1820-1821.

RAVENNA—DRAMAS—CAIN—VISION OF JUDGMENT.

Byrons's life at Ravenna was during the first months comparatively calm; nevertheless, he mingled in society, took part in the Carnival, and was received at the parties of the Legate. "I may stay," he writes in January, 1820, "a day—a week—a year—all my life." Meanwhile, he imported his movables from Venice, hired a suite of rooms in the Guiccioli palace, executed his marvellously close translation of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore, wrote his version of the story of Francesca of Rimini, and received visits from his old friend Bankes and from Sir Humphrey Davy. At this time he was accustomed to ride about armed to the teeth, apprehending a possible attack from assassins on the part of Count Guiccioli. In April his letters refer to the insurrectionary movements then beginning against the Holy Alliance. "We are on the verge of a row here. Last night they have over-written all the city walls with 'Up with the Republic!' and 'Death to the Pope!' The police have been searching for the subscribers, but have caught none as yet. The other day they confiscated the whole translation of the fourth canto of Childe Harold, and have prosecuted the translator." In July a Papal decree of separation between the Countess and her husband was obtained, on condition of the latter paying from his large income a pittance to the lady of 200 l. a year, and her undertaking to live in her father's house—an engagement which was, first in the spirit, and subsequently in the letter, violated. For a time, however, she retired to a villa about fifteen miles from Ravenna, where she was visited by Byron at comparatively rare intervals. By the end of July he had finished Marino Faliero, and ere the close of the year the fifth canto of Don Juan. in September he says to Murray, "I am in a fierce humour, at not having Scott's Monastery. No more Keats,[1] I entreat. There is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the manikin. I don't feel inclined to care further about Don Juan. What do you think a very pretty Italian lady said to me the other day, when I remarked that 'it would live longer than Childe Harold'? 'Ah! but I would rather have the fame of Childe Harold for three years than an immortality of D. J.'" This is to-day the common female judgment; it is known to have been La Guiccioli's, as well as Mrs. Leigh's, and by their joint persuasion Byron was for a season induced to lay aside "that horrid, wearisome Don." About this time he wrote the memorable reply to the remarks on that poem in Blackwood's Magazine', where he enters on a defence of his life, attacks the Lakers, and champions Pope against the new school of poetry, lamenting that his own practice did not square with his precept; and adding, "We are all wrong, except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell."

[Footnote 1: In a note on a similar passage, bearing the date November 12, 1821, he, however, confesses:—"My indignation at Mr. Keats' depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius, which malgrÉ all the fantastic fopperies of his style was undoubtedly of great promise. His fragment of Hyperion seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as AEschylus. He is a loss to our literature."]

In November he refers to reports of his letters being opened by the Austrian officials, and the unpleasant things the Huns, as he calls them, are likely to find therein. Early in the next month he tells Moore that the commandant of their troops, a brave officer, but obnoxious to the people, had been found lying at his door, with five slugs in him, and, bleeding inwardly, had died in the palace, where he had been brought to be nursed.

This incident is versified in Don Juan, v. 33-39, with anatomical minuteness of detail. After trying in vain to wrench an answer out of death, the poet ends in his accustomed strain—

But it was all a mystery. Here we are,
And there we go:—but where? Five bits of lead—
Or three, or two, or one—send very far!

Assassination has sometimes been the prelude to revolution, but it may be questioned if it has over promoted the cause of liberty. Most frequently it has served as a pretext for reaction, or a red signal. In this instance—as afterwards in 1848—overt acts of violence made the powers of despotism more alert, and conduced with the half-hearted action of their adversaries to the suppression of the rising of 1820-21. Byron's sympathy with the movement seems to have been stimulated by his new associations. Theresa's brother, Count Pietro, an enthusiastic young soldier, having returned from Rome and Naples, surmounting a prejudice not wholly unnatural, became attached to him, and they entered into a partnership in behalf of what—adopting a phrase often flaunted in opposite camps—they called constitutional principles. Finally the poet so committed himself to the party of insurrection that, though his nationality secured him from direct attack, his movements were necessarily affected by the fiasco. In July the Gambas were banished from the Romagna, Pietro being actually carried by force over the frontier; and, according to the articles of her separation, the Countess had to follow them to Florence. Byron lingered for some mouths, partly from a spirit of defiance, and partly from his affection towards a place where he had enlisted the regards of numerous beneficiaries. The Gambas were for some time bent on migrating to Switzerland; but the poet, after first acquiescing, subsequently conceived a violent repugnance to the idea, and early in August wrote to Shelley, earnestly requesting his presence, aid, and counsel. Shelley at once complied, and, entering into a correspondence with Madame Guiccioli, succeeded in inducing her relatives to abandon their transmontane plans, and agree to take up their headquarters at Pisa. This incident gave rise to a series of interesting letters, in which the younger poet gives a vivid and generous account of the surroundings and condition of his friend. On the 2nd of August he writes from Ravenna:—"I arrived last night at ten o'clock, and sat up talking with Lord B. till five this morning. He was delighted to see me. He has, in fact, completely recovered his health, and lives a life totally the reverse of that which he led at Venice…. Poor fellow! he is now quite well, and immersed in politics and literature. We talked a great deal of poetry and such matters last night, and, as usual, differed, I think, more than ever. He affects to patronize a system of criticism fit only for the production of mediocrity; and, although all his finer poems and passages have been produced in defiance of this system, yet I recognize the pernicious effects of it in the Doge of Venice." Again, on the 15th: "Lord B. is greatly improved in every respect—in genius, in temper, in moral views, in health, and happiness. His connexion with La Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him. He lives in considerable splendour, but within his income, which is now about 4000_l_. a year, 1000_l_. of which he devotes to purposes of charity. Switzerland is little fitted for him; the gossip and the cabals of those Anglicised coteries would torment him, as they did before. Ravenna is a miserable place. He would in every respect be better among the Tuscans. He has read to me one of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan. It sets him not only above, but far above, all the poets of the day. Every word has the stamp of immortality…. I have spoken to him of Hunt, but not with a direct view of demanding a contribution. I am sure, if I asked, it would not be refused; yet there is something in me that makes it impossible. Lord B. and I are excellent friends; and were I reduced to poverty, or were I a writer who had no claim to a higher position than I possess, I would freely ask him any favour. Such is not now the case." Later, after stating that Byron had decided upon Tuscany, he says, in reference to La Guiccioli, "At the conclusion of a letter, full of all the fine things she says she has heard of me, is this request, which I transcribe:—'Signore, la vostra bontÀ mi fa ardita di chiedervi un favore, me lo accordarete voi? Non partite da Ravenna senza milord.' Of course, being now by all the laws of knighthood captive to a lady's request, I shall only be at liberty on my parole until Lord Byron is settled at Pisa."

Shelley took his leave, after a visit of ten days' duration, about the 17th or 18th of April. In a letter, dated August 26, he mentions having secured for his lordship the Palazzo Lanfranchi, an old spacious building on the Lung' Arno, once the family residence of the destroyers of Ugolino, and still said to be haunted by their ghosts. Towards the close of October, he says they have been expecting him any day those six weeks. Byron, however, did not leave till the morning of the 29th. On his road, there occurred at Imola the accidental meeting with Lord Clare. Clare—who on this occasion merely crossed his friend's path on his way to Rome—at a later date came on purpose from Geneva before returning to England to visit the poet, who, then at Leghorn, recorded in a letter to Moore his sense of this proof of old affection undecayed. At Bologna—his next stage—he met Rogers by appointment, and the latter has preserved his memory of the event in well-known lines. Together they revisited Florence and its galleries, where they were distracted by the crowds of sight-seeing visitors. Byron must have reached Pisa not later than the 2nd of November (1821), for his first letter from there bears the date of the 3rd.

The later months of the poet's life at Ravenna were marked by intense literary activity. Over a great part of the year was spread the controversy with Bowles about Pope, i.e. between the extremes of Art against Nature, and Nature against Art. It was a controversy for the most part free from personal animus, and on Byron's part the genuine expression of a reaction against a reaction. To this year belong the greater number of the poet's Historical Dramas. What was said of these, at the time by Jeffrey, Heber, and others, was said with justice; it is seldom that the criticism of our day finds so little to reverse in that of sixty years ago.

The author, having shown himself capable of being pathetic, sarcastic, sentimental, comical, and sublime, we would be tempted to think that he had written these plays to show, what no one before suspected, that he could also be dull, were it not for his own exorbitant estimation of them. Lord Byron had few of the powers of a great dramatist; he had little architectural imagination, or capacity to conceive and build up a whole. His works are mainly masses of fine, splendid, or humorous writing, heaped together; the parts are seldom forged into one, or connected by any indissoluble link. His so-called Dramas are only poems divided into chapters. Further, he had little of what Mr. Ruskin calls penetrative imagination. So it has been plausibly said that he made his men after his own image, his women after his own heart. The former are, indeed, rather types of what he wished to be than what he was. They are better, and worse, than himself. They have stronger wills, more definite purposes, but less genial and less versatile natures. But it remains true, that when he tried to represent a character totally different from himself, the result is either unreal or uninteresting. Marino Faliero, begun April, finished July, 1820, and prefixed by a humorous dedication to Goethe—which was, however, suppressed—was brought on the stage of Drury Lane Theatre early in 1821, badly mangled, appointed, and acted—and damned.

Byron seems to have been sincere in saying he did not intend any of his plays to be represented. We are more inclined to accuse him of self-deception when he asserts that he did not mean them to be popular; but he took sure means to prevent them from being so. Marino Faliero, in particular, was pronounced by Dr. John Watkins—old Grobius himself—"to be the dullest of dull plays;" and even the warmest admirers of the poet had to confess that the style was cumbrous. The story may be true, but it is none the less unnatural. The characters are comparatively commonplace, the women especially being mere shadows; the motion is slow; and the inevitable passages of fine writing are, as the extolled soliloquy of Lioni, rather rhetorical than imaginative. The speeches of the Doge are solemn, but prolix, if not ostentatious, and—perhaps the vital defect—his cause fails to enlist our sympathies. Artistically, this play was Byron's most elaborate attempt to revive the unities and other restrictions of the severe style, which, when he wrote, had been "vanquished in literature." "I am persuaded," he writes in the preface, "that a great tragedy is not to be produced by following the old dramatists, who are full of faults, but by producing regular dramas like the Greeks." He forgets that the statement in the mouth of a Greek dramatist that his play was not intended for the stage, would have been a confession of failure; and that Aristotle had admitted that even the Deity could not make the Past present. The ethical motives of Faliero are, first, the cry for vengeance—the feeling of affronted or unsatiated pride,—that runs through so much of the author's writing, and second, the enthusiasm for public ends, which was beginning to possess him. The following lines have been pointed out as embodying some of Byron's spirit of protest against the more selfish "greasy domesticity" of the Georgian era:—

I. BER. Such ties are not
For those who are called to the high destinies
Which purify corrupted commonwealths:
We must forget all feelings save the one,
We must resign all passions save our purpose,
We must behold no object save our country,
And only look on death as beautiful
So that the sacrifice ascend to heaven,
And draw down freedom on her evermore.

CAL. But if we fail—?

I. BER. They never fail who die
In a great cause: the block may soak their gore;
Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs
Be strung to city gates and castle walls,
But still their spirit walks abroad.

—a passage which, after his wont, he spoils by platitudes about the precisian Brutus, who certainly did not give Rome liberty.

Byron's other Venetian Drama, the Two Foscari, composed at Ravenna, between the 11th of June and the 10th of July, 1821, and published in the following December, is another record of the same failure and the same mortification, due to the same causes. In this play, as Jeffrey points out, the preservation of the unities had a still more disastrous effect. The author's determination to avoid rant did not hinder his frequently adopting an inflated style; while professing to follow the ancient rules, he forgets the warning of Horace so far as to permit the groans of the tortured Foscari to be heard on the stage. The declamations of Marina produce no effect on the action, and the vindictiveness of Loridano, though effectively pointed in the closing words, "He has paid me," is not rendered interesting, either by a well established injury, or by any trace of Iago's subtle genius.

In the same volume appeared Sardanapalus, written in the previous May, and dedicated to Goethe. In this play, which marks the author's last reversion to the East, we are more arrested by the majesty of the theme—

Thirteen hundred years
Of empire ending like a shepherd's tale,

by the grandeur of some of the passages, and by the development of the chief character, made more vivid by its being distinctly autobiographical. Sardanapalus himself is Harold, raised "high on a throne," and rousing himself at the close from a life of effeminate lethargy. Myrrha has been often identified with La Guiccioli, and the hero's relation to his Queen Zarina compared with that of the poet to his wife; but in his portrait of the former the author's defective capacity to represent national character is manifest: Myrrha is only another Gulnare, Medora, or Zuleika. In the domestic play of Werner—completed at Pisa in January, 1822, and published in November, there is no merit either of plan or execution; for the plot is taken, with little change, from "The German's Tale," written by Harriet Lee, and the treatment is throughout prosaic. Byron was never a master of blank verse; but Werner, his solo success on the modern British stage, is written in a style fairly parodied by Campbell, when he cut part of the author's preface into lines, and pronounced them as good as any in the play.

The Deformed Transformed, another adaptation, suggested by a forgotten novel called The Three Brothers, with reminiscences of Faust, and possibly of Scott's Black Dwarf, was begun at Pisa in 1821, but not published till January, 1824. This fragment owes its interest to the bitter infusion of personal feeling in the first scene, and its occasional charm to the march of some of the lines, especially those describing the Bourbon's advance on Rome; but the effect of the magical element is killed by previous parallels, while the story is chaotic and absurd. The Deformed Transformed bears somewhat the same relation to Manfred as Heaven and Earth—an occasionally graphic dream of the world before the Deluge, written October, 1821, and issued about the same time as Moore's Loves of the Angels, on a similar theme—does to Cain. The last named, begun in July, and finished at Ravenna in September, is the author's highest contribution to the metaphysical poetry of the century. In Cain Byron grapples with the perplexities of a belief which he never either accepted or rejected, and with the yet deeper problems of life and death, of good and ill. In dealing with these his position is not that of one justifying the ways of God to man—though he somewhat disingenuously appeals to Milton in his defence—nor that of the definite antagonism of Queen Mab. The distinction in this respect between Byron and Shelley cannot be over-emphasized. The latter had a firm faith other than that commonly called Christian. The former was, in the proper sense of the word, a sceptic, beset with doubts, and seeking for a solution which he never found, shifting in his expression of them with every change of a fickle and inconsistent temperament. The atmosphere of Cain is almost wholly negative; for under the guise of a drama, which is mainly a dialogue between two halves of his mind, the author appears to sweep aside with something approaching to disdain the answers of a blindly accepted tradition, or of a superficial optimism, e.g.—

CAIN. Then my father's God did well
When he prohibited the fatal tree.

LUCIFER. But had done better in not planting it.

Again, a kid, after suffering agonies from the sting of a reptile, is restored by antidotes—

Behold, my son! said Adam, how from evil
Springs good!

LUCIFER. What didst thou answer?

CAIN. Nothing; for
He is my father; but I thought, that 'twere
A better portion for the animal
Never to have been stung at all.

This rebellious nature naturally yields to the arguments of Lucifer, a spirit in which much of the grandeur of Milton's Satan is added to the subtlety of Mephistopheles. In the first scene Cain is introduced, rebelling against toils imposed on him by an offence committed before he was born,—"I sought not to be born"—the answer, that toil is a good, being precluded by its authoritative representation as a punishment; in which mood he is confirmed by the entrance and reasonings of the Tempter, who identifies the Deity with Seva the Destroyer, hints at the dreadful visitation of the yet untasted death; when Adah, entering, takes him at first for an angel, and then recognizes him as a fiend. Her invocation to Eve, and comparison of the "heedless, harmless, wantonness of bliss" in Eden, to the later lot of those girt about with demons from whose fascination they cannot fly, is one of the most striking in the drama; as is the line put into the mouth of the poet's most beautiful female character, to show that God cannot be alone,—

What else can joy be, but diffusing joy?

Her subsequent contrast of Lucifer with the other angels is more after the style of Shelley than anything else in Byron—

As the silent sunny moon,
All light, they look upon us. But thou seemst
Like an ethereal night, where long white clouds
Streak the deep purple, and unnumber'd stars
Spangle the wonderful mysterious vault
With things that look as if they would be suns—
So beautiful, unnumber'd and endearing;
Not dazzling, and yet drawing us to them,
They fill my eyes with tears, and so dost thou.

The flight with Lucifer, in the second act, in the abyss of space and through the Hades of "uncreated night," with the vision of long-wrecked worlds, and the interminable gloomy realms

Of swimming shadows and enormous shapes,

—suggested, as the author tells us, by the reading of Cuvier—leaves us with impressions of grandeur and desolation which no other passages of English poetry can convey. Lord Byron has elsewhere exhibited more versatility of fancy and richness of illustration, but nowhere else has he so nearly "struck the stars." From constellation to constellation the pair speed on, cleaving the blue with mighty wings, but finding in all a blank, like that in Richter's wonderful dream. The result on the mind of Cain is summed in the lines on the fatal tree,—

It was a lying tree—for we know nothing;
At least, it promised knowledge at the price
Of death—but knowledge still; but, what knows man?

A more modern poet answers, after beating at the same iron gates, "Behold, we know not anything." The most beautiful remaining passage is Cain's reply to the question—what is more beautiful to him than all that he has seen in the "unimaginable ether"?—

My sister Adah.—All the stars of heaven,
The deep blue noon of night, lit by an orb
Which looks a spirit, or a spirit's world—
The hues of twilight—the sun's gorgeous coming—
His setting indescribable, which fills
My eyes with pleasant tears as I behold
Him sink, and feel my heart flow softly with him
Along that western paradise of clouds
The forest shade—the green bough—the bird's voice—
The vesper bird's, which seems to sing of love,
And mingles with the song of cherubim,
As the day closes over Eden's walls:—
All these are nothing, to my eyes and heart,
Like Adah's face.

Lucifer's speech, at the close of the act is perhaps too Miltonic to be absolutely original. Returning to earth, we have a pastoral, of which Sir Egerton Brydges justly and sufficiently remarks, "The censorious may say what they will, but there are speeches in the mouth of Cain and Adah, especially regarding their child, which nothing in English poetry but the 'wood-notes wild' of Shakespeare, ever equalled." Her cry, as Cain seems to threaten the infant, followed by the picture of his bloom and joy, is a touch of perfect pathos. Then comes the interview with the pious Abel, who is amazed at the lurid light in the eyes of his brother, with the spheres "singing in thunder round" him—the two sacrifices, the murder, the shriek of Zillah—

Father! Eve!
Adah! Come hither! Death is in the world;

Cain's rallying from stupor—

I am awake at last—a dreary dream
Had madden'd me,—but he shall never wake:

the curse of Eve; and the close—[Greek: meizon ae kata dakrua]

CAIN. Leave me.

ADAH. Why all have left thee.

CAIN. And wherefore lingerest thou? Dost thou not fear?

ADAH. I fear
Nothing, except to leave thee.

* * * * *

CAIN. Eastward from Eden will we take our way.

ADAH. Leave! thou shalt be my guide; and may our God
Be thine! Now let us carry forth our children.

CAIN. And he who lieth there was childless. I
Have dried the fountain of a gentle race.
O Abel!

ADAH. Peace be with him.

CAIN. But with me!

Cain, between which and the Cenci lies the award of the greatest single performance in dramatic shape of our century, raised a storm. It was published, with Sardanapalus and The Two Foscari in December, 1821, and the critics soon gave evidence of the truth of Elze's remark— "In England freedom of action is cramped by the want of freedom of thought. The converse is the case with us Germans; freedom of thought is restricted by the want of freedom in action. To us this scepticism presents nothing in the least fearful." But with us it appeared as if a literary Guy Fawkes had been detected in the act of blowing up half the cathedrals and all the chapels of the country. The rage of insular orthodoxy was in proportion to its impotence. Every scribbler with a cassock denounced the book and its author, though few attempted to answer him. The hubbub was such that Byron wrote to Murray, authorizing him to disclaim all responsibility, and offering to refund the payment he had received. "Say that both you and Mr. Gilford remonstrated. I will come to England to stand trial. 'Me, me, adsum qui feci,'"—and much to the same effect. The book was pirated; and on the publisher's application to have an injunction, Lord Eldon refused to grant it. The majority of the minor reviewers became hysterical, and Dr. Watkins, amid much almost inarticulate raving, said that Sir Walter Scott, who had gratefully accepted the dedication, would go down to posterity with the brand of Cain upon his brow. Several even of the higher critics took fright. Jeffrey, while protesting his appreciation of the literary merits of the work, lamented its tendency to unsettle faith. Mr. Campbell talked of its "frightful audacity." Bishop Heber wrote at great length to prove that its spirit was more dangerous than that of Paradise Lost—and succeeded. The Quarterly began to cool towards the author. Moore wrote to him, that Cain was "wonderful, terrible, never to be forgotten," but "dreaded and deprecated" the influence of Shelley. Byron showed the letter to Shelley, who wrote to a common friend to assure Mr. Moore that he had not the smallest influence over his lordship in matters of religion, and only wished he had, as he would "employ it to eradicate from his great mind the delusions of Christianity, which seem perpetually to recur, and to lie in ambush for the hours of sickness and distress." Shelley elsewhere writes: "What think you of Lord B.'s last volume? In my opinion it contains finer poetry than has appeared in England since Paradise Lost. Cain is apocalyptic; it is a revelation not before communicated to man." In the same strain, Scott says of the author of the "grand and tremendous drama:" "He has certainly matched Milton on his own ground." The worst effect of those attacks appears in the shifts to which Byron resorted to explain himself,—to be imputed, however, not to cowardice, but to his wavering habit of mind. Great writers in our country have frequently stirred difficult questions in religion and life, and then seemed to be half scared, like Rouget de Lisle, by the reverberation of their own voices. Shelley almost alone was always ready to declare, "I meant what I said, and stand to it."

Byron having, with or without design, arraigned some of the Thirty-Nine Articles of his countrymen, proceeded in the following month (October 1821) to commit an outrage, yet more keenly resented, on the memory of their sainted king, the pattern of private virtue and public vice, George III. The perpetration of this occurred in the course of the last of his numerous literary duels, of which it was the close. That Mr. Southey was a well-meaning and independent man of letters, there can be no doubt. It does not require the conclusive testimony of the esteem of Savage Landor to compel our respect for the author of the Life of Nelson, and the open-handed friend of Coleridge; nor is it any disparagement that, with the last-named and with Wordsworth, he in middle life changed his political and other opinions. But in his dealings with Lord Byron, Southey had "eaten of the insane root." He attacked a man of incomparably superior powers, for whom his utter want of humour—save in its comparatively childish forms—made him a ludicrously unequal match, and paid the penalty in being gibbeted in satires that will endure with the language. The strife, which seems to have begun on Byron's leaving England, rose to its height when his lordship, in the humorous observations and serious defence of his character against "the Remarks" in Blackwood, 1819 (August), accused the Laureate of apostasy, treason, and slander.

In 1821, when the latter published his Vision of Judgment—the most quaintly preposterous panegyric ever penned—he prefixed to it a long explanatory note, in the course of which he characterizes Don Juan as a "monstrous combination of horror and mockery, lewdness and impiety," regrets that it has not been brought under the lash of the law, salutes the writer as chief of the Satanic school, inspired by the spirits of Moloch and Belial, and refers to the remorse that will overtake him on his death-bed. To which Byron, inter alia: "Mr. Southey, with a cowardly ferocity, exults over the anticipated death-bed repentance of the objects of his dislike, and indulges himself in a pleasant 'Vision of Judgment,' in prose, as well as verse, full of impious impudence. What Mr. Southey's sensations or ours may be in the awful moment of leaving this state of existence, neither he nor we can pretend to decide. In common, I presume, with most men of any reflection, I have not waited for a death-bed to repent of many of my actions, notwithstanding the 'diabolical pride' which this pitiful renegade in his rancour would impute to those who scorn him." This dignified, though trenchant, rejoinder would have been unanswerable; but the writer goes on to charge the Laureate with spreading calumnies. To this charge Southey, in January, 1822, replies with "a direct and positive denial," and then proceeds to talk at large of the "whip and branding iron," "slaves of sensuality," "stones from slings," "Goliahs," "public panders," and what not, in the manner of the brave days of old.

In February Byron, having seen this assault in the Courier, writes off in needless heat, "I have got Southey's pretended reply; what remains to be done is to call him out,"—and despatches a cartel of mortal defiance. Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, through whom this was sent, judiciously suppressed it, and the author's thirst for literary blood was destined to remain unquenched. Meanwhile he had written his own Vision of Judgment. This extraordinary work, having been refused by both Murray and Longman, appeared in 1822 in the pages of the Liberal. It passed the bounds of British endurance; and the publisher, Mr. John Hunt, was prosecuted and fined for the publication.

Readers of our day will generally admit that the "gouty hexameters" of the original poem, which celebrates the apotheosis of King George in heaven, are much more blasphemous than the ottava rima of the travesty, which professes to narrate the difficulties of his getting there. Byron's Vision of Judgment is as unmistakably the first of parodies as the Iliad is the first of epics, or the Pilgrim's Progress the first of allegories. In execution it is almost perfect. Don Juan is in scope and magnitude a far wider work; but no considerable series of stanzas in Don Juan are so free from serious artistic flaw. From first to last, every epithet hits the white; every line that does not convulse with laughter stings or lashes. It rises to greatness by the fact that, underneath all its lambent buffoonery, it is aflame with righteous wrath. Nowhere in such space, save in some of the prose of Swift, is there in English so much scathing satire.