in concert with other men of letters. The plan failed, and failed ignominiously. Angry with himself, angry with his coadjutors, he relinquished it and turned to another project,

the last and the noblest of his life.

of coaches, turn slowly northward, leaving be
hind it that cemetery, which had been conse
crated by the dust of so many great poets, but
of which the doors were closed against all
that remained of Byron. We well remember
that, on that day, rigid moralists could not re-

trious, so unhappy, gifted with such rare gifts,
and tried by such strong temptations. It is
unnecessary to make any reflections. The
history carries its mora. with it. Our age has
indeed been fruitful of warnings to the emi-
nent, and of consolations to the obscure. Two
men have died within our recollection, who
a time of life at which few people have com-
pleted their education, had raised themselves,
each in his own department, to the height of
glory. One of them died at Longwood, the
other at Missolonghi.

A nation, once the first among the nations, pre-eminent in knowledge, pre-eminent in mi-frain from weeping for one so young, so illuslitary glory, the cradle of philosophy, of eloquence, and of the fine arts, had been for ages bowed down under a cruel yoke. All the vices which tyranny generates-the abject vices which it generates in those who submit to it, the ferocious vices which it generates in those who struggle against it-had deformed the character of that miserable race. The valour which had won the great battle of human civilization, which had saved Europe, and subjugated Asia, lingered only among pirates and robbers. The ingenuity, once so conspicuously displayed in every department of physical and moral science, had been depraved into a timid and servile cunning. On a sudden this degraded people had risen on their oppressors. Discountenanced or betrayed by the surrounding potentates, they had found in themselves something of that which might well supply the place of all foreign assistance -something of the energy of their fathers.

As a man of letters, Lord Byron could not but be interested in the event of this contest. His political opinions, though, like all his opinions, unsettled, leaned strongly towards the side of liberty. He had assisted the Italian insurgents with his purse; and if their struggle against the Austrian government had been prolonged, would probably have assisted them with his sword. But to Greece he was attached by peculiar ties. He had, when young, resided in that country. Much of his most splendid and popular poetry had been inspired by its scenery and by its history. Sick of inaction, degraded in his own eyes by his private vices and by his literary failures, pining for untried excitement and honourable distinction, he carried his exhausted body and his wounded spirit to the Grecian camp.

His conduct in his new situation showed so much vigour and good sense as to justify us in believing, that, if his life had been prolonged, he might have distinguished himself as a soldier and a politician. But pleasure and sorrow had done the work of seventy years upon his delicate frame. The hand of death was on him; he knew it; and the only wish which he uttered was that he might die sword in hand.

This was denied to him. Anxiety, exertion, exposure, and those fatal stimulants which had become indispensable to him, soon stretched him on a sick-bed, in a strange land, amidst strange faces, without one human being that he loved near him. There, at thirty-six, the most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth century closed his brilliant and miserable

career.

We cannot even now retrace those events without feeling something of what was felt by the nation, when it was first known that the grave had closed over so much sorrow and so much glory;-something of what was felt by those who saw the hearse, with its long train

It is always difficult to separate the literary character of a man who lives in our own time from his personal character. It is peculiarly difficult to make this separation in the case of Lord Byron. For it is scarcely too much to say, that Lord Byron never wrote without some reference, direct or indirect, to himself. The interest excited by the events of his life mingles itself in our minds, and probably in the minds of almost all our readers, with the interest which properly belongs to his works. A generation must pass away before it will be pos sible to form a fair judgment of his books, considered merely as books. At present they are not only books, but relics. We will, how ever, venture, though with unfeigned diffidence, to offer some desultory remarks on his poetry.

His lot was cast in the time of a great literary revolution. That poetical dynasty which had dethroned the successors of Shakspeare and Spenser was, in its turn, dethroned by a race who represented themselves as heirs of the ancient line, so long dispossessed by usurpers. The real nature of this revolution has not, we think, been comprehended by the great majority of those who concurred in it.

If this question were proposed-wherein especially does the poetry of our times differ from that of the last century? ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would answer, that the poetry of the last century was correct, but cold and mechanical, and that the poetry of our time, though wild and irregular, presented far more vivid images, and excited the passions far more strongly, than that of Parnell, of Addison, or of Pope. In the same manner we constantly hear it said, that the poets of the age of Elizabeth had far more genius, but far less correctness, than those of the age of Anne. It seems to be taken for granted, that there is some necessary incompatibility, some antithesis, between correctness and creative power. We rather suspect that this notion arises merely from an abuse of words; and that it has been the parent of many of the fallacies which perplex the science of criticism.

What is meant by correctness in poetry If by correctness be meart the conforming to rules which have their foundation in truth and in the principles of human nature, then correctness is only another name for excel lence. If by correctness be meant the con

forming to rules purely arbitrary, correctness may be another name for dulness and absurdity.

A writer who describes visible objects falsely, and violates the propriety of character-a writer who makes the mountains "nod their drowsy heads" at night, or a dying man take leave of the world with a rant like that of Maximin, may be said, in the high and just sense of the phrase, to write incorrectly. He violates the first great law of his art. His imitation is altogether unlike the thing imiated. The four poets who are most eminently free from incorrectness of this description are Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. They are, therefore, in one sense, and that the best sense, the most correct of poets.

When it is said that Virgil, though he had less genius than Homer, was a more correct writer, what sense is attached to the word correctness? Is it meant that the story of the Eneid is developed more skilfully than that of the Odyssey? that the Ronan describes the face of the external world, or he emotions of the mind, more accurately nan the Greek that the characters of Achates and Mnestheus are more nicely discriminated, and more consistently supported, than those of Achilles, of Nestor, and of Ulysses? The fact incontestably is, that for every violation of the fundamental laws of poetry, which can be found in Homer, it would be easy to find twenty in Virgil.

Troilus and Cressida is perhaps of all the plays of Shakspeare that which is commonly considered as the most incorrect. Yet it seems to us infinitely more correct, in the sound sense of the terin, than what are called the most correct plays of the most correct dramatists. Compare it, for example, with the Iphigénie of Racine. We are sure that the Greeks of Shakspeare bear a far greater resemblance than the Greeks of Racine, to the real Greeks who besieged Troy; and for this reason, that the Greeks of Shakspeare are human beings, and the Greeks of Racine mere names;-mere words printed in capitals at the head of paragraphs of declamation. Racine, it is true, would have shuddered at the thought of making Agamemnon quote Aristotle. But of what use is it to avoid a single anachronism, when the whole play is one anachronism-the topics and phrases of Versailles in the camp of Aub's?

ers. Watt Tinlinn and William of Deloraine are not, it is true, persons of so much dignity as Cato. But the dignity of the persons represented has as little to do with the correctness of poetry as with the correctness of painting. We prefer a gipsy by Reynolds to his majes ty's head on a signpost, and a borderer by Scott to a senator by Addison.

In what sense, then, is the word correctness used by those who say, with the author of the Pursuits of Literature, that Pope was the most correct of English poets, and, that next to Pope, came the late Mr. Gifford? What is the nature and value of that correctness, the praise of which is denied to Macbeth, to Lear, and te Othello, and given to Hoole's translations and to all the Seatonian prize-poems? We can discover no eternal rule, no rule founded in reason and in the nature of things, which Shakspeare does not observe much more strictly than Pope. But if by correctness be meant the conforming to a narrow legislation, which, while lenient to the mala in se, multiplies, without the shadow of a reason, the mala prohibita; if by correctness be meant a strict attention to certain ceremonious observances, which are no more essential to poetry than etiquette to good government, or than the washings of a Pharisee to devotion; then, assuredly, Pope may be a more correct poet than Shakspeare; and, if the code were a little altered, Colley Cibber might be a more correct poet than Pope. But it may well be doubted whether this kind of correctness be a merit; nay, whether it be not an absolute fault.

It would be amusing to make a digest of the irrational laws which bad critics have framed for the government of poets. First in celebrity and in absurdity stand the dramatic unities of place and time. No human being has ever been able to find any thing that could, even by courtesy, be called an argument for these unities, except that they have been deduced from the general practice of the Greeks. It requires no very profound examination to discover that the Greek dramas, often admirable as compo sitions, are, as exhibitions of human charac ter and human life, far inferior to the English plays of the age of Elizabeth. Every scholar knows that the dramatic part of the Athenian tragedies was at first subordinate to the lyrical part. It would, therefore, have been little less than a miracle if the laws of the Athenian stage had been found to suit plays in which In the sense in which we are now using the there was no chorus. All the great masterword correctness, we think that Sir Walter pieces of the dramatic art have been comSco', Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge, are far posed in direct violation of the unities, and more correct writers than those who are com- could never have been composed if the unities monly extolled as the models of correctness-had not been violated. It is clear, for examPope for example, and Addison. The single ple, that such a character as that of Hamlet description of a moonlight night in Pope's could never have been developed within the Iliad contains more inaccuracies than can be limits to which Alfieri confined himself. Yet found in all the Excursion. There is not a such was the reverence of literary men during single scene in Cato in which every thing that the last century for these unities, that Johnson, conduces to poetical illusion-the propriety of who, much to his honour, took the opposite character, of language, of situation, is not side, was, as he says, "frighted at his own te more grossly violated than in any part of the merity;" and "afraid to stand against the auLay of the Last Minstrel. No man can possi-thorities which might be produced against bly think that the Romans of Addison resem- him."

b'e the real Romans so closely as the moss- There are other rules of the same kind troopers of Scott resemble the real moss-troop- without end. "Shakspeare," says Rymer,

"ought not to have made Othello black; for | see in old Bibles-an exact square, enclosed the hero of a tragedy ought always to be by the rivers Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euwhite." "Milton," says another critic, "ought phrates, each with a convenient bridge in the not to have taken Adam for his hero; for the centre-rectangular beds of flowers-a long hero of an epic poem ought always to be vic- canal neatly bricked and railed in-the tree of torious." "Milton," says another, "ought not knowledge, clipped like one of the limes beto have put so many similes into his first hind the Tuileries, standing in the centre of book; for the first book of an epic poem ought the grand alley-the snake twined round italways to be the most unadorned. There are the man on the right hand, the woman on the no similes in the first book of the Iliad." left, and the beasts drawn up in an exact cirMilton," says another, "ought not to have cle round them. In one sense the picture is placed in an epic poem such lines as these: correct enough. That is to say, the squares are correct; the circles are correct; the man and woman are in a most correct ne with the

I so erred in overmuch admiring.'”

46

And why not? The critic is ready with a reason tree; and the snake forms a n.ost correct -a lady's reason. "Such lines," says he, spiral. are not, it must be allowed, unpleasing to the ear; but the redundant syllable ought to be confined to the drama, and not admitted into epic poetry." As to the redundant syllable in heroic rhyme, on serious subjects, it has been, from the time of Pope downward, proscribed by the general consent of all the correct school. No magazine would have admitted so incorrect a couplet as that of Dayton,

But if there were a painter so gifted, that he should place in the canvass that glorious paradise seen by the interior eye of him whose outward sight had failed with long watching and labouring for liberty and truth-if there were a painter who could set before us the mazes of the sapphire brook, the lake with its fringe of myrtles, the flowery meadows, the grottoes overhung by vines, the forests shining with Hesperian fruit and with the plumage of gorgeous birds, the massy shade of that nuptial bower which showered down roses on the Another law of heroic poetry which, fifty years sleeping lovers-what should we think of a ago, was considered as fundamental, was, that connoisseur who should tell us that this paintthere should be a pause-a comma at least, at ing, though finer than the absurd picture of the the end of every complet. It was also provided old Bible, was not so correct? Surely we that there should never be a full stop except should answer, It is both finer and more corat the end of a couplet. Well do we remem-rect; and it is finer because it is more correct. ber to have heard a most correct judge of poe-It is not made up of correctly drawn diagrams, try revile Mr. Rogers for the incorrectness of but it is a correct painting, a worthy representahat most sweet and graceful passage,

"As when we lived untouched with these disgraces, When as our kingdom was our dear embraces."

"Twas thine, Maria, thine, without a sigh, At midnight in a sister's arms to die, Nursing the young to health."

Sir Roger Newdigate is fairly entitled, we think, to be ranked among the great critics of this school. He made a law that none of the poems written for the prize which he established at Oxford should exceed fifty lines. This law seems to us to have at least as much foundation in reason as any of those which we have mentioned; nay, much more, for the world, we believe, is pretty well agreed in thinking that the shorter a prize-poem is, the better.

tion of that which it is intended to represent.

It is not in the fine arts alone that this false correctness is prized by narrow-minded men, by men who cannot distinguish means from ends, or what is accidental from what is essential. Mr. Jourdain admired correctness in fencing. "You had no business to hit me then. You must never thrust in quart till you have thrust in tierce." M. Tomès liked correctness in medical practice. "I stand up for Artemius. That he killed his patient is plain enough. But still he acted quite according to rule. A man dead is a man dead, and there is an end of the matter. But if rules are to be broken, there is no saying what consequences may follow." We have heard of an old German We do not see why we should not make a officer, who was a great admirer of correctness few more rules of the same kind-why we in military operations. He used to revile Boshould not enact that the number of scenes in naparte for spoiling the science of war, which every act shall be three, or some multiple of had been carried to such an exquisite perfecthree; that the number of lines in every scene tion by Marshal Daun. "In my youth we used shall be an exact square; that the dramatis to march and countermarch all the summer, persona shall never be more nor fewer than six-without gaining or losing a square league, and teen; and that, in heroic rhymes, every thirty- then we went into winter-quarters. And now sixth line shall have twelve syllables. If we were to lay down these canons, and to call Pope, Goldsmith, and Addison incorrect writers for not having complied with our whims, we should act precisely as those critics act who find incorrectness in the magnificent imagery and the varied music of Coleridge and Shelley.

The correctness which the last century prized so much resembled the correctness of those pictures of the garden of Eden which we VOL. I.-16

comes an ignorant, hot-headed young man.
who flies about from Boulogne o Ulm, and
from Ulm to the middle of Moravia, and fights
battles in December. The whole system of
his tactics is monstrously incorrect." The
world is of opinion, in spite of critics like these,
that the end of fencing is to hit, that the end of
medicine is to cure, that the end of war is t
conquer, and that those means are the mos
correct which best accomplish the ends.
And has poetry no end, no eternal and im
L

flows into the gesture and the face-always an imperfect, often a deceitful sign of that which is within. The deeper and more complex parts of human nature can be exhibited by means of words alone. Thus the objects of the imitation of poetry are the whole external and the whole internal universe, the face of nature, the vicissitudes of fortune, man as he is in himself, man as he appears in society, all things of which we can form an image in our minds, by combining together parts of things which really exist. The domain of this imperial art is commensurate with the imaginative faculty.

An art essentially imitative ought not surely to be subjected to rules which tend to make its imitations less perfect than they would other wise be; and those who obey such rules ought to be called, not correct, but incorrect artists. The true way to judge of the rules by which English poetry was governed during the last century, is to look at the effects which they produced.

mutable principles? Is poetry, like heraldry, mere matter of arbitrary regulation? The heralds tell us that certain scutcheons and bearings denote certain conditions, and that to put colours on colours, or metals on metals, is false blazonry. If all this were reversed; if every coat of arms in Europe were new-fashioned; if it were decreed that or should never be placed but on argent, or argent but on or; that illegitimacy should be denoted by a lozenge, and widowhood by a bend, the new science would be just as good as the old science, because both the new and the old would be good for nothing. The mummery of Portcullis and Rouge Dragon, as it has no other value than that which caprice has assigned to it, may well submit to any laws which caprice may impose on it. But it is not so with that great imitative art, to the power of which all ages, the rudest and the most enlightened, bear witness. Since its first grea' masterpieces were produced, every thing that is changeable in this world has been changed. Civilization has been It was in 1780 that Johnson completed his gained, los', gained again. Religions, and Lives of the Poets. He tells us in that work languages, and forms of government, and that since the time of Dryden, English poetry usages of private life, and the modes of think- had shown no tendency to relapse into its oriing, all have undergone a succession of revo-ginal savageness; that its language had been lutions. Every thing has passed away but the refined, its numbers tuned, and its sentiments great features of nature, the heart of man, and improved. It may, perhaps, be doubted whether the miracles of that art of which it is the office the nation had any great reason to exult in the to reflect back the heart of man and the fea-refinements and improvements which gave it tures of nature. Those two strange old poems, Douglas for Othello, and the Triumphs of the wonder of ninety generations, still retain Temper for the Faerie Queen. all their freshness. They still command the veneration of minds enriched by the literature of many nations and ages. They are still, even n wretched translations, the delight of schoolDoys. Having survived ten thousand capricious fashions, having seen successive codes of criticism become obsolete, they still remain, Emmortal with the immortality of truth, the same when perused in the study of an English scholar as when they were first chanted at the banquets of the Ionian princes.

It was during the thirty years which preceded the appearance of Johnson's Lives, that the diction and versification of English poetry were, in the sense in which the word is commonly used, most correct. Those thirty years form the most deplorable part of our literary history. They have bequeathed to us scarcely any poetry which deserves to be remembered. Two or three hundred lines of Gray, twice as many of Goldsmith, a few stanzas of Beattie and Collins, a few strophes of Mason, and a few clever prologues and satires, were the masterpieces of this age of consummate excel lence. They may all be printed in one volume, and that volume would be by no means a volume of extraordinary merit. It would contain no poetry of the highest class, and little which could be placed very high in the second class. The Paradise Regained, or Comus, would outweigh it all.

Poetry is, as that most acute of human beings, Aristotle, said, more than two thousand years ago, imitation. It is an art analogous in many respects to the art of painting, sculpture, and acting. The imitations of the painter, the sculptor, and the actor are, indeed, within certain limits, more perfect than those of the poet. The machinery which the poet employs consists merely of words; and words cannot, even when employed by such an artist as Homer or Dante, present to the mind images of visible objects quite so lively and exact as those which we carry away from looking on the works of the brush and the chisel. But, on the other hand, the range of poetry is infinitely wider than that of any other imitative art, or than that of all the other imitative arts together. The sculptor can imitate only form; the painter only form and colour; the actor, until the poet supplies him with words, only form, colour, and motion. Poetry holds the outer world in common with the other arts. The heart of man is the province of poetry, and of poetry alone. The painter, the sculptor, and the actor, when the actor is unassisted by the poet, It was in a cold and barren season that the can exhibit no more of human passion and seeds_of_that_rich harvest which we have character than that small portion which over-reaped were first sown. While poetry was

At last, when poetry had fallen inte such utter decay that Mr. Hayley was thought a great poet, it began to appear that the excess of the evil was about to work the cure. Men became tired of an insipid conformity to a standard which derived no authority from nature or reason. A shallow criticism had taught them tc ascribe a superstitious value to the spurious correctness of poetasters. A deeper criticism brought them back to the free correctness of the first great masters. The eternal laws of poetry regained their power, and the temporary fashions which had superseded those laws went after the wig of Lovelace and the hoop of Clarissa.

every year becoming more feeble and more manliness of taste which approached to roughmechanical, while the monotonous versifica-ness. They did not deal in mechanical versition which Pope had introduced, no longer re-fication and conventional phrases. They wrote deemed by his brilliant wit and his compact- concerning things, the thought of which set ness of expression, palled on the ear of the their hearts on fire; and thus what they wrote, public, the great works of the dead were every even when it wanted every other grace, had that day attracting more and more of the admiration inimitable grace which sincerity and strong which they deserved. The plays of Shakspeare passion impart to the rudest and most homely were better acted, better edited, and better compositions. Each of them sought for inspi known than they had ever been. Our noble ration in a noble and affecting subject, fertile old ballads were again read with pleasure, and of images, which had not yet been hackneyed. it became a fashion to imitate them. Many Liberty was the muse of Álfieri; religion was of the imitations were altogether contemptible. the muse of Cowper. The same truth is found But they showed that men had at least begun in their lighter pieces. They were not among to admire the excellence which they could not those who deprecated the severity, or deplored rival. A literary revolution was evidently at the absence of an unreal mistress in melodious hand. There was a ferment in the minds of commonplaces. Instead of raving about imamen, a vague craving for something new, aginary Chloes and Sylvias, Cowper wrote of disposition to hail with delight any thing which | Mrs. Unwin's knitting-needles. The only love might at first sight wear the appearance of verses of Alfieri were addressed to one whom originality. A reforming age is always fertile he truly and passionately loved. Tutte le of impostors. The same excited state of pub-rime amorose che seguono," says he, "tutte lic feeling which produced the great separation sono per essa, e ben sue, e di lei solamente from the see of Rome, produced also the ex- poichè mai d'altra donna per certo non canterò." cesses of the Anabaptists. The same stir in the public mind of Europe which overthrew the abuses of the old French government, produced the Jacobins and Theophilanthropists. Macpherson and the Della Cruscans were to the true reformers of English poetry what Chipperdoling was to Luther, or what Clootz was to Turgot. The public was never more disposed to believe stories without evidence, and to admire books without merit. Any thing which could break the dull monotony of the correct school was acceptable.

46

These great men were not free from affectation. But their affectation was directly opposed to the affectation which generally prevailed. Each of them has expressed, in strong and bitter language, the contempt which he felt for the effeminate poetasters who were in fashion both in England and Italy. Cowper complains that

He

had

"Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ,

The substitute for genius, taste, and wit." praised Pope; yet he regretted that Pepe

"Made poetry a mere mechanic art,

The forerunner of the great restoration of our literature was Cowper. His literary caAnd every warbler had his tune by heart." reer began and ended at nearly the same time Alfieri speaks with similar scorn of the trage with that of Alfieri. A parallel between Alfieri dies of his predecessors. "Mi cadevano dalle and Cowper may, at first sight, seem as un- mani per la languidezza, trivialtà e prolissità promising as that which a loyal Presbyterian dei modi e del verso, senza parlare poi della minister is said to have drawn, in 1745, be- snervatezza dei pensieri. Or perchè mai questa tween George the Second and Enoch. It may nostra divina lingua, sì maschia anco, ed ener seem that the gentle, shy, melancholy Calvin-gica, e feroce, in bocca di Dante, dovra elle ist, whose spirit had been broken by fagging at farci così sbiadata ed eunuca nel dialogo traschool, who had not courage to earn a liveli-gico." hood by reading the titles of bills in the House of Lords, and whose favourite associates were a blind old lady and an evangelical divine, could have nothing in common with the haughty, ardent, and voluptuous nobleman, the horse-jockey, the libertine, who fought Lord Ligonier in Hyde Park, and robbed the Pretender of his queen. But though the private lives of these remarkable men present scarcely any points of resemblance, their literary lives bear a close analogy to each other. They both found poetry in its lowest state of degradation, feeble, artificial, and altogether nerveless. They both possessed precisely the talents which fitted them for the task of raising it from that deep abasement. They cannot, in strictness, be called great poets. They had not in any very high degree the creative power,

To men thus sick of the languid manner of their contemporaries, ruggedness seemed a venial fault, or rather a positive merit. In their hatred of meretricious ornament, and of what Cowper calls "creamy smoothness," they erred on the opposite side. Their style was too aus tere, their versification too harsh. It is not easy, however, to overrate the service which they rendered to literature. Their merit is rather that of demolition than that of construc tion. The intrinsic value of their poems is considerable. But the example which they set of mutiny against an absurd system was invaluable. The part which they performed was rather that of Moses than that of Joshua. They opened the house of bondage; but they did not enter the promised land.

During the twenty years which followed the death of Cowper, the revolution in English poetry was fully consummated. None of the "The vision and the faculty divine;" writers of this period, not even Sir Walter but they had great vigour of thought, great Scott, contributed so much to the consummawarmth of feeling, and what, in their circum- tion as Lord Byron. Yet he, Lord Byron, con stances, was above all things important, atributed to it unwillingly, and with constant