in one who had so

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often praised and vilified the same persons, without assigning any cause for the change of sentiment. There was, however, one thing with which they who had now fallen under the displeasure of the noble lord might console themselves, and that was the reflection of having published no work so disgraceful as the poem in which they were held up to ridicule.

The history of Don Juan is carried on till his arrival at Constantinople, where he is purchased by a black eunuch for the favourite Sultana of the Grand Signor. Here our hero is compelled to put on female attire, in which disguise he attracts the notice of the Sultan himself; but at this period the author cuts the story short; and if he terminates it here, the world will be gainers by his prudence.

Of this Odyssey of immorality, there cannot be two opinions; for let the religious sentiments of the reader be as lax as possible, he must be shocked at the barefaced licentiousness of the poem, and the direct attempt made in it to recommend a promiscuous sexual intercourse as the sum of human happiness. Marriage is of course reprobated, and all the

laws of social life are set at open defiance as violations of natural liberty. Lord Byron is the very Comus of poetry, who, by the bewitching airiness of his numbers, aims to turn the moral world into a herd of monsters. It must however be allowed that in his tale of Don Juan, he has not acted the wily part of concealing the poison under the appearance of virtue; on the contrary, he makes a frank confession of his principles, and glories in vice with the unblushing temerity of a rampant satyr who acknowledges no rule but appetite. The mischief of the work is rendered doubly so by the attractive gaiety of the language, the luxuriance of the imagery, and the humorous digressions with which the story is embellished and checquered.

CHAPTER XVII.

Controversy on the Character of Pope, and Poetic Composition.-Attack on Mr. Bowles.-His Defence.-Letter of Lord Byron.-Reply of Mr. Bowles.-Observations on the Dispute.

We have now to consider Lord Byron in a new character: as a controvertist and critic. His entrance into this field of contention, however, was not occasioned by an attack upon his own writings; nor in fact could any ostensible cause be assigned for his interference at all in a dispute with which he had no concern. About fifteen years since, the associated Booksellers employed Mr. Bowles, the favourite pupil of Warton, on a new edition of the works of Pope; which task he performed with great credit as a commentator, and not less so as a biographer and critic. A little after the appearance of this edition, Lord