has not extended his editorial discretion beyond the limits of what is here printed, for, in giving permanence to some of these pieces the extreme limits of such discretion have been reached. The lees even of Byron are not exhilarating, and as we gather from Mr. Coleridge that lees still remain, it is to be hoped that no less discreet successor of Mr. Coleridge will be permitted to allow vulgar curiosity to regale on them.

But it is as affording more copious material than has hitherto been collected for a critical estimate of Byron's work as a poet that this edition is perhaps of most interest and importance. We are now enabled, thanks to Mr. Coleridge, to distinguish between what Byron owed to nature and what he owed to predecessors and contemporaries, and, following him into his workshop, to study his methods and to be admitted into all the secrets of his technique. It will certainly come as a surprise to many to learn. how often the most vehement and impetuous of poets, in what appears to be the full tide of impassioned inspiration, is, at the same time, the most patient of artists; how, with so much originality in essence, his poetry is, in expression and often in imagery and sentiment, almost as much indebted to assimilative memory as that of Gray or Tennyson.

Among Byron's many affectations was his almost morbid anxiety to have it supposed that composition cost him no labour; and of this he was always boasting. "Like Edie Ochiltree," he said, "I never dowed to bide a hard turn o' wark in my life." That he composed, as a rule, with great rapidity seems certain, but that he took immense pains in preparing

himself for composition, and in revising what he composed, is abundantly apparent, not only from the elaborate accuracy of his realism, when realism was his aim, but from the testimony afforded by the variants and deletions in his manuscripts and proofs. Of the first, we have two very striking illustrations in Don Juan, namely, the shipwreck and the incidents succeeding it in the second canto, and the siege of Ismail in the seventh and eighth. Of the shipwreck, he himself said there was "not a single circumstance of it not taken from fact; not indeed from any single shipwreck, but all from actual facts of different wrecks." The fidelity with which this part of the poem was compiled, in other words, constructed out of passages dovetailed from Dalzell's Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, Hartford's Remarkable Shipwrecks, Bligh's Narrative of the Mutiny of the Bounty, and his own grandfather's Narrative, shows to what patient drudgery Byron could sometimes submit. Most of the passages borrowed by him have been duly recorded in Mr. Coleridge's notes, but one of the most interesting and remarkable appears to have escaped his notice. The magnificent stanza

And first one universal shriek there rush'd,
Louder than the loud ocean, like a crash
Of echoing thunder; and then all was hush'd,
Save the wild wind and the remorseless dash
Of billows; but at intervals there gush'd,
Accompanied with a convulsive splash,

A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry
Of some strong swimmer in his agony.

-was plainly based on the following passage in the

wreck of the "Pandora" (Shipwrecks and Disasters, vol. iii, p. 129):

Within a very few minutes of the time when Mr. Rogers gained the rock an universal shriek, which long vibrated in their ears, . . . announced a dreadful catastrophe. In a few minutes all was hushed except the roaring of the winds and the dashing of the waves. . . . The cries of men drowning were dreadful in the extreme, but died away by degrees as they became faint.

It would indeed be quite impossible to exceed the scrupulous particularity with which, even to the most trifling minutiae, Byron has drawn on these narratives, owing literally nothing to invention. In his account of the siege and capture of Ismail he has drawn in the same way, and almost to the same extent, on the Marquis Gabriel de Castelnau's Essai sur l'Histoire ancienne et moderne de la Nouvelle Russie. And this drudging industry was not more remarkable than the labour expended on successive editions of some of his poems, notably English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, the Hints from Horace, and The Giaour.

What trouble composition sometimes cost him will be plain to any one who will turn to the record of the variants in stanza ix of the first canto of Childe Harold, and in cxxxiv of the fourth canto. How revision could at times transform his poetry is illustrated by the passage which every one knows in The Giaour, "He who hath bent him o'er the dead." The lines which now run:

The first dark day of nothingness,
The last of danger and distress,

(Before Decay's effacing fingers

Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,)
And mark'd the mild angelic air,

The rapture of repose that's there;

The fix'd yet tender traits that streak
The languor of the placid cheek;

originally ran:

The first dark day of nothingness,

The last of doom and of distress,
Before Corruption's cankering fingers
Hath tinged the hue where beauty lingers,
And marked the soft and settled air

That dwells with all but spirit there.

The line "Where cold obstruction's apathy," which occurs later, and originally appeared as "Whose touch thrills with mortality," illustrates what is often perceptible in Byron's variants. A reminiscence of Shakespeare's "cold obstruction " occurring to him as he corrected the proofs, suggested it; just as, in the apostrophe to the ocean in Childe Harold, the memory of a couplet in Campbell's Battle of the Baltic enabled him to transform

into

These oaken citadels which made and make
Their clay creator the vain title take,

The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make, etc.

Again, the lines in The Giaour,

Yes, love indeed is light from heaven,

A spark of that immortal fire

With angels shared, by Allah given,
To lift from earth our low desire.

were evolved thus:

The couplet in The Bride of Abydos,

The evening beam that smiles the clouds away
And tints to-morrow with prophetic ray.

took final form from

an airy

And gilds the hope of morning with its ray.
{gilds }

tints

And gilds to-morrow's hope with heavenly ray.

There is a variant in the description of the thunderstorm in the third canto of Childe Harold which, poor as it is, is certainly preferable to the ludicrous line for which it is substituted:

The glee

Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth,
As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth;

namely,

As they had found an heir and feasted o'er his birth.

There is one characteristic of Byron's variants which is very significant: they rarely improve the rhythm, and were apparently seldom designed for that purpose. So incurably bad was his ear that occasionally they are, from this point of view, alterations for the worse, as here (Childe Harold, iii, lix):

Wild but not rude, awful yet not austere,
Is to the mellow earth as autumn to the year.