out a cause, as a perverse smile of evil; he is the son of despair, whose language is contempt and denial; a man who has not passed through the age of innocence, and who, having come forth reprobate from the bosom of nature, is the damned of annihilation.

Such is the Byron of heated imaginations; such, as it appears to me, is not the man in reality.

As in the case of most others, two different men are combined in Lord Byron; the man of nature and the man of training. The poet, perceiving the character which the public gave him to play, accepted it, and began to curse the world, which he had at first only done in his poetic dreams; this course is арраrent in the chronological order of his works.

As to his genius, far from having the extent attributed to it, it is limited enough; his poetical thoughts are confined to lamentation, complaint, and imprecation; in these respects they are admirable; we are not to ask the lyre what it thinks, but what it sings.

As to his mind, it is sarcastic and varied, but of a nature which agitates, and of evil influence. The writer has carefully studied Voltaire, and imitates him.

Lord Byron, endowed with every advantage, had little reason to reproach his birth; the very accident which rendered him unhappy, and which linked all his lofty superiority with human infirmity, ought not to have tormented him, since it did not hinder him from being loved. The immortal bard knew, from his own experience, how true is the maxim of Zeno: voice is the flower of beauty."

The

How deplorable is the rapidity with which renown flies away at the present day! At the end of some years, what do I say? of some months, the public infatuation disappears, and reviling succeeds. The glory of Lord Byron already begins to pale; his genius is better understood among us; and altars will be raised to his honour longer in France than in England. As the peculiar excellency of Childe Harold consists in the delineation of individual sentiment and feeling, the English, who prefer such sentiments as are common to all, will end by disowning the poet whose plaint is so deep and sorrowful. Let them beware: if they break the image of the man who has made them live, what will they have remaining?

WHEN I wrote these remarks on Lord Byron, during my exile in London in 1822, he had only two years of his earthly race to run: he died in 1824, at the very time in which the public disenchantment, and a strong feeling of repugnance towards him, were about to commence. I preceded him in life— he has He has been called away before me to the gone grave. before his turn; my number was before his, and, nevertheless, his was drawn out before mine. Childe Harold ought to have remained; the world might lose me without perceiving my disappearance. In continuing my route, I met Madame Guiccioli in Rome, and Lady Byron in Paris. Weakness and virtue have thus been presented to me: the former had, perhaps, too much reality-and the latter not enough of ideality.

London, from April till September, 1822.

ENGLAND, FROM RICHMOND TO GREENWICH-EXCURSION WITH PELLE- · TIER-BLENHEIM-STOWE-HAMPTON COURT-OXFORD-ETON COLLEGE-MANNERS, PRIVATE AND POLITICAL-FOX-PITT—BURKE— GEORGE III.

HAVING now spoken of English writers at the period when England afforded me an asylum, it only remains for me to say something of England itself at that time, its scenery, castles, and manners and customs, private as well as political.

The whole of England may, perhaps, be seen in the space of a dozen miles, from Richmond above London to Greenwich below it.

Below London, lies England industrial and commercial, with its docks, warehouses, custom-house, foundries, and ships; at every tide vessels of all sizes ascend the Thames in three divisions; the smallest first, then those of middle size, and finally, the large ships, whose sails almost touch the columns of Greenwich Hospital, and the windows of its festive taverns.

Above London, lies England agricultural and pastoral, with its meadows, herds, country-houses, and parks, washed by the waters of the Thames driven back by the tide, and twice in the day bathing their shrubberies and lawns. Between these two opposite points-Richmond and Greenwich-London embraces

in itself all the things of this double England; in the west the aristocracy, in the east the democracy, the Tower, and Westminster-limits, between which the entire history of Great Britain has its centre.

I passed a part of the summer of 1799 at Richmond with Christian de Lamoignon, engaged on the Génie du Christianisme. I enjoyed myself with boating on the Thames, and walks in the park. I could have wished that Richmond-by-London had been Honor Richemundiæ, the Richmond of the treaty, for in that case, I should have found myself in my own country again,—and thus: William the Bastard made a present to Alain, Duke of Britanny, his son-in-law, of four hundred and forty-two lordships in England, which afterwards formed the county of Richmond ;* Alain's successors, the Dukes of Brittany, granted these domains as feofs to Breton chevaliers, younger sons of the families of de Rohan, de Tinteniac, de Chateaubriand, de Goyon, and de Montboucher. But in spite of my good will, I was obliged to seek in Yorkshire for the county of Richmond, erected into a duchy under Charles II., for a bastard; Richmond on the Thames is the old Sheen of Edward III.

At this place, in 1377, died Edward III., that renowned king robbed by his mistress, Alice Pearce, who was no longer the Alice or Catherine of Salisbury of the early years of the victor of Cressy; do not love except at an age when you can be loved. Henry VIII. and Elizabeth also died at Richmond; where do not men die? Henry VIII. delighted in this palace. English historians are greatly embarrassed with the character of this atrocious man; on the one hand, they cannot dissemble his tyranny, and the servility of parliament; on the other, if they spoke too strongly against the head of the Reformation, they would condemn themselves by condemning him:

"Plus l'oppresseur est vil, plus l'esclave est infâme."

The hill is still in Richmond Park which served Henry VIII. as an observatory to obtain intelligence of the execution of Anne Boleyn. Henry leaped with joy at sight of the signal from the Tower of London. What a pleasure! The

*See Domesday Book.

axe had cut in twain the delicate neck, and bloodied the beautiful hair, which the poet-king had clasped in his fatal embrace.

In the deserted park of Richmond, I watched for no homicidal signal, and should not even have wished the smallest ill to any one who might then have betrayed me. I walked in company with a few peaceable deer; they were accustomed to run before a pack of hounds, to stop when they were tired, and be then brought back, very lively and well-pleased with the game, in a cart filled with straw. I went to Kew to see the kangaroos; ridiculous creatures, exactly the inverse of the giraffe; these innocent, leaping quadrupeds, peopled the wilds of Australia better than the mistresses of the old Duke of Queensbury peopled the streets of Richmond. The Thames glided past the lawn of a cottage half hidden beneath a cedar, and sheltered by weeping willows; a newly married couple had come to spend their honeymoon in this paradise.

One evening, while I was sauntering on the green-sward at Twickenham, Pelletier made his appearance, holding his handkerchief to his mouth.

"What a villanous perpetual fog !" cried he, as soon as he was within hearing; "how can you stay here? I have made my list: Stowe, Blenheim, Hampton Court, Oxford; with your dreaming fashion, you would be in John Bull's land in vitam æternam and see nothing."

In vain I begged to be excused; I was obliged to go. In the carriage Pelletier gave me a history of his hopes; he had relays of them; if one broke down under him, he bestrode another, and drove on, a leg on this side, a leg on that, to the end of his journey. One of these hopes, the most substantial of the number, conducted him into Bonaparte's suite; he took Napoleon by the collar, and Napoleon was foolish enough to box with him. Pelletier had James Mackintosh for his second; convicted afterwards on his trial, he made a fresh fortune (which he squandered directly) by selling the writings belonging to the trial.

Blenheim was disagreeable to me; I suffered the more from being reminded of an ancient disaster of my country, because the recollection of a recent personal insult was fresh. Some men in a boat up the Thames had seen me on the shore, and perceiving that I was a Frenchman, had begun to shout

"hurrah." News of the naval engagement at Aboukir had just been received: these victories of the foreigner, although they might be the means of re-opening the gates of France to me, were hateful in my eyes. Nelson, whom I had met several times in Hyde Park, buried his victories at Naples in the shawl of Lady Hamilton, whilst the lazzaroni played at ball with heads. The Admiral died gloriously at Trafalgar, and his mistress miserably at Calais, having lost beauty, youth, and fortune; and I, whom the triumph of Aboukir thus wounded on the banks of the Thames, have seen the palms of Libya fringing the calm solitary waters once reddened by the blood of my fellow-countrymen.

The park at Stowe is celebrated for its various buildings; I prefer its shady depths. The cicerone of the place showed us, in a dark ravine, the imitation of a temple, the original of which I was one day to see in the brilliant valley of Cephisus. Beautiful paintings of the Italian school were pining in the obscurity of uninhabited chambers, with closed shutters; poor Raphael, thus prisoner in an old English castle, far from the clear sky which smiled above the Farnesina!

In Hampton Court was preserved a collection of portraits of the mistresses of Charles II.: such was this prince's course when raised to the throne, after a revolution which had deprived his father of his head, and was destined to banish his

race.

At Slough, we saw Herschel, his learned sister, and his great telescope, forty feet long: he was looking out for new planets; at which Pelletier, who kept to the seven old ones, was much amused.

We remained two days in Oxford, and I was much pleased with this republic of Alfred the Great: it represented the privileged liberties and manners of learned institutions in the middle ages. We hurried through the twenty-five colleges, the libraries, the pictures, the museum, and the Botanical Garden. I turned over with extreme pleasure, among the manuscripts of Worcester College, a life of the Black Prince, written in French verse by that Prince's herald.

Oxford, without resembling them, recalled to my memory the modest colleges of Dol, Rennes, and Dinan. I had translated Gray's Elegy written in a Country Churchyard:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,