Othello. Her father loved

me,

oft invited me;

Still questioning me the story of my life
From year to year; the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I'd passed.

I ran it through, e'en from my boyish days
To the very moment that he bade me tell it:
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances
Of moving accidents, by flood and field;

Of hair-breadth 'scapes in the imminent, deadly breach;
Of being taken by the insolent fo,

And sold to slavery: of my redemption thence;
Of battles bravely, hardly fought; of victories
O'er which the conquerors mourned so many fell:
Sometimes I told the story of a siege,

Wherein I had to combat plagues, and famine,
Soldiers unpaid fearful to fight,

Yet bold in dangerous mutiny. All these to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:

But oft the house affairs would draw her thence,
Which ever as she could with haste despatch,
She'd come again, and, with a greedy ear,
Devour up my discourse; which I observing
Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart,
That I would all my pilgrimage dilate;
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not distinctively. I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her tears,
When I related some distressful stroke

That my youth suffered. My story being done;
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:

She swore, in faith,'twas strange, 'twas passing strange; 'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful

She wished she had not heard it
yet she wished
That Heaven had made her such a man; she thanked me
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her. On this hint Ispake
She loved me for the dangers I had passed;
And I loved her that she did pity them!
This, only, is the witchcraft I have used. 1
Here comes the Lady, let her witness it.

SHAKESPEARE.

LECTURE IV.

An Historical account of English Composition.

Byron b. 1788; d. 1824: Scott b. 1771.

Note. The following Essay was written just before Lord Byron's death. BYRON and SCOTT

Contrasted.

Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott are, among writers now living, the two, who would carry away a majority of suffrages as the greatest geniuses of the Age. The former would, perhaps, obtain the preference with the fine gentlemen and ladies (squeamishness apart)—the latter with the critics and the vulgar. We shall treat of them in the same connection, partly on account of their distinguished pre-eminence, and partly because they afford a complete contrast to each other. In their Poetry, in their Prose, in their Politics, and in their Tempers, no two men can be more unlike.

If Sir Walter Scott may be thought by some to have been * Born universal heir to all humanity,"

it is plain Lord Byron can set up no such pretention. He is, in a striking degree, the creature of his Own Will. He holds no communion with his kind; but stands alone, without mate or fellow

"As if a man were author of himself,

And owned no other kin."

He is like a solitary peak, all access to which is cut off, not more by elevation than distance. He is seated on a lofty eminence, cloud-capped, or reflecting the last rays of setting suns; and in his poetical moods, reminds us of the fabled Titans, retired to a ridgy steep, playing on their pan's-pipes, and taking up ordinary men and things in their hands with haughty indifference. He raises his subject to himself, or tramples on it: he neither stoops to, nor loses himself in it. He exists not by sym

pathy, but by antipathy. He scorns all things; even himself. Nature must come to him to sit for her picture

no

he does not go to her. She must consult his time, his convenience, and his humor; and wear a sombre or a fantastic garb, or his Lordship turns his back upon her. There is no ease, no unaffected simplicity of manner, golden-mean. All is strained or petulent in the extreme. His thoughts are sphered and crystalline; his style "prouder than when blue Iris bends"; his spirit fiery, impatient, wayward, indefatigable. Instead of taking his impressions from without, in entire and almost unimpaired masses, he moulds them according to his own temperament, and heats the materials of his imagination in the furnace of his passions.

Lord Byron's verse glows like a flame, consuming every thing in its way; Sir Walter Scott's glides like a river clear, gentle, harmless. The poetry of the former scorches, that of the latter scarcely warms. The light of the one proceeds from an internal source, ensanguined, sullen, fixed; the other reflects the hues of heaven, or the face of nature, glancing vivid and various. The productions of the Northern Bard have the rust and the freshness of antiquity about them; those of the Noble Poet cease to startle from their extreme ambition of novelty, both in style and matter. &c.

who

We

Lord Byron, who, in his politics, is a liberal, in his genius is haughty and aristocratic: Sir Walter Scott, is an aristocrat in principle, is popular in his writings, and is (as it were) equally servile to nature and to opinion. The genius of Sir Walter is essentially imitative, or "denotes a foregone conclusion:" that of Lord Byron is self-dependent; or at least requires no aid, is governed by no law; but the impulses of its own will. &c. had rather be Sir Walter Scott (meaning thereby the Author of Waverley) than Lord Byron, a hundred times over. &c. Sir Walter gives us Man as he is, or as he was, in almost every variety of situation, action, and feeling: Lord Byron makes man after his Own Image, woman after his Own Heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave; he gives us the misantrophe and the voluptuary by turns; and with these two characters, burning or melting in their own fires, he makes out everlasting centos of Himself. &c. In this point of view, the Author of Waverly is one of the greatest teachers of Morality that ever lived, by emancipating the mind from petty, narrow, bigoted prejudices: Lord Byron

is the greatest pamperer of those prejudices, by seeming to think that there is nothing else worth encouraging but the seeds or the full luxuriant growth of dogmatism and self-conceit. In reading the Scotch Novels,

we never

think about the Author, except from a feeling of curiosity respecting our unknown benefactor: in reading Lord Byron's works, he himself is never absent from our minds. The coloring of Lord Byron's style, however rich and dipped in Tyrian dyes, is, nevertheless, opaque — is in itself an object of delight and wonder: Sir Walter Scott's is perfectly transparent. &c. Or to sum up the distinction in one word Sir Walter Scott is the most dramatic writer now living; and Lord Byron the least so. It would be difficult to imagine that the Author of Waverley is, in the smallest degree, a pedant; as it would be hard to persuade ourselves that the Author of Childe Harold and Don Juan is not a coxcomb, though a provoking and sublime one. In this decided preference given to Sir Walter Scott over Lord Byron, we distinctly include the Proseworks of the former; for we do not think his Poetry alone, by any means, entitles him to precedence. Sir Walter in his poetry, though pleasing and natural, is a comparative trifler: it is in his anonymous productions that he has shown himself What he is!

Intensity is the great and prominent distinction of Lord Byron's writings. He seldom gets beyond force of style, nor has he produced any regular work, or masterly whole. He does not prepare any plan beforehand, nor revise and retouch what he has written, with polished accuracy. &c. He composes (as he himself has said) whether he is in the bath, in his study, or on horseback - he writes as habitually as others talk or think and whether we have the inspiration of the muse or not, we always find the spirit of the Man of Genius breathing in his verse. He grapples with his subject, and moves, penetrates, and animates it, by the electric force of his own feelings. He is often monotonous, extravagant, offensive; but he is never dull, or tedious except when he writes Prose. &c.

Lord Byron has strength and elevation enough to fill up the mould of our classical and time-hallowed recollections, and to rekindle the earliest aspirations of the mind after greatness and true glory with a pen of fire. The names of Tasso, Ariosto, Dante, Cincinnatus, Cesar, and Scipio, lose nothing of their pomp, or their lustre, in his hands; and when he begins and continues a strain of panegyric on such subjects, we indeed sit down with

him to a banquet of rich praise, brooding over imperishable glories,

"Till Contemplation has her fill." &c.

Lord Byron 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, only to dash them to the earth again, and break them in pieces the more effectually from the very height they have fallen. Our enthusiasm for genius or virtue is thus turned into 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 profligate and sometimes moral — but when he is most serious and most moral, he is only preparing to mortify the unsuspecting reader, by putting a pitiful hoax upon him. This is a most unaccountable anomaly. &c. There is no taint in the writings of the Author of Waverley, all is fair, and natural, and aboveboard; he never outrages the public mind; he introduces no anomalous character; broaches no staggering opinion. &c.

We do not like Sir Walter's gratuitous servility: we like Lord Byron's preposterous liberalism little better. He may affect the principles of equality, but he resumes his privilege of peerage, upon occasion. His Lordship has made great offers of service to the Greeks Money and Horses. He is at present in Cephalonia, waiting the event!

We had written thus far when News came of the Death of Lord Byron, and put an end at once to a strain of somewhat peevish invective, which was intended to meet his eye, not to insult his memory. Had we known that we were writing his Epitaph, we must have done it with a different feeling. As it is, we think it better and more like himself, to let what we had written stand, than to take up our leaden shafts, and try to melt them into "tears of sensibility", or mould them into dull praise, and an affected show of candor. &c.

Lord Byron is dead! he also died a Martyr to his zeal in the cause of Freedom - for the last, best hopes of man. Let that be his excuse and his epitaph.

tt

HAZLITT.