XXII. WATKINS. "Of this Odyssey of immorality, there cannot be two opinions; for, let the religious sentiments of the reader be as lax as possible, he must be shocked at the barefaced licentiousness of the poem. Marriage is of course reprobated, and all the laws of social life are set at open defiance as violations of natural liberty. Lord Byron is the very Comus of poetry, who, by the bewitching airiness of his numbers, aims to turn the whole moral world into a herd of monsters. It must, however, be allowed that in this tale, he has not acted the wily part, of concealing the poison under the appearance of virtue; on the contrary, he makes a frank confession of his principles, and glories in vice with the unblushing temerity of a rampant satyr who acknowledges no rule but appetite. The mischief of the work is rendered doubly so by the attractive gaiety of the language, the luxuriance of the imagery, and the humorous digressions with which the story is embellished and chequered." Another great moralist-practically, we believe, a most eminent one-is the next on our catalogue ; namely, the late Rev. Caleb Colton, the author of "Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words" (or, as Lord Byron, somewhere, was wicked enough to misquote it" Few Things in Many Words") in his "Remarks on the Tendencies of Don Juan," published in 1822. XXIII. COLTON. "The impurity of Rochester is too disgusting to do harm; the morality of Pope is too neutralised to do good: but the muse of Byron has mixed her poison with the hand of an adept; it is proffered in a goblet of crystal and of gold; it will please the palate, remain on the stomach, and circulate through the veins. There are persons who think that some of the objectionable parts of Don Juan are reclaimed by others that are both beautiful and faultless. But, alas! the poison is general, the antidote particular; the ribaldry and obscenity will be understood by the many; the profundity and the sublimity only by the few. We live in an age when orators are trying how much treason they may talk without being hanged, poets how much nonsense they may write without being neglected, and libertines how much licentiousness they may venture upon without being execrated and despised. We consider Don Juan to be a bold experiment, made by a daring and determined hand, on the moral patience of the public. It is most melancholy to reflect that a man of Lord Byron's stupendous powers should lend himself to such unworthy purposes as these; led thereto by the grovelling gratification of dazzling the fool, or encouraging the knave; of supporting the weakest sophistry by the strongest genius, and the darkest wickedness by the brightest wit. He applies, alas, the beams of his mighty mind, not to comfort, but to censure us, and, like Nero, gives us nothing but a little harmony to console us for the conflagration he has caused. I shall sum up my opinion of Don Juan in the words of Scaliger on a poem of Cardinal Bembus: - Hoc poema vocare possis aut obscœnissimam elegantiam, aut elegantissimam obscœnitatem."'" XXIV. HUNT. Speaking of Don Juan, I will here observe, that Lord Byron had no plan with regard to that poem. His hero in this work was a picture of the better part of his own nature. When the author speaks in his own person, he is endeavouring to bully himself into a satisfaction with the worse, and courting the eulogies of the knowing. His jealousy of Wordsworth and others who were not town poets was not more creditable to him. He pretended to think worse of them than he did. He had the modesty one day to bring me a stanza, intended for Don Juan, in which he had sneered at them all, adding, that nobody but myself thought highly of them. He fancied I should put up with this, for the sake of being mentioned in the poem; an absurdity which nothing but his own vanity had suggested. I told him I should consider the introduction of such a stanza an affront, and that he had better not put it in. I am sorry I did not let it go; for it would have done me honour with posterity." Another historical evidence is that of Mr. Captain -or XXV. MEDWIN. "People are always advising me," said Byron (at Písa, in October, 1821), "to write an epic. If you must have an epic, there's Don Juan' for you. I call that an epic; it is an epic as much in the spirit of our day as the Iliad was in that of Homer. Love, religion, and politics form the argument, and are as much the cause of quarrels now as they were then. There is no want of Parises and Menelauses, Der of crim. cons. into the bargain. In the very first canto you have a Helen. Then, I shall make my hero a perfect Achilles for fighting, a man who can snuff a candle three successive times with a pistol-ball: and, depend upon it, iny moral will be a good one: not even Dr. Johnson should be able to find a flaw in it. I will make him neither a dandy in town, nor a fox-hunter in the country. He shall get into all sorts of scrapes, and at length end his career in France. Poor Juan shall be guillotined in the French Revolution! What do you think of my plot? It shall have twenty-four books too, the legitimate number. Episodes it has, and will have, out of number; and my spirits good or bad, must serve for the machinery. If that be not an epic - if it be not strictly according to Aristotle - I don't know what an epic poem meaus.' Returning to mere criticism, we light upon the late ingenious but eccentric author of "Spirits of the Age XXVI. MR. WILLIAM HAZLITT. "Don Juan has, indeed, great power; but its power is owing to the force of the serious writing, and to the oddity of the contrast between that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are surprised that any one shoul! turn round and travestie himself; the drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and feelings. He makes virtue serve as a foil to vice; dandyism is (for want of any other) a variety of genius. A classical intoxication is followed by the splashing of soda water, by frothy effusions of ordinary bile. After the lightning and the hurricane, we are introduced to the interior of the cabin, and the contents of wash-hand basins. The solemn hero of tragedy plays Scrub in the farce. Thes is very tolerable and not to be endured.' The noble lord is almost the only writer who has prostituted his talents in this way. He hallows in order to desecrate; takes a pleasure in defacing the images of beauty his hands have wrought, and raises our hopes and our belief in goodness to heaven, edy to dash them to the earth again, and break them in panoes the more effectually from the very height they have fallen Our enthusiasm for genius or virtue is thus turned in to a jest. by the very person who has kindled it, and who thus fatally quenches the sparks of both. It is not that Lord Byron is sometimes serious and sometimes trifling, sometimes profigate and sometimes moral-but when he is most serious and most moral, he is only preparing to mortify the ursuspecting reader by putting a pitiful hoax upon him. Tik is a most unaccountable anomaly. Don Juan has been card a Tristram Shandy in rhyme: it is rather a poem about itself." We find no "Sir Cosmo Gordon" in any baronetage of this age, or even in any list of K. B.'s or K.H.'s; but it stands on the titlepage of a book published in 1825, and entitled "The Life and Genius of Lord Byron." Take, then, XXVII. SIR COSMO GORDON. "At Venice, Lord Byron planned that which, had he lived to complete it, must have been considered as the most dari g and the most wonderful of all his works, Don Juan. Ths work was general in its satire, and warm and glowing th108 colouring; and though it had an obvious and important moral, the absurdity of giving to a young man a seclude 1 and monkish education, in the hope that that would preserve him from temptations, it excited a great deal of clame 27. especially among those upon whom, in the execution of 12, the hand of the poet had been heavy. The Don was the most singular and the most original poem that had perhaps ever appeared. It was made up of the most cutting and searching satires, mixed with dissections of the human heart, and delineations of human passion and frailty, which were drawn both to and with the life, and therefore threw all those te dreaded exposure into the most serious alarm. There was much more both of politics and of personality in this prem than in any of his former ones, and upon this account, the outery against it was more loud and general. The stuff of h immortality was, however, in the poem, and not a few of those who were offended at its appearance will probably ad (if indeed they shall live as long) their only memorials after all which, good or bad, they have done for themselves shall be forgotten." DON JUAN. The "West" that follows is not Benjamin, the President, but a young American brother of the brush, who visited Lord Byron in Italy, anno Domini 1822. XXVIII. WEST. It was "He showed me two of the Cantos of Don Juan in manuscript. They were written on large sheets of paper, put together like a schoolboy's copybook. Here and there I observed alterations of words, but seldom of whole lines; and just so, he told me, it was written down at once. all gin, he said, meaning thereby that he drank nothing but gin when he wrote it. The Guiccioli was present, and said, she wished my lord would leave off writing that ugly Don Juan.' I cannot give up my Don Juan,' he replied; I do not know what I should do without my Don Juan.' From "Lord Byron's Works, viewed in connection with Christianity and the Obligations of Social Life, "a sermon preached in Holland Chapel, Kennington, by the Rev. John Styles, D.D. — and sold by the Doctor's pew-openers, we now submit a We believe Dr. Styles has been fabrief extract. miliarised to every reader, by one of the Rev. Sidney Smith's articles in the Edinburgh Review. XXIX. STYLES. "Be assured, my Brethren, it is with sorrowful reluctance I feel myself called upon to denounce the greatest genius of the age as the greatest enemy of his species. The poem is one in which the author has put forth all the energy of his wonderful faculties; nor has he written any thing more decisively and triumphantly expressive of the greatness of his genius. It is at once the glory and disgrace of our literature; and will remain to all ages a perpetual monument of the exalted genius and depraved heart of the writer. It is devoted to the worst of purposes and passions; and flows on in one continued stream of pollution. Its great design seems to be, to shame the good out of their virtues, and to inspire the wicked with the pride of depravity. If, for a moment, the author appears to forget himself, and to suffer his muse to breathe of purity and tenderness- if a touch of humanity, a faint gleam of goodness, awaken our sympathy, he turns upon us with a sneer of contempt, or laughs our sensibility to scorn. Indeed, throughout, we discover the heartless 'I'd rather be the wretch that scrawls So fair, so foul,-framed with such art O my Brethren! how I wish that the style of this discourse could be less accusatory and severe !" The "Letter of Cato to Lord Byron," next to be quoted, attracted considerable notice; and was, we know not whether justly or unjustly, ascribed to the pen of the Rev. George Croly, D.D., Rector of author of "Paris in 1815," Romford, in Essexa poem-" Pride shall have a Fall, a Comedy," -"Salathiel, a Romance," "Catiline, a Tragedy," "Comment on "Life of George the Fourth," the Apocalypse," &c. &c. &c. XXX. CATO. "Whatever your principles, no page of any of your writings has contributed to the security or the adornment of virtue. Have you not offended against decency? and repudiated The ensuing paragraphs are from a writer who ΧΧΧΙ. ΑΝΟΝ. "It is to Don Juan, the last of Lord Byron's productions, peculiarity of expression, the incidents, the circumstances, the "The XXXII. ANON. (Second.) "All at once the accumulated torrent of obloquy is poured forth upon the devoted head of Lord Byron! Well-he despised it, and justly he might do so it will never tarnish a leaf of his laurels. Every man who has once read Don Juan, if he ingenuously confesses the truth, will feel inclined to peruse it again and again. If Byron's works be proscribed on the score of want of decency, it will be necessary to sweep off one half of English literature at once, as libri expurgati. But Byron was a proscribed poet with the puritanical moralists, or exclusively good men!" A third "ANON." meets us in the Author of "Don John; or, Don Juan unmasked; being a Key to the mystery attending that remarkable publication." XXXIII. ANON. (Third.) "In Don Juan, his lordship's muse displays all his characteristic beauties and blemishes soaring to the vastest heights, or creeping to the lowest depths-glancing with an eye of fantasy at things past, at things present, and at things to come. The poem is constructed, like the image of Nebuchadnezzar's dream-of fine gold, silver, and clay. It abounds in sublime thought and low humour, in dignified feeling and malignant passion, in elegant wit and obsolete conceit. It alternately presents us with the gaiety of the ball-room, and the gloom of the scaffold-leading us among the airy pleasantries of fashionable assemblages, and suddenly conducting us to haunts of depraved and disgusting sensuality. We have scarcely time to be refreshed and soothed by the odours of flowers and bursting blossoms, the pensive silence of still waters, and the contemplation of beautiful forms, before we are terrified and horror-stricken by the ferocious clamours of tumultuous crowds, and the agonies of innocent and expiring victims. This poem turns decorum into jest, and bids defiance to the established decencies of life. It wars with virtue as resolutely as with vice." Our next author is a pseudonomous one- -the writer of a "Letter to Lord Byron, by John Bull," London, 8vo, 1821. This production much excited Lord Byron's curiosity. In one of his letters to Mr. Murray he asks, "Who the devil can have done this diabolically well-written letter?" and subsequently he is found resting his suspicion (unfoundedly, no doubt,) on one of his own most intimate personal friends. We extract a few paragraphs. XXXIV. JOHN BULL. "Stick to Don Juan; it is the only sincere thing you have ever written; and it will live many years after all your Harolds have ceased to be, in your own words, 'A school-girl's tale- the wonder of an hour.' I consider Don Juan as out of all sight the best of your works: it is by far the most spirited, the most straightforward, the most interesting, and the most poetical; and every body thinks as I do of it, although they have not the heart to say 80. Old Gifford's brow relaxed as he gloated over it; Mr. Croker chuckled; Dr. Whitaker smirked; Mr. Milman sighed; Mr. Coleridge took it to his bed with him. I think the great charm of its style is, that it is not much like the style of any other poem in the world. It is utter humbug to say, that it is borrowed from the style of the Italian weavers of merry ottava rima: their merriment is nothing, because they have nothing but their merriment; yours is every thing, because it is delightfully intermingled with, and contrasted by, all manner of serious things-murder and lust included. It is also mere humbug to accuse you of having plagiarised it from Mr. Frere's pretty and graceful little Whistlecrafts. The measure, to be sure, is the same; but then the measure is as old as the hills. But the spirit of the two poets is as different as can be. Mr. Frere writes elegantly, playfully, very like a gentleman, and a scholar, and a respectable man; and his poems never sold, nor ever will sell. Your Don Juan, again, is written strongly, lasciviously, fiercely, laughingly, every body sees in a moment that nobody could have written it but a man of the first order, both in genius and in dissipation a real master of all his tools a profligate, pernicious, irresistible, charming devil; -and accordingly the Don sells, and will sell, to the end of time, whether our good friend, Mr. John Murray, honour it with his imprimatur, or doth not so honour it. I will mention a book, however, from which I do think you have taken a great many hints; nay, a great many pretty full sketches, for your Juan. It is one which (with a few more) one never sees mentioned in reviews, because it is a book written on the anti-humbug principle. It is-you know it exceedingly well -it is no other than Faublas, a book which contains as much good fun as Gil Blas, or Molière; as much good luscious description as the Héloise; as much fancy and imagination as all the comedies in the English language put together, and less humbug than any one given romance that has been written since Don Quixote-a book which is to be found on the tables of roués, and in the desks of divines, and under the pillows of spinsters-a book, in a word, which is read universally I wish I could add-in the original. "But all this has nothing to do with the charming style of Don Juan, which is entirely and inimitably your own-the sweet, fiery, rapid, easy-beautifully easy,-anti-humbug style of Don Juan. Ten stanzas of it are worth all your Manfred and yet your Manfred is a noble poem, too, in its way. I had really no idea what a very clever fellow you were till I read Don Juan. In my humble opinion, there is very little in the literature of the present day that will stand the test of half a century, except the Scotch novels of Sir Walter Scott, and Don Juan. They will do so because they are written with perfect facility and nature- because their materials are all drawn from life." Coming once more to men with names, we present this extract from a Life of Byron, by the well-known author of "The Annals of the Parish," "The Provost," "The Entail," "Sir Andrew Wylie," "Laurie Todd," and "The Member." XXXV. GALT. "Strong objections have been made to the moral tendency of Don Juan; but, in the opinion of many, it is Lord Byron's masterpiece; and undoubtedly it displays all the varieties of his powers, combined with a quaint playfulness not found to an equal degree in any other of his works. The serious and pathetic portions are exquisitely beautiful; the descriptions have all the distinctness of the best pictures in Childe Harold, and are, moreover, generally drawn from nature; while the satire is for the most part curiously associated and sparkling dy witty. The characters are sketched with amazing firmness and freedom; and, though sometimes grotesque, are yet not often overcharged. It is professedly an epic poem, but it may be more properly described as a poetical novel. Nor can it be said to inculcate any particular moral, or to do more than unmantle the decorum of society. Bold and buoyant throughout, it exhibits a free irreverent knowledge of the world, laughing or mocking as the thought serves, in the most unexpected antitheses to the proprieties of time, place, and circumstance. The object of the poem is to describe the progress of a libertine through life; not an unprincipled prodigal, whose profligacy, growing with his growth and strengthening with his strength, passes from voluptuous indulgence into the morbid sensuality of systemde debauchery; but a young gentleman who, whirled by the vigoar and vivacity of his animal spirits into a world of adventures, in which his stars are chiefly in fault for his liaisons, settles at last into an honourable lawgiver, a moral speaker om divorce bills, and possibly a subscriber to the Society for the Suppression of Vice." Next to Mr. Galt we place the amiable and humane Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, Baronet, of Denton and Lee Priory, Kent, author of " Mary Clifford," the "Censura Literaria," the " Autobiography of Clavering," &c. &c. &c. XXXVI. BRYDGES. "Don Juan is, no doubt, very licentious in parts, which renders it dangerous to praise it very much; and makes it improper for those who have not a cool and correct judgment, and cannot separate the objectionable parts from the numerous beautiful passages intermixed. But nowhere is the poet's mind more elastic, free, and vigorous, and his knowledge oď human nature more surprising. It has all sorts of tults, many of which cannot be defended, and some of which are disgusting; but it has, also, almost every sort of portical merit; there are in it some of the finest passages which Lord Byron ever wrote; there is amazing knowledge of human nature in it; there is exquisite humour; there is freed", and bound, and vigour of narrative, imagery, sentiment, sad style, which are admirable; there is a vast fertility of deep extensive, and original thought, and, at the same time, there is the profusion of a prompt and most richly-stored memory. The invention is lively and poetical; the descriptions are brilliant and glowing, yet not over-wrought, but fresh fr nature, and faithful to her colours; and the prevai character of the whole (bating too many dark spots) "ot dispiriting, though gloomy; not misanthropic, though batter, and not repulsive to the visions of poetical enthusiasm. though indignant and resentful. I know not how to wish be had never written this poem, in spite of all its faults and intermingled mischief! There are parts of it word are among the most brilliant proofs of his genius; and, what la even better, there are parts which throw a blaze of light up the knowledge of human life." After depicting the mode of life pursued by Lord Byron at Venice, in 1817-18, his biographer this notices Don Juan:: XXXVII. MOORE. "It was at this time, as the features of the progeny itself would but too plainly indicate, that Lord Byron conceived and wrote part of his poem of Don Juan; and never tal | pages more faithfully, and in many respects lamentably, reflect every variety of feeling, and whim, and passion that like the rack of autumn, swept across the author's muni in writing them. Nothing less, indeed, than that singular corn DON JUAN. bination of attributes, which existed and were in full activity Immediately on receiving the news of Lord Byron's XXXVIII. SCOTT. "Amidst the general calmness of the political atmosphere, we have been stunned, from another quarter, by one of those death notes, which are pealed at intervals, as from an archangel's trumpet, to awaken the soul of a whole people at once. Lord Byron, who has so long and so amply filled the highest place in the public eye, has shared the lot of humanity. That mighty genius, which walked amongst men as something superior to ordinary mortality, and whose powers were beheld with wonder, and something approaching to terror, as if we knew not whether they were of good or of evil, is laid as soundly to rest as the poor peasant whose ideas went not The voice of just blame and of maligbeyond his daily task. nant censure are at once silenced; and we feel almost as if the great luminary of heaven had suddenly disappeared from the sky, at the moment when every telescope was levelled for the examination of the spots which dimmed its brightness. It is not now the question, what were Byron's faults, what his mistakes; but, how is the blank which he has left in Not, we fear, in one British literature to be filled up? generation, which, among many highly gifted persons, has produced none which approached Lord Byron, in ORIGINALITY, -so much time rethe first attribute of genius. Only thirty-six years oldso much already done for immortality maining, as it seemed to us short-sighted mortals, to maintain and to extend his fame, and to atone for errors in conduct and levities in composition,-who will not grieve that such a race has been shortened, though not always keeping the One word on this unstraight path; such a light extinguished, though sometimes flaming to dazzle and to bewilder? grateful subject, ere we quit it for ever. "The errors of Lord Byron arose neither from depravity of heart, for Nature had not committed the anomaly of uniting to such extraordinary talents an imperfect moral sense, nor from feelings dead to the admiration of virtue. No man had ever a kinder heart for sympathy, or a more open hand for the relief of distress; and no mind was ever more formed for the enthusiastic admiration of noble actions, providing he was convinced that the actors had proceeded on Remonstrances from a friend, of disinterested principles. whose intentions and kindness he was secure, had often great weight with him; but there were few who would venture on a task so difficult. Reproof he endured with impatience, and reproach hardened him in his error; so that he often resembled the gallant war-steed, who rushes forward on the steel In the most painful crisis of his private that wounds him. life, he evinced this irritability and impatience of censure in such a degree, as almost to resemble the noble victim of the bull-fight, which is more maddened by the squibs, darts, and petty annoyances of the unworthy crowds beyond the lists, than by the lance of his nobler, and, so to speak, his more In a word, much of that in which he legitimate antagonist. erred was in bravado and scorn of his censors, and was done with the motive of Dryden's despot, to show his arbitrary power. "As various in composition as Shakspeare himself (this will be admitted by all who are acquainted with his Don Juan'), he has embraced every topic of human life, and sounded every string on the divine harp, from its slightest to its most powerful and heart-astounding tones. There is scarce a passion or a situation which has escaped his pen; and he might be drawn, like Garrick, between the weeping and the laughing Muse, although his most powerful efforts have certainly been devoted to Melpomene. His genius seemed as prolific as various. The most prodigal use did not exhaust his powers, nay, seemed rather to increase their All that's bright must fade, The brightest still the fleetest!' In a little journal conducted by the great poet of XXXIX. GOETHE. "Don Juan is a thoroughly genial work- misanthropical to the bitterest savageness, tender to the most exquisite and appreciate the author, and make up our minds not fretdelicacy of sweet feelings: and when we once understand fully and vainly to wish him other than he is, it is impossible not to enjoy what he chooses to pour out before us with such unbounded audacity-with such utter recklessness. The technical execution of the verse is in every respect answerable to the strange, wild simplicity of the conception and plan: the poet no more thinks of polishing his phrase, than he does of flattering his kind; and yet, when we examine the piece more narrowly, we feel that English poetry is in possession of what the German has never attained, a classically elegant comic style... "If I am blamed for recommending this work for translation for throwing out hints which may serve to introduce so immoral a performance among a quiet and uncorrupted nation I answer, that I really do not perceive any likeli hood of our virtue's sustaining serious damage in this way: Poets and Romancers, bad as they may be, have not yet which lie on every table." learned to be more pernicious than the daily newspapers After Scott and Goethe we should be sorry to In Mr. quote anybody but Lord Byron himself. Kennedy's account of his "Conversations" with the noble poet at Cephalonia, a few weeks before his death, we find the following passage, with which let these prolegomena conclude. XL. BYRON ipse (apud Kennedy), They certainly," said I, "I cannot," said Lord Byron," conceive why people will of the imaginary beings which, as a poet, I have the right and always mix up my own character and opinions with those liberty to draw." do not spare your Lordship in that respect, and in Childe Harold, Lara, the Giaour, and Don Juan, they are too much disposed to think that you paint, in many costumes, yourself, and that these characters are only the vehicles for the expression of your own sentiments and feelings." "and what was "They do me great injustice," he replied never before done to any poet. Even in Don Juan I have been equally misunderstood. I take a vicious and unprincipled character, and lead him through those ranks of society, whose high external accomplishments cover and cloak internal and secret vices, and I paint the natural effects of such characters; and certainly they are not so highly coloured as we find them in real life." "This may be true; but the question is, what are your motives and object for painting nothing but scenes of vice and folly?""To remove the cloak, which the manners and maxims of society," said his Lordship, "throw over their secret sins, and show them to the world as they really are." Postscript. We had intended to stop with the above - but after it was too late to derange the order of our earlier testimonies, our attention was solicited to a sportive effusion by the learned Dr. William Maginn, of Trinity College, Dublin, which appears to us not unworthy of being transferred to this Olla podrida. Every one ought to have, but every one has not, by heart Wordsworth's" Yarrow Unvisited;" therefore we shall place the original alongside of the parody. YARROW UNVISITED (1809). FROM Stirling Castle we had seen The mazy Forth unravell'd; Had trod the banks of Clyde and Tay, And with the Tweed had travell'd; And when we came to Clovenford, Then said my "winsome Marrow," "Whate'er betide, we'll turn aside, And see the Braes of Yarrow." "Let Yarrow Folk, frae Selkirk Town, Who have been buying, selling, Go back to Yarrow, 't is their own; Each Maiden to her Dwelling! On Yarrow's banks let herons feed, Hares couch, and rabbits burrow! But we will downwards with the Tweed, Nor turn aside to Yarrow. "There's Gala Water, Leader Haughs, Both lying right before us; And Dryborough, where with chiming Tweed The Lintwhites sing in chorus; There's pleasant Tiviot Dale, a land [row: Made bithe with plough and harWhy threw away a needful day To go in search of Yarrow? "What's Yarrow but a River bare, That glides the dark hills under? There are a thousand such elsewhere As worthy of your wonder." -Strange words they seem'd of slight and scorn; My true-love sigh'd for sorrow: And look'd me in the face, to think I thus could speak of Yarrow! "Oh! green," said I, "are Yarrow's "Holms, And sweet is Yarrow flowing! Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, But we will leave it growing. O'er hilly path, and open Strath, We 'll wander Scotland thorough; But, though so near, we will not turn Into the Dale of Yarrow. "Let beeves and home-bred kine partake The sweets of Burn-mill meadow; The swan on still St. Mary's Lake Float double, swan and shadow! We will not see them; will not go To day, nor yet to-morrow; Enough if in our hearts we know There's such a place as Yarrow. "Be Yarrow Stream unseen, unknown! It must, or we shall rue it: We have a vision of our own; Ah! why should we undo it? The treasured dreams of times long past, [row! We'll keep them, winsome MarFor when we're there, although t'is T'will be another Yarrow. [fair, "If Care with freezing years should come, And wandering seem but folly,Should we be loth to stir from home, And yet be melancholy; Should life be dull, and spirits low; T will soothe us in our sorrow, That earth has something yet to show, The bonny Holms of Yarrow!" DON JUAN UNREAD (1819). Or Corinth Castle we had read The amazing Siege unravell'd, And swallow'd Lara and the Giaour, And with Childe Harold travell'd; And so we follow'd Cloven foot, And faithfully as any, Until he cried, Come turn aside, And read of Don Giovanni." "Let Whiggish folk, frae Holland House, Who have been lying, prating, Read Don Giovanni, 't is their own; A child of their creating! On jests profane they love to feed, And there they are- and many! But we, who link not with the The sweets of Lady Morgan ; We will not read them, will not hear "Be Juan then unseen, un. It must, or we shall rue it; We may have virtue of our own; Ah! why should we undo it? The treasured faith of days long past, We still would prize o'er any; And grieve to hear the ribald jeer Of scamps like Don Giovanni. "When Whigs with freezing rule shall come, And piety seem folly; [Brougham, When Cam and Isis, curb'd by Shall wander melancholy; When Cobbett, Wooler, Watson, And all the swinish many, [Hunt, Shall rough-shod ride o'er Church and State; Then hey! for Don Giovanni." What Tory "Then hey! for Don Giovanni! will not pronounce Dr. Maginn's last octave a prophetic one, when he compares it with the time of the forthcoming of this, the first complete and unmutilated edition of Don Juan ?" January 30, 1833.] DEDICATION. I I. BOB SOUTHEY! You're a poet-Poet-laureate, "Which pye being open'd they began to sing" Or Regent, who admires such kind of food ;- But like a hawk encumber'd with his hood,- You, Bob are rather insolent, you know, And be the only Blackbird in the dish; -- And tumble downward like the flying fish Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob, And fall, for lack of moisture quite a-dry, Bob! IV. And Wordsworth, in a rather long “Excursion" (I think the quarto holds five hundred pages), Has given a sample from the vasty version Of his new system 3 to perplex the sages; 'Tis poetry at least by his assertion, And may appear so when the dog-star ragesAnd he who understands it would be able To add a story to the Tower of Babel. [This "Dedication" was suppressed, in 1819, with Lord Byron's reluctant consent; but, shortly after his death, as existence became notorious, in consequence of an article in the Westminster Review, generally ascribed to Sir Johs Hobhouse; and, for several years, the verses have been selling in the streets as a broadside. It could, therefore, serve no purpose to exclude them on the present occasion.] 2 [Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria" appeared in 1817.] 3 ["When, some years ago, a gentleman, the chief writer and conductor of a celebrated review, distinguished by its bostility to Mr. Southey, spent a day or two at Keswick, he was circumstantially informed by what series of accidents it had happened, that Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Southey, and I bad become neighbours; and how utterly groundless was the sup position, that we considered ourselves as belonging to any common school, but that of good sense, confirmed by the long-established models of the best times of Greece, Rome, Italy, and England; and still more groundless the notion that Mr. Southey (for, as to myself, I have published so littà, and that little of so little importance, as to make it almos ludicrous to mention my name at all) could have been concerned in the formation of a poetic sect with Mr. Wordsworth, when so many of his works had been published, not only previously to any acquaintance between them, but before Mr. Wordsworth himself had written any thing but in a detion ornate, and uniformly sustained; when, too, the slightest examination will make it evident, that between those and the after-writings of Mr. Southey there exists no other difference than that of a progressive degree of excellence, from progres and increase of experience. Yet, among the first artick sive developement of power, and progressive facility from batt which this man wrote after his return from Keswick, we were characterised as the School of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes."" COLERIDGE.] 1 1 |