ron might have made of it, had he chosen the fiery narrative-pace of Lara, or the Giaour-instead of this lumbering, and lax, and highly undramatic blank-verse dialogue. The Foscari is totally inferior to the Sardanapalus. It is a ridiculous caricature of some historical situations, in themselves beautiful and interesting. The true trage dy of the Foscari is to be read in the notes at the end of Lord Byron's tragedy bearing that name; and the public is much obliged to him, and so is M. Simonde de Sismondi, for these very pretty extracts. CAIN contains, perhaps, five or six passages of as fine poetry as Lord Byron ever wrote or will write; but, taken altogether, it is a wicked and blasphemous performance, destitute of any merit sufficient to overshadow essential defects of the most abominable nature. The three plays, bound up together, we repeat, constitute a dullish volume-perhaps one of the heaviest that has appeared in the poetical world since the days of "Ricciarda, Tragedia."

Now, we have no right to abuse Lord Byron, or any other man, for publishing a dullish volume in octavo, price fifteen shillings boards: but we have a right to speak a little of our mind to him in regard to certain prose notes, the mean malignity and rancour of which were probably intended to set off, in some measure, the leaden volume of blank verse in which they make their incongruous and absurd appearance. What we have to say, however, shall be at least said very shortly and we shall just confine ourselves to two heads.

And first in relation to LADY MORGAN, Lord Byron calls her Italy "an excellent and fearless work." This is dishonest; nobody can be taken in by it. Lady Morgan's Italy is not an English work at all-it is a piece of flimsy Irish slip-slop, altogether unworthy of occupying for half an hour the attention of any man of the smallest pretensions to understanding. WE, who now write, have, it so happens, spent about three times as many years in Italy as Lady Morgan and Lord Byron taken together have yet done, and we now solemnly declare, that if the Ettrick Shepherd, after driving a score of fat ewes to Durham, were to announce "ENGLAND, BY JAMES HOGG," he could not proany thing more exquisitely worthy of all human contempt, than that

duce

VOL. XI.

"ITALY, BY LADY MORGAN," which Lord Byron has the impudence to puff. Lord Byron knows that we are honest, and speak the truth, when we say all this; and, indeed, there is but one human creature in the world who will think differently.

Lord Byron is a very excellent hand at a joke; but let him take care; he may perhaps go a little too far some day. Indeed, he has done so already. Does he wish to add much to the list of those escapades of his, which he is destined to repent in sorrow and bitterness till the day of his death?

The puff direct in honour of Miladi, is followed by a little side puff, in the shape of an acknowledgment of her ladyship's having called Venice" the Ocean-Rome," without communication with his lordship, who also, about the same time, chose to call Venice by the same appropriate title. If Lord Byron and Lady Morgan will have the goodness to turn over a few pages of Bembo, or any other member of the great Venetian Corpus Historicum, we venture to lay a rump and dozen they will fall in with the same phrase, rather more frequently than they could wish; but they need not look so far. They will find the thing in Gibbon at least a dozen times! The idea occurs also in Schiller's Ghost-seer-in Mrs Radcliffe-in Rose's Letters-in Reichardt's "Pocket Companion through Italy"

and in various other works which we could mention, if it were worth while to be at all particular about a thing perfectly notorious, and at the same time perfectly unimportant. We despise the ninnies who chatter about Lord Byron and plagiarism in the same breath; but Lord Byron must be kind enough to keep his quizzing humour in a more decent measure of control.

Our second remark is called forth by a very venomous attack on Mr Southey, which appears in one of the notes to the Tragedy of the Foscari.

So far as we can understand the true. state of the case, it is as follows. Mr Southey, in his Vision of Judgment, (which nobody has read) chose to clap my Lord Byron into the " Satanic School of Poetry," This was ridiculous-firstly, because Mr Southey is no satyrist, and should keep his fingers from edge tools of all sorts; and secondly and chiefly, because Mr Southey is a brother poet of Lord Byron's, and should have had nothing to do with criticising his poetical performances.

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But, ridiculous as Mr Southey's conduct certainly was, it furnishes no sort of excuse for Lord Byron's attacks upon him in the last cantos of Don Juan, and here in these Notes. Mr Southey blamed Lord Byron's poetry for being of an immoral tendency now and then-which all the world knows it to be; but did this give Lord Byron any right to compose, and deliberately -most deliberately-publish a set of contumelious verses about the circumstances of Mr Southey's marriage, and the character of Mr Southey's wifeor to lash Mr Southey himself for making money by the use of his pen?

The first of these offences against Mr Southey's feelings is of such a kind that we could not comment upon it without increasing the injury inflicted. We may also add, that it is a sort of thing calculated to excite no feeling in the mind of any man (excepting only Mr Southey himself and his family friends), but those of perfect loathing, disgust, contempt, and profound sorrow, for the shocking wilful degradation of majestic genius.

The second-the sarcasm about Mr Southey's professional authorship comes with a fine grace from a man who is at this present time, and has been for several years past, in the habit of receiving several thousand pounds per annum, all for value received in Verse and Prose, from the magnificent Exchequer of Albemarle Street. What right has Lord Byron to sneer at 'Mr Southey as "a writer of all work?" Has not Lord Byron himself published within the last year two volumes of tragic blank-verse-one volume of indecent gross licentious ottava rima-one pamphlet of clever polemical criticism, seasoned with shame ful personalities against all sorts of men-friends and foes; and at least six or seven articles in the Monthly Review; besides writing an Armenian Grammar-a filthy novel-and several other little things we could mention-all of which will in due season see the light, impensis Joannis de Moravia?

As for Lord Byron's grand and solemn prophecy of " a second English Revolution," "vatem aspernimur non bene querulum." It must certainly, how ever, be conceded to his Lordship, that the state of these kingdoms is not very

likely to be improved, in consequence of the life and example of those Englishmen of rank, who sell their paternal acres, cut Old England, and address stanzas to the Genius of Liberty, from their lodgings within the Empire of the Austrian double-Eagle.

To conclude, Lord Byron very modestly informs us, that he has done more good in any one year of his life, than Mr Southey has done in the whole of the years he has yet lived upon the earth. We are much at a loss to understand the drift of this very candid communication. Does Lord Byron mean to say, that he has given away more money in charity than Mr Southey could afford to do? We believe this may very well be so, but what induces the man to trumpet his own alms-giving in such a pompous fashion upon the house top? There are plenty of good rich old widow ladies, who have subscribed lots of money to all sorts of charities, and advertised all their largesses in the Newspapers:-but are they entitled on that account to talk of themselves as doing more "good" than Mr Southey? Nobody ever suspected Lord Byron of being either an uncharitable or a stingy man, but few people will believe that (laying his poetry out of the question) he is at all entitled to take a conspicuous place among the benefactors of his species. On the contrary we venture to say, that very few sensible men have at this moment any sort of doubt that Lord Byron has very often done more ill in one day's writing, than will ever be atoned for by all the

good" he ever did with his left hand, and published to the world by means of his right. The author of "Cain, a Mystery," is quite wrong to play both the Sadducee and the Pharisee in the same volume.

As for Mr Southey, as all the world knows him to be a man of splendid genius and admirable learning, and of the purest possible character as a man, a citizen, and writer; we dare to say, there is no risk of his making himself at all unhappy about any thing which the genius, even of Byron, can inflict -coming, as it does, with the name of Lord Byron attached to it. There is something very healing in the effect of such a signature, applied on such an occasior.

SIR,

HAVING seen in the newspapers a note relating to myself, extracted from a recent publication of Lord Byron's, I request permission to reply, through the medium of your Journal.

I come at once to his Lordship's charge against me, blowing away the abuse with which it is frothed, and evaporating a strong acid in which it is suspended. The residuum then appears to be, that " Mr Southey, on his return from Switzerland, (in 1817,) scattered abroad calumnies, knowing them to be such, against Lord Byron and others." To this I reply with a direct and positive denial.

If I had been told in that country that Lord Byron had turned Turk, or Monk of La Trappe that he had furnished a harem, or endowed an hospital, I might have thought the account, whichever it had been, possible, and repeated it accordingly; passing it, as it had been taken,' in the small change of conversation, for no more than it was worth. In this manner I might have spoken of him, as of Baron Gerambe, the Green Man, the Indian Jugglers, or any other figurante of the time being. There was no reason for any particular delicacy on my part, in speaking of his Lordship: and, indeed, I should have thought any thing which might be reported of him, would have injured his character as little as the story which so greatly annoyed Lord Keeper Guildford, that he had ridden a rhinoceros. He may ride a rhinoceros, and though every body would stare, no one would wonder. But making no inquiry concerning him when I was abroad, because I felt no curiosity, I heard nothing, and had nothing to repeat. When I spoke of wonders to my friends and acquaintance on my return, it was of the flying-tree at Alpuacht, and the eleven thousand virgins at Cologne not of Lord Byron. I sought for no staler subject than St Ursula.

Once, and only once, in connexion with Switzerland, I have alluded to his Lordship; and, as the passage was curtailed in the press, I take this opportunity of restoring it. In the Quarterly Review, speaking incidentally of the Jungfrau, I said, "it was the scene where Lord Byron's Manfred met the devil and bullied himthough the devil must have won his cause before any tribunal in this world, or the next, if he had not pleaded more feebly for himself, than his advocate, in a cause of canonization, ever pleaded for him."

With regard to the "others," whom his Lordship accuses me of calumniating, I suppose he alludes to a party of his friends, whose names I found written in the Al bum, at Mont-Auvert, with an avowal of Atheism annexed, in Greek, and an indignant comment, in the same language, underneath it. Those names, with that avowal and the comment, I transcribed in my note-book, and spoke of the circumstance

on my return. ' - Ïf I had nublished it. the

thought himself slandered, by having that recorded of him which he has so often recorded of himself.

The many opprobrious appellations which Lord Byron has bestowed upon me, I leave as I find them, with the praises which he has bestowed upon himself.

How easily is a noble spirit discern'd
From harsh and sulphurous matter that flies out
In contumelies, makes a noise, and stinks!
B. JONSON.

But I am accustomed to such things; and, so far from irritating me are the enemies who use such weapons, that, when I hear of their attacks, it is some satisfaction to think they have thus employed the malignity which must have been employed somewhere, and could not have been directed against any person whom it could possibly molest or injure less. The viper, however venomous in purpose, is harmless in effect, while it is biting at the file. It is seldom, indeed, that I waste a word, or a thought, upon those who are perpetually assailing me. But abhorring, as I do, the personalities which disgrace our current literature, and averse from controversy as I am, both by principle and inclination, I make no profession of non-resistance. When the offence and the offender are such as to call for the whip and the branding-iron, it has been both seen and felt that I can inflict them.

Lord Byron's present exacerbation is evidently produced by an infliction of this kind-not by hearsay reports of my conversation, four years ago, transmitted him from England. The cause may be found in certain remarks upon the Satanic school of poetry, contained in my preface to the Vision of Judgment. Well would it be for Lord Byron if he could look back upon any of his writings, with as much satisfaction as I shall always do upon what is there said of that flagitious school. Many persons, and parents especially, have expressed their gratitude to me for having applied the branding-iron where it was so richly deserved. The Edinburgh Reviewer, indeed, with that honourable feeling by which his criticisms are so peculiarly distinguished, suppressing the remarks themselves, has imputed them wholly to envy on my part. I give him, in this instance, full credit for sincerity: I believe he was equally incapable of comprehending a worthier motive, or of inventing a worse; and, as I have never condescended to expose, in any instance, his pitiful malevolence, I thank him for having, in this, stript it bare himself, and exhibited it in its bald, naked, and undisguised deformity.

Lord Byron, like his encomiast, has not ventured to bring the matter of those animadversions into view. He conceals the fact, that they are directed against the authors of blasphemous and lascivious books; against men who, not content with indulging their own vices, labour to make others the slaves of sensuality, like themselvesagainst public panders, who, mingling im

niety with lewdness, seek at once to destroy