geon's Daughter. Cromwell and Charles have not been so successfully treated: the one has been unduly lowered, the other as unduly elevated, by the strong political partialities of the author.

§ 12. The Chronicles of the Canongate contain the short tales of the Highland Widow, the Two Drovers, and the novels of the Surgeon's Daughter and the Fair Maid of Perth. By a fiction like that of Peter Pattieson, the imaginary author of the Tales of My Landlord, these were supposed to be the production of Chrystal Croftangry, a retired Scottish gentleman, whose life had been full of agitation. The introductory portion, describing the life of this person, and the causes which led him to try his skill in authorship, are very agreeably written, and contain one most pathetic incident; but we see throughout in this part, as well as in the tales, a somewhat melancholy and desponding tone of thought, which may partly be ascribed to the approach of old age, but still more probably to the influence of Scott's personal calamities. The two first stories are comparatively insignificant; but the Surgeon's Daughter is in its general incidents and characters so sombre and gloomy that the impression it leaves is far from agreeable. The hero, Richard Middlemas, is a villain of such mean and ignoble calibre, and the innocent are throughout pursued by such hopeless and unmitigated misfortune, that the effect of the whole is unpleasing. The latter portion of the incidents takes place in India, in which country Scott does not appear at home: the descriptions read as if they had been got up out of books.

The Fair Maid of Perth is a romantic and half-historical picture from an interesting period of the early Scottish annals. The great defect of the story is the hazardous and unsuccessful novelty of representing the hero Conachar—or rather one of the heroes, for perhaps the Smith is the real protagonist as a coward; an expedient that has more of novelty than felicity to recommend it. Novelists have indeed succeeded tolerably well with a plain, nay, even with an ugly heroine; but a cowardly hero even though his poltroonery be represented as a sort of congenital disease or weakness is what never did and never can be made interesting. And this is the more unfortunate when we think of the period of the story, the nation, the age, and the position of Conachar; the young chief of a Highland clan, in the wildest and most warlike age of Scottish history. The Smith is, however, one of Scott's happy characters, and the scene of the combat between the two clans is painted with something of the same fire that glows in Marmion and in the Lady of the Lake. Henbane Dwining, the potticarrier, though powerfully conceived, is a sort of anachronism in the story, and the assassination of the Duke of Rothsay, as a scene of horror, is not to be compared with the murder of old Trapbois in Nigel.

Anne of Geierstein afforded the opportunity of contrasting the wild nature and simple manners of the Swiss patriots with the feudal splendor of the Court of Burgundy. The reception of the Shepherd ambassador by Charles in his cour plenière is a piece of magnificent painting; the execution of de Hagenbach and the rout of Nancy are

also very powerfully given: but we confess that the scene of the Vehmtribunal, though carefully worked up, has something of an artificial and theatrical effect.

In the two last novels written by this mighty creator, Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous, we see, with pity and respect, the last feeble runnings of this bright and abundant fountain, soon to be choked up forever. The scenes and descriptions have the air of being painfully worked up from books, the characters are conventional and without individuality, the dialogues are long and pointless, and nothing remains of the great master's manner but that free, honest, pure, and noble spirit of thought and feeling which never deserted him.

In the delineation of character, as well as in the painting of external nature, Scott proceeds objectively: his mind was a mirror that faithfully reflected the external surfaces of things. He does not show the profound analysis which penetrates into the internal mechanism of the passions and anatomizes the nature of man, nor does he communicate, like Richardson and Byron, his own personal coloring to the creations of his fancy; but he sets before you so brightly, so transparently, so vividly, all that is necessary to give a distinct idea, that his images remain indelibly in the memory.

CHAPTER XXI.

BYRON, MOORE, SHELLEY, KEATS, CAMPBELL, LEIGH HUNT, AND WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

§ 1. LORD BYRON. His life and writings. § 2. Childe Harold. § 3. Romantic Tales: The Giaour, Siege of Corinth, Corsair, &c. § 4. Beppo and the Vision of Judgment. The Island and other poems. § 5. Dramatic Works: Manfred and Cain. Marino Faliero. The Two Foscari. Sardanapalus. Werner. § 6. Don Juan. §7. THOMAS MOORE. His life and writings. § 8. Translation of Anacreon. Thomas Little's Works. Odes and Epistles. Irish Melodies. National Airs. Sacred Songs. § 9. Political lampoons: the Fudge Family in Paris. § 10. Lalla Rookh and the Loves of the Angels. §11. Prose works. The Epicurean, and Biographies of Sheridan, Byron, and Lord Edward Fitzgerald. § 12. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. His life. § 13. Queen Mab. Alastor. Revolt of Islam. Hellas. The Witch of Atlas. Prometheus Unbound. The Cenci. § 14. Rosalind and Helen. The Sensitive Plant. § 15. JOHN KEATS. His life and writings. § 16. THOMAS CAMPBELL. His life and writings. § 17. LEIGH HUNT. His life and writings. § 18. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. His life and writings.

§ 1. THE immense influence exerted by Byron on the taste and sentiment of Europe has not yet passed away, and though far from being so supreme and despotic as it once was, is not likely to be ever effaced. He called himself, in one of his poems, "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme;" and there is some similarity between the suddenness and splendor of his literary career and the meteoric rise and domination of the First Bonaparte. They were both, in their respective departments, the offspring of revolution; and both, after reigning with absolute power for some time, were deposed from their supremacy, though their reign will leave profound traces in the history of the nineteenth century. GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824), was born in London in 1788, and was the son of an unprincipled profligate and of a Scottish heiress of ancient and illustrious extraction, but of a temper so passionate and uncontrolled that it reached, in its capricious alternations of fondness and violence, very nearly to the limit of insanity. Her dowry was speedily dissipated by her worthless husband; and the lady, with her boy, was obliged to retire to Aberdeen, where they lived for several years in very straitened circumstances. The future poet inherited from his mother a susceptibility almost morbid, which such a kind of early training must have still further aggravated. His personal beauty was remarkable; but that fatality that seemed to poison in him all the good gifts of fortune and nature, in giving him "a head that sculptors loved to model," afflicted him with a slight malformation in one of his feet, which was ever a source of pain and mortification to his vanity. He was about eleven years old when the death of his

grand-uncle, a strange, eccentric, and misanthropic recluse, made him heir-presumptive to the baronial title of one of the most ancient aristocratic houses in England a house which had figured in our history from the time of the Crusades, and had been for several generations notorious for the vices and even crimes of its representatives. With the title he inherited large though embarrassed estates, and the noble, picturesque residence of Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham. This sudden change in the boy's prospects of course relieved both mother and child from the pressure of almost sordid poverty; and he was sent first to Harrow School, and afterwards to Trinity College, Cambridge. At school he distinguished himself by his moody and passionate character, and by the romantic intensity of his youthful friendships. Precocious in everything, he had already felt with morbid violence the sentiment of love. At college he became notorious for the irregularities of his conduct, for his contempt for academical discipline, and for his friendship with several young men of splendid talents, but sceptical principles. He was a greedy though desultory reader, and his imagination appears to have been especially attracted to Oriental history and travels.

It was while at Cambridge that Byron made his first literary attempt, in the publication of a small volume of fugitive poems entitled Hours of Idleness, by Lord Byron, a Minor. This collection, though in no respect inferior to the youthful essays of ninety-nine out of every hundred young men, was seized upon and most severely critcised in the Edinburgh Review, a literary journal then just commencing that career of brilliant innovation which rendered it so formidable. The judgment of the reviewer as to the total want of value in the poems was perfectly just; but the unfairness consisted in so powerful a journal invidiously going out of its way to attack such a very humble production as a volume of feeble and pretentious commonplaces written by a young lord. The criticism, however, threw Byron into a frenzy of rage. He instantly set about taking his revenge in the satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which he involved in one common storm of invective not only his enemies of the Edinburgh Review, but almost all the literary men of the day— Walter Scott, Moore, and a thousand others, from whom he had received no provocation whatever. He soon became ashamed of his unreasoning and indiscriminate violence; tried, but vainly, to suppress the poem; and became indeed, in after life, the friend and sincere admirer of many of those whom he had lampooned in this burst of youthful retaliation. Though written in the classical, declamatory, and regular style of Gifford, himself an imitator of Pope, the English Bards shows a fervor and power of expression which enables us to see in it, dimly, the earnest of Byron's intense and fiery genius, which was afterwards to exhibit itself under such different literary forms.

Byron now went abroad to travel, and visiting countries then little frequented, and almost unknown to English society, he filled his mind with the picturesque life and scenery of Greece, Turkey, and the East;

and accumulated those stores of character and description which he poured forth with such royal splendor in his poems. The two first cantos of Childe Harold absolutely took the public by storm, and carried the enthusiasm for Byron's poetry to a pitch of frenzy of which we have now no idea, and at once placed him at the summit of social and literary popularity. These were followed in rapid and splendid succession by those romantic tales, written somewhat upon the plan which Scott's poems had rendered so fashionable, the Giaour, Bride of Abydos, Corsair, Lara. As Scott had drawn his material from feudal and Scottish life, Byron broke up new ground in describing the manners, scenery, and wild passions of the East and of Greece · a region as picturesque as that of his rival, as well known to him by experience, and as new and fresh to the public he addressed. Returning to England in the full blaze of his dawning fame, the poet became the lion of the day. His life was passed in fashionable frivolities, and he drained, with feverish avidity, the intoxicating cup of fame. He at this period married Miss Milbanke, a lady of considerable expectations; but the union was an unhappy one, and domestic disagreements were embittered by improvidence and debt. In about a year Lady Byron, by the advice of her family, and of many distinguished lawyers who were consulted on the subject, suddenly quitted her husband; and the reasons for taking this step will ever remain a mystery. The scandal of the separation deeply wounded the poet, who to the end of his life asserted that he never knew the real motive of the divorce; and the society of the fashionable world, passing with its usual caprice from exaggerated idolatry to as exaggerated hostility, pursued its former darling with a furious howl of reprobation. He again left England; and from thenceforth his life was passed uninterruptedly on the Continent, in Switzerland, in Greece, and at Rome, Pisa, Ravenna, and Venice, where he solaced his embittered spirit with misanthropical attacks upon all that his countrymen held sacred, and gradually plunged deeper and deeper into a slough of sensuality and vice. While at Geneva he produced the third canto of Childe Harold, the Prisoner of Chillon, Manfred, and the Lament of Tasso. Between 1818 and 1821 he was principally residing at Venice and Ravenna; and at this period he wrote Mazeppa, the first five cantos of Don Juan, and most of his tragedies, as Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, the Two Foscari, Werner, Cain, and the Deformed Transformed, in many of which the influence of Shelley's literary manner and philosophical tenets is more or less traceable; and here too he terminated Don Juan, at least as far as it ever was completed. The deep profligacy of his private life in Italy, which had undermined his constitution as well as degraded his genius, was in some measure redeemed by an illegitimate, though not ignoble connection with the young Countess Guiccioli, a beautiful and accomplished girl, united by a marriage of family interest with a man old enough to be her grandfather. In 1823, Byron, who had deeply sympathized with revolutionary efforts in Italy, and was wearied with the companionship of Leigh Hunt and others who surrounded him, determined to devote his fortune