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.

The present poem is certainly not without specimens of those talents, of which few have been greater admirers than ourselves, and none have more feelingly lamented the waste and abuse. The following address of Manfred to the "Witch of the Alps," rising beneath the arch of the sun-beam of the torrent, is full of Lord Byron's descriptive vigour.

"MAN. Beautiful Spirit! with thy hair of light,
And dazzling eyes of glory, in whose form

The charms of Earth's least-mortal daughters grow
To an unearthly stature, in an essence

Of purer elements; while the hues of youth,-
Carnation'd like a sleeping infant's cheek,
Rock'd by the beating of her mother's heart,
Or the rose tints, which summer's twilight leaves
Upon the lofty glacier's virgin snow,

The blush of earth embracing with her heaven,-
Tinge thy celestial aspect, and make tame

The beauties of the sunbow which bends o'er thee.
Beautiful Spirit! in thy calm clear brow,
Wherein is glass'd serenity of soul,
Which of itself shows immortality,
I read that thou wilt pardon to a Son
Of Earth, whom the abstruser powers permit
At times to commune with them-if that he
Avail him of his spells-to call thee thus,
And gaze on thee a moment." (P. 31, 32.)

The account which Manfred gives of himself, and his early addictions, it is impossible not to admire, notwithstanding it has so much of the mannerism of the

poet.

"MAN. Well, though it torture me, 'tis but the same;

My pang shall find a voice. From my youth upwards

My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men,

Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers,
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh,
Nor midst the creatures of clay that girded me
Was there but one who-but of her anon.
I said, with men, and with the thoughts of men,
I held but slight communion; but instead,
My joy was in the wilderness, to breathe
The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,
Where the birds dare not build, nor insect's wing
Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge
Into the torrent, and to roll along

On the swift whirl of the new breaking wave

L

et

Of river-stream, or ocean, in their flow.
In these my early strength exulted; or
To follow through the night the moving moon,
The stars and their developement; or catch
The dazzling lightnings till my eyes grew dim;
Or to look, list'ning, on the scattered leaves,
While Autumn winds were at their evening song.
These were my pastimes, and to be alone;
For if the beings, of whom I was one,-
Hating to be so,-cross'd me in my path,
I felt myself degraded back to them,
And was all clay again. And then I dived,
In my lone wanderings, to the caves of death,
Searching its cause in its effect; and drew
From wither'd bones, and skulls, and heap'd up dust,
Conclusions most forbidden. Then I pass'd
The nights of years in sciences untaught,
Save in the old-time; and with time and toil,
And terrible ordeal, and such penance
As in itself hath power upon the air,
And spirits that do compass air and earth,
Space, and the peopled infinite, I made
Mine eyes familiar with Eternity,

Such as, before me, did the Magi.-" (P. 33-35.)

The effect of the Coloseum and surrounding scene of storied ruins, in a starry night, is the passage most laboured, and perhaps most successfully so, in the poem, and it would be scarcely just towards Lord Byron not to give it a place.

"SCENE IV.-Interior of the Tower.

MANFRED alone.

MAN. The stars are forth, the moon above the tops

Of the snow-shining mountains.-Beautiful!

I linger yet with Nature, for the night

Hath been to me a more familiar face

Than that of man; and in her starry shade

Of dim and solitary loveliness,

I learn'd the language of another world.
I do remember me, that in my youth,
When I was wandering,-upon such a night
I stood within the Coloseum's wall,
'Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome;
The trees which grew along the broken arches
Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the stars
Shone through the rents of ruin; from afar
The watchdog bayed beyond the Tiber; and
More near from out the Cæsars' palace came
The owl's long cry, and, interruptedly,
Of distant sentinels the fitful song

Begun and died upon the gentle wind.
Some cypresses beyond the time-worn breach
Appeared to skirt the horizon, yet they stood
Within a bowshot-where the Cæsars dwelt,
And dwell the tuneless birds of night, amidst
A grove which springs through levell'd battlements,
And twines its roots with the imperial hearths,
Ivy usurps the laurel's place of growth;-
But the gladiators' bloody Circus stands,
A noble wreck in ruinous perfection!

While Cæsar's chambers, and the Augustan halls,
Grovel on earth in indistinct decay.-

And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which soften'd down the boar austerity
Of rugged desolation, and fill'd up,
As 'twere, anew, the gaps of centuries;
Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
And making that which was not, till the place
Became religion, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old !-
The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.-" (P. 68, 69.)

We trust we have done justice to this little poem, which, as a drama, or as a whole, we cannot praise; as a repetition of the old story of one of Lord Byron's pleasant fellows, full of crime, and yet full of conscious superiority, we cannot but condemn; but which, for its particular passages of poetical excellence, we consider as worthy of the fame of the author.

ART. VI.-A Physiological System of Nosology; with a corrected and simplified Nomenclature. By John Mason Good, F. R. S. &c. 8vo. pp. 566. Cox and Son. London, 1817.

It is not often that we carry our remarks into the regions of the healing art; but the present work has a claim upon our attention, as well from the sanction under which it appears before the world, being dedicated by permission (which permission is, we understand, never granted but upon examination of the work) to the royal college of physicians of London, as, from the extensive range it takes into the wider and more open tracks of physiology and general science.

"The main object of the present attempt is not so much to interfere with any existing system of nosology as to fill up a niche that still seems unoccupied in the great gallery of physiological study. It