The Life of Lord Byron

CHAPTER XXIX

Lord Byron in 1813—The Lady’s Tragedy—Miss Milbanke—Growing Uneasiness of Lord Byron’s Mind—The Friar’s Ghost—The Marriage—A Member of the Drury Lane Committee—Embarrassed Affairs—The Separation

The year 1813 was perhaps the period of all Lord Byron’s life in which he was seen to most advantage. The fame of Childe Harold was then in its brightest noon; and in that year he produced The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos– compositions not only of equal power, but even tinted with superior beauties. He was himself soothed by the full enjoyment of his political rank and station; and though his manners and character had not exactly answered to the stern and stately imaginations which had been formed of his dispositions and appearance, still he was acknowledged to be no common man, and his company in consequence was eagerly courted.

It forms no part of the plan of this work to repeat the gossip and tattle of private society, but occurrences happened to Lord Byron which engaged both, and some of them cannot well be passed over unnoticed. One of these took place during the spring of this year, and having been a subject of newspaper remark, it may with less impropriety be mentioned than others which were more indecorously made the topics of general discussion. The incident alluded to was an extravagant scene enacted by a lady of high rank, at a rout given by Lady Heathcote; in which, in revenge, as it was reported, for having been rejected by Lord Byron, she made a suicidal attempt with an instrument, which scarcely penetrated, if it could even inflict any permanent mark on, the skin.

The insane attachment of this eccentric lady to his Lordship was well known; insane is the only epithet that can be applied to the actions of a married woman, who, in the disguise of her page, flung herself to a man, who, as she told a friend of mine, was ashamed to be in love with her because she was not beautiful – an expression at once curious and just, evincing a shrewd perception of the springs of his Lordship’s conduct, and the acuteness blended with frenzy and talent which distinguished herself. Lord Byron unquestionably at that time cared little for her. In showing me her picture, some two or three days after the affair, and laughing at the absurdity of it, he bestowed on her the endearing diminutive of vixen, with a hard-hearted adjective that I judiciously omit.

The immediate cause of this tragical flourish was never very well understood; but in the course of the evening she had made several attempts to fasten on his Lordship, and was shunned: certain it is, she had not, like Burke in the House of Commons, premeditatedly brought a dagger in her reticule, on purpose for the scene; but, seeing herself an object of scorn, she seized the first weapon she could find – some said a pair of scissors – others, more scandalously, broken jelly-glass, and attempted an incision of the jugular, to the consternation of all the dowagers, and the pathetic admiration of every Miss who witnessed or heard of the rapture.

Lord Byron at the time was in another room, talking with Prince K – , when Lord P – came, with a face full of consternation, and told them what had happened. The cruel poet, instead of being agitated by the tidings, or standing in the smallest degree in need of a smelling-bottle, knitted his scowl, and said, with a contemptuous indifference, “It is only a trick.” All things considered, he was perhaps not uncharitable; and a man of less vanity would have felt pretty much as his Lordship appeared to do on the occasion. The whole affair was eminently ridiculous; and what increased the absurdity was a letter she addressed to a friend of mine on the subject, and which he thought too good to be reserved only for his own particular study.

It was in this year that Lord Byron first proposed for Miss Milbanke; having been urged by several of his friends to marry, that lady was specially recommended to him for a wife. It has been alleged, that he deeply resented her rejection of his proposal; and I doubt not, in the first instance, his vanity may have been a little piqued; but as he cherished no very animated attachment to her, and moreover, as she enjoyed no celebrity in public opinion to make the rejection important, the resentment was not, I am persuaded, either of an intense or vindictive kind. On the contrary, he has borne testimony to the respect in which he held her character and accomplishments; and an incidental remark in his journal, “I shall be in love with her again, if I don’t take care,” is proof enough that his anger was not of a very fierce or long-lived kind.

The account ascribed to him of his introduction to Miss Milbanke, and the history of their attachment, ought not to be omitted, because it serves to illustrate, in some degree, the state of his feelings towards her, and is so probable, that I doubt not it is in the main correct: —

“The first time of my seeing Miss Milbanke was at Lady ***’s. It was a fatal day; and I remember, that in going upstairs I stumbled, and remarked to Moore, who accompanied me, that it was a bad omen. I ought to have taken the warning. On entering the room, I observed a young lady more simply dressed than the rest of the assembly sitting alone upon a sofa. I took her for a female companion, and asked if I was right in my conjecture. ‘She is a great heiress,’ said he, in a whisper, that became lower as he proceeded, ‘you had better marry her, and repair the old place, Newstead.’

“There was something piquant, and what we term pretty, in Miss Milbanke. Her features were small and feminine, though not regular. She had the fairest skin imaginable. Her figure was perfect for her height, and there was a simplicity, a retired modesty about her, which was very characteristic, and formed a happy contrast to the cold artificial formality and studied stiffness which is called fashion. She interested me exceedingly. I became daily more attached to her, and it ended in my making her a proposal, that was rejected. Her refusal was couched in terms which could not offend me. I was, besides, persuaded, that in declining my offer, she was governed by the influence of her mother; and was the more confirmed in my opinion, by her reviving our correspondence herself twelve months after. The tenour of her letter was, that, although she could not love me, she desired my friendship. Friendship is a dangerous word for young ladies; it is love full-fledged, and waiting for a fine day to fly.”

But Lord Byron possessed this sort of irrepressible predilections – was so much the agent of impulses, that he could not keep long in unison with the world, or in harmony with his friends. Without malice, or the instigation of any ill spirit, he was continually provoking malignity and revenge. His verses on the Princess Charlotte weeping, and his other merciless satire on her father, begot him no friends, and armed the hatred of his enemies. There was, indeed, something like ingratitude in the attack on the Regent, for his Royal Highness had been particularly civil; had intimated a wish to have him introduced to him; and Byron, fond of the distinction, spoke of it with a sense of gratification. These instances, as well as others, of gratuitous spleen, only justified the misrepresentations which had been insinuated against himself, and what was humour in his nature, was ascribed to vice in his principles.

Before the year was at an end, his popularity was evidently beginning to wane: of this he was conscious himself, and braved the frequent attacks on his character and genius with an affectation of indifference, under which those who had at all observed the singular associations of his recollections and ideas, must have discerned the symptoms of a strange disease. He was tainted with a Herodian malady of the mind: his thoughts were often hateful to himself; but there was an ecstasy in the conception, as if delight could be mingled with horror. I think, however, he struggled to master the fatality, and that his resolution to marry was dictated by an honourable desire to give hostages to society, against the wild wilfulness of his imagination.

It is a curious and a mystical fact, that at the period to which I am alluding, and a very short time, only a little month, before he successfully solicited the hand of Miss Milbanke, being at Newstead, he fancied that he saw the ghost of the monk which is supposed to haunt the abbey, and to make its ominous appearance when misfortune or death impends over the master of the mansion. – The story of the apparition in the sixteenth canto of Don Juan is derived from this family legend, and Norman Abbey, in the thirteenth of the same poem, is a rich and elaborate description of Newstead.

After his proposal to Miss Milbanke had been accepted, a considerable time, nearly three months, elapsed before the marriage was completed, in consequence of the embarrassed condition in which, when the necessary settlements were to be made, he found his affairs. This state of things, with the previous unhappy controversy with himself, and anger at the world, was ill-calculated to gladden his nuptials: but, besides these real evils, his mind was awed with gloomy presentiments, a shadow of some advancing misfortune darkened his spirit, and the ceremony was performed with sacrificial feelings, and those dark and chilling circumstances, which he has so touchingly described in The Dream: —

 
I saw him stand
Before an altar with a gentle bride;
Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The starlight of his boyhood: – as he stood
Even at the altar, o’er his brow there came
The self-same aspect, and the quivering shock
That in the antique oratory shook
His bosom in its solitude; and then —
As in that hour – a moment o’er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced – and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The faltering vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reeled around him: he could see
Not that which was, nor that which should have been —
But the old mansion and the accustom’d hall,
And the remembered chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sunshine and the shade,
All things pertaining to that place and hour.
And her, who was his destiny, came back,
And thrust themselves between him and the light.
 

This is very affectingly described; and his prose description bears testimony to its correctness. “It had been predicted by Mrs Williams that twenty-seven was to be a dangerous age for me. The fortune-telling witch was right; it was destined to prove so. I shall never forget the 2nd of January, 1815, Lady Byron was the only unconcerned person present; Lady Noel, her mother, cried; I trembled like a leaf, made the wrong responses, and after the ceremony called her Miss Milbanke.

“There is a singular history attached to the ring. The very day the match was concluded a ring of my mother’s, that had been lost, was dug up by the gardener at Newstead. I thought it was sent on purpose for the wedding; but my mother’s marriage had not been a fortunate one, and this ring was doomed to be the seal of an unhappier union still.

“After the ordeal was over, we set off for a country-scat of Sir Ralph’s (Lady B.’s father), and I was surprised at the arrangements for the journey, and somewhat out of humour, to find the lady’s maid stuck between me and my bride. It was rather too early to assume the husband; so I was forced to submit, but it was not with a very good grace. I have been accused of saying, on getting into the carriage, that I had married Lady Byron out of spite, and because she had refused me twice. Though I was for a moment vexed at her prudery, or whatever you may choose to call it, if I had made so uncavalier, not to say brutal, a speech, I am convinced Lady Byron would instantly have left the carriage to me and the maid. She had spirit enough to have done so, and would properly have resented the affront. Our honeymoon was not all sunshine; it had its clouds.

“I was not so young when my father died, but that I perfectly remember him, and had a very early horror of matrimony from the sight of domestic broils: this feeling came over me very strongly at my wedding. Something whispered me that I was sealing my own death-warrant. I am a great believer in presentiments: Socrates’s demon was not a fiction; Monk Lewis had his monitor, and Napoleon many warnings. At the last moment I would have retreated, could I have done so; I called to mind a friend of mine, who had married a young, beautiful, and rich girl, and yet was miserable; he had strongly urged me against putting my neck in the same yoke.”

For some time after the marriage things went on in the usual matrimonial routine, until he was chosen into the managing committee of Drury Lane; an office in which, had he possessed the slightest degree of talent for business, he might have done much good. It was justly expected that the illiterate presumption which had so long deterred poetical genius from approaching the stage, would have shrunk abashed from before him; but he either felt not the importance of the duty he had been called to perform, or, what is more probable, yielding to the allurements of the moment, forgot that duty, in the amusement which he derived from the talents and peculiarities of the players. No situation could be more unfit for a man of his temperament, than one which exposed him to form intimacies with persons whose profession, almost necessarily, leads them to undervalue the domestic virtues.

It is said, that the course of life into which he was drawn after he joined the managing committee of Drury Lane was not in unison with the methodical habits of Lady Byron. But independently of outdoor causes of connubial discontent and incompatibility of temper, their domestic affairs were falling into confusion.

“My income at this period,” says Lord Byron, “was small, and somewhat bespoken. We had a house in town, gave dinner-parties, had separate carriages, and launched into every sort of extravagance. This could not last long; my wife’s ten thousand pounds soon melted away. I was beset by duns, and at length an execution was levied, and the bailiffs put in possession of the very beds we had to sleep on. This was no very agreeable state of affairs, no very pleasant scene for Lady Byron to witness; and it was agreed she should pay her father a visit till the storm had blown over, and some arrangement had been made with my creditors.” From this visit her Ladyship never returned; a separation took place; but too much has been said to the world respecting it, and I have no taste for the subject. Whatever was the immediate cause, the event itself was not of so rare a kind as to deserve that the attention of the public should be indelicately courted to it.

Beyond all question, however, Lord Byron’s notions of connubial obligations were rather philosophical. “There are,” said he to Captain Parry, “so many undefinable and nameless, and not to be named, causes of dislike, aversion, and disgust in the matrimonial state, that it is always impossible for the public, or the friends of the parties, to judge between man and wife. Theirs is a relation about which nobody but themselves can form a correct idea, or have any right to speak. As long as neither party commits gross injustice towards the other; as long as neither the woman nor the man is guilty of any offence which is injurious to the community; as long as the husband provides for his offspring, and secures the public against the dangers arising from their neglected education, or from the charge of supporting them; by what right does it censure him for ceasing to dwell under the same roof with a woman, who is to him, because he knows her, while others do not, an object of loathing? Can anything be more monstrous, than for the public voice to compel individuals who dislike each other to continue their cohabitation? This is at least the effect of its interfering with a relationship, of which it has no possible means of judging. It does not indeed drag a man to a woman’s bed by physical force, but it does exert a moral force continually and effectively to accomplish the same purpose. Nobody can escape this force, but those who are too high or those who are too low for public opinion to reach; or those hypocrites who are, before others, the loudest in their approbation of the empty and unmeaning forms of society, that they may securely indulge all their propensities in secret.”

In the course of the conversation, in which he is represented to have stated these opinions, he added what I have pleasure in quoting, because the sentiments are generous in respect to his wife, and strikingly characteristic of himself: —

“Lady Byron has a liberal mind, particularly as to religious opinions: and I wish when I married her that I had possessed the same command over myself that I now do. Had I possessed a little more wisdom and more forbearance, we might have been happy. I wished, when I was just married to have remained in the country, particularly till my pecuniary embarrassments were over. I knew the society of London; I knew the characters of many who are called ladies, with whom Lady Byron would necessarily have to associate, and I dreaded her contact with them. But I have too much of my mother about me to be dictated to; I like freedom from constraint; I hate artificial regulations: my conduct has always been dictated by my own feelings, and Lady Byron was quite the creature of rules. She was not permitted either to ride, or run, or walk, but as the physician prescribed. She was not suffered to go out when I wished to go: and then the old house was a mere ghost-house, I dreamed of ghosts and thought of them waking. It was an existence I could not support.” Here Lord Byron broke off abruptly, saying, “I hate to speak of my family affairs, though I have been compelled to talk nonsense concerning them to some of my butterfly visitors, glad on any terms to get rid of their importunities. I long to be again on the mountains. I am fond of solitude, and should never talk nonsense, if I always found plain men to talk to.”

CHAPTER XXX

Reflections on his domestic Verses—Consideration of his Works—“The Corsair”—Probabilities of the Character and Incidents of the Story—On the Difference between poetical Invention and moral Experience: illustrated by the Difference between the Genius of Shakespeare and that of Byron

The task just concluded may disappoint the expectations of some of my readers, but I would rather have said less than so much, could so little have been allowed; for I have never been able to reconcile to my notions of propriety, the exposure of domestic concerns which the world has no right claim to know, and can only urge the plea of curiosity for desiring to see explained. The scope of my undertaking comprehends only the public and intellectual character of Lord Byron; every word that I have found it necessary to say respecting his private affairs has been set down with reluctance; nor should I have touched so freely on his failings, but that the consequences have deeply influenced his poetical conceptions.

There is, however, one point connected with his conjugal differences which cannot be overlooked, nor noticed without animadversion. He was too active himself in bespeaking the public sympathy against his lady. It is true that but for that error the world might never have seen the verses written by him on the occasion; and perhaps it was the friends who were about him at the time who ought chiefly to be blamed for having given them circulation: but in saying this, I am departing from the rule I had prescribed to myself, while I ought only to have remarked that the compositions alluded to, both the Fare-thee-well and the Anathema on Mrs Charlemont, are splendid corroborations of the metaphysical fact which it is the main object of this work to illustrate, namely, that Byron was only original and truly great when he wrote from the dictates of his own breast, and described from the suggestions of things he had seen. When his imagination found not in his subject uses for the materials of his experience, and opportunities to embody them, it seemed to be no longer the same high and mysterious faculty that so ruled the tides of the feelings of others. He then appeared a more ordinary poet – a skilful verse-maker. The necromancy which held the reader spellbound became ineffectual; and the charm and the glory which interested so intensely, and shone so radiantly on his configurations from realities, all failed and faded; for his genius dealt not with airy fancies, but had its power and dominion amid the living and the local of the actual world.

I shall now return to the consideration of his works, and the first in order is The Corsair, published in 1814. He seems to have been perfectly sensible that this beautiful composition was in his best peculiar manner. It is indeed a pirate’s isle, peopled with his own creatures.

It has been alleged that Lord Byron was indebted to Sir Walter Scott’s poem of Rokeby for the leading incidents of The Corsair, but the resemblance is not to me very obvious: besides, the whole style of the poem is so strikingly in his own manner, that even had he borrowed the plan, it was only as a thread to string his own original conceptions upon; the beauty and brilliancy of them could not be borrowed, and are not imitations.

There were two islands in the Archipelago, when Lord Byron was in Greece, considered as the chief haunts of the pirates, Stampalia, and a long narrow island between Cape Colonna and Zea. Jura also was a little tainted in its reputation. I think, however, from the description, that the pirate’s isle of The Corsair is the island off Cape Colonna. It is a rude, rocky mass. I know not to what particular Coron, if there be more than one, the poet alludes; for the Coron of the Morea is neighbour to, if not in, the Mainote territory, a tract of country which never submitted to the Turks, and was exempted from the jurisdiction of Mussulman officers by the payment of an annual tribute. The Mainotes themselves are all pirates and robbers. If it be in that Coron that Byron has placed Seyd the pasha, it must be attributed to inadvertency. His Lordship was never there, nor in any part of Maina; nor does he describe the place, a circumstance which of itself goes far to prove the inadvertency. It is, however, only in making it the seat of a Turkish pasha that any error has been committed. In working out the incidents of the poem where descriptions of scenery are given, they relate chiefly to Athens and its neighbourhood. In themselves these descriptions are executed with an exquisite felicity; but they are brought in without any obvious reason wherefore. In fact, they appear to have been written independently of the poem, and are patched on “shreds of purple” which could have been spared.

The character of Conrad the Corsair may be described as a combination of the warrior of Albania and a naval officer – Childe Harold mingled with the hero of The Giaour.

 
A man of loneliness and mystery,
Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh;
Robust, but not Herculean, to the sight,
No giant frame sets forth his common height;
Yet in the whole, who paused to look again
Saw more than marks the crowd of vulgar men:
They gaze and marvel how, and still confess
That thus it is, but why they cannot guess.
Sun-burnt his cheek, his forehead high and pale,
The sable curls in wild profusion veil.
And oft perforce his rising lip reveals
The haughtier thought it curbs, but scarce conceals:
Though smooth his voice, and calm his general mien,
Still seems there something he would not have seen.
His features’ deepening lines and varying hue
At times attracted, yet perplex’d the view,
As if within that murkiness of mind
Work’d feelings fearful, and yet undefined:
Such might he be that none could truly tell,
Too close inquiry his stern glance could quell.
There breathed but few whose aspect could defy
The full encounter of his searching eye;
He had the skill, when cunning gaze to seek
To probe his heart and watch his changing cheek,
At once the observer’s purpose to espy,
And on himself roll back his scrutiny,
Lest he to Conrad rather should betray
Some secret thought, than drag that chief’s to day.
 
 
There was a laughing devil in his sneer
That raised emotions both of rage and fear;
And where his frown of hatred darkly fell
Hope withering fled, and mercy sigh’d, farewell.
 

It will be allowed that, in this portrait, some of the darker features and harsher lineaments of Byron himself are very evident, but with a more fixed sternness than belonged to him; for it was only by fits that he could put on such severity. Conrad is, however, a higher creation than any which he had previously described. Instead of the listlessness of Childe Harold, he is active and enterprising; such as the noble pilgrim would have been, but for the satiety which had relaxed his energies. There is also about him a solemnity different from the animation of the Giaour – a penitential despair arising from a cause undisclosed. The Giaour, though wounded and fettered, and laid in a dungeon, would not have felt as Conrad is supposed to feel in that situation. The following bold and terrific verses, descriptive of the maelstrom agitations of remorse, could not have been appropriately applied to the despair of grief, the predominant source of emotion in The Giaour.

 
There is a war, a chaos of the mind
When all its elements convulsed combined,
Lie dark and jarring with perturbed force,
And gnashing with impenitent remorse.
That juggling fiend who never spake before,
But cries, “I warn’d thee,” when the deed is o’er;
Vain voice, the spirit burning, but unbent,
May writhe, rebel – the weak alone repent.
 

The character of Conrad is undoubtedly finely imagined; as the painters would say, it is in the highest style of art, and brought out with sublime effect; but still it is only another phase of the same portentous meteor, that was nebulous in Childe Harold, and fiery in The Giaour. To the safe and shop-resorting inhabitants of Christendom, The Corsair seems to present many improbabilities; nevertheless, it is true to nature, and in every part of the Levant the traveller meets with individuals whose air and physiognomy remind him of Conrad. The incidents of the story, also, so wild and extravagant to the snug and legal notions of England, are not more in keeping with the character, than they are in accordance with fact and reality. The poet suffers immeasurable injustice, when it is attempted to determine the probability of the wild scenes and wilder adventurers of his tales, by the circumstances and characters of the law-regulated system of our diurnal affairs. Probability is a standard formed by experience, and it is not surprising that the anchorets of libraries should object to the improbability of The Corsair, and yet acknowledge the poetical power displayed in the composition; for it is a work which could only have been written by one who had himself seen or heard on the spot of transactions similar to those he has described. No course of reading could have supplied materials for a narration so faithfully descriptive of the accidents to which an Ægean pirate is exposed as The Corsair. Had Lord Byron never been out of England, the production of a work so appropriate in reflection, so wild in spirit, and so bold in invention, as in that case it would have been, would have entitled him to the highest honours of original conception, or been rejected as extravagant; considered as the result of things seen, and of probabilities suggested, by transactions not uncommon in the region where his genius gathered the ingredients of its sorceries, more than the half of its merits disappear, while the other half brighten with the lustre of truth.

The manners, the actions, and the incidents were new to the English mind; but to the inhabitant of the Levant they have long been familiar, and the traveller who visits that region will hesitate to admit that Lord Byron possessed those creative powers, and that discernment of dark bosoms for which he is so much celebrated; because he will see there how little of invention was necessary to form such heroes as Conrad, and how much the actual traffic of life and trade is constantly stimulating enterprise and bravery. But let it not, therefore, be supposed, that I would undervalue either the genius of the poet, or the merits of the poem, in saying so, for I do think a higher faculty has been exerted in The Corsair than in Childe Harold. In the latter, only actual things are described, freshly and vigorously as they were seen, and feelings expressed eloquently as they were felt; but in the former, the talent of combination has been splendidly employed. The one is a view from nature, the other is a composition both from nature and from history.

Lara, which appeared soon after The Corsair, is an evident supplement to it; the description of the hero corresponds in person and character with Conrad; so that the remarks made on The Corsair apply, in all respects, to Lara. The poem itself is perhaps, in elegance, superior; but the descriptions are not so vivid, simply because they are more indebted to imagination. There is one of them, however, in which the lake and abbey of Newstead are dimly shadowed, equal in sweetness and solemnity to anything the poet has ever written.

 
It was the night, and Lara’s glassy stream
The stars are studding each with imaged beam:
So calm, the waters scarcely seem to stray,
And yet they glide, like happiness, away;
Reflecting far and fairy-like from high
The immortal lights that live along the sky;
Its banks are fringed with many a goodly tree,
And flowers the fairest that may feast the bee:
Such in her chaplet infant Dian wove,
And innocence would offer to her love;
These deck the shore, the waves their channel make
In windings bright and mazy, like the snake.
All was so still, so soft in earth and air,
You scarce would start to meet a spirit there,
Secure that naught of evil could delight
To walk in such a scene, in such a night!
It was a moment only for the good:
So Lara deemed: nor longer there he stood;
But turn’d in silence to his castle-gate:
Such scene his soul no more could contemplate:
Such scene reminded him of other days,
Of skies more cloudless, moons of purer blaze;
Of nights more soft and frequent, hearts that now —
No, no! the storm may beat upon his brow
Unfelt, unsparing; but a night like this,
A night of beauty, mock’d such breast as his.
 
 
He turn’d within his solitary hall,
And his high shadow shot along the wall:
There were the painted forms of other times —
’Twas all they left of virtues or of crimes,
Save vague tradition; and the gloomy vaults
That hid their dust, their foibles, and their faults,
And half a column of the pompous page,
That speeds the spacious tale from age to age;
Where history’s pen its praise or blame supplies
And lies like truth, and still most truly lies;
He wand’ring mused, and as the moonbeam shone
Through the dim lattice o’er the floor of stone,
And the high-fretted roof and saints that there
O’er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer;
Reflected in fantastic figures grew
Like life, but not like mortal life to view;
His bristling locks of sable, brow of gloom,
And the wide waving of his shaken plume
Glanced like a spectre’s attributes, and gave
His aspect all that terror gives the grave.
 

That Byron wrote best when he wrote of himself and of his own, has probably been already made sufficiently apparent. In this respect he stands alone and apart from all other poets, and there will be occasion to show, that this peculiarity extended much farther over all his works, than merely to those which may be said to have required him to be thus personal. The great distinction, indeed, of his merit consists in that singularity. Shakspeare, in drawing the materials of his dramas from tales and history has, with wonderful art, given from his own invention and imagination the fittest and most appropriate sentiments and language; and admiration at the perfection with which he has accomplished this, can never be exhausted. The difference between Byron and Shakspeare consists in the curious accident, if it may be so called, by which the former was placed in circumstances which taught him to feel in himself the very sentiments that he has ascribed to his characters. Shakspeare created the feelings of his, and with such excellence, that they are not only probable to the situations, but give to the personifications the individuality of living persons. Byron’s are scarcely less so; but with him there was no invention, only experience, and when he attempts to express more than he has himself known, he is always comparatively feeble.