to another. Two widely different matters, however, are generally, we might say universally, mixed up here-the personal character of the man, as proved by his course of life, and his personal character as revealed in, or guessed from, his books. Nothing can be more unfair than the style in which this mixture is made use of. Is there a noble sentiment, a lofty thought, a sublime conception, in the book? -Ah! yes,' is the answer. But what of that? It is only the roue Byron that speaks!' Is a kind, a generous action of the man mentioned? 'Yes, yes,' comments the sage, 'but only remember the atrocities of Don Juan; depend on it, this, if it be true, must have been a mere freak of caprice, or perhaps a bit of vile hypocrisy.' Salvation is thus shut out at either entrance: the poet damns the man, and the man the poet.

"Nobody will suspect us of being so absurd as to suppose that it is possible for people to draw no inferences as to the character of an author from his book, or to shut entirely out of view, in judging of a book, that which they may happen to know about the man who writes it. The cant of the day supposes such things to be practicable, but they are not. But what we complain of, and scorn, is the extent to which they are carried in the case of this particular individual, as compared with others; the impudence with which thinge are at once assumed to be facts in regard to his private history, and the absolute unfairness of never arguing from his writings to him-but for evil.

"Take the man, in the first place, as unconnected, in so far as we can thus consider him, with his works;-and ask, what, after all, are the bad things we know of him? Was he dishonest or dishonourable ?-had he ever done any thing to forfeit, or even endanger, his rank as a gentleman? Most assuredly no such accusations have ever been maintained against Lord Byron, the private nobleman-although some. thing of the sort may have been insinuated against the author. But, he was such a profligate in his morals, that his name cannot be mentioned with any thing like tolerance.' Was he so, indeed? We should like extremely to have the catechising of the individual man who says so. That be indulged in sensual vices to some extent is certain --and to be regretted and condemned. But, was he worse, as to such matters, than the enormous majority of those who join in the cry of horror upon this occasion? We most assuredly believe exactly the reverse; and we rest our belief upon very plain and intelligible grounds. First, we hold it impossible that the majority of mankind, or that any thing beyond a very small minority, are or can be entitled to talk of sensual profligacy as having formed a part of the life and character of the man who, dying at six-and-thirty, bequeathed a collection of works such as Byron's to the world. Secondly, we hold it impossible that, laying the extent of his intellectual labours out of the question, and looking only to the nature of the intellect which generated, and delighted in generating, such beautiful and noble conceptions as are to be found in almost all Lord Byron's works-we hold it impossible that very many men can be at once capable of comprehending these conceptions, and entitled to consider sensual profligacy as having formed the principal, or even a principal, trait in Lord Byron's character. Thirdly, and lastly, We have never been able to hear any one fact established, which could prove Lord Byron to deserve any thing like the degree or even kind of odium which has, in regard to matters of this class, been heaped upon his name. have no story of base unmanly seduction, or false and villanous intrigue, against him-none whatever. It seems to us quite clear, that, if he had been at all what is called in society an unprincipled sensualist, there must have been many such stories-authentic and authenticated. But there are none such-absolutely none. His name has been coupled with the names of three, four, or more women of some rank: but what kind of women?-every one of them, in the first place, about as old as himself in years, and therefore a great deal older in character-every one of them utterly battered in reputation long before he came into contact with themlicentious, unprincipled, characterless women. What father has ever reproached him with the ruin of his daughter? What husband has denounced him as the destroyer of his peace?

We

"Let us not be mistaken. We are not defending the offences of which Lord Byron unquestionably was guilty: neither are we finding fault with those who, after looking honestly within and around themselves, condemn those of fences-no matter how severely. But we are speaking of society in general, as it now exists; and we say that there is vile hypocrisy in the tone in which Lord Byron is talked

of there. We say that, although all offences against purity of life are miserable things and condemnable things, the degrees of guilt attached to different offences of this clas are as widely different as are the degrees of guilt between an assault and a murder; and we confess our belief, that no man of Byron's station and age could have run much risi in gaining a very bad name in society, had a course of life similar (in so far as we know any thing of that) to Lord By ron's been the only thing chargeable against him.

"The last poem he wrote was produced upon his birthday, not many weeks before he died. We consider it as of of the finest and most touching effusions of his noble genius. We think he who reads it, and can ever after bring himself to regard even the worst transgressions that have been charged against Lord Byron with any feelings but those of humble sorrow and manly pity, is not deserving of the name of man. The deep and passionate struggles with the inferior elements of his nature (and ours) which it records-the lofty thirsting after purity-the heroic devotion of a soul hait weary of life, because unable to believe in its own power to live up to what it so intensely felt to be, and so reveren tially honoured as, the right-the whole picture of this mighty spirit, often darkened, but never sunk, often erring, but never ceasing to see and to worship the beauty of virtue --the repentance of it, the anguish, the aspiration, almost stifled in despair-the whole of this is such a whole, that we are sure no man can read these solemn verses too often; and we recommend them for repetition, as the best and most conclusive of all possible answers, whenever the name of Byron is insulted by those who permit themselves to fr get nothing, either in his life or his writings, but the good" Mr. Jeffrey, late Lord Advocate of Scotland, and at present one of the Lords of Session, thus gratefuly admonished the yet living author of Don Juan, in the 72d Number of the

XXI. EDINBURGH REVIEW.

"Lord Byron complains bitterly of the detraction by which he has been assailed-and intimates that his works have been received by the public with far less cordiality and f vour than he was entitled to expect. We are constraine to say that this appears to us a very extraordinary mistake In the whole course of our experience, we cannot recolier a single author who has had so little reason to complais his reception-to whose genius the public has been so eart and so constantly just-to whose faults they have been long and so signally indulgent. From the very first, t must have been aware that he offended the principles and shocked the prejudices of the majority, by his sentiments as much as he delighted them by his talents. Yet they never was an author so universally and warmly applanded. so gently admonished-so kindly entreated to look heedfully to his opinions. He took the praise, as usual, and rejected the advice. As he grew in fame and authority, h aggravated all his offences-clung more fondly to all he ba been reproached with-and only took leave of Childe Har to ally himself to Don Juan! That he has since been talle of, in public and in private, with less unmingled admirat -that his name is now mentioned as often for censure & for praise and that the exultation with which his country men once hailed the greatest of our living poets, is now loyed by the recollection of the tendency of his writings matter of notoriety to all the world; but matter of surprise. we should imagine, to nobody but Lord Byron himself.

"That the base and the bigoted-those whom he has darkened by his glory, spited by his talent, or mortified by his neglect-have taken advantage of the prevailing disa fection, to vent their puny malice in silly nick-names an vulgar scurrility, is natural and true. But Lord Byron ma! depend upon it, that the dissatisfaction is not confined t them, and, indeed, that they would never have had the courage to assail one so immeasurably their superior, if be had not at once made himself vulnerable by his errors, alienated his natural defenders by his obstinate adheres to them. We are not bigots, nor rival poets. We bate not been detractors from Lord Byron's fame, nor the friends of his detractors; and we tell him-far more in sorrow thai in anger-that we verily believe the great body of the Eng nation-the religious, the moral, and the candid part of -consider the tendency of his writings to be immoral pernicious-and look upon his perseverance in that strai composition with regret and reprehension. We ourselve are not easily startled, either by levity of temper, or boil

* See Miscellaneous Poems.

ness, or even rashness of remark; we are, moreover, most sincere admirers of Lord Byron's genius, and have always felt a pride and an interest in his fame: but we cannot dissent from the censure to which we have alluded; and shall endeavour to explain, in as few and as temperate words as possible, the grounds upon which we rest our concurrence.

"He has no priestlike cant or priestlike reviling to apprebend from us. We do not charge him with being either a disciple or an apostle of Satan; nor do we describe his poetry as a mere compound of blasphemy and obscenity. On the contrary, we are inclined to believe that he wishes well to the happiness of mankind-and are glad to testify, that his poems abound with sentiments of great dignity and tenderness, as well as passages of infinite sublimity and beauty. But their general tendency we believe to be, in the highest degree, pernicious; and we even think that it is chiefly by means of the fine and lofty sentiments they contain, that they acquire their most fatal power of corruption. This may sound at first, perhaps, like a paradox; but we are mistaken if we shall not make it intelligible enough in the end.

"We think there are indecencies and indelicacies, seductive descriptions and profligate representations, which are extremely reprehensible; and also audacious speculations, and erroneous and uncharitable assertions, equally indefensible. But if these had stood alone, and if the whole body of his works had been made up of gandy ribaldry and flashy scepticism, the mischief, we think, would have been much less than it is. He is not more obscene, perhaps, than Dryden or Prior, and other classical and pardoned writers; nor is there any passage in the history even of Don Juan so degrading as Tom Jones's affair with Lady Bellaston. It is no doubt a wretched apology for the indecencies of a man of genius, that equal indecencies have been forgiven to his predecessors; but the precedent of lenity might have been followed; and we might have passed both the levity and the voluptuousness-the dangerous warmth of his romantic situations, and the scandal of his cold-blooded dissipation. It might not have been so easy to get over his dogmatic scepticism-his hard-hearted maxims of misanthropy-his cold-blooded and eager expositions of the non-existence of virtue and honour. Even this, however, might have been comparatively harmless, if it had not been accompanied by that which may look, at first sight, as a palliation-the frequent presentment of the most touching pictures of tenderness, generosity, and faith.

"The charge we bring against Lord Byron in short is, that his writings have a tendency to destroy all belief in the reality of virtue-and to make all enthusiasm and constancy of affection ridiculous; and that this is effected, not merely by direct maxims and examples, of an imposing or seducing kind, but by the constant exhibition of the most profligate heartlessness in the persons of those who had been transicatly represented as actuated by the purest and most exalted emotions-and in the lessons of that very teacher who had been, but a moment before, so beautifully pathetic in the expression of the loftiest conceptions.

This is the charge which we bring against Lord Byron. We say that, under some strange misapprehension as to the truth, and the duty of proclaiming it, he has exerted all the powers of his powerful mind to convince his readers, both directly and indirectly, that all ennobling pursuits, and disinterested virtues, are mere deceits or illusions-hollow and despicable mockeries for the most part, and, at best, but laborious follies. Love, patriotism, valour, devotion, constancy, ambition-all are to be laughed at, disbelieved in, and despised !—and nothing is really good, so far as we can gather, but a succession of dangers to stir the blood, and of banquets and intrigues to soothe it again! If this doctrine stood alone, with its examples, it would revolt, we believe, more than it would seduce:-but the author of it has the unlucky gift of personating all those sweet and lofty illusions, and that with such grace and force and truth to nature, that it is impossible not to suppose, for the time, that he is among the most devoted of their votaries-till he casts off the character with a jerk-and, the moment after he has moved and exalted us to the very height of our conception, resumes his mockery at all things serious or sublime-and ets us down at once on some coarse joke, hard-hearted arcasm, or fierce and relentless personality-as if on purDose to show

"Whoe'er was edified, himself was not '--

r to demonstrate practically as it were, and by example, cow possible it is to have all fine and noble feelings, or

their appearance, for a moment, and yet retain no particle of respect for them-or of belief in their intrinsic worth or permanent reality."

The next Author we must cite, is the late industrious Dr. John Watkins, well known for his Biographical Dictionary, his Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan, etc.-styled ignominiously by Lord Byron "Old Grobius."

XXII. WATKINS.

"Of this Odyssey of immorality, there cannot be two opinions; for, let the religious sentiments of the reader be as lax as possible, he must be shocked at the barefaced licentiousness of the poem. Marriage is of course reprobated, and all the laws of social life are set at open defiance as violations of natural liberty. Lord Byron is the very Comus of poetry, who, by the bewitching airiness of his numbers, aims to turn the whole moral world into a herd of monsters. It must, however, be allowed that, in this tale, he has not acted the wily part of concealing the poison under the appearance of virtue; on the contrary, he makes a frank confession of his principles, and glories in vice with the unblushing temerity of a rampant satyr who acknowledges no rule but appetite. The mischief of the work is rendered doubly so by the attractive gaiety of the language, the luxuriance of the imagery, and the humorous digressions with which the story is embellished and chequered."

Another great moralist-practically, we believe, a most eminent one-is the next on our catalogue; namely, the late Rev. Caleb Colton, the author of Lacon; or, Many Things in few Words (or, as Lord Byron, somewhere, was wicked enough to misquote it-" Few Things in many Words"), in his Remarks on the Tendencies of Don Juan, published in 1822.

XXIII. COLTON.

"Aut minus impurus, minus aut jucundus, adesto;
Aut minus exundans felle, minusve sale;
Et culpare tuam, piget et laudare, Camœnam,
Materiem, Dæmon struxit;-Apollo, modos.

"Or less impure, or less attractive sing,

And less of wit, or less of rancour bring;
It grieves to reprobate, it grieves to praise,-

The theme a Demon lent,-a God the lays. "Lord Byron might have been not only the best, but the greatest poet of past or present times, with the exception of Shakspeare alone: he has chosen to be the most mischievous and dangerous without any exception. His muse possesses the precise quantum of evil to effect the greatest possible quantum of harm: had she more or had she less, in either case she would not be so destructive; were her poison more diluted, it would not kill; were it more concentrated, it would nauseate and be rejected. The impurity of Rochester is too disgusting to do harm; the morality of Pope is too neutralised to do good: but the muse of Byron has mixed her poison with the hand of an adept; it is proffered in a goblet of crystal and of gold; it will please the palate, re. main on the stomach, and circulate through the veins. There are persons who think that some of the objectionable parts of Don Juan are reclaimed by others that are both beautiful and faultless. But, alas! the poison is general, the antidote particular; the ribaldry and obscenity will be understood by the many; the profundity and the sublimity only by the few. We live in an age when orators are trying how much treason they may talk without being hanged, poets how much nonsense they may write without being neglected, and libertines how much licentiousness they may venture upon without being execrated and despised. We consider Don Juan to be a bold experiment, made by a daring and determined hand, on the moral patience of the public. It is most melancholy to reflect that a man of Lord Byron's stupendous powers should lend himself to such unworthy purposes as these; led thereto by the grovelling gratification of dazzling the fool, or encouraging the knave; of supporting the weakest sophistry by the strongest genius; and the darkest wickedness by the brightest wit. He applies, alas! the beams of his mighty mind, not to comfort, but to censure us, and, like Nero, gives us nothing but a

little harmony to console us for the conflagration he has caused. I shall sum up my opinion of Don Juan in the words of Scaliger on a poem of Cardinal Bembus:-' Hoc poema vocare possis aut obscœnissimam elegantiam, aut eleyantissimam obscœnitatem.'"

of beauty his hands have wrought; and raises our hopes and our belief in goodness to heaven, only to dash then to the earth again, and break them in pieces the man effectually from the very height they have fallen. O enthusiasm for genius or virtue is thas turned into a jest by the very person who has kindled it, and who thus fatally quenches the sparks of both. It is not that Lord Byron is sometimes serious and sometimes trifling, sometimes profigate and sometimes moral,-but when he is most seriou and most moral, he is only preparing to mortify the m

XXIV. HUNT.

"Speaking of Don Juan, I will here observe, that Lord Byron had no plan with regard to that poem. His hero in this work was a picture of the better part of his own nature. When the author speaks in his own person, he is endeavouring to bully himself into a satisfaction with the worse, and courting the eulogies of the 'knowing.' His jealousy of Wordsworth and others who were not town poets was not more creditable to him. He pretended to think worse of them than he did. He had the modesty one day to bring me a stanza, intended for Don Juan, in which he had sneered at them all, adding, that nobody but myself thought highly of them. He fancied 1 should put up with this, for the sake of being mentioned in the poem; an absurdity which nothing but his own vanity had suggested. I told him I should consider the introduction of such a stanza an affront, and that he had better not put it in. I am sorry I did not let it go; for it would have done me honour with posterity. He was so jealous of being indebted to any one for a hint, that he was disconcerted at the mention I made, in the Liberal, of Whistlecraft's Specimen, the precursor of Beppo and Don Juan."

Another historical evidence is that of Mr.-or Captain

XXV. MEDWIN.

"People are always advising me," said Byron (at Pisa, in October, 1821), "to write an epic. If you must have an epic, there's Don Juan for you. I call that an epic: it is an epic as much in the spirit of our day as the Iliad was in that of Homer. Love, religion, and politics, form the argument, and are as much the cause of quarrels now as they were then. There is no want of Parises and Menelauses, nor of crim. cons. into the bargain. In the very first canto

you have an Helen. Then, I shall make my hero a perfect Achilles for fighting,-a man who can snuff a candle three successive times with a pistol-ball: and, depend upon it, my moral will be a good one; not even Dr. Johnson should be able to find a flaw in it. I will make him neither a dandy in town, nor a fox-hunter in the country. He shall get into all sorts of scrapes, and at length end his career in France. Poor Juan shall be guillotined in the French Revolution! What do you think of my plot? It shall have twenty-four books too, the legitimate number. Episodes it has, and will have, out of number; and my spirits, good or bad, must serve for the machinery. If that be not an epic -if it be not strictly according to Aristotle,-I don't know what an epic poem means."

Returning to mere criticism, we light upon the late ingenious but eccentric author of Spirits of the Age—

XXVI. MR. WILLIAM HAZLITT.

"Don Juan has, indeed, great power; but its power is owing to the force of the serious writing, and to the oddity of the contrast between that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the sublime to the ridiculous

there is but one step. You laugh and are surprised that any one should turn round, and travestie himself: the drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and feelings. He makes virtue serve as a foil to vice; dandyism is (for want of any other) a variety of genius. A classical intoxication is followed by the splashing of soda-water, by frothy effusions of ordinary bile. After the lightning and the hurricane, we are introduced to the interior of the cabin, and the contents of wash hand basins. The solemn hero of tragedy plays Scrub in the farce. This is very tolerable and not to be endured.' The noble lord is almost the only writer who has prostituted his talents in this way. He hallows in order to desecrate; takes a pleasure in defacing the images

is a most unaccountable anomaly. Don Juan has been called a Tristram Shandy in rhyme: it is rather a porn about itself."

We find no "Sir Cosmo Gordon" in any baronetage of this age, or even in any list of K. B.'s or K. H.'s; but it stands on the title-page of a book pablished in 1825, and entitled The Life and Geniu of Lord Byron. Take, then,

XXVII. SIR COSMO GORDON.

"At Venice, Lord Byron planned that which, had he lived ing and the most wonderful of all his works, Don Ju to complete it, must have been considered as the most dar This work was general in its satire, and warm and glowing in its colouring; and though it had an obvious and impor tant moral, the absurdity of giving to a young man a se cluded and monkish education, in the hope that that woud preserve him from temptations,-it excited a great deal of clamour, especially among those upon whom, in the exe tion of it, the hand of the poet had been heavy. The fa was the most singular and the most original poem that lat perhaps ever appeared. It was made up of the most cottag and searching satires, mixed with dissections of the bus heart, and delineations of human passion and frailty, which were drawn both to and with the life, and therefore threw all those who dreaded exposure into the most serious alarm. There was much more both of politics and of personality in this poem than in any of his former ones, and, upon this count, the outcry against it was more loud and gener The stuff of immortality was, however, in the poem, a not a few of those who were offended at its appearance probably find (if indeed they shall live as long) their only memorials in it, after all-which, good or bad, they batt done for themselves shall be forgotten."

The "West" that follows is not Benjamin, the President, but a young American brother of the brash, who visited Lord Byron in Italy, anno Domini 1822.

XXVIII. WEST.

"He showed me two of the Cantos of Don Juan in man script. They were written on large sheets of paper, p together like a schoolboy's copy-book. Here and there I served alterations of words, but seldom of whole lines; and just so, he told me, it was written down at once. It w all gin, he said; meaning thereby that he drank nothing t gin when he wrote it. The Guiccioli was present, and mi she wished my lord would leave off writing that ugly Juan.' 'I cannot give up my Don Juan,' he replied; "l do not know what I should do without my Don Juan.""

From Lord Byron's Works, viewed in connection with Christianity and the Obligations of Social Life, -a sermon preached in Holland Chapel, Kennington by the Rev. John Styles, D.D.-and sold by the Doctor's pew-openers, we now submit a brief extract We believe Dr. Styles has been familiarised to every reader, by one of the Rev. Sidney Smith's articles i the Edinburgh Review.

XXIX. STYLES.

I feel myself called upon to denounce the greatest genins of "Be assured, my brethren, it is with sorrowful reluctante the age as the greatest enemy of his species. The poen one in which the author has put forth all the energy ef wonderful faculties; nor has he written any thing more de cisively and triumphantly expressive of the greatness of in genius. It is at once the glory and disgrace of our litert, ture; and will remain to all ages a perpetual monument of the exalted genius and depraved heart of the writer. It

devoted to the worst of purposes and passions; and flows on in one continued stream of pollution. Its great design seems to be, to shame the good out of their virtues, and to inspire the wicked with the pride of depravity. If, for a moment, the author appears to forget himself, and to suffer his muse to breathe of purity and tenderness—if a touch of humanity, a faint gleam of goodness, awaken our sympathy, he turns upon us with a sneer of contempt; or laughs our sensibility to scorn. Indeed, throughout, we discover the heartless despiser of human nature;-a denaturalised being, who, having exhausted every species of sensual gratification, and drained the cup of sin to its bitterest dregs, is resolved to show that he is no longer human, even in his frailties, but a cool unconcerned fiend, treating, well-nigh with equal derision, the most pure of virtues and the most odious of vices, dead alike to the beauty of the one and the deformity of the other; yet possessing a restless spirit of seduction,debasing the nobler part of man, that he may more surely bring into action his baser appetites and passions. To accomplish this, he has lavished all the wiles of his wit, all the enchantments of his genius. In every page the poet is a libertine; and the most unexceptionable passages are mildewed with impurity. The cloven foot of the libidinous satyr is monstrously associated with the angelwing of genius:

'I'd rather he the wretch that scrawls

His idiot nonsense on the walls;

Not quite a man, not quite a brute,
Than I would basely prostitute

My powers to serve the cause of vice,

To build some jewel'd edifice

So fair, so foul,-framed with such art

To please the eye and soil the heart,

That he who has not power to shun,
Comes, looks, and feels himself undone.'

0, my brethren! how I wish that the style of this discourse could be less accusatory and severe !"

The Letter of Cato to Lord Byron, next to be quoted, attracted considerable notice; and was, we know not whether justly or unjustly, ascribed to the pen of the Rev. George Croly, D.D., Rector of Romford, in Essex-author of Paris in 1815, a poem,— Pride shall have a Fall, a Comedy,-Catiline, a Tragedy, Salathiel, a Romance,-Life of George the Fourth,-Comment on the Apocalypse, etc. etc. etc. XXX. CATO.

"Whatever your principles, no page of any of your writings has contributed to the security or the adornment of virtue. Have you not offended against decency, and repudiated shame? Have you not represented almost every woman as a harlot? How your fame will stand with posterity, it would be idle to speculate upon. It is not improbable that something like the doubt which crossed the mind of the senate, whether they should pronounce their deceased emperor a tyrant or a god, will perplex the judgment of succeeding generations as to the credit and character of your poetry. They will hardly know if they shall deify or desecrate a genius so majestic, degrading itself by subjects and sentiments so repulsive. With an insane partiality, we are undervaluing our standard writers, and placing licentious drivellers in their room. The Shakspeares and Miltous of better days are superseded by the Byrons and Shelleys, the Hunts and Moores, of our own: but let us hope that the garbage which the present generation luxuriates upon, posterity will nauseate and cast upon the dunghill. With such a teacher as you have shown yourself, how is it possible for the disciples of your school to be any other than. most vicious beings? He who brutalises every feeling that gives dignity to social, every principle that imparts comfort to domestic, life-he who represents all chastity as visionary, and all virtue as vile, is not entitled to be considered as a man-he is a living literary monster.”

The ensuing paragraph is from a writer who affixes to his lucubration the initials W. C-; but with whose full name and surname we have, after much diligence, failed to make ourselves acquainted.

XXXI. ANON.

"It is to Don Juan, the last of Lord Byron's productions, that he will owe his immortality. It is his only work which

excels by its allurement and delight; by its power of attracting and detaining attention. It keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; it is perused with eagerness, and, in hopes of new pleasure, is perused again. The wild and daring sallies of sentiment with which it abounds, the irregular and eccentric violence of wit which pervades every canto, excite at once astonishment and enthusiasm. The original humour, the peculiarity of expression, the incidents, the circumstances, the surprises, the jests of action and of thought, the shades of light and darkness so exquisitely intermingled, impart a peculiarity of character to the work, which places it above all modern, above all ancient fame. Indeed, if we except the sixteen satires of Juvenal, there is nothing in antiquity so bitter or so decisive, as the sixteen cantos of Don Juan. The Roman satirist exhibits a mixture of dignity and aversion, of hatred and invective; the English censor displays a contempt of the various relations of society, of the hypocrisies, the tumults, and the agitations of life. Juvenal disdains to wield the feeble weapon of ridicule-Byron delights to mix seriousness with merriment, and thoughts purely jocular with sen timents of exasperation and revenge. Juvenal is never pathetic-Byron, when he arrives at this species of excellence, destroys its effect by effusions of ridicule or insensibility. Both poets, however, exhibit the same ebullitions of resentment against the miserable victims which they sacrifice to their fury-the same scorn for mankind-and the same ve hemence in depicting their crimes, passions, and follies. Both attack existing villany, strike at corruption and profligacy, and trample upon the turpitude and baseness of high life. Both are grave, intrepid, and implacable. If at any time they relax the sternness of their manner, they never forget themselves. They sometimes smile, indeed, but their smile is more terrible than their frown: it is never excited but when their indignation is mingled with contempt.--Don Juan will be read as long as satire, wit, mirth, and supreme excellence shall be esteemed among men: it will continue to enchain every affection and emotion of the mind; and every reader, when he arrives at its conclusion, will view it with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts on departing day."

Another (or the same) Mr. ANON., in a work, in three volumes 8vo., London, 1825, entitled The Life, Writings, Opinions, and Times of Lord Byron, thus observes

XXXII. ANON. (Second.)

"There are few readers, male or female, young or old, who do not remember, or will blush to acknowledge their acquaintance with, Marmontel's Tales. In one of the best of them, a rustic swain and nymph, in sheer simplicity of heart, but prompted by the impulse of nature, commit exactly the same fault as poor Don Juan and Haidée; the fault of nature rather than the effect, of human depravity. For the scenes in the Turkish harem, we may find a parallel in that fashionable work the Letters of Lady Mary Worlley Montagu, in a hundred books of travels, and in a thousand volumes of novels and romances, the peculiar companions by day, and the pillow associates by night, of most of the fair sex. For the intrigues of the Empress Catharine of Russia, one may consult very grave historians out of num. ber; and there is not one, who has treated on that subject, who has passed over so remarkable a trait in her character. But all at once the accumulated torrent of obloquy is poured forth upon the devoted head of Lord Byron! Well-he despised it, and justly he might do so: it will never tarnish a leaf of his laurels. Every man who has once read Don Juan, if he ingenuously confesses the truth, will feel inclined to peruse it again and again. If Byron's works be pro scribed on the score of want of decency, it will be necessary to sweep off one half of English literature at once, as libri expurgati. But Byron was a proscribed poet with the pu ritanical moralists, or exclusively good men!"

A third "ANON." meets us in the Author of Don John, or Don Juan unmasked; being a Key to the Mystery attending that remarkable publication: with a descriptive View of the Poem.

XXXIII. ANON. (Third.)

"In Don Juan, his lordship's muse displays all his characteristic beauties and blemishes-soaring to the vastest heights, or creeping to the lowest depths-glancing with an