incurable tendency resides in the organs, to which the creation of such a monotonous series of whimsical hypochondriacs is scientifically to be ascribed.

It was a circumstance rather agreeable to us in opening this little poem, to find that the scene was in Switzerland. This, at least, gave us a hope that we were safe from our old enemies in turbans; from languishing pirates, gentlemen-thieves, and pensive cutthroats, with all the bloody delights of the divan, the kiosk, and the haram: but, alas! the Noble Poet knows only, understands only, feels only one solitary character, the prototype of which is for ever in his imagination. The constituent parts of this strange composition of a man are easily enumerated: save that he is violently in love, he is altogether a desperate villain, with just so much of palliation as a certain degree of craziness, produced by crime, may be said to afford. Without this demon to inspire him, it seems as if his Lordship were incapable of all effort; for whenever he attempts any thing independently of his assistance, absolute failure seems to be the penalty of his desertion. Now, if this be so, however we may morally regret the necessity, we scarcely know how to blame the poet. His case, indeed, is to be lamented as well as that of his readers, since all those glowing and picturesque descriptions of scenery, in which he so eminently excels, are thus under a law which compels them to pass through the mind of this conscience-smitten hero, who is sure to mix with them, in their passage, a portion of his own malignant ill-humour. From the Giaour, or perhaps from the Childe, with whom Lord Byron first started in his career of sentimental poetry, an unity of character has pervaded all the principal personages of this poet, with only that variety which the deepening shades of villainy has supplied, as his muse has proceeded. The renegade, who figured in the "Siege of Corinth," was certainly in considerable advance beyond his predecessors in crime. He had assumed the costume and religion of a Turk, to participate in the massacre of his own countrymen, the Venetians, in revenge for some imagined wrong received from some of them. Parasina, a tale of woeful debauchery, presents us with an improvement upon the turpitude of Lord Byron's former heroes; we had there the amour of a bastard son with his father's wife. This favourite character of Lord Byron seemed in this last display to have done his worst. It seemed impossible to carry him a stage further in depravity without bringing him very near his infernal home; and accordingly, in the poem now in our hands, we find our old companion in downright fellowship with familiar spirits.

Count Manfred has an insufferable load of crime upon his conscience ;--some black and atrocious deed or deeds, the na

ture of which is scarcely hinted in the course of the poem and in virtue of his crime or crimes, he appears to have been invested with a magician's art, and to have received, or acquired, the knowledge of some spells too strong for the principalities and powers of darkness to resist, whenever it was his pleasure to summon them. He has also, by what charter it is impossible to say, a controul over very odd beings, of whom but little, if any thing, has been heard in romance,-ministering destinies, and talking elements, and young and florid witches. He is withal an astrologer, and no stranger to the visions of the Apocalypse. Arimanes is also one of the spiritual persons of this unintelligible drama, whose part is as short as it is significant, almost all he has to say being condensed in the solemn monosyllable "yea." The other spirits, however, make up for the taciturnity and reserve of their prince. When first summoned by Manfred, they appear to be officiously disposed to serve him, and to enter into a full communication with him. But it does not seem that the Count, when he has got them about him, knows exactly what to do with them. He has no commands for them. But it occurs to him at length to desire to see these spirits in their accustomed forms. They tell him they have no forms of their own, being mere mind and principle; but that they can assume any form, and they desire him to choose one. He declines making any choice, and one of them appears in the shape of a beautiful female: in this figure is involved the great mystery of the poem; he rushes forward to embrace it, but it vanishes. And now follows the incantation, which was printed some time ago among the poems of which the Prisoner of Chillon is the principal. As it stood in that publication without a bearing upon any events, it had more than its original vacancy of meaning, and served as a curious instance to show what liberties with the public the poet felt he could take upon the strength of his established reputation. The reader will be at once in full possession of Manfred's character, and sufficiently reminded of a personage with whom he has been well acquainted ever since he has known Lord Byron's muse, by the following soliloquy of the hero of this dramatic poem.

"MAN. (not perceiving the other.) To be thus-
Grey-hair'd with anguish, like these blasted pines,
Wrecks of a single winter, barkless, branchless,
A blighted trunk upon a cursed root,
Which but supplies a feeling to decay-
And to be thus, eternally but thus,

Having been otherwise! Now furrow'd o'er

With wrinkles, plough'd by moments, not by years;
And hours-all tortured into ages-hours
Which I outlive!-Ye toppling crags of ice!

Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down

In mountainous o'erwhelming, come and crush me!
I hear ye momently above, beneath,

Crash with a frequent conflict; but ye pass,
And only fall on things which still would live;
On the young flourishing forest, or the hut
And hamlet of the harmless villager." (P. 23.)

Manfred is on the point of throwing himself headlong from the brow of one of the Alpine crags, when a Chamois hunter comes just in time to save him. This Chamois hunter, who talks in the strain of a buskined hero, is the character next in importance to the Count himself; he comes and goes, however, with this one scene, and contributes nothing to the developement. One address, however, of Manfred to this honest villager puts his character in very pleasing contrast with his own, and shows the poet to have very accurate views of those unsophisticated joys, of which we heartily wish he had a more practical relish, and were more frequently employed in describing.

"MAN. Myself, and thee-a peasant of the AlpsThy humble virtues, hospitable home,

And spirit patient, pious, proud and free ;

Thy self-respect, grafted on innocent thoughts;

Thy days of health, and nights of sleep; thy toils,
By danger dignified, yet guiltless; hopes

Of cheerful old age and a quiet grave

With cross and garland over its green turf,

And thy grandchildren's love for epitaph. (P. 29.)

Among the crimes of Manfred, one great and cardinal sin is constantly in his thoughts, frequently alluded to, but never distinctly divulged. It seems, however, to have partly consisted in breaking the heart of a young lady of great perfections by his ill-treatment; and we obscurely collect that the unhappy victim was so nearly related to him as to stamp an unholy character on the sentiment with which he had regarded her. When the Chamois hunter invites him to taste his wine, the following dialogue takes place :

"MAN. Away, away! there's blood upon the brim!

Will it then never-never sink in the earth?

C. HUN. What dost thou mean? thy senses wander from thee.
MAN. I say 'tis blood-my blood! the pure warm stream

Which ran in the veins of my fathers, and in ours

When we were in our youth, and had one heart,
And loved each other as we should not love,

And this was shed: but still it rises up,

Colouring the clouds, that shut me out from heaven,
Where thou art not-and I shall never be." (P. 27.)

66

In the dialogue with the Witch of the Alps, the Count speaks of the unhappy young lady as having been his own counterpart, and as having had the same lone thoughts and wanderings, and confesses that he loved and destroyed her;" that his heart had broken hers; that he had shed blood, but not hers; nevertheless, that "her blood was shed"—he " saw it-and could not staunch it."

In a subsequent scene we have the phantom of Astarte, the injured lady, produced to the view of Manfred. The spirit is conjured to speak to him, but nothing can be obtained from her, except that on the morrow the Count is to die. Some attempts are afterwards made by an old Abbot, to soften the obduracy of the Count; but neither the secret of his soul, nor any avowal of penitent feelings, escapes from his lips. The nature of his great crime is, however, somewhat further developed, in a conversation between two of the Count's dependants, on the terrace before the castle.

"HER. Come, be friendly;

Relate me some to while away our watch:
I've heard thee darkly speak of an event

Which happened hereabouts, by this same tower.

MANUEL. That was a night indeed; I do remember
'Twas twilight, as it may be now, and such

Another evening;-yon red cloud, which rests
On Eigher's pinnacle, so rested then,-
So like that it might be the same; the wind
Was faint and gusty, and the mountain snows
Began to glitter with the climbing moon;
Count Manfred was, as now, within his tower,-
How occupied, we knew not, but with him
The sole companion of his wanderings
And watchings-her, whom of all earthly things
That lived, the only thing he seem'd to love,-
As he, indeed, by blood was bound to do,
The lady Astarte, his" (P. 66.)

A spirit now arrives to summon the forfeited soul of Manfred away, his hour being come. The desolate man, with his usual haughtiness, defies the spirit, and denies his authority; but after a short dialogue, in which the old Abbot takes a very friendly, but ineffectual part, the man of blood, impurity, magic, and magnanimity, is seized with a rattling in his throat, and dies in good earnest, quite in the ordinary way, like any other gentleman. And thus ends this new deformed bantling of Lord Byron's muse, scarcely better than an abortion in moral form and structure, but nourished, and cradled, and rocked, as all this progeny have been, by the hand of a fostering genius, and the lullabies of melodious song. The mischief that lurks in all Lord Byron's productions is

this-they are lying representations of human nature; they bring qualities of a most contradictory kind into close alliance; and so shape them into seeming union as to confound sentiments, which, for the sake of sound morality and social security, should for ever be kept contrasted, and at polar extremities with respect to each other. Manfred is represented to have loved but one, and the heart of that one he cruelly broke; his very love, too, appears to have been of that sort which lies under a natural interdict. He also confesses himself to have been a man of crime and blood; and yet a certain air of native nobleness, a mysterious grandeur of character, an elevation far above ordinary humanity, all these qualities are made to throw a sort of brilliance around him, and to seem, like the sun-bow of the mountain cataract, the still and magnificent product of the conflict beneath it. These representations go beyond mere contradictoriness of character; they involve a confusion of principle, and operate very fatally and very diffusively in strengthening prejudices, which are at the bottom of our falsest estimations of men and things. In Lord Byron's own mind, we perceive this proneness to childishly erroneous impressions of human worth. The agents of a mild and regular government; those by whom the great machine of society is kept in repair, and peaceful limits imposed upon passion and ambition, or what may be called by some the privileges of genius, receive but little quarter from his muse, while the fate of a sanguinary tyrant, whose present restraint is the pledge of security and peace to the world, has been lamented in the third canto of the Child Harolde, with ludicrous sensibility.

It would be an idle parade of criticism to enter into the merits of this performance, as a specimen of dramatic composition. It has none of the properties of this kind of writing, but the division into scenes, and the conduct of the story by the means of dialogue. It affords, indeed, a pretty good ground for inferring the unfitness of the poet for this province of the art.

His peasant converses in the same language and sentiment as his nobleman; and to make up the complement of characters essential to the prosecution of the story, he throws in an old Abbot, whose province it is only to ask questions and offer advice: a couple of domestic servants, who talk together for the sake of the reader, and half a score of spirits and witches, distinguished only by their ordinal descriptions of first spirit and second spirit, first destiny and second destiny. One only character has absorbed the whole of Lord Byron's creative power. "The steady aspect of one clear large star," of demoniac influence, has fascinated his genius, and we perfectly despair of ever seeing the spell broken, and a natural, free, and wholesome exercise of those very superior talents which he unquestionably possesses.