persevering in his abuse and personality, but he should have minded his ledger; he never excited my spleen."*

There are few who have not felt a strong desire to trace the cause of the original development of the poetic faculty, in those men whose names the muse has married to their own immortal verse. Lord Byron has himself recorded his first experience of the visits of the Nine.

"I don't know from whom I inherited verse-making; probably the wild scenery of Morven and Loch-na-garr, and the banks of the Dee, were the parents of my poetical vein, and the developers of my poetical boss. If it was so, it was dormant; at least I never wrote any thing worth mentioning till I was in love. Dante dates his passion for Beatrice at twelve. I was almost as young when I fell over head and ears in love, but I anticipate. I was sent to Harrow at twelve, and spent my vacations at Newstead. It was there that I first saw Mary C- -. She was several years older than myself: but, at my age, boys like something older than themselves, as they do younger, later in life. Our estates adjoined: but, owing to the unhappy circumstance of the feud to which I before alluded, our families (as is generally the case with neighbors who happen to be relations) were never on terms of more than common civility, scarcely those. I passed the summer vacation of this year among the Malvern hills: those were days of romance! She was the beau idéal of all that my youthful fancy could paint of beautiful; and I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of women from the perfection of my imagination created in her-I say created, for I found her, like the rest of the sex, any thing but angelic."

Captain Medwin next proceeds to recount, without scruple or reserve, the early dissipations of Lord Byron. An attempt is perpetually made to palliate this palpable violation of the rights of decency and friendship, on the ground that Lord Byron had authorized the publication of his Memoirs, in which the irregularities of his early life are unreservedly detailed. To this plea we again reply, that Lord Byron had no right to authorize their publication. He was under sacred obligations to his injured wife and daughter, to do nothing that might involve them in the shame he was preparing for himself, and we do not recollect, anywhere, of a more striking instance of unpardonable selfishness, than his resolution to make public, after his death, those circumstances of his separation from his wife, which he thought would throw all the odium and disgrace of that unfortunate procedure upon her. We can

*The taste and critical acumen of the American magazine, will appear from the following extract:

"The verses (it is of the Prisoner of Chillon' that it speaks) are in the eight syllable measure, and occasionally display some pretty poetry; at all events, there is little in them to offend.

"We do not find any passage of sufficient beauty or originality to warrant an extract." Am. Critical Review, 1817.

not well imagine a more ungenerous, a more unprincipled design. Let us even suppose (what there is very little reason to suppose) that Lady Byron's conduct had been criminal in the extreme, need we ask what a generous, noble-minded man would have done in such a case? Would he not have gloried in supporting that reproach, which is scarcely dishonor to a man, but worse than death itself to a woman? But his selfishness is rendered still more inexcusable, if possible, by the fact that he sternly and contemptuously spurned the solemn adjuration of his wife, that if he regarded not her honor, he should spare, at least, the memory of his daughter. "I told her," said his Lordship to this friend of his who tells it to the world, "I told her that she knew all I had written was incontrovertible truth, and that she did not wish to sanction the truth. I ended, by saying that she might depend on their being published!"

But it may be said, that although a man of honor would disdain to justify himself, if his defence must implicate his wife, yet that there exists no obligation that forbids him to disclose to the notice of the world, the weaknesses, the vices and the crimes of which he has been guilty, because these confessions may be useful, as warnings to the young and inexperienced. To this, one word will serve for a reply. These confessions never operate as warnings, and their authors either most egregiously miscalculate the effect of these disclosures, or what is far more probable, seek to hide a longing after notoriety beneath the garb of a generous concern for the interests of posterity. But whatever may be said in palliation of the conduct of these gratuitous confessors of romantic aberrations, splendid vices, and sentimental crimes, we doubt whether any one will be found with hardihood enough to seek to justify the man who unhesitatingly divulges facts which are disgraceful to the reputation of his friend, because, forsooth, his friend meant to give them to the world, but was prevented. This is as if a man should assist a lunatic in stripping off his. clothes in the public streets, and then defend himself by saying that the madman was unable to undress himself without assistance. Captain Medwin can find in the plea of truth's paramount obligations, no apology for thus dishonoring the memory of a man whom he professes to honor and revere. We have heard before of this pretended regard for the rights and the claims of posterity. We have heard before, the public interest urged in justification of the disclosure of the weaknesses and follies of a friend; as if the public interest did not suffer infinitely more from the frailties of friendship

and the insecurities of confidence, than from the loss of all the knowledge that the public informer can communicate.

We know there are some, too, who will wonder at our earnestness, and pretend to see nothing so disgraceful in the anecdotes here recorded. Yet we hope we shall not incur the imputation of fastidiousness, when we confess that the cold, flippant and self-complacent tone with which Lord Byron perpetually speaks of his bonnes fortunes, is to us exceedingly offensive. The vanity, indecency and ribaldry that characterize some parts of his Lordship's conversation, would be scarcely tolerable in a thoughtless boy of half his age; but we cannot find words to express our sorrow and disgust, when we hear the noblest poet of the day boast like a bacchanalian of his four bottles of wine, and detail with a disgraceful affectation of penitence and regret, the low amours and vile intrigues in which he has been engaged. We feel ashamed of human nature, when we see the evidence of so monstrous an incongruity as the union of all that is beautiful in intellect, with all that is profligate in morals. We might have forgiven him, if sometimes he had yielded to the influence of passion or the corruption of example; but no man can forgive him for vaunting his debaucheries in the coarsest language of the debauchee. We are sorry to complain so much of Capt. Medwin; for after all, his book has somewhat in it of interest and entertainment; but we cannot help regretting, that when he had it in his power to furnish to the world the proofs of the many high and noble qualities which atone for all Lord Byron's follies and offences, he seems to have recorded with scrupulous exactness, every word that could bring discredit upon the intellectual, and disgrace upon the moral character of a man, who we are told in the preface and conclusion of this book (what it needed not this book to have told us) was as distinguished for his love of liberty and hatred of oppression, as for the extent of his attainments and the splendor of his talents. But enough of this ungrateful subject. Would that it had never been revived!

Lord Byron's speculations on the drama are such as might naturally be expected from a man who had been led, by his aversion to his countrymen, to depreciate their literary chaWe think that a vast deal of ingenuity has been thrown away in attempting to decide the rival claims of the northern and southern schools of tragedy. We are not of the opinion of those who maintain that the rules of taste are independent of the circumstances of national associations. The pleasures of the imagination are perpetually modified by the ever-varying relations which subsist between the object

and the sense; that is, between the subject of contemplation and the circumstances of the contemplator. A change in either must affect the degree of enjoyment which arises from the influence of the one upon the other, and therefore to require that the Aristotelian tragedy shall please, be the spectators who they may, is a requisition far more unphilosophical than the exactors of the unities are probably aware of. The tragedies of Alfieri are not acted in London or New-York, nor Shakspeare's dramas in Paris or Milan; but it does not follow thence, that Mirra and Macbeth ought not to please the audiences for whom they were intended. For this reason, we think that the objections to Alfieri and Racine by the British critics, and Lord Byron's sweeping denunciation of the early English dramatists, are equally short-sighted and unreasonable. In the first place, we must acknowledge, that if the close attention of the audience is an evidence of the interest of the play, and if this is a proof of the skill of the tragic writer, Alfieri ought to rank as high with the Italians, and Racine or Voltaire with the Parisians, as Shakspeare and Goethe with the English and Germans. On the other hand, it is vain to contend that it is a mere prejudice to admire the daring and magnificent extravagance of Marlow, the skilful delineations of Decker, the sustained yet tempered dignity of Massinger, the pointed shrewdness and felicity of Marston, the lurid yet powerful imaginings of Webster, and the affecting truth and tenderness of Shirley and Ford.

There is one remark, however, of Lord Byron's which strikes us as unquestionably just; "No one" he says "can be absurd enough to contend that the preservation of the unities is a defect," and of course their violation is an argument of the want of skill, if not the want of taste, of the dramatic poct. Alfieri's idea of a perfect tragedy is, to say the least of it, imposing, and we cannot help believing that a tragedy successfully executed upon his principles would in all probability coincide with more varieties of opinion, and conciliate more diversities of taste than any other scheme we are acquainted with.*

The four words, alluded to by Byron in Filippo, are in

*La tragedia di cinque atti, pieni, quanto il soggetto dà, del solo soggetto; dialogizzata dai soli personaggi attori, e non consultori o spettatori; la tragedia di un solo filo ordita; rapida per quanto si può servendo alle passioni, che tutte più o meno vogliono pur dilungarsi; semplice per quanto uso d'arte il comporti; tetra e feroce, per quanto la natura lo soffra; calda quanto era in me : questa è la tragedia, che io, se non ho esressa, avro forse accennata, o certamente almeno concepita.

Alfieri's Reply to a Letter from Ranieri de' Ca'srbigi.

correctly quoted by Capt. Medwin.* There is a similar passage in Antigone, which, in our opinion, contains a laconism still more sublime. Creonte grants to Antigone a day to determine whether she will give her hand to Emone or die. After a violent struggle between her love for Emone and her duty, she presents herself before Creonte, and the following short but fearfully significant dialogue ensues:

C. Scegliesti?

A. Ho scelto.

C. Emon?

A. Morte.

C. L'avrai.

The power of passages like these does not reside in the mere form of the dialogue, but in the absorbing interest of the tre

*The passage referred to is in the last scene of the second Act. If Captain Medwin is as inaccurate in the rest of his reports as he must have been in this instance, he will lose all credit with his readers. In the first place, he calls the play Don Carlos,' instead of Filippo, which is as if one had spoken of Shakspeare's tragedy of Polonio. poses that "the king and his minister are secreted during an interview of In the next place, he supthe Infant with the Queen Consort." There is such an interview in the

fifth act; but in the present scene, nothing of the kind takes place. Filippo, Isabella, Carlo, and Gomez, are on the stage together. Filippo, after searching the hearts of Carlo and Isabella, in a scene full of admirably delineated Macchiavellianism, dismisses the Queen to her apartment. The Prince also retires, and leaves the king and his minister together. The following dialogue then ensues:

F. Udisti?
G. Udii.