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mutineers dragged their captain out of bed and brought him upon deck. Here

"He dared them to the worst, exclaiming 'Fire,'

but they, instead of taking him at his word, put him and their other officers into a boat with

"Some cordage, canvas, sails and lines and twine,"

to which was added the following uisite exqmagnetic spiritualization

"That trembling vassal of the Pole,

The feeling compass, Navigation's soul."

Much is the force of heaven-bred poesy: as by the fancied stone of the Chemist, all it touches is turned into gold, In Captain Bligh's plain, sailor-like narrative he represents himself as asking Christian, the chief mutineer, "whether this was a proper return for his long experienced friendship?" He appeared disturbed at the question, and answered with much emotion, "That-Captain Bligh that is the thing-I am in hell-I am in hell." These few rude words of the guilty sufferer speak the terrors of conscience far more forcibly than any finished portraiture which could be elaborated by a narrator: and Lord Byron, uniting refined delicacy of taste and judgment with the strictest historic fidelity, has taken care to transfer them in all the bloom of their simplicity to his glowing rhymes.

"His feverish lips thus broke their gloomy spell,

" TIS THAT! 'TIS THAT! I AM IN HELL! IN HELL!'" After this farewell Captain Bligh and his companions get to land as they can, and the first Canto concludes with "Huzza for Otaheite."

Canto the second opens very appropriately with a Song of the Tonga Islands; because Christian and his Comrades took refuge in Toobonai, which is not one of the Tonga Islands. Be this as it may, somebody sings a song about wood-doves, who coo from Bolotoo, about Mooa, Marly, Fiji, Tappa, Hooni, gay Licoo, Mataloco and many other highly interesting things or persons. We are not quite sure when this song was first sung, nor who sang it, for it is described as a "ditty of Tradition's days

Which to the dead a lingering fame conveys,"

and afterwards, truly enough, as a "simple stave." On the present occasion, however, it was sung on

"The tropic afternoon of Toboonai"

by a gentle savage songstress, who had been taught " passion's desolating joy" by a stranger, and was

"Herself a billow in her energies."

She had a wild warm bosom, and a clear nut-brown skin. was lovely, premature, and dusky; full of life and (of course) voluptuous. She had smiles and tears like a Naiad's cave before an earthquake changes it into

"The amphibious desart of the dank morass,"

(a sort of desart which is very sublime and quite new to us:) and her name was Neuha. The gentleman who sat by while she sung was blue eyed and fair haired, "a careless thing," a native of the Hebrides, a husband of Neuha, and his name was Torquil.

Torquil it seems had been attracted on his first visit to Otaheite, Toobonai, the Tonga Islands, or all three or some one of them, by

"The bread tree which without the plough-share yields
The unreaped harvest of unfurrowed fields,

And bakes its unadulterated loaves

Without a furnace in unpurchased groves."

In this happy olimate, therefore, so far exceeding the most brilliant anticipations even of the author of Political Justice, that instead of the plough being turned into a field and performing its office without the superintendence of man, there is absolutely no need of a plough at all: (every body will perceive how daintily Lord Byron has versified the passage to which we allude) free from all apprehensions of burnt bones, plaster of Paris, alum, and short weight, had Torquil taken up his abode. Here sea-spread nets and healthy slumbers, the chace and the race, the canoe and the cottage, the palm, the cava, the yam and the cocoa, "the luxuries of seas and woods, The airy joys of social solitudes,” (alack! alack!" we will look again for the intellect of these poetries") performed a wondrous work, which Lord Byron recounts in most mellifluous song-they,

"Did more than Europe's discipline had done,

And civilized civilization's son!"

Torquil and Neuha loved mountain scenery, and so too does Lord Byron. He "adores" the Alps, "loves" the Apennine, "reveres" Parnassus, and has "beheld" Ida and Olympus; and all, as we learn from the following note, in consequence of the scarlet fever. Really these notices of

self from a great man are mightily taking, and will be a bonne bouche for posterity." Am not I, I, if there be such an I!"

"When very young, about eight years of age, after an attack of the scarlet fever at Aberdeen, I was removed by medical advice into the Highlands. Here I passed occasionally some summers, and from this period I date my love of mountainous countries. I can never forget the effect a few years afterwards in England, of the only thing I had long seen, even in miniature, of a mountain, in the Malvern Hills. After I returned to Cheltenham, I used to watch them every afternoon at sunset, with a sensation which I cannot describe. This was boyish enough; but I was then only thirteen years of age, and it was in the holidays." P. 33.

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Torquil and Neuha loved each other also, as we are assured in some amatory lines in which bid rhymes to did, and his to kiss and they loved not according to those conjugal forms which Lord Byron in this, as in all other matters, referring to self alone as a testimony, imagines to be general to matrimony. While solacing themselves on the sea shore, one fine summer's evening, they are disagreeably interrupted by a shrill naval whistle and a whiff of tobacco, which last gives occasion to the least vapid lines in the Poem. The dialogue which follows defies all abridgment; we must give it entire.

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"What cheer, Ben Bunting' cried (when in full view
Our new acquaintance) Torquil,' Aught of new ?'
Ey, ey,' quoth Ben, not new, but news enow';
A strange sail in the offing.'- Sail! and how?
What! could you make her out? It cannot be ;
I've seen no rag of canvass on the sea.'

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'Belike,' said Ben, 'you might not from the bay,
But from the bluff-head, where I watched to-day,
I saw her in the doldrums; for the wind

Was light and baffling. When the sun declin'd
Where lay she had she anchored?'-'No, but still
She bore down on us, till the wind grew still.'
Her flag?'-'I had no glass; but fore and aft,
Egad, she seemed a wicked-looking craft.'

Armed?'-'I expect so;-sent on the look-out ;

'Tis time, belike, to put our helm about.'
'About ?--Whate'er may have us now in chace,

We'll make no running fight, for that were base;

We will die at our quarters, like true men.'

'Ey, ey; for that, 'tis all the same to Ben.'

Does Christian know this ?'-' Aye; he has piped all hands To quarters. They are furbishing the stands

That's but fair;

Of arms; and we have got some guns to bear,
And scaled them. You are wanted.'
And if it were not, mine is not the soul
To leave my comrades helpless on the shoal.
My Neuha! ah! and must my fate pursue
Not me alone, but one so sweet and true?
But whatsoe'er betide, ah, Neuha! now
Unman me not; the hour will not allow
A tear; I am thine whatever intervenes !'

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'Right,' quoth Ben, that will do for the marines."" P. 44. After this right naval salutation, we are rapidly hurried over a sea fight in which the mutineers are beaten by a vessel sent out to discover their retreat. The survivors, Christian, Torquil, Ben Bunting and some others, are found, on opening the third Canto, wounded and fugitive under a beetling rock. The two first have no marked characteristics: the third must have betrayed much peculiarity of expression. He is next to Torquil, and is thus described ;

"Beside him stood another

Rough as a bear, but willing as a brother."

A little onward, however, Christian is allowed to partake somewhat of his mate's nature; for when Neuha carries Torquil off in a canoe, Christian, who is moved at the sight, "Gazed upon the pair as in his den

A lion looks upon his cubs again."

Furthermore, why Christian looked like a lion, why Torquil and Neuha looked like a lion's cubs, or why either Christian or the lion gazed either once or again, we are not informed. Neuha directs her friends to take care of Christian and his comrades. She, with Torquil singly, rows to a craggy isle, whose precipitous side affords no hope of landing. They are gained upon by their pursuers. She instructs her lover to follow her boldly, and they both dive to the bottom and are seen to rise no more. The crew which tracked them is astonished at their disappearance, and after a short pause it departs with a conviction that they are both drowned, and leaves the Poet to speculate upon the probability that the lovers are blowing shells and combing their hair with mermaids. Neuha, however, was too wise for so desperate a leap. She dived "smoothly, bravely, and brilliantly,"

"Leaving a streak of light behind her heel

Which struck and flashed like

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like what, in the name of all that is marvellous? Gentle

reader, your queries are all wide of the mark, and the noble Bard must speak for himself

"Which struck and flashed like AN AMPHIBIOUS STEEL,”

After this likeness (a likeness which we are neither willing nor able to dispute) Neuha with her husband penetrated to a sub-marine cave, which, in the same way as her song, for the sake of consistency, is not in Toobonai where she dived, but in the Tonga Islands. Here Torquil is safe, while his comrades are hunted down and killed. We shall conclude with Christian's epitaph, which (as far as we can understand it) bears the genuine stamp of its author.

"The rest was nothing-save a life mis-spent,

And soul-but who shall answer where it went?
'Tis ours to bear, not judge the dead; and they
Who doom to hell, themselves are on the way,
Unless these bullies of eternal pains

Are pardoned their bad hearts for their worse brains.” P. 76. Such is the Poem of "The Island," the first which Lord Byron has publicly avowed since his cross with the Cockney School: the first also of his works for the production of which we can most sincerely thank him. He will not accuse us of flattery, when we assure him that we cordially wish for the extensive circulation of the present specimen of his powers, and that we think by continuing to write as he has here written, he will effectually furnish an antidote to much of his former poison.

ART. V. The Scottish Pulpit; a Collection of Sermons by Eminent Clergymen of the Church of Scotland. Edited by the Rev. Robert Gillan. Ogle and Co. 1823. THIS is a pic-nic volume, contributed by about a dozen of the topping preachers of the North, and now given to the world, as a specimen of the best that is done in that way by our bre thren of the Scottish establishment. It seems there was a publication of the same sort set on foot about thirty or forty years ago, called the "Scottish Preacher," and which we believe extended to several volumes; consisting, like the present performance, of separate Sermons by different authors, and serving the part of a magazine for successful efforts of pulpit oratory, or of ecclesiastical research. Mr. Gillan regrets the discontinuance of the miscellany now alluded to, "fraught," as he tells us," with such general utility," and being " sen

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