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the tumuli of the Troad, Lemnos, Tenedos, all added to the associations of the time. But what seemed the most "poetical" of all at the moment, were the numbers (about two hundred) of Greek and Turkish craft, which were obliged to "cut and run " before the wind, from their unsafe anchorage, some for Tenedos, some for other isles, some for the main, and some, it might be, for eternity. The sight of these little scudding vessels, darting over the foam in the twilight, now appearing and now disappearing between the waves in the cloud of night, with their peculiarly white sails, (the Levant sails not being of “ coarse canvass," but of white cotton), skimming along as quickly, but less safely, than the sea-mews which hovered over them; their evident distress, their reduction to fluttering specks in the distance, their crowded succession, their littleness, as contending with the giant element, which made our stout forty-four's teak timbers (she was built in India) creak again; their aspect and their motion, all struck me as something far more "poetical" than the mere broad, brawling, shipless sea, and the sullen winds, could possibly have been without them.

The Euxine is a noble sea to look upon, and the port of Constantinople the most beautiful of harbours; and yet I cannot but think that the twenty sail of the line, some of one hundred and forty guns, rendered it more "poetical" by day in the sun, and by night perhaps still more; for the Turks illuminate their vessels of war in a manner the most picturesque, and yet all this is artificial. As for the Euxine, I stood upon the Symplegades-I stood by the broken altar still exposed to the winds upon one of them-I felt all the "poetry" of the situation, as I repeated the first lines of Medea; but would not that "poetry " have been heightened by the Argo? It was so even by the appearance of any

merchant vessel arriving from Odessa. But Mr. Bowles says, "Why bring your ship off the stocks?" For no reason that I know, except that ships are built to be launched. The water, &c., undoubtedly HEIGHTENS the poetical associations, but it does not make them; and the ship amply repays the obligation: they aid each other; the water is more poetical with the ship -the ship less so without the water. But even a ship laid up in dock is a grand and a poetical sight. Even an old boat, keel upwards, wrecked upon the barren sand, is a "poetical" object, (and Wordsworth, who made a poem about a washing-tub and a blind boy, may tell you so as well as I), whilst a long extent of sand and unbroken water, without the boat, would be as like dull prose as any pamphlet lately published.

What makes the poetry in the image of the "marble waste of Tadmor," or Grainger's "Ode to Solitude," so much admired by Johnson? Is it the "marble," or the waste," the artificial or the natural object? The "waste" is like all other wastes; but the "marble" of Palmyra makes the poetry of the passage as of the place.

The beautiful but barren Hymettus-the whole coast of Attica, her hills and mountains, Pentelicus, Anchesmus, Philopappus, &c. &c.-are in themselves poetical, and would be so if the name of Athens, of Athenians, and her very ruins, were swept from the earth. But am I to be told that the "nature" of Attica would be more poetical without the “art” of the Acropolis of the Temple of Theseus ? and of the still all Greek and glorious monuments of her exquisitely artificial genius? Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical-the Parthenon, or the rock on which it stands ? The COLUMNS of Cape Colonna, or the Cape itself? The rocks at the foot of it, or the

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recollection that Falconer's ship was bulged upon them? There are a thousand rocks and capes far more picturesque than those of the Acropolis and Cape Sunium in themselves; what are they to a thousand scenes in the wilder parts of Greece, of Asia Minor, Switzerland, or even of Cintra in Portugal, or to many scenes of Italy, and the Sierras of Spain? But it is the “art," the columns, the temples, the wrecked vessel which give them their antique and their modern poetry, and not the spots themselves. Without them, the spots of earth would be unnoticed and unknown; buried, like Babylon and Nineveh, in indistinct confusion, without poetry, as without existence; but to whatever spot of earth these ruins were transported, if they were capable of transportation, like the obelisk, and the sphinx, and the Memnon's head, there they would still exist in the perfection of their beauty, and in the pride of their poetry. I opposed, and will ever oppose, the robbery of ruins from Athens, to instruct the English in sculpture; but why did I do so? The ruins are as poetical in Piccadilly as they were in the Parthenon; but the Parthenon and its rocks are less so without them. Such is the poetry of art.-Ravenna, Feb. 7, 1821.

POPE VERSUS THE POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

With regard to poetry in general,* I am convinced, the more I think of it, that he and all of us-Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, I,-are all in the wrong, one as much as another; that we are upon

* On this paragraph, in the MS. copy of the above letter, I find the following note, in the handwriting of Mr. Gifford: "There is more good sense, and feeling, and judgment in this passage, than in any other I ever read, or Lord Byron wrote."-Moore.

a wrong revolutionary poetical system, or systems, from which none but Rogers and Crabbe are free; and that the present and next generations will finally be of this opinion. I am the more confirmed in this by having lately gone over some of our classics, particularly Pope, whom I tried in this way,-I took Moore's poems and my own and some others, and went over them side by side with Pope's, and I was really astonished (I ought not to have been so) and mortified at the ineffable distance in point of sense, harmony, effect, and even imagination, passion, and invention, between the little Queen Anne's man, and us of the Lower Empire. Depend upon it, it is all Horace then, and Claudian now, among us; and if I had to begin again, I would mould myself accordingly. Crabbe's the man, but he has got a coarse and impracticable subject, and Rogers is retired upon half-pay, and has done enough, unless he were to do as he did formerly."-To Mr. Murray, Sept. 15, 1817.

LORD BYRON AND MR. MURRAY.

Not having received the slightest answer to my last three letters, nor the book (the last number of the Edinburgh Review) which they requested, I presume that you were the unfortunate person who perished in the pagoda on Monday last, and address this rather to your executors than yourself, regretting that you should have had the ill-luck to be the sole victim on that joyous occasion.

I beg leave, then, to inform these gentlemen (whoever they may be) that I am a little surprised at the previous neglect of the deceased, and also at observing an advertisement of an approaching publication on Saturday next, against the which I protested, and do protest for

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the present. Yours (or theirs), &c., B.—To Mr. Murray,

Aug. 4, 1814.

Can't accept your courteous offer.*

For Orford and for Waldegrave

You give much more than me you gave;
Which is not fairly to behave,

My Murray.

These matters must be arranged with Mr. Douglas Kinnaird. He is my trustee, and a man of honour. To him you can state all your mercantile reasons, which you might not like to state to me personally, such as "heavy season "flat public '-"don't go off" -"Lordship writes too much"-"won't take advice" declining popularity"-" deduction for the trade" "make very little -"generally lose by him ""pirated edition "_" foreign edition "- severe criticisms," &c., with other hints and howls for an oration, which I leave Douglas, who is an orator, to answer. You can also state them more freely to a third person, as between you and me they could only produce some smart postscripts, which would not adorn our mutual archives.-To Mr. Murray, Ravenna, Aug. 23, 1821.

As to "honour," I will trust no man's honour in affairs of barter. I will tell you why: a state of

* This letter is in reply to a proposal of Mr. Murray to give a thousand pounds for the copyright of "Sardanapalus " and "The Foscari," and the same for three Cantos of "Don Juan," the third, fourth, and fifth.