And getting but a nibble at a time, Still fussily keeps fishing on, the same Of female wits, boy bards-in short, a fool! LXXIV. A stalking oracle of awful phrase, LXXX. Oh, mirth and innocence! Oh, milk and water! His thirst with such pure beverage. No matter, The approving "Good!" (by no means GOOD in law Meantime I drink to your return in brandy. The bluest of bluebottles you e'er saw, One hates an author that's all author, fellows One don't know what to say to them, or think, Of coxcombry's worst coxcombs e'en the pink LXXVI. Of these same we see several,-and of others, Who think of something else besides the pen; LXXVII. The poor dear Mussalwomen whom mention Have none of these instructive pleasant people, Our Christian usage of the parts of speech. No chemistry for them unfolds her gasses, Religious novels, moral tales, and strictures No exhibition glares with annual pictures; Why I thank God for that is no great matter, And yet methinks the older that one grows (1) "Nothing can be cleverer than this caustic little diatribe, introduced a propos of the life of Turkish ladies in their harams." Jeffrey.-L. E. LXXXI. Our Laura's Turk still kept his eyes upon her, But Laura could not thus be led astray; LXXXII. The morning now was on the point of breaking, The ball-room ere the sun begins to rise, LXXXIII. I've seen some balls and revels in my time, To see what lady best stood out the season; The name of this Aurora I'll not mention, Although I might, for she was nought to me Laura, who knew it would not do at all To meet the daylight after seven hours sitting Among three thousand people at a ball, To make her curtsy thought it right and fitting; And they the room were on the point of quitting, LXXXVI. In this they're like our coachmen, and the cause LXXXVII. The Count and Laura found their boat at last, (As to their palace stairs the rowers glide) "Sir," said the Count, with brow exceeding grave, "Your unexpected presence here will make It necessary for myself to crave Its import? But perhaps 'tis a mistake; I hope it is so; and, at once to wave All compliment, I hope so for your sake; You understand my meaning, or you shall.” "Sir," (quoth the Turk) "'t is no mistake at all: LXXXIX. "That lady is my wife!" Much wonder paints And then come to themselves, almost or quite; Which saves much hartshorn, salts, and sprinkling faces, And cutting stays, as usual in such cases. XC. She said,-what could she say? Why, not a word: XCI. They enter'd, and for coffee call'd-it came, A beverage for Turks and Christians both, To speak, cries "Beppo! what's your pagan name? XCII. "And ars you really, truly, now a Turk? (1) In the MS. "Sate Laura with a kind of comic horror."-L, E. (2) "You ask me," says Lord Byron, in a letter written in 1820, for a volume of Manners, etc. on Italy. Perhaps I am in the case to know more of them than most Englishmen, because I have lived among the natives, and in parts of the country where Englishmen never resided before (1 speak of Romagna and this place particularly); but there are many reasons why I do not choose to treat in print on such a subject. Their moral is not your moral; their life is not your life; you would not understand it: it is not English,, nor French, nor German, which you would all understand. The conventual education, the cavalier servitude, the habits of thought and living, are so entirely different, and the difference becomes so much more striking the more You'll give it me? They say you eat no pork. XCIII. "Beppo! that beard of yours becomes you not; It shall be shaved before you're a day older: Why do you wear it? Oh! I had forgot Pray don't you think the weather here is colder? How do I look? You shan't stir from this spot In that queer dress, for fear that some beholder Should find you out, and make the story known. How short your hair is! Lord! how grey it's grown!" XCIV. What answer Beppo made to these demands Is more than I know. He was cast away About where Troy stood once, and nothing stands; Became a slave of course, and for his pay Had bread and bastinadoes, till some bands Of pirates landing in a neighbouring bay, He join'd the rogues and prosper'd, and became A renegado of indifferent fame. XCV. But he grew rich, and with his riches grew so And so he hired a vessel come from Spain, XCVI. Himself, and much (Heaven knows how gotten!) cash, In our opinions:-well, the ship was trim, XCVII. They reach'd the island, he transferr'd his lading, Or else the people would perhaps have shot him; you live intimately with them, that I know not how to make you comprehend a people who are at once temperate and profligate, serious in their characters and buffoons in their amusements, capable of impressions and passions, which are at once sudden and durable (what you find in no other nation), and who actually have no society (what we would call so), as you may see by their comedies; they have no real comedy, not even in Goldoni, and that is because they have no society to draw it from. Their conversazioni are not society at all. They go to the theatre to talk, and into company to hold their tongues. The women sit in a circle, and the men gather into groups, or they play at dreary faro, or lotto reale,' for small sums. Their academie are concerts like our own, with better music and more form. Their best things are the carnival balls and masquerades, XCVIII. His wife received, the patriarch re-baptized him Finding he'd wherewithal to make them gay With dinners, where he oft became the laugh of them For stories-but I don't believe the half of them. when every body runs mad for six weeks. After their dinners and suppers, they make extempore verses and buffoon one another; but it is in a humour which you would not enter into, ye of the north."-"In their houses it is better. As for the women, from the fisherman's wife up to the nobil dama, their system has its rules, and its fitnesses, and its decorums, so as to be reduced to a kind of discipline or game at hearts, which admits few deviations, unless you wish to lose it. They are extremely tenacious, and jealous as furies, not permitting their lovers even to marry if they can help it, and keeping them always close to them in public as in private, whenever they can. In short, they transfer marriage to adultery, and strike the not ont of that commandment. The reason is, that they marry for their parents, and love for themselves. They exact fidelity from a lover as a debt of honour, while they pay the husband as a tradesman, that is, not at all. You hear a person's character, male or female, canvassed, not as depending on their conduct to their husbands or wives, but to their mistress or lover. If I wrote a quarto, 1 don't know that I could do more than amplify what I lave here noted."-L. E. "The author of Sketches Descriptive of Italy, etc., one of the hundred tours lately published, is extremely anxious to disclaim a possible charge of plagiarism from Childe Hurold and Beppo. He adds, that still less could this presumed coincidence arise from my conversation,' as he had repeatedly declined an introduction to me while in Italy. "Who this person may be I know not, but he must have been deceived by all or any of those who repeatedly offered to introduce him, as I have invariably refused to receive any English with whom I was not previously acquainted, even when they had letters from England. If the whole assertion is not an invention, I request this person not to sit down with the notion that he COULD have been introduced, since there has been nothing I have so carefully avoided as any kind of intercourse with his countrymen, excepting the very few who were a considerable time resident in Venice, or had been of my previous acquaintance. Whoever made him any such offer was possessed of impudence equal to that of making such an assertion without having had it. The fact is, that I hold in utter abhorrence any contact with the travelling English, as my friend the Consul General Hoppner, and the Countess Benzoni (in whose house the conversazione mostly frequented by them is held), could amply testify, were it worth while. I was persecuted by these tourists even to my riding ground at Lido, and reduced to the most disagreeable circuits to avoid them. At Madame Benzoni's I repeatedly refused to be introduced to them; of a thousand such presentations pressed upon me, I accepted two, and both were to Irish women. XCIX. Whate'er his youth had suffer'd, his old age Which being finish'd, here the story ends; "I should hardly have descended to speak of such trifles publicly, if the impudence of this sketcher' had not forced me to a refutation of a disingenuous and gratuitously impertinent assertion;-so meant to be, for what could it import to the reader to be told that the author had repeatedly declined an introduction,' even had it been true, which, for the reasons I have above given, is scarcely possible? Except Lords Lansdowne, Jersey, and Lauderdale; Messrs. Scott, Hammond, Sir Humphry Davy, the late M. Lewis, W. Bankes, Mr. Hoppner, Thomas Moore, Lord Kinnaird, his brother, Mr. Joy, and Mr. Hobhouse, I do not recollect to have exchanged a word with another Englishman since I left their country; and almost all these 1 had known before. The others-and God knows there were some hundreds-who bored me with letters or visits, I refused to have any communication with, and shall be proud and happy when that wish becomes mutual." Byron.-P.E (1) "This extremely clever and amusing performance af fords a very curious and complete specimen of a kind of diction and composition of which our English literature has hitherto presented very few examples. It is, in itself, absolutely a thing of nothing-without story, characters, sentiments, or intelligible object;-a mere piece of lively and loquacious prattling, in short, upon all kinds of frivolous subjects,--a sort of gay and desultory babbling about Italy and England, Turks, balls, literature, and fish-sauces. But still there is something very engaging in the uniform gaiety, politeness, and good humour of the author, and something still more striking and admirable in the matchless facility with which he has cast into regular, and even difficult, versification, the unmingled, unconstrained, and unselected language of the most light, familiar, and ordinary conver sation. With great skill and felicity, he has furnished us with an example of about one hundred stanzas of good verse, entirely composed of common words, in their common places; never presenting us with one sprig of what is called poetical diction, or even making use of a single inversion, either to raise the style or assist the rhyme--but running on in an inexhaustible series of good easy colloquial phrases, and finding them fall into verse by some unaccountable and happy fatality. In this great and characteristic quality it is almost invariably excellent. In some other respects, it is more unequal. About one half is as good as possible, in the style to which it belongs; the other half bears, perhaps, too many marks of that haste with which such a work must necessarily be written. Some passages are rather too snappish, and some run too much on the cheap, and rather plebeian, humour of out-of-the-way rhymes, and strangesounding words and epithets. But the greater part is extremely pleasant, amiable, and gentlemanlike," Jeffrey.-L E.. ADVERTISEMENT. Mazeppa. (1) "CELUI qui remplissait alors cette place était un gentilhomme polonais, nommé Mazeppa, né dans le palatinat de Padolie: il avait été élevé page de Jean Casimir, et avait pris à sa cour quelque teinture des belles-lettres. Une intrigue qu'il eut dans sa jeunesse (1) The following "lively, spirited, and pleasant tale," as Mr. Gifford calls it, on the margin of the MS., was avec la femme d'un gentilhomme polonais ayant été découverte, le mari le fit lier tout nu sur un cheval farouche, et le laissa aller en cet état. Le cheval, qui était du pays de l'Ukraine, y retourna, et y porta Mazeppa, demi-mort de fatigue et de faim. Quelques paysans le secoururent: il resta longtems parmi eux, et se signala dans plusieurs courses contre les Tartares. La supériorité de ses lumières lui donna une written in the autumn of 1818, at Ravenna, We extract the following from a reviewal, of the time:-“ Mazeppa is 7 grande considération parmi les Cosaques: sa réputation s'augmentant de jour en jour, obligea le Czar à le faire Prince de l'Ukraine."-VOLTAIRE, Hist. de Charles XII. p. 196. "Le roi fuyant, et poursuivi, eut son cheval tué sous lui; le Colonel Gieta, blessé, et perdant tout son sang, lui donna le sien. Ainsi on remit deux fois à cheval, dans la fuite, ce conquérant qui n'avait pu y monter pendant la bataille."-p. 216. "Le roi alla par un autre chemin avec quelques cavaliers. Le carrosse où il était rompit dans la marche; on le remit à cheval. Pour comble de disgrace, il s'égara pendant la nuit dans un bois; là, son courage ne pouvant plus suppléer à ses forces épuisées, les douleurs de sa blessure devenues plus insupportables par la fatigue, son cheval étant tombé de lassitude, il se coucha quelques heures au pied d'un arbre, en danger d'être surpris à tout moment par les vainqueurs, qui le cherchaient de tous côtés.”—p. 218. (1) MAZEPPA. I. 'Twas after dread Pultowa's day, When fortune left the royal Swede, Around a slaughter'd army lay, No more to combat and to bleed; The power and glory of the war, Faithless as their vain votaries, men, Had pass'd to the triumphant Czar, And Moscow's walls were safe again,Until a day more dark and drear, And a more memorable year, Should give to slaughter and to shame A mightier host and haughtier name; A greater wreck, a deeper fall, A shock to one-a thunderbolt to all. II. Such was the hazard of the die; The wounded Charles was taught to fly When truth had nought to dread from power. a very fine and spirited sketch of a very noble story, and is every way worthy of its author. The story is a well-known one; namely, that of the young Pole, who, being bound naked on the back of a wild horse, on account of an intrigue with the lady of a certain great noble of his country, was carried by his steed into the heart of the Ukraine, and being there picked up by some Cossacks, in a state apparently of utter hopelessness and exhaustion, recovered, and lived to be long after the prince and leader of the nation among whom he had arrived in this extraordinary manner. Lord Byron has represented the strange and wild incidents of this adventure, as being related in a half serious, half sportive way, by Mazeppa himself, to no less a person than Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, in some of whose last campaigns the Cossack Hetman took a distinguished part. He tells it during the desolate bivouack of Charles and the few A band of chiefs!-alas! how few, And all are fellows in their need. And smooth'd his fetlocks and his mane, And slack'd his girth, and stripp'd his rein. And joy'd to see how well he fed; For until now he had the dread His wearied courser might refuse To browse beneath the midnight dews: But he was hardy as his lord, And little cared for bed and board; But, spirited and docile too, Whate'er was to be done would do. Shaggy and swift, and strong of limb, All Tartar-like he carried him; Obey'd his voice, and came to call, And knew him in the midst of all: Though thousands were around,—and Night, Without a star, pursued her flight,— That steed from sunset until dawn His chief would follow like a fawn. IV. This done, Mazeppa spread his cloak, And laid his lance beneath his oak, friends who fled with him towards Turkey, after the bloody overthrow of Pultowa. There is not a little of beauty and gracefulness in this way of setting the picture; the age of Mazeppa-the calm practised indifference with which he now submits to the worst of fortune's deeds-the heroic unthinking coldness of the royal madman to whom he speaks the dreary and perilous accompaniments of the scene around the speaker and the audience,-all contribute to throw a very striking charm both of preparation and of contrast over the wild story of the Hetman. Nothing can be more beautiful, in like manner, than the account of the love-the guilty love-the fruits of which had been so miraculous."-L. E. (1) For some authentic and interesting particulars concerning the Hetman Mazeppa, see Mr. Barrow's delightful Life of Peter the Great. Family Library, Vol. XXXV. —L E. Felt if his arms, in order good, And flints unloosen'd kept their lock- Prepared and spread his slender stock; All Scythia's fame to thine should yield The school wherein I learn'd to ride!" And ten to one at least the foe, Of this your troop."—" But I request," (1) This comparison of a "sall mine" may, perhaps, be permitted to a Pole, as the wealth of the country consists greatly in the salt mines. To gaze upon his splendid court, So sung his poets, all but one, A Count of far and high descent, As if from heaven he had been sent: As few could match beneath the throne; Which almost look'd like want of head, His junior she by thirty years-- "I was a goodly stripling then; At seventy years I so may say, But smooth, as all is rugged now; For time, and care, and war, have plough'd My very soul from out my brow; And thus I should be disavow'd This change was wrought, too, long ere age Such as our Turkish neighbourhood |