of The Grove. Nemi is but an evening's ride from the comfortable inn of Albano. 3 The whole declivity of the Alban hill is of unrivalled beauty, and from the convent on the highest point, which has succeeded to the temple of the Latian Jupiter, the prospect embraces all the objects alluded to in this stanza; the Medi. terranean; the whole scene of the latter half of the Eneid, and the coast from beyond the mouth of the Tiber to the headland of Circæum and the Cape of Terracina. - See Appendix, "Historical Notes," No. XXXI. 1 [When Lord Byron wrote this stanza, he had, no doubt, the following passage in Boswell's Johnson floating on his mind: - Dining one day with General Paoli, and talking of his projected journey to Italy, A man,' said Johnson, who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. The grand object of all travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean. On those shores were the four great empires of the world; the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman. All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean.' The General observed, that The Mediterranean' would be a Doble subject for a poem."- Life of Johnson, vol. v. p. 145. ed. 1835.] 2 [This passage would, perhaps, be read without emotion, if we did not know that Lord Byron was here describing his actual feelings and habits, and that this was an unaffected picture of his propensities and amusements even from childbood,-when he listened to the roar, and watched the bursts of the northern ocean on the tempestuous shores of Aberdeenshire. It was a fearful and violent change at the age of ten years to be separated from this congenial solitude, - this independence so suited to his haughty and contemplative spirit, this rude grandeur of nature, and thrown among the mere worldly-minded and selfish ferocity, the affected polish and repelling coxcombry, of a great public school. How many thousand times did the moody, sullen, and indig. Bant boy wish himself back to the keen air and boisterous billows that broke lonely upon the simple and soul-invigor ating haunts of his childhood. How did he prefer some ghost-story; some tale of second-sight; some relation of Robin Hood's feats; some harrowing narrative of buccaneerexploits, to all of Horace, and Virgil, and Homer, that was dinned into his repulsive spirit! To the shock of this change is, I suspect, to be traced much of the eccentricity of Lord Byron's future life. This fourth Canto is the fruit of a mind which had stored itself with great care and toil, and had digested with profound reflection and intense vigour what it had learned: the sentiments are not such as lie on the surface, but could only be awakened by long meditation. Whoever reads it, and is not impressed with the many grand virtues as well as gigantic powers of the mind that wrote it, seems to me to afford a proof both of insensibility of heart, and great stupidity of intellect."-SIR E. BRYDGES.] 3" It was a thought worthy of the great spirit of Byron, after exhibiting to us his Pilgrim amidst all the most striking scenes of earthly grandeur and earthly decay, after teaching us, like him, to sicken over the mutability, and vanity, and emptiness of human greatness, to conduct him and us at last to the borders of "the Great Deep." It is there that we may perceive an image of the awful and unchangeable abyss of eternity, into whose bosom so much has sunk, and ail shall one day sink, of that eternity wherein the scorn and the contempt of man, and the melancholy of great, and the fretting of little minds, shall be at rest for ever. No one, but a true poet of man and of nature, would have dared to frame such a termination for such Pilgrimage. The image of the wanderer may well be associated, for a time, with the rock of Calpe, the shattered temples of Athens, or the gigantic fragments of Rome; but when we wish to think of this dark personification as of a thing which is, where can we so well imagine him to have his daily haunt as by the roaring of the waves? It was thus that Homer represented Achilles in his moments of ungovernable and inconsolable grief for the loss of Patroclus. It was thus he chose to depict the paternal despair of Chriseus Βῆ δ ̓ ἀκίων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης. - WILSON.] THE tale which these disjointed fragments present, is founded upon circumstances now less common in the East than formerly; either because the ladies are more circumspect than in the "olden time," or because the Christians have better fortune, or less enterprise. The story, when entire, contained the adventures of a female slave, who was thrown, in the Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover, at the time the Seven Islands were possessed by the Republic of Venice, and soon after the Arnauts were beaten back from the Morea, which they had ravaged for some time subsequent to the Russian invasion. The desertion of the Mainotes, on being refused the plunder of Misitra, led to the abandonment of that enterprise, and to the desolation of the Morea, during which the cruelty exercised on all sides was unparalleled even in the annals of the faithful. 2 1 [The "Giaour" was published in May 1813, and abundantly sustained the impression created by the two first cantos of Childe Harold. It is obvious that in this, the first of his romantic narratives, Lord Byron's versification reflects the admiration he always avowed for Mr. Coleridge's "Christabel," the irregular rhythm of which had already been adopted in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel." The fragmentary style of the composition was suggested by the then new and popular "Columbus" of Mr. Rogers. As to the subject, it was not merely by recent travel that the author had familiarised himself with Turkish history. "Old Knolles," he said at Missolonghi, a few weeks before his death, "was one of the first books that gave me pleasure when a child; and I believe it had much influence on my future wishes to visit the Levant, and gave, perhaps, the oriental colouring which is observed in my poetry." In the margin of his copy of Mr. D'Israeli's Essay on the Literary Character, we find the following note:-" Knolles, Cantemir, De Tott, Lady M.W. Montague, Hawkins's translation from Mignot's History of the Turks, the Arabian Nights-all travels or histories, or books upon the East, I could meet with, I had read, as well as Ricaut, before I was ten years old."]" 2 [An event, in which Lord Byron was personally concerned, undoubtedly supplied the groundwork of this tale; but for the story, so circumstantially put forth, of his having himself been the lover of this female slave, there is no foundation. The girl whose life the poet saved at Athens was not, The Giaour. No breath of air to break the wave Fair clime! where every season smiles Benignant o'er those blessed isles, Which, seen from far Colonna's height, Make glad the heart that hails the sight, And lend to loneliness delight. There mildly dimpling, Ocean's cheek Reflects the tints of many a peak Caught by the laughing tides that lave These Edens of the eastern wave: we are assured by Sir John Hobhouse, an object of his Lordship's attachment, but of that of his Turkish servant. For the Marquis of Sligo's account of the affair, see Moore's Notices.] 3 A tomb above the rocks on the promontory, by some supposed the sepulchre of Themistocles. -["There are." says Cumberland, in his Observer, "a few lines by Plato, upon the tomb of Themistocles, which have a turn of elegant and pathetic simplicity in them, that deserves a better translation than I can give : 'By the sea's margin, on the watery strand, Thy monument, Themistocles, shall stand: By this directed to thy native shore, The merchant shall convey his freighted store; And when our fleets are summoned to the fight, Athens shall conquer with thy tomb in sight.""] 4["Of the beautiful flow of Byron's fancy," says Moore, "when its sources were once opened on any subject, the Giaour affords one of the inost remarkable instances: this poem having accumulated under his hand, both in printing and through successive editions, till from four hundred lines, of which it consisted in its first copy, it at present amounts to fourteen hundred. The plan, indeed, which he had adopted, of a series of fragments, a set of orient pearls at random strung' left him free to introduce, without reference to more than the general complexion of his story, whatever sen And if at times a transient breeze That wakes and wafts the odours there! The maid for whom his melody, His thousand songs are heard on high, Blooms blushing to her lover's tale : His queen, the garden queen, his Rose, Unbent by winds, unchill'd by snows, Far from the winters of the west, By every breeze and season blest, Returns the sweets by nature given In softest incense back to heaven; And grateful yields that smiling sky Her fairest hue and fragrant sigh. And many a summer flower is there, And many a shade that love might share, And many a grotto, meant for rest, That holds the pirate for a guest; Whose bark in sheltering cove below Lurks for the passing peaceful prow, Till the gay mariner's guitar? Is heard, and seen the evening star; And every charm and grace hath mix'd And trample, brute-like, o'er each flower timents or images his fancy, in its excursions, could collect; and, how little fettered he was by any regard to connection in these additions, appears from a note which accompanied his own copy of this paragraph, in which he says, 'I have Dot yet fixed the place of insertion for the following lines, but will, when I see you- as I have no copy.' Even into this new passage, rich as it was at first, his fancy afterwards poured a fresh infusion."- The value of these after-touches of the master may be appreciated by comparing the following verses, from his original draft of this paragraph, with the form which they now wear : "Fair clime! where ceaseless summer smiles, Make glad the heart that hails the sight, And give to loneliness delight. There shine the bright abodes ye seek, So smiling round the waters lave That waves and wafts the fragrance there." The whole of this passage, from line 7. down to line 167., * Who heard it first had cause to grieve," was not in the first edition.] The attachment of the nightingale to the rose is a wellknown Persian fable. If I mistake not, the "Bulbul of a thousand tales" is one of his appellations. [Thus, Mesihi, as translated by Sir William Jones : "Come, charming maid ! and hear thy poet sing, But springs as to preclude his care, And, fix'd on heavenly thrones, should dwell So soft the scene, so form'd for joy, So curst the tyrants that destroy ! He who hath bent him o'er the dead 3 Ere the first day of death is fled, Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,) And mark'd the mild angelic air, That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now, The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon; The first, last look by death reveal'd !6 'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more 17 So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, We start, for soul is wanting there. 2 The guitar is the constant amusement of the Greek sailor by night with a steady fair wind, and during a calm, it is accompanied always by the voice, and often by dancing. 3 [If once the public notice is drawn to a poet, the talents he exhibits on a nearer view, the weight his mind carries with it in his every-day intercourse, somehow or other, are reflected around on his compositions, and co-operate in giving a collateral force to their impression on the public. To this we must assign some part of the impression made by the "Giaour." The thirty-five lines beginning "He who hath bent him o'er the dead" are so beautiful, so original, and so utterly beyond the reach of any one whose poetical genius was not very decided, and very rich, that they alone, under the circumstances explained, were sufficient to secure celebrity to this poem. - SIR E. BRYDGES.] 4["And mark'd the almost dreaming air Which speaks the sweet repose that's there."- MS.] 5 "Ay, but to die and go we know not where, To lye in cold obstruction?". Measure for Measure, act iii. sc. 2 6 I trust that few of my readers have ever had an oppor tunity of witnessing what is here attempted in description; but those who have will probably retain a painful remembrance of that singular beauty which pervades, with few exceptions, the features of the dead, a few hours, and but for a few hours, after "the spirit is not there." It is to be remarked in cases of violent death by gun-shot wounds, the expression is always that of languor, whatever the natural energy of the sufferer's character: but in death from a stab the countenance preserves its traits of feeling or ferocity, and the mind its bias, to the last. 7 [In Dallaway's Constantinople, a book which Lord Byron is not unlikely to have consulted, I find a passage quoted from Gillies's History of Greece, which contains, perhaps, the first seed of the thought thus expanded into full perfection by |