SELECT REVIEW.

General review of lord Byron's poems,

[From the British Review.]

The following pages are introductory to a critique on The Siege of Corinth and Parisina.' We extract them because they are written with force and spirit, and in order that our readers may be acquainted with the various opinions of the Ilterary world concerning the works of this celebrated poet.

We are not so little conversant with the human character, and especially with the habits of authors, as to trust to their promises of silence. We know that in general when a disputant says he will not say one word more, he means that he is fully determined to have the last word, and we do not give a poet credit for greater moderation. In our criticisms, therefore, on lord Byron's Corsair, in the dedication of which he announced his intention to forbear trespassing, as he modestly expresses himself, upon the public patience for some time, though we thanked him in the name of common sense, good poetry, and sound morality for the promised forbearance, we were not such simpletons as to expect that, as long as there was left remaining in story a vagabond ruffian, and a blackeyed maid to be celebrated; as long as any men, women, or children could be found to endure the repetition of the same gaudy confusion, and distorted sentiment in broken verse, the same combinations of blood and debauchery, the poet would cease to take advantage of the infatuation. We did hope, however, that lord Byron had determined to lay down his pen for a season, in order to lay up a little more of that abundance which great nature, and the greater scene of moral existence, are always spreading before the contemplative mind; and to learn, by a better acquaintance with the higher forms of poetry, what are its noblest ends, and what is the authentic stamp of its value. When the little poem that succeeded to the Corsair made its appearance with all the old characteristics about it, as like to the former productions as a one pound bank-note is to another one pound bank-note, and with as little difference in value, we were still not in despair; because we con

sidered that his lordship's muse had been too long under the influence of her Turkish habits, at once to renounce the harem, and that some fruit of her former connexions was yet to be got rid of before the ancient ties could be completely dissolved. But alas! after allowing the full time for the consequences of former bad habits to pass away, we are mortified to find this self-same muse of lord Byron again a delinquent, and performing her vows of chastity and seclusion by bringing twins into the world; the Siege of Corinth, and Parisina! hopeful pair! happy mixture of Turkish and Italian breed! possessing that genuine cast of physiognomy which in one expression combines valour and apostacy, slaughter and sentiment, felony and feeling, profaneness and tenderness, incestuous love and melting sorrow.

The two poems which are now presented to the public under the sanction of lord Byron's reputation exhibit all the faults which have characterized his lordship's preceding effusions, without the admixture of any of their merits, for merits undoubtedly some of them have displayed, especially that poem which appears to have been sacrificed to new friendships with some of those who were the objects of its spirited and just satire; we mean the address to the "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." To the "Childe Harold" we have also tendered our humble tribute of applause: but from that poem (in which, though there was little to elevate, there was much to delight) the poet has tumbled down through several successive stages of deteriority, with an incredible "vivacite de pesanteur," to the lowest profundity of the bathos; at the very bottom of which he now lies together with his wretched Parisina. To the same limbo of inanity we would gladly consign all those unholy images of slaughter, sensuality, incest, and infidelity, which have taken such poetical possession of lord Byron's brain.

The hero of lord Byron's poems, who is always a man that has defrauded the gallows, whether he be a Giaour, a Corsair, or a Renegado, is scarcely diversified by the different degrees of iniquity by which he is characterised. What was said by Martin Clifford ill-naturedly enough to Dryden, might, with a change of the names, be properly addressed to lord Byron:-"I am strangely mistaken, if I have not seen this very Almansor of yours in some disguise about this town, and passing under another name. Pr'ythee, tell me true, was not this Huffcap once the Indian emperor, and at another time did he not call himself Maximin?" &c. It might with greater propriety be inquired of lord Byron, whether all his heroes

were not one and the same rogue with an alias only to distinguish him, and whether the Venetian renegado at the siege of Corinth has any thing to give him a distinct personality, unless it be his bare arm in battle, and his spinning, quivering, shivering, departure out of life: for the poet has represented him as making his exit in a sort of pirouette. Sallies of frantic depravity; combinations of confused magnificence; halftold and half-smothered motives to revenge; half-sensual and half-sentimental passion; dark or dark blue scenery; a horrific group of dogs, and carrion, and jackalls, and wolves, and Tartars and Turcomans' heads and bones; to which may be added all that the very significant line prefixed to the work by way of motto announces,

"Guns, trumpets, blunderbusses, drums, and thunder”—

these, and more of a similar kind, are mingled in the first of the poems, now before us, in so ludicrous an assemblage, as to make us doubt whether it was not the design of this young nobleman to laugh at the simplicity of his admirers, and to try how much of this stuff the stupid infatuation of the public would endure. The vehicle of this tasteless accumulation is a lax and lawless versification, which seems to propose to itself something of lyric irregularity, in the simple neglect of metrical consonance and methodical structure.

To enter into a detailed criticism upon such a work would, we feel, be mightily ridiculous; especially as we are by no means sure that the poet is not trying a ludicrous experiment upon the tolerance of fashionable favouritism: for after all we cannot without a struggle surrender that impression in favour of the author's genius, which, with some intermixture of disgust, the Childe Harold created in our minds. We must own that while we dwelt with great and glowing satisfaction on the many passages of poetical sentiment and imagery with which the poem last alluded to abounds, we regarded the character of the Childe himself with great suspicion; but we certainly did not see in it the embryo of that delusive compound of a man, who, by an unnatural mixture of heroism and crime, brutality and sentiment, was afterwards to warp the principles of the young into an admiration, and perhaps imitation, of a very pernicious model.

What increased our suspicion that there was some danger to public sentiment lurking in this new poetical character, which would in some other forms further develop its malignity, was the very obtrusive manner in which it was brought forward in a picturesque poem, whose object was to describe

in rich and vivid colours the interesting scenes of Turkish Greece, with those mixed sentiments of admiration and regret, which the awful traces of pristine splendour in the bosom of that fair region were calculated to produce. Through these magnificent scenes the poem has dragged along a refining, repining, blasphemous sensualist, sulky at any turn that brought new beauties to his eye, and in the midst of external glory and grandeur, fretting about himself and his disappointments, and haunted by the ghosts of his departed plea

sures.

But although we were sorry that lord Byron had picked up this fellow, to set him in the heart of ancient Greece, instead of leaving him to do his duty on the Thames; yet, as he bore so unmeaning a part in the scene, we cannot say that he prevented us from enjoying the brilliant stanzas with which the poem of Childe Harold is interspersed; but when we find him, strutting in his cap and feather, the hero of every subsequent poem from the same hand, we must confess that we totally lose our temper, and feel the most pleasing part of the performance to be that in which the grim-featured sentimentalist surrenders his existence to one of those guns or blunderbusses which lord Byron enumerates in the very wellchosen motto of his present poem, as the instruments which he has always at hand to bring about his bloody catastrophes.

As the Childe possessed nothing of the poet's melancholy, nothing of that musing sadness which sometimes belongs to a rich imagination combined with a soft and tender disposition, so neither has the Giaour, or the Corsair, or Selim, or Alp, any of those properties which entitle them to the true and natural sympathies of the reader; none of those delights which, "dolphin-like, showed their backs above the element they lived in." They are a very narrow-minded gentry, without any sentiments that carry them out of the selfish circle of animal pleasure, but covering all their brutal habits with the expiatory quality of desperate devotion to some pretty woman. We cannot, however, say so much for Alp, the hero of the poem now in our hands, who having suffered some outrageous indignity or some state persecution at Venice, his native city, enters a renegado into the service of the Moslems, and undertakes the siege of Corinth, of which he anticipates the total destruction, and where he knows the object of his love, together with her aged father, must necessarily be liable to perish in the general carnage, in order to be revenged upon his own country. And even when, on the night before the siege, the ghost of the gentle lady visited her lover in his sad vigil under

the walls of the city, and threatened him with the loss of heaven and herself, he remained true to his turban and his Turkish creed, thus giving an oblique preference to the paradise of Mahomet and the celestial houris.

It must be owned, however, in behalf of this poem that it is meritoriously short, and that the story does not require that painful investigation, and, oh terrible thought! a second perusal, to understand its plot and catastrophe. And as we have formerly, in our review of the Corsair, observed upon the uncertain and mysterious end of that hero's existence, his lordship has amply provided against the recurrence of such doubts in his reader's mind by shooting his renegado dead, and then blowing him up with gun-powder. We have here therefore a complete certificate of his hero's death; and one might have hoped that after such a doubly sure disposition of our old enemy, we should never have had to encounter him again: but alas! he does appear again, and is beheaded in another poem in the same volume. After the discipline which he had undergone in the siege of Corinth, however he certainly does not appear in the same blustering and outrageous character in which he had before presented himself,

"His face

Deep scars of thunder had entrench'd, and care

Sat on his faded cheek."

In a word, he is more moderate and decent; he contents himself with simply defiling his father's bed, for which he peaceably submits to a public execution. And thus the Childe, whom we have identified through all his felonious disguises, is brought to his appropriate end, and poetical justice is satisfied.

But we are not so well satisfied; and we will tell our readers why:-because we have sons and daughters: but this is but a partial reason; let us add-because Britannia has sons and daughters, and in the duration of their characteristic virtue and modesty we behold the best pledge of the continuance of our happiness and greatness. We do not say that lord Byron means to interrupt this happiness or greatness, but we think that the false associations, the loose morality, and the atheistical character of his productions, dressed up in poetry not generally good, but often fascinating to female and youthful fancies, is doing a species of mischief which, if he could once be brought to view it in its real extent, he would probably regret and be anxious to remedy. We love the public mind, and feel tremblingly alive to its best interests.