silver from the mirror, we now see through, where before there was only brilliant and gorgeous reflection. These after thoughts come, perhaps, as much from the different relations with society time is apt to create, as from the increased strength of the judgment. Youth has little understanding of good or evil. It may feel the mysterious dominion of moral excellence, without an appreciation of its importance, seeking to gather pleasure from the moment, it does not look beyond the sphere of self, it has no doubts, no scruples; conscience, with its awakening sting of recollections, has not yet become a powerful, even a tremendous principle; there may, or may not be, for it depends much on nature and education, an innate and inward shrinking from the haggard form evil presents, when thought bares its concealed and deceiving features. It is only accident, not discrimination, that leads us, when young, to recoil from vice; not the mere bold and open allurements of the things that gratify sense, but the far more hazardous attractions, that come to us glowing with the beautiful hues of imagination and fancy, and breathing with all the interest intellect can call forth.

In these consisted the danger from Byron's writings. We do not accuse him of a settled design to break down the feeble-barriers man has raised to secure himself from the assaults of vice -yet all his efforts had that tendency, and were more effectual than if the world had been aware of his intentions, and could have guarded systematically against systematic attacks. But the venom lay beneath the rose-the poison was concealed by pleasure. Beauty threw a halo over its errors. With our sensibilities roused by the pathetic delineations of sorrow, we stopped not to ask if its source were pure-with our indignation heated by the infliction of wrong, we did not stay our warmth to ask the faults that had produced it-we flung aside the possibility of error-we stigmatized all blame as ungenerous and unjust, and we felt it almost as a personal offence, in any way to assail the being whose soul had become united with our own. Such was the deep enthusiasm of the day; and even now, when time has made colder and more regulated all these feelings, it is like spurning the ashes of a friend, to listen to abuse of Byron's name, though conscious that it is foolish to make him any longer the idol of our fancies, though aware that the altar is broken, and the worship invaded, if not destroyed, by the knowledge of purer and more exalted excellence; yet there is a still lingering sentiment of affection, that forbids harshness and almost merited severity of censure. He was a man of impulse, governed by fierce passions, and, from his rank in society, made early to feel an importance and an independence of opinion, that formed and fostered the disposition to follow the bent of his inclinations. He became selfish, not by his nature, but through circumstances. His rank alone

made him an object of interest; but when encircled with the splendour of genius, this was increased tenfold. His title brought his poetry into immediate notice. He had not to go through years of labour, anxiety and neglect-his ambition came at once to its goal-he gained in youth the fame that is but sparingly yielded to time and age, and thus heralded by glory and with repeated success, it would have been a matter of wonder if self had not become the subject of his thoughts, and the will been made as feverish, capricious and perverse as the temperament which belonged to him as a poet was excitable. But there were other causes, besides the personal character of the individual, that made Byron's poetry popular. There was a novelty and a freshness and a feeling in it that seemed to harmonize with the times, and to strike the chord that vibrated among the latent sensibilities of men. It was impassioned from the strong passions and intense egotism that were a part of his nature, and it excited a deeper interest from the idea that in his imaginary characters we saw his own. There has never been so remarkable an instance in literary history of an individual fixing the gaze of men so much upon himself, creating an universal feeling, not only of admiration, but of intense love, exciting a constant and pervading curiosity, and casting over the real being a romance and mystery, that it was almost impossible to penetrate; and shrouding, beneath the glory of the poet, the errors and vices of the man. Yet so it was; and during the few years of Byron's life, his sway over the realms of feeling was despotic. But now, the panic of the tempest having subsided, we may judge of the ruin it has produced-we may examine, with the cold acuteness of critics, though with no malignity, the works that have excited so deep a sensation. There is something in the endeavour similar to a review of our own life. There may be remorse and regret for certain parts of it, yet we examine it with tenderness, and do our utmost to subdue the reproaches of conscience, though no shame attaches to our conduct; there may be the darker and more wearing evidence of sorrow; there may be grief for the folly of our blind admiration, and the deep injury with which it affected the mind, yet a sense of joy at the recollection of the intoxicating influence by which we were carried away at the moment. But now that all this belongs only to the past, and to memory,-instead of feeling; and now that the judgment is no longer clouded by excitement, we may view its cause as steadily and coolly, as the astronomer, in the silence of the night, looks on the beauty and majesty of the heavens. With this, the result of time, but not of caprice, the expression of an opinion becomes a duty. It is not that we admire the less, but that our admiration is sobered and shadowed by regret; it is not that our feelings are changed, but that we condemn the feelings

themselves. All passions lead to errors; and there need be no dislike of the object on which the affections were once fixed, to bring us to sorrow over the consequences of a foolish love; there need be no alteration of sentiment, but, on the contrary, a conviction that under the same circumstances we should play the same part. Still we may recoil from the evil that has been wrought. It is not disgust, then, but pain-not dislike or anger, but grief, with which we struggle in considering Byron's writings; and they come not from the unhappy disclosures of his biographerfrom the malicious insinuations of his enemies, or the unwise candour of his friends, but from marking their bad effects. Neither calumny nor truth were required to diminish or increase our admiration; our opinion would have been the same, if all voices had been hushed concerning him. An author, even where he is disposed, cannot always play the hypocrite; like the veiled prophet, he raises, sooner or later, the web which conceals his character. The soul that can for ever work in the dark, that plays the coward to its disposition, that lies to the world, and is the traitor to its efforts, must lose too much of its power to effect great harm. But a man's works are a sufficient index to the man. The world has no right nor need to go farther.

No one however ever attempted to impose less mystery upon the world as to his designs, than Byron. Each new work was the diary of his latest acts and feelings, whether good or bad, dangerous or useful: they were issued in his poetical bulletin with all the audacity, beauty, and strength, his will and genius could create; all his hopes and desires, all his errors and excellences, were bared to the view of men as negligently, boldly, and unsparingly, as if he were sketching an imaginary person, and depicting the evil consequences of bad and ill-regulated passions in one to whom he was altogether indifferent. This extraordinary perversion in an extraordinary individual only increased the bad influence of his writings, by extending their popularity. The vanity and the egotism were forgotten in the appeals that were thus made to our own vanity by the entire intimacy in which they seemed to place us with the author; the feeling not only of acquaintance, but of extreme friendship, that we imbibed as we followed the poet through the impassioned delineations and unfoldings of what was to all appearance self, and not this alone, but what, by a very natural translation became ourselves. Yet there is no point of view in which Byron can be considered, that does not reflect him as one of the most dangerous writers the world has ever known-teeming too with a danger of the worst possible kind. Time will no doubt lessen this, and future readers may take him up with all the indifference with which we now read Rousseau or Voltaire. The fame men acquire from personal

character does not last long; they and their writings become matter of history, but the man and his peculiarities are only subjects of interest to the few, and the main source of Byron's power was in his eccentricities, and the notoriety they gave him; as the vibration of these dies away, the world begins to throw upon him the censure they found far too feeble (to resist him) during his life. There were causes at work, however, that his censors did not perceive, which made it impossible to repel effectually the force with which he invaded the world's moral strongholds. Literature of all sorts is only the type of the times. It sometimes seems to precede events, sometimes only to follow or mingle with them;-still it either comes from, or is a part of the feeling of the day-the power that moves and keeps in agitation the heart of the universe. The circulation of thought may be tranquil and torpid, it may neither meet nor rouse passion, till the advent of some master spirit brings into fierce commotion the languid current of the intellect, and stirs the waters like a tempest. The mind of the world thus finds its vent, and expression for its dormant energies; then follow great events, violent change and revolution, misfortune, regret, and sorrow, deep agony for the ruins of the past, pain for the desolation of the present, and the two constant companions, doubt and hope for the future. Thus Rousseau gave the impulse to a dangerous philosophy, and Voltaire, the arch-fiend of all mischief, with sneers, and ridicule, and sarcasm, assaulted the prevailing opinions of religion and government. The question is, whether they originated much of the evil with which they are charged, or whether they only foresaw, with the sagacity that belongs to genius, the tendency of the human spirit, and seized the moment to work great results, without designing or conceiving the ruin that followed. Perhaps, as there is always wisdom in a charitable conclusion, this should be conceded to them, and though they may never rank amongst those who have done the most good to mankind, yet they will be relieved from the awful imputation of having intended his injury, and removed from the bad eminence of malicious destroyers, to the more humble level of mere mischief makers. It matters not whether these writers blew the trumpet of the wrongs of society, and roused it to avenge itself, or whether they saw the struggling passions of men, the storm gathering in their bosoms, and only became their means of giving it vent; still they stand as the type and emblem of the era. The great event occurred towards which all things were tending; all the elements of society were displaced, all check was removed from the boldest expression of human sentiments, and from that time to this there has been a defiance of order, a ferocity in assaulting it, a disinclination amounting to hatred for all fixed and regulated institutions, that prove the unsettled condition of feeling, how stirring a

future is rising over the destinies of men-how steady, but stern, should be the resistance that is made to the pervading spirit of destruction. We of course do not mean by this to retard improvement-revolution must not be confounded with reform;nations as well as individuals have the right to remedy evils, but none to make encroachments-yet there is undoubtedly great difficulty in fixing the barrier, in drawing the line that divides the progress of good and the commencement of its opposite; for where things are at the mercy of men and not of principles, it is impossible to foresee how far they may be borne on by the heady impetuosity of passion. Yet till the time when evil is our good, there must ever be principles at work, the advantageous or the dangerous; they are the world's social pivots, and man without them would be like Archimedes with no place to fix the lever, with which he was to move the earth. The three now in action are, the enquiring and doubting, the conservative, the revolutionary or convulsive.

The three poets, whom we have thought the best of the time, represent these various principles. It is singular, perhaps, that poets should be reformers; but it is part of their nature to love freedom; and the strength of the great faculty which governs them, gives their souls a wider circle of sympathies, and lays them more open to the agitation of the moment. They have, too, more hope, more enthusiasm, more impatience, than other men; more readiness of action, more acuteness of perception, and less despair. Every poet represents the spirit of his age; or, with the prophetic sense that his tenderness and benevolence of sentiment create, with indignation at present wrong, the prevailing spirit of an age to come: and poetry, like the sea-fowl that rests upon the bosom of the waters in the tempest, seems to float upon the stormy sea of troubles with as much composure as if it ruled them. Great minds must be brought out or produced by great things; they will always be above and beyond the occasion; they do not rise with every blast that brings foam to the surface, and break like bubbles when the agitation has passed. Thus, Dante was nurtured amid the contending factions of the rival. republics of his country; and he wrote his great work in the misery and exile to which they dismissed him. Milton was bred among, and shared in, the civil convulsions of England; and the present century has seen imagination keeping pace with the tumult and distraction of war, encouraging revolution, loosening all the bonds that enchained thought, and freeing the control with which laws and morals kept down the wayward will and evil disposition of men.

Poetry has kept in unceasing action the mental excitement of the universe; and poets, with all the power and ardour, that are a part of their art and character,-with all the fineness of senti