Which arched the horizon like a fiery cloud,
And in the Danube's waters shone the same,
A mirrored Hell! The volleying roar, and loud
Long booming of each peal on peal, o'ercame
The ear far more than thunder; for Heaven's flashes
Spare, or smite rarely-Man's make millions ashes!
" VII.

"The column ordered on the assault, scarce passed
Beyond the Russian batteries a few toises,
When up the bristling Moslem rose at last,

Answering the Christian thunders with like voices;
Then one vast fire, air, earth and stream embraced,
Which rocked as 'twere beneath the mighty noises;
While the whole rampart blazed like Etna, when
The restless Titan hiccups in his den,

" VIII.

"And one enormous shout of ・ Allah!' rose

In the same moment, loud as even the roar
Of War's most mortal engines, to their foes

Hurling defiance: city, stream, and shore
Resounded Allah!' and the clouds which close
With thick'ning canopy the conflict o'er,
Vibrate to the Eternal name. Hark! through
All sounds it pierceth, Allah! Allah! Hu!'”

P. 62,

In the very next stanza we however stumble all at once on a piece of shameless blasphemy, into which Lord Byron has with singular dexterity warped some inadvertent nonsense of Wordsworth's: and as if his good genius deserted him, he falls foul, in the nezt stanza, of the order of society to which he himself belongs. This is Samson making sport for the Philistines, with a witness, and no doubt must occasion much secret diversion to Mr. Hunt, if indeed that personage did not himself insert the stanza in question.

The assault, in which Juan and his friend Johnson take a prominent and distinguished part, proceeds very slowly indeed through several pages, clogged by such edifying digressions as the following, which bears still more unequivocal marks of Mr. Hunt's pen.

"The Briton must be bold, who really durst

Put to such trial John Bull's partial patience,

As say that Wellington at Waterloo

Was beaten, though the Prussians say so too ;—

"Allau Hu! is properly the war cry of the Mussulmans, and they dwell Jong on the last syllable, which gives it a very wild and peculiar effect."

"XLIX.

"And that if Blucher, Bulow, Gneisenau,

And God knows who besides in 'au' and ou,'
Had not come up in time to cast an awe

Into the hearts of those who fought till now

As tigers combat with an empty craw,

The Duke of Wellington had ceased to show

His orders, also to receive his pensions,

Which are the heaviest that our history mentions.
" L.

"But never mind;- God save the king!' and kings!
For if he don't, I doubt if men will longer-

I think I hear a little bird, who sings

The people by and bye will be the stronger.
The veriest jade will wince whose harness wrings
So much into the raw as quite to wrong her
Beyond the rules of posting, and the mob
At last fall sick of imitating Job.

"LI.

"At first it grumbles, then it swears, and then,

Like David, flings smooth pebbles 'gainst a giant:

At last it takes to weapons such as men

Snatch when despair makes human hearts less pliant.
Then comes the tug of war;'-'twill come again,

I rather doubt; and I would fain say 'fie on't,'

If I had not perceived that Revolution

Alone can save the Earth from Hell's pollution."

P. 73.

Sometimes, indeed, the coadjutor is allowed to try his hand at a description, as in the following instance, in which Lord Byron tired with the first bloody charge, and wanting to get away to Kentucky in the midst of the battle, to record the life and conversation of an old back-woodsman, leaves Mr. Hunt to lead up the second attack as his lieutenantEcce signum.

« XLII.

"Egad! they found the second time what they
The first time thought quite terrible enough
To fly from, malgrè all which people say
Of glory, and all that immortal stuff

Which fills a regiment (besides their pay,

That daily shilling which makes warriors tough)

They found on their return the self-same welcome,

Which made some think, and others know, a Hell come."

P. 72.

Towards the close of the storm, Lord Byron takes his heroes in hand again, and with some portion of his former

spirit, conducts them safely and gloriously to the end of the canto. Juan, who is one of the foremost on the walls, rescues a female child from the swords of two Cossacks; and as a reward for his bravery and humanity, is sent to Petersburgh with the dispatches, accompanied by his young protegèe. His conduct in this affair is certainly narrated in Lord Byron's best and most touching manner; but it is difficult to say whether the episode may not be introduced to mask some future attack on virtue and good feeling, or to lead to some diabolical conclusion. Time and the future cantos will shew.

With the character of Juan, however, as hitherto exhibited, we have no more quarrel than with that of Tom Jones, or any other child of passion and impulse. Lord Byron knew very well that a character like the original Don Juan, or the heroes of Gil Blas and Peregrine Pickle, most of whom, a young and ingenuous reader heartily wishes in the house of correction, would not have answered the purposes of seduction so well as the generous but ungovernable boy of seventeen, whom he has so artfully enveloped in a constant maze of temptation. Nor, indeed, do we think that these purposes are so systematically pursued in the present three cantos as in the first. In the sixth canto, Lord Byron talks indecency, partly from an idle habit, of which he cannot divest himself, partly as a bait to induce the shilling customers of Messrs. Hunt, Dolby, and Benbow, to wade through the long digressions in the other two cantos, in the hope of finding something to their minds, which may sweeten the dull lessons of radicalism. It may not be foreign to the purpose to enquire why seduction has thus become a secondary object to proselytism in the mind of the noble lord.

It must have long been obvious to Lord Byron's penetration, that the fall which he has experienced in the moral estimation of the world, has also shaken his literary character. The family circumstances which, with such delicacy and judgment, he paraded before the world, in his Domestic Poems, have had their full weight; and the insulted moral sense of his country has fully revenged itself on his other works. His readers, soon after the events in question, became tired and suspicious of the perpetual tale of his wrongs, and his feelings, and would not even allow him to stalk in his accustomed disguise, half Hamlet, half Diogenes, through the magnificent third canto of Childe Harold, without cordially echoing his own words, "Somewhat too much of this." It was not probable that a proud, vain, and sensitive man of rank, the spoilt child of fame, and the Coryphæus of the " genus irritabile vatum," should not writhe secretly

*

under the humiliating consciousness of general disgust, which made even the profligate Lord Littleton wince so severely. The spleen thus engendered, struggled for a vent, and found it at last in Don Juan. Eager to hurl defiance against those feelings and principles which his own voluntary conduct had irrecoverably outraged, Lord Byron, with the comprehensive views of a Caligula, attacks in one sweeping clause, religion, national spirit, the honour of man, and the virtue of woman, in short, all the most widely embracing bulwarks of society; whose demolition would exactly fit us for that naked and sylvan state which he contemplates as our final Utopia, (see Canto VIII. Stanza 60.) Finding that this pleasant and disinterested arrangement succeeded no better than the wellknown project of Esop's tail-less fox, Lord Byron, in a towering passion, has bestrode the broken knee'd hobbyhorse of Radicalism, and dashed acrosss the Rubicon at once, threshing the wind with a flail which has recoiled on his own pate. Like an angry gentleman whose previous life has chiefly been devoted to poetry, he betrays that he has neither the command of temper necessary to write good political prose, nor the habits of logical precision which might have protected him from the following inference.

"Either George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron, is not his father's legitimate son, or, in virtue of the tenth stanza in his eighth Canto, the aforesaid George is a blockhead by prescription-and in any case, the aforesaid George ought to yield moral precedence to every tinker's turnspit, by his own confession in the 7th and most angry stanza of his 7th Canto.”

The habit of writing from the enthusiasm of the moment may be a very good poetical one, but in this instance, it has entrapped the poor lord twice in the tu quoque, the very fool's mate of argument.

As to the Preface before us, the most indulgent thing that can be said of it, is, in the words of the song,

"Hot and heavy, hot and heavy!"

We shall not insult our readers by any extract from a virulent and deliberate attack upon the dead, wound up by a chuckling allusion to an unnatural vice. Let it stand as a brand upon Lord Byron's forehead; a mark which will identify him as the author of the Age of Bronze, and the Mock Vision of Judgment, and the coadjutor of Mr. Leigh Hunt. These facts we have long persevered in doubting,

See his Letters.

but now we doubt them no longer. Nor do we now lament to see the noble Lord

"Fall'n from his high estate,

And weltering in-the mud."

courting the society, aping the slang, and feeding the sordid necessities of persons, who in the pithy words of Gifford, are fitter objects of castigation for the beadle than the muse; and encountering more self-humiliation for their sakes, than the best saint would willingly undergo for the sake of his religion. His fate can now excite no more compassion in the minds of his former admirers, than that of a vicious racer sold to drudge in a night-cart: or if the comparison be somewhat unsavoury, we might remark in its stead, that since the æra of the Liberal, and the publication of the three Cantos before us, he has sunk from the dignity of Milton's fallen angel, to the vulgar horned and tailed devil of a puppet shew; a pert and mischievous buffoon; the fellow-wit of Punch, Scaramouch, and other sordid ribalds. With a happy consistency, he now exhibits for the moderate price of one shilling, as the envelope of the little duodecimo before us indicates.

It is impossible to foresee the final bathos to which the Rimini school, like the muddy heroes of the Dunciad, may think proper to dive in prose or verse, or what Mr. John Hunt may think it expedient to publish. For Lord Byron however, individually we entertain just sufficient remains of interest, to warn him, that " in the lowest deep there is a lower deep," and that certain allusions still pass for very scurvy jests in England, to say the least of them. We do not choose to quote, but shall only remark that the note to the preface is repeated in a more offensive shape in the 8th Canto, and that if such jokes again occur in the three which are forthcoming, the unfortunate little duodecimo which may contain them, will probably be thrown out of the window along with the Liber Amoris, instead of being locked up with its predecessors.

ART. IX. Journal of a Voyage to the Northern WhaleFishery; including Researches and Discoveries on the Eastern Coast of West Greenland, made in the Summer of 1822, in the Ship Baffin, of Liverpool. By William Scoresby, Jun. F.R.S.E., M.W.S. &c. &c. Commander. pp. 516. Hurst, Robinson, and Co. 1823.

THIS is a work of considerable interest. Mr. Scoresby can