" and Lamartino had also then imbibed-from thence Byron drew also the subject of many poems. Zuleika, The Corsair, The Giacur, the Siege of Corinth-you might style them all exquisite pictures tapestried upon the same canvas. Throughout all we have a man, heroic only in resolution or in misdeeds and peril; for his virtue, pride; his only human sentiment, love, but this of fire, and to excess and to exaggeration. "Oh! youth," exclaims Nodier, "treasure up your love; it is the divinity of your age." We have ourselves often felt that it is time to give over depicting the passion of love, and that this age, over more greedy of the truth and of utility, is weary of such strains. But, since the passion of love is the sentiment the most general amongst men; since from it arise most follies and most fine actions; since from it we see poets, even, the greatest of every climo and age, select their theme, why seek to proclaim a law of exclusion which, like all things unreasonable, will certainly be infringed? Nor should we strive to extinguish the passions. They are the natural consequences of our nature, but lot them be directed by reason, and to a good end. Therefore has the writer of these pages congratulated himself, albeit in youthful verse, at having got rid of those ever-recurring strains of love wherewith Arcadians and Petrarchists have wearied the ears and cajoled the public imagination, nor yet believes it a reflection on him who makes of love the moving spring of tragedy and romance. Why not, in fact, if it be the moving spring of real life? Or has, perchance, the greatest of living poets desired to be untrammelled by it? And here would this same writer wish his voice had power to mako itself heard, that he might exhort the youth of Italy not to be deluded into following the models of those, particularly among the French, who know not how to divest their love-scenes of the most exuberant exaggeration, and crimes, and convulsions. Oh! is not woman the most attractive ornament in our state of being? Do we not owe to her the contentments of our childhood, of which, through life, we retain the soothing recollection? Is not with woman the most delicious moments of our youth? Is not with woman our C 2 consolation in our troubles; the relief of our maladies? But woman, we would say, with her most prominent characteristics, modesty and sweetness of temper, (1) to be loved and esteemed as she deserves. Who otherwise depicts her travesties her ideality equally with him who brings her out a strolling player in the public square, adancer on the tight-rope, or an equestrian in the circus. Neither shall we lament over the perpetual couleur de rose wherewith poets from time immemorial have tinged their sweet measures, of which we know but the golden locks, eyes tremulous with love, and the tout ensemble of an insipid face reprinted on the inanimate profile of Laura. But that of Herminia, who, on the bark of the beech and the laurel, carves the cherished name in endless forms of love, is an image that we prefer, We love, too, the meditative Julia on Lake Leman's shores, and fearful not so much of the love of her beloved, as of her own. We love in Rinaldo, the Amelia, who, from nature, had received divine and indescribable attractions: "her mind possessed the same ingenuous graces as her person; exquisite sweetness of thought, and in her disposition all that was delightful and likewise pensive. She possessed the timidity and love of woman, and the purity and harmony of the angels." The Lauretta and Theresa of Ortis likewise must please, and the Laura of Manzoni, who, you may say, perhaps, could neither love nor hate, and we reply-she is true to life-she is nature. This digression on our part will appear perhaps only useless to those who have not discovered in every-day literature a tendency to caricature, to exaggeration, which, if the well-disposed will not oppose, much evil may result to letters and the sacred characteristics of beauty, truth, and civilization, which they are destined to perfect! No! Italian fancy, guided ever only by a calm and truthful observation, never, we trust, will consent to place woman amid scenes of horror and revenge, amidst villanies, and beside its concomitant, the executioner, as are wont to do the highest intellects of another nation, but to whom can certainly accrue neither fame nor advantage from such disordered fantasies (1). Ah! sad is that man's fate who, in the craving for strong emotions, knows only how to recover himself on the bed of sin, or at the foot of the scaffold! But to such a school would ever have given encouragement the poet of whom we speak? Alas! too truly we believe it; although perhaps little otherwise than Tasso contributed to deprave the taste of the Sci-cento. Certain enough is it that Byron strives to excite emotion, to sway by his genius the imagination of his reader, without caring for the moral consequences; that he even makes a vaunt of inspiring us with sympathy for beings with whom we never wish conformity of sentiment. He always considers women solely under the aspect of the passion of love, and not in their individuality, from whence it is they are not portrayed as natural and true, but fashioned by his taste and caprice. In the Siege of Corinth (2), the Venetian Alp, a renegade who, through animosity, abjured his country and his faith, himself leads the Turks to the siege of Corinth, in which is then beleaguered the Christian damsel whom he loves. And she, Francesca, visits him to persuade him to become a convert, in vain (3). The next day Alp attacks and takes the city. He encounters Minotti, the father of his beloved, and as he hears from his lips that she is dead, and that her spirit alone had appeared to him, he leaves his breast unguarded to the death wound, whilst Minotti, setting fire to the magazine, buries himself and his enemies under the ruins of the captured city. Lara is enveloped altogether in mystery, into the abyss of which the imagination of the reader does not penetrate; mysterious crimes torment him with remorse, the secret and remedy of which is known only to his Page (4). The Corsair was perhaps a man of virtuous instincts, but circumstances have made him the leader of a band of pirates; have rendered him an enemy of the human race; greedy of fame, but unable to acquire it by great actions, he seeks it in the savage indulgence of revenge (1) The writings of the famous Balzac, the not less famous Victor Hugo, Borel, and others, are here referred to.-Ed. and destruction, until he dies a man "of one virtue and a thousand crimes." (2). Love and hatred form the existence of the Giaour. My days, though few, have passed below Now leagued with friends, now girt by foes, But place again before my eyes, Through reading steel and rolling fire, &c. Here throughout we find again an intensity of grief and of desire, whence gush forth violent passions that, amidst the smiling scenes where they occur, assimilate the poet to a volcano, when, over the verdant landscape, it vomits forth ashes and stones and torrents of lava. Here, however, we have not the truth pictured but rather an ideal, a study, in fact, which materially deviates from the natural and true. Nor is it the duty of the poet who knows perfectly his vocation to cause undue emotion, or disturb the mind's tranquility, or transport it to a sphere beyond the limits of nature, even be it one of virtue, but from which, descending or expelled, it wanders guideless; rather should he design to develop the moral powers, so that by his instrumentality the passions may be governed or truly directed. XIII. BYRON'S MARRIAGE, Amidst such scenes Byron abandoned not the reckless habits of his youth, until at last he himself felt the (2) The Corsair. craving for domestic happiness, and sought a wife,Byron a wife! To put his house in order, send away his dogs, horses, monkeys, pay off his debts, arrange his books no display henceforth of pistols or of foilssheathed must be his Albanian scimitar-no longer his aspect or appearance that of one inspired! He chooses a tranquil moment, and demands as his wife the daughter of Sir Ralph Milbank Noel, heiress to the title and revenues of the Wentworths; leads her to the altar, and promises himself a happy and domestic life (1). But what if the man of pleasure should again appear? If the poet should again revive? If the sated youth, the melancholy dreamer, the adventurous Harold, should again return? Where then the husband, the father? And thus it came to pass. That felicity-how happy he who enjoys it was not for Byron's mind: the caresses of a wife, the smiles of an infant, of which a year after he was the fortunato father, the' tranquillity of the domestic hearth, were not to relax the poetical sinews of a mind strained by real or fancied wrongs. What and how much has not been said of the unforeseen and mysterious separation of Lord Byron from his wife! A day comes, and she goes to her father's house on the pretext of a visit, and thence writes to her husband that she will never return to him. We do not attempt to lose ourselves in a labyrinth of accusations and retorts: it has been said that great men should be admired, but cannot be loved; we, however, who are acquainted with Romagnosi (2) and Manzoni (3), we say, that this is the plea of men too petty and too malicious, of those, too numerous, alas who cannot forgive him who raises himself above the crowd (4), and who may be compared to the disinherited, whose hatred or virulence would seize or keep back the property of their brethren. The excessive expenditure entailed by espousing a wealthy heiress; the continual claims of creditors, carried to the seizure of property and furniture (5); the fact of being watched in his own house, and out of doors; the existence of domestic disorder excluding Lord Byron almost from society; the self-imposed duty of maintaining acquaintance with actresses (6); all this, |