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she produced them, and we shrink from degradation, lest their silent manes should reproach us.

and unobtrusive individual? You must share the fate of your brethren, and abide the judgment of the spectaHad it been your destiny to live two centuries ago, tors. Having assumed for our amusement, these gaudy and in the place of these illustrious spirits, to form the trappings, you must not hope to screen your blunders national poetry of England, how miserably different from our castigation, by a sudden and prudish_retreat had been, with regard to you and to themselves, the feel-into a less glittering costume. You have made your ings of your countrymen! In all your writings, how election.-The simile which I have employed may aplittle is there whose object it is to make us reverence pear inept to many; of these, I well know your Lordvirtue, or love our country! You never teach us to ship is not one. despise earthly sufferings, in the hope of eternal hap- You made your debut in the utmost dignity and piness. With respect to all that is best and greatest in sadness of the Cothurnus. You were the most luguthe nature and fate of man, you preserve not merely a brious of mortals; it was the main ambition of your sorrowful, but a sullen silence. Your poetry need not vanity to attract to your matchless sorrows the overhave been greatly different from what it is, although flowing sympathies of the world. We gave you credit you had lived and died in the midst of a generation of for being sincere in your affliction. We looked upon heartless, vicious, and unbelieving demons. With you, you as the victim of more than human misery, and heroism is lunacy, philosophy folly, virtue a cheat, and sympathized with the extravagance of your public and religion a bubble. Your man is a stern, cruel, jealous, uncontrollable lamentations. It is true that no one revengeful, contemptuous, hopeless, solitary savage. knew whence your sorrow had sprung, but we were Your woman is a blind, devoted, heedless, beautiful generous in our compassion, and asked few questions. minister and victim of lust. The past is a vain record, In time, however, we have become less credulous and and the present a fleeting theatre of misery and mad-more inquisitive; the farce was so often renewed, that ness: the future one blank of horrid darkness, whereon we became weary of its wonders; we have come to your mind floats and fluctuates in a cheerless uncertainty, between annihilation and despair.

suspect at last, that whatever sorrows you may have, they are all of your own creating; and that, whencesoever they may be, they are at least neither of so uniform nor of so majestic a character as you would fain have had us to suppose.

The interest which you have found means to excite for the dismal creations of your poetry, is proof abundant of the vigor of your genius, but should afford small consolation to your conscience-stricken mind. You are There was indeed something not a little affecting in a skilful swordsman; but you have made use of poison- the spectacle of youth, nobility, and genius, doomed to ed weapons, and the deadliness of your wound gives no a perpetual sighing over the treachery of earthly hopes, addition to your valor. You have done what greater and the vanity of earthly enjoyments. Admitting, as and better men despised to do. You have brought we did to its full extent, the depth of your woes, it is yourself down to the level of that part of our erring no wonder that we were lenient critics of the works of and corrupted nature, which it was their pride and pri- such a peerless sufferer. We reverenced your mournful vilege to banish from the recollection and the sympathy muse; we were willing to believe that, if such was her of those to whom they spake. In the great struggle be- power in the midst of tears, a brighter fortune would tween the good and the evil principle, you have taken the have made it unrivalled and irresistible. The forlornwrong side, and you enjoy the worthless popularity of ness of your bosom gained you the forbearance of the a daring rebel. But hope not that the calm judgment most unrelenting judges. Every thing was pardoned of posterity will ratify the hasty honors which you have to the chosen victim of destiny. We regarded you as extorted from the passions of your contemporaries. the very masterpiece and symbol of affliction, and Believe me, men are not upon the whole quite so un-looked up to you the more that your glory had been principled, nor women quite so foolish,-nor virtue so withereduseless,--nor religion so absurd,-nor deception so lasting,-nor hypocrisy so triumphant,-as your Lordship has been pleased to fancy. A day of terrible retribution will arrive, and the punishment inflicted may not improbably consist of things the most unwelcome to a poet's view-the scorn of many, and the neglect of all. Even Dow, among the serious and reflective part of the men and the women of England, your poetry is read, indeed, and admired, but you yourself are never talked of except with mingled emotions of anger and pity. With what pain do the high spirits of your virtuous and beroic ancestors contemplate the degradation of their descendant. Alas! that the genius which might have ennobled any name, should have only assisted you to stamp a more lasting stain upon the pure, the generous, the patriotic, the English name of Byron.

Any other poet might complain with justice, should he see remarks of a personal nature mixed up with a criticism upon his writings. You, my Lord, can scarcely fatter yourself that you have any right to expect such forbearance. If the scrutiny of the world be disagreeable to you, either in its operation or in its effects, you need blame no one but yourself. We were well enough disposed to treat you with distant respect, but you have courted and demanded our gaze. You have bared your bosom when no man entreated you; it is your own fault if we have seen there not the scars of honorable wounds, but the festering blackness of a loathsome disease. You have been the vainest and the most egotistical of poets. You have made yourself your only theme; shall we not dare to dissect the hero, because, forsooth, he and his poet are the same? You have debased your nobility by strutting upon the stage; shall we still be expected to talk of you as of a private

"As when Heaven's fire

Had scathed the forest oak, or mountain pine,
With singed top his stately growth, though bare,
Stands on the blasted heath."

Although, however, we at the time believed what
you told us, and opened all the stores of our pity to
your moving tale, we have not been able to abstain, in
the sequel, from considering somewhat more calmly the
items of its horror. The first thing which made us
suspect that we had been played upon, was the vehe-
mence of your outcries. If your account of yourself
were a true one, your heart was broken. You decked
yourself in the sable trappings of a Hamlet, and, like
him, you were free to confess that "the earth seemed
to you only a sterile promontory, and the goodly canopy
of heaven a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
You had no pleasure in man, no! nor, for all our smi-
You stood like another
ling, in woman neither."
Niobe, a cold and marble statue, frozen by despair
amidst the ruin of your hopes. Had your sorrow been
so deep, my Lord, its echoes had been lower. The dig-
nified sufferer needs no circle of listeners to fan, by
their responding breath, the expiring embers of misery.
Poetry was born within you, and you must have made
it the companion of your afflictions; but your lyre,
like that of the bereaved hero of old, would have uttered
lonely and unobtrusive notes, had your fingers, like his,
been touched with the real tremblings of agony. A
truly glorious spirit, sunk in sorrow such as you as-
sumed, might have well deserved the silent veneration
of its more lowly and more happy contemplators. But
it would neither have courted their notice, nor enjoyed
their sympathy. Alone, in its gigantic wretchedness,
it would have scorned to lay its troubles open to the

gaze of common men. Your delicacy was less exquisite, or your grief was less sincere. You howled by day upon the house-top; you called upon all the world to admire your song of lamentation, and to join their voices in its doleful chorus.

Under pretence of making us partakers in a fictitious or exaggerated grief, you have striven to make us sympathise with all the sickly whims and phantasies of a self-dissatisfied and self-accusing spirit. That you were, as you have yourself told us, a dissipated, a sceptical, and therefore, for there was no other cause, a wretched man, was no reason why you should wish to make your readers devoid of religion, virtue, and happiness. You had no right to taint the pure atmosphere of the English mind with the infectious phrenzies of the fever of debauch. Your misery was the punishment of your folly and your wickedness; why did you come to rack the eyes of the wise, the good, and the tranquil, with the loathsome spectacle of your merited torments? Could genius, a thousand times more splendid than yours, entitle the poor, giddy, restless victim of remorse, to make his art the instrument of evil,-to abuse the gifts of his God, by rendering them the engines of corruption and ruin among his fellow men? For shame! my Lord, for shame upon your manhood! If you had acted as became the dignity, either of your person or of your genius, you would have hidden yourself from the public gaze, until you had expiated, in the solitude of some congenial dungeon, the sins that had embittered your conscience, and degraded your muse. You had offended the eternal laws of virtue, and yielded up your self-condemning soul to be the play-thing-the Repov kivvypa—of doubt, and of derision. But although you felt within yourself the hell of conscience, why should you have assumed at once the malevolence of a demon? Alas! you have not even attained to the generosity of "the superior fiend." While the abject instruments of his rebellious rage found comfort in the companionship of many, the Satan of Milton preserved a nobler sentiment in the midst of his calamity. He scorned the vulgar consolation, and would have wished to have been alone in his sufferings, as he had been unequalled in his fault.

"His form had not yet lost All his original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined.

His face

Deep scars of thunder had entrenched, and care
Sat on his faded cheek.

Cruel his eye, but cast
Signs of remorse and passion, to behold
The fellows of his crime, the followers rather,
(Far other once beheld in bliss), condemned
For ever now to have their lot in pain,
Millions of spirits for his fault amerced

Of Heaven, and from eternal splendors flung,
For his revolt."

I have a singular pleasure, I know not how, in quoting to your Lordship the lines of Milton. You cannot listen to their high and melancholy music, without reflecting with repentant humiliation on your own perverted and dishonored genius. To his pure ear, the inspirations of the muse came placid and solemn, with awful and majestic cadences. She ruffled not, but smoothed and cherished the wings of his contemplation. She breathed the calm of a holier harmony into his unspotted bosom. Reason and imagination went hand in hand with virtue. He never forgot that his poetry was given him, only to be the ornament and instrument of a patriot and a saint. Beside your pillow the "nightly visitant" respires the contaminating air of its pollution. The foul exhalations of disorder and sensuality poison her virgin breath, and dim the celestial lustre of her eye. In despair of ennobling you, she becomes herself degraded, and lends her vigor to be the weapon of that violence, which, had its phrenzy been less incurable, her ministrations might have soothed and tempered. Milton is to you as his own cherub was to the apostate.

"That glory then, when thou no more wast good,
Departed from thee."

His very name is to your unwilling ears a grave re-
buke;" and you feel, when you reflect upon the beauty
of his purity, as the revolted demon did in "the place
inviolable."
"Abashed the devil stood,

And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her own shape more lovely; saw, and pined
His loss but chiefly to find here observed
His lustre visibly impaired."

I give you credit for a real anguish, when you turn from the contemplation of this happy spirit, to that of your own "faded splendor wan."

Visible, however, as was your apostacy, and mean your vengeance, there was still something about you to create respect, even in those who comprehended the best your vices and your errors. If you were an im moral and an unchristian, you were at least a serious, poet. Your pictures of depravity were sketched with such a sombre magnificence, that the eye of vulgar observers could gain little from surveying their lineaments. The harp of the mighty was still in your hands; and when you dashed your fingers over its loosened strings, faded as was the harmony, and harsh the execution, the notes were still made for their listening who had loved the solemn music of the departed.

The last lingering talisman which secured to you the pity, and almost the pardon, even of those that abhorred your guilt,-with the giddiness of a lunatic, or the resolution of a suicide,-you have tossed away. You have lost the mournful and melancholy harp which lent a protecting charm even to the accents of pollution; and bought, in its stead, a gaudy viol, fit for the fingers of eunuchs, and the ears of courtezans. You have parted

"With what permissive glory, since that fall,

Was left."

You have flung off the last remains of the "regal port;" you are no longer one of "the great seraphic lords," that sat even in Pandemonium, in their own dimensions like themselves." You have grown weary your fallen grandeur, and dwarfed your stature, that You may resume, if you will, your giant-height, but we you might gain easier access, and work paltrier mischief. shall not fail to recognise, in spite of all your elevation, the swollen features of the same pigmy imp whom we have once learned-a lasting lesson-not to abhor merely, and execrate, but to despise. You may wish, as heretofore, to haunt our imaginations in the shadowy semblance of Harold, Conrad, Lara, or Manfred: you may retain their vice, and their unbelief, and their restlessness; but you have parted irretrievably with the majesty of their despair. We see you in a shape less sentimental and mysterious. We look below the disguise which has once been lifted, and claim acquaintance, not with the sadness of the princely masque, with the scoffing and sardonic merriment of the illdissembling reveller beneath it. In evil hour did you step from your vantage-ground, and teach us that Harold, Byron, and the Count of Beppo are the same. I remain, my Lord, with much pity, and not entirely without hope, your Lordship's most obedient, most humble servant, PRESBYTER ANGLICANUS.

CHARLATANERIE DES SAVANS.

but

In an old French work, called 'La Charlatanerie des Savans,' is the following note. "D'autres ont proposé et résolu en même temps des questions ridicules-par example celle-ci. Devroit-on faire souffrir une seconde fois le même genre de mort à un criminel qui apres avoir eu la tête coupée, viendroit a résusciter?"

"Others have proposed and at the same time answered ridiculous questions-for example the following. Can a criminal be made to suffer a second time the same kind of death, who after having been beheaded, should come to life again?"

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INFLUENCE OF MORALS.

CONTINUED.

By a native (but not now a resident) of Petersburg, Va.

No. V.

FIVE DOLLARS PER ANNUM.

the rapidity with which revolutions have been effected. While the press exercises its tremendous agency for weal or woe, the social and political fabric can only be sustained when it reposes upon the broad basis of morality. Experience, with her ever burning lamp, shows us, that the paths of licentiousness lead to the grave of social and political establishments. And wherefore should we not, like the Ismenian priests of old, who sought for prophecies in the ashes of the altar they had raised to their divinity, seek amid the ruins of the past for light to guide us through the darkness of the future?

"It is a little singular," says Chancellor Kent, that distinguished jurist, whose whole life and writings, like those of the Roman philosopher, are replete with intellectual and moral excellence, “it is a little singular, that some of the best ethical writers under the christian dispensation should complain of the moral lessons of We adhere to the stern rule, that IT IS THE FIRST DUTY Cicero, as being too austere in their texture, and too OF EVERY CHRISTIAN AND OF EVERY PATRIOT TO OPsublime in speculation for actual use. There is not, POSE EVERYTHING, WHICH TENDS TO CORRUPT PUBLIC indeed, a passage in all Greek and Roman antiquity MORALS OR TO PROMOTE LICENTIOUSNESS OF OPINION. equal in moral dignity and grandeur to that in which The great and fatal error of the present generation Cicero lays it down as a fixed principle, that we ought springs from the promptings of a presumptuous underto do nothing that is avaricious, nothing that is dishon-standing; and we are prone to persuade ourselves that est, nothing that is lascivious, even though we could we live in a boasted age of reason. The invention of escape the observation of gods and men." And in poets has been exhausted in describing the sufferings of some other portion of the works of that sublime moral- the human family in the ages of brass and iron: but it ist, he lifts up his voice from amid the dusky twilight of was reserved for history to write in the tears of nations paganism, and exclaims in a tone not unworthy of in- the instructive and appalling drama of the age of reaspiration: "The soul, during her confinement in the son. Before the mind of man was darkened by his deprison of the body, is doomed to undergo a severe pravity, before he tasted of the "forbidden tree, whose penance: for, her native seat is in heaven, and it is mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our with reluctance that she is forced down from those woe,”—all his mental faculties, the will and the undercelestial mansions into these lower regions, where all is standing, the reason and the imagination, were harmoniforeign and repugnant to her divine nature. But the ously blended and united: but since his fall, a dark spigods, I am persuaded, have thus widely disseminated rit has interposed its shadow between him and the sun immortal spirits, and clothed them with human bodies, of righteousness, and disorder and confusion have enthat there might be a race of intelligent creatures, nottered into his mind and soul, and troubled their several only to have dominion over this our earth, but to contemplate the host of heaven, and imitate in their moral conduct the same beautiful order and uniformity, so con. spicuous in those splendid orbs." It is upon precepts like this that man should frame his rule of action; it is from the sacred fountain of pure philosophy, that he should derive that sense of the dignity of his nature and of his sublime destiny, which will enable him to correspond with the end of his creation.

faculties. Thus, the light of the understanding not unfrequently illumes the path of duty, but the obstinate will refuses to pursue it; and the eager and chastened will sometimes eagerly gropes its way where the darkened understanding is unable to direct it. In their hostility to the social, political, and religious institutions of the human family, the French philosophists propagated a senseless theory of the progressive improvement of man emerging gradually from the savage state, which In a former number we have erected a standard of they styled a state of nature, and improving impermorals, which many will censure for its loftiness; and ceptibly in his language and polity. For the direct and we have, in a spirit of bold inquiry, questioned the consistent revelation of the Deity, they substituted their utility, in their immediate results and prospective ten-wild and incoherent speculations. But a wiser philosodency, of the two great revolutions in the religion and government of mankind in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

phy, lighting her torch at the consecrated flame of revealed truth, has dissipated these shadowy theories, and taught us, that the savage state is a state of social degradation, and that what these dreamers have called the germs or roots of tongues are, in fact, the ruins of cussion of this interesting question for a future number. In the primitive revelation the first man received the highest degree of intellectual illumination, which, although obscured by his fall, still shone with a subdued splendor throughout the ages of the primeval world. By a just retribution, as man abused his great intellectual powers, he was gradually deprived of those

From the former of these great movements, sprang at once into the full vigor of life universal freedom of opinion; and for all the horrors of the latter we are indebt-once perfect languages. But we will reserve the dised to the deadly legacy of anti-christian doctrines and anti-social principles, which the last age has bequeathed to the present. We have heretofore observed, that since the establishment of universal freedom of opinion, and the discovery of the art of printing, men have been astounded at the facility with which public morals have been corrupted, and, as a necessary consequence, at

VOL. IV.-35

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