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was grand or beautiful glanced away from his memory without making any impression, the absurd and the monstrous ate into it like aquafortis, and remained fixed for ever. Almost every tale which he told us was evidently the extravagance of some grave jester, but our honest friend treasured it up as the most precious gem of history or science, and we apprehend before he returns to Scarborough he will have stock enough to set up for a western Sindbad. The silliness of this man was at first diverting enough, but mere fatuity soon grows tiresome;-the German, however, never ceased to be amused with a credulity which revolted from no absurdity, which could believe that the reason why

the fires of Vesuvius could not be
seen in the day was that they were
lighted up in the evening and put out
in the morning, &c. &c. Their con-
versations were sometimes amusing
enough, but most commonly consist-
ed merely of outrageous lies on the
one side, and thick-headed simplicity
on the other. The drollest as well as
the silliest things that took place
were the conversations which
the Englishman, would resolutely
hold with the captain, while after
supper we sat smoking round the
cabin fire; the apropos and malapro-
pos remarks and replies which passed
between them, neither understanding
a word the other said, often afforded
us a hearty laugh.

SARDANAPALUS, THE TWO FOSCARI, AND CAIN,
BY LORD BYRON.*

"ONCE a jacobin, always a jacobin," was formerly a paradox;" but now the time gives it proof." "Once an aristocrat, always an aristocrat" might pass, with as little question, into a proverb. Lord Byron, who has sometimes sought to wrap himself in impenetrable mystery, who has worn the fantastic disguises of corsairs, giaours, and motley jesters, now comes out in all the dignity of his birth, arrayed in a court suit of the old French fashion, with the star glittering on his breast, and the coronet overtopping his laurels. The costume only has been changed, the man has been the same from the first. He has played off his most romantic vagaries from mere recklessness of will, in legitimate defiance of the world. When he sneered at human glory, at patriotism and virtue, put religion aside as an empty name, and scoffed at immortality as a "tale that is told," his rank gave him confidence and success. If he ranged over the mournful scenes of classic desolation, and called up the spirit of their old magnificence, he appealed almost exclusively to aristocratic sympathies. If he sought to represent the violence of passion as justifying its own excesses to command admiration for the darkest spirits-or to bid a proud defiance to all

established opinions and prejudices, he dared scarcely less as a lord than as a poet. In his very scorn of kings and rulers, there has been little regard for the common sorrows of the people; but a high feeling of injured dignity, a sort of careless ferocity, like that of Cataline amidst his hated foes and his despised supporters. On a lonely rock amidst the storm, in the moonlight shadows of the Colosseum, or pensively musing on the sad and silent shores of Greece, his nobility is ever with him. And now this Alcibiades of our literature, who has set all rules at defiance, who thought it sport to drag the critics "panting after him in vain," whose whole course has been one marvelous deviation from the beaten track of laureled bards, comes forth with his eulogies on Pope, and is pleased to patronize the unities! He who breathed about "Manfred" its mighty mysticism, and there mingled in splendid confusion the spirits of various superstitions, now appears as the champion of dramatic coherence after the straitest sect in criticism. The "chartered libertine," who has made humanity a jest-who has scoffed not only at the forms and creeds of the pious, but at all which raises man above the dust on which he tramples-to whom the spirit of

Sardanapalus, a Tragedy; the Two Foscari, a Tragedy; Cain, a Mystery. By Lord Byron. London. Murray, 1821.

poetry even in himself has been a thing to mock at-now plays the rhetorician's part; discovers ethical poetry to be the finest thing in the world; and the author of that piece of shallowest philosophy, the Essay on Man, to be the first of ethic poets! This is the natural course of a man who has great powers, and great pride, with rank to sustain his excesses, and without that presiding and majestic faculty which would enable him to be master in his own heart, and to dispose into harmonious creations the vast elements within him. His present change, from the wild to the austere, is not the result of any principle harmonizing his faculties; but only a rash excursion into another style. Like a military adventurer drunk with glory, he rushes with half his forces into a strange country, trusting to his fortune and his name to defend him.

There are two of Lord Byron's characteristic excellencies which he never leaves behind in his most fantastic expeditions, and which he has accordingly brought into his new domain of classic tragedy. One of these is his intense feeling of the loveliness of woman-his power, not only of picturing individual forms, but of infusing into the very atmosphere which surrounds them the spirit of beauty and of love. A soft roseate light is spread over them, which seems to sink into the soul. The other faculty to which we allude is his comprehensive sympathy with the vastest objects in the material universe. There is scarcely any pure description of individual scenes in all his works; but the noblest allusions to the grandeurs of earth and heaven. He pays no allegiance but to the elements." The moon, the stars, the ocean, the mountain desart, are endowed by him with new "speech and language," and send to the heart their mighty voices. Ile can interpret between us and the firmament, or give us all the sentiment of an everlasting solitude. His power in this respect differs essentially from that of Wordsworth, who does not require an over-powering greatness in his theme, whom the "meanest flower" can move to sweetest thoughts, to whom all earth is redolent with divinest associations, and in whose lowliest path beauty is

ever present," a simple product of the common day."

We believe that we may safely refer to one or other of these classes of beauty and grandeur almost every passage in the tragedies before us which deserves a place in the memory. Excepting where these occur, the plays appear to us "coldly correct, and critically dull." They abound in elaborate antitheses, frigid disputations, stately common places, and all the lofty trifling of those English tragedies which are badly modeled on the bad imitations of the Greeks by the French. There is little strongly marked character, little picturesque grouping, and scarcely any action. For pages together of laboured dialogue, the fable makes no progress-but the persons develope their own characters with the most edifying minuteness. We almost wish the rule of our law, that no man shall be a witness for or against himself, were rigidly applied to the drama. In the French courts of justice, and on the French stage, the rule is otherwise; but we need not desire to imitate the taste of our neighbours in criminal jurisprudence or in tragedy.

The poverty of the piece, on the striking history of Sardanapalus, has really surprised us. It afforded such room for towering luxury, such hints for the embodying in the person of the hero a mighty hunger and thirst after enjoyment, such fitting space for a great picture of Assyrian pomp, ennobled by the striking spectacle of the brave sensualist leaping from the dreamy deliciousness of his regal couch into a fiery grave, that we anticipated from the title a splendid wonder. How would some of our old poets have rioted in such a theme! How would their verses have breathed of the spicy east-how would they, with liberal hand, have showered on us "barbaric pearl and gold"! But Lord Byron has been a very niggard of his Asiatic stores. His hero is a gentle epicurean philosopher, who is slothful on system, buries himself in his palace in mercy to his subjects, and is actually distinguished only from the class of sovereigns by his love for a lady to whom he is not married, and his neglect of his Queen. His tremulous abhorrence of even necessary bloodshed is utterly out of

character in an oriental sensualist who can have no sense of the value of human existence, and is belied by the very carelessness with which he resigns his own. There is no feeling of luxury communicated to the mind of the reader; for the whole pomp hinted at in the course of the play, if faithfully copied, would hardly furnish one scene for a Covent Garden show. Even its catastrophe does not astonish or appal us; but happens almost as a thing of course. How little action it comprises, may be shortly known by a mere recapitulation of its scenes. The first act is occupied by the attempt of Salemenes, the brother of the Queen, to rouse Sardanapalus to a sense of his danger, and to prevent him from supping in a pavilion on the Euphrates; and, by some fond discourses between the King and his favorite Myrrha, an Ionian slave. In the second, a priest and a nobleman hold long and leisurely conversations about a scheme of dethroning the King are detected by Salemenes, and rescued by the King from his sword, forgiven, and ordered to their satrapies: they renew their plotsand the King and Myrrha return to their philosophy and their love. The third act shows us the breaking out of this conspiracy. Sardanapalus is alarmed in the midst of a banquet, and, throwing off his weakness, arms himself for the combat, which rages with various success, till the rebels are driven from the city. In the fourth act, Myrrha is discovered watching the troubled slumbers of the king, who, on waking, relates to her a frightful dream, which is the most ambitious piece of writing in the play; but it seems to us quite artificial and frigid.

Salemenes then begs his brotherin-law to grant his sister an interview, in which her patience and enduring love revive his old affection within him. This is the most beautiful and affecting scene m the play; but too long to be extracted. After another scene with Myrrha, beginning in coldness and ending in love, and a consultation with Salemenes on the posture of affairs, the monarch hastens again to battle. The fifth act opens with the following speech of Myrrha, who is gazing on the sun as it rises:

Myrrha. (At a window.) The day at last has broken. What a night Hath usher'd it! How beautiful in heaven! Though varied with a transitory storm, More beautiful in that variety! How hideous upon earth! where peace and And love and revel, in an hour were tramhope, pled

By human passions to a human chaos, Not yet resolved to separate elements.'Tis warring still! And can the sun so rise, So bright, so rolling back the clouds into Vapours more lovely than the unclouded sky With golden pinnacles, and snowy mountains,

And billows purpler than the ocean's, making

In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth,
So like we almost deem it permanent;
So fleeting, we can scarcely call it aught
Beyond a vision, 'tis so transiently
Scatter'd along the eternal vault: and yet
It dwells upon the soul, and soothes the soul,
And blends itself into the soul, until
Sunrise and sunset form the haunted epoch
Of sorrow and of love; which they who
mark not,

Know not the realms where those twin genii
Who chasten and who purify our hearts,
So that we would not change their sweet re-
bukes
For all the boisterous joys that ever shook
The air with clamour), build the palaces
Where their fond votaries repose and breathe
Briefly; but in that brief cool calm inhale
Enough of heaven to enable them to bear
The rest of common, heavy, human hours,
And dream them through in placid suffer-

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sense

Escapes our highest efforts to be happy.

The greater part of this speech is very beautiful, though the description of the sun rolling back the vapours is apparently imitated from a magnificent scene in the second book of Wordsworth's Excursion which far surpasses it; and the closing lines are obscure. Salemenes is brought in to die; Sardanapalus enters defeated; news arrives that the Euphrates has swept down the bulwark; and the king, after providing for the safety of his friends, and ordering a funeral pyre to be heaped round the throne, dismisses all but Myrrha, who resolves to die with him. Nothing is then left them but to perish: Sar

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embrace.

Myrrha. Embrace, but not the last;
there is one more.
Sardanapalus. True, the commingling
fire will mix our ashes.

Myrrha. And pure as is my love to thee, shall they, Purged from the dross of earth, and earthly passion,

Mix pale with thine. A single thought yet irks me.

Sardanapalus. Say it.

Myrrha. It is that no kind hand will
gather

The dust of both into one urn.
Sardanapalus.

The better:
Rather let them be borne abroad upon
The winds of heaven, and scatter'd into air,
Than be polluted more by human hands
Of slaves and traitors, in this blazing pa-
lace,

And its enormous walls of reeking ruin, We leave a nobler monument than Egypt Hath piled in her brick mountains, o'er dead kings,

Or kine, for none know whether those proud

piles

Be for their monarch, or their ox-god Apis: So much for monuments that have forgotten Their very record!

Myrrha. Then farewell, thou earth! And loveliest spot of earth! farewell Ionia! Be thou still free and beautiful, and far Aloof from desolation! My last prayer Was for thee, my last thoughts, save one, were of thee!

Sardanapalus. And that?
Myrrha.
Is yours.
(The trumpet of Pania sounds without)

Hark!

Now!

Sardanapalus. Myrrha. Sardanapalus. Adieu, Assyria ! I loved thee well, my own, my fathers' land, And better as my country than my kingdom.

I satiated thee with peace and joys; and

this

Is my reward! and now I owe thee nothing, Not even a grave.

(He mounts the pile.) Now, Myrrha!

Myrrha.
Art thou ready?
Sardanapalus. As the torch in thy grasp.
(Myrrha fires the pile.)
VOL. V.

"Tis fired! I come

Myrrha. (As Myrrha springs forward to throw her self into the flames, the Curtain falls.)

Can any thing be more ill-timed than the moralizing of the dying king about the Egyptian pyramids ? The last thought in the speech, too, is taken from Fuller, the Church Historian, who quaintly observes, "the pyramids, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders." When we consider, that this play is nearly twice the length of any acted tragedy, we shall scarcely wonder that these incidents, expanded into such a length, are weakened by the plenitude of words. The following little dialogue, respecting the irruption of the river, may serve as a specimen of the expansive art of writing:

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For the assurance of the vacant space
As time and means permit.

Sandanapalus.
About it straight,
And bring me back as speedily as full
And fair investigation may permit
Report of the true state of this irruption
Of waters.

The Two Foscari" is founded on the interesting story of the Son of a Venetian Doge, who was suspected of murder, and sentenced to exile; and who returned to his beloved home,

only to be tortured and sent back into banishment, where he died broken hearted. Lord Byron has only taken the latter part of the tale: his piece opens with the sufferings of the young Foscari, after his return, and contains no incidents, except the repetition of his tortures, his second sen→ sence of banishment, his death, and the deposition and death of his father. There is no character in it, except that of the old Doge, who is admirably depicted ;-the quiet dignity, the deep, silent agony, scarcely perceived amidst the careful discharge of his great office, the noiseless attention to all forms and observances, while his aged heart is breaking; and the withering of the last support at the toll of the bell for the installation of his successor, form a fine Titian-like picture. But young Foscari, and his wife Marina, are merely the creatures of circumstance, excepting that he is a gentle, and she a vociferous sufferer. There

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"Cain, a Mystery," is altogether of a higher order than these classical tragedies. Lord Byron has not, indeed, fulfilled our expectations of a gigantic picture of the first murderer; for there is scarcely any passion, except the immediate agony of rage, which brings on the catastrophe, and Cain himself is little more than the subject of supernatural agency. This piece is essentially nothing but a vehicle for striking allusions to the mighty abstractions of Death and Life, Eternity and Time, for vast but dim descriptions of the regions of space, and for daring disputations on that great problem, the origin of evil. Lucifer meets Cain, doubting and troubled, and "breathes his spirit in his ear," till he consents to accompany him through the abyss of space to Hades. There he sees the phantasms of an earlier and mightier world, destroyed by the crushing of the elements. He returns to earth, but his soul is unfitted for devotion; his prayers are impious, and his sacrifice is scattered to the winds; he rushes with wild rage to pull down the altar of his accepted brother, and kills him, because he resists his purpose. The ground-work of the arthe awful subjects guments, on handled, is very common place; but they are arrayed in great majesty of language, and conducted with a frightful audacity. The direct attacks on the goodness of God are such as we dare not utter or transcribe. They are not, perhaps, taken apart, bolder than some passages of Milton; but they inspire quite a different sensation, because, in thinking of Paradise Lost, we never regard the Deity, or Satan, as other than great adverse powers, created by the imagination of the poet. God is only the name for the King of Heaven, not for the Father of all. The personal identity which Milton has given to his spiritual intelligences,-the local habitations which he has assigned them,-the material beauty with which he has invested their forms, all these remove the idea of impiety from their discourses. ron's Lucifer, except his speeches; But we know nothing of Lord Bythem; and the whole appears an abhe is invented only that he may utter stract discussion, held for its own sake, not maintained in order to pre

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