Ere your first score of cantos Time unrolls,i.

Beware for God's sake, don't begin like Bowles ! "Awake a louder and a loftier strain,"

And pray, what follows from his boiling brain ?--

He sinks to Southey's level in a trice,

Whose Epic Mountains never fail in mice !

Not so of yore awoke your mighty Sire
The tempered warblings of his master-lyre;
Soft as the gentler breathing of the lute,

"Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit "
He speaks, but, as his subject swells along,
Earth, Heaven, and Hades echo with the song..

200

i. Ere o'er our heads your Muse's Thunder rolls.—[MS. L. (a).] ii. Earth, Heaven and Hell, are shaken with the Song.—[MS. L. (a).] Pye, and all the "dull of past and present days." Even if he is not a Milton, he may be better than Blackmore; if not a Homer, an Antimachus. I should deem myself presumptuous, as a young man, in offering advice, were it not addressed to one still younger. Mr. Townsend has the greatest difficulties to encounter; but in conquering them he will find employment; in having conquered them, his reward. I know too well "the scribbler's scoff, the critic's contumely;" and I am afraid time will teach Mr. Townsend to know them better. Those who succeed, and those who do not, must bear this alike, and it is hard to say which have most of it. I trust that Mr. Townsend's share will be from envy; he will soon know mankind well enough not to attribute this expression to malice. [This note was written [at Athens] before the author was apprised of Mr. Cumberland's death [in May, 1811]-MS. (See Byron's letter to Dallas, August 27, 1811.) The Rev. George Townsend (1788-1857) published Poems in 1810, and eight books of his Armageddon in 1815. They met with the fate which Byron had predicted. In later life he compiled numerous works of scriptural exegesis. He was a Canon of Durham from 1825 till his death.]

I. [The first line of A Spirit of Discovery by Sea, by the Rev. W. Lisle Bowles, first published in 1805.]

Still to the "midst of things" he hastens on,
As if we witnessed all already done;"
Leaves on his path whatever seems too mean
To raise the subject, or adorn the scene;
Gives, as each page improves upon the sight,

Not smoke from brightness, but from darkness-light; 210
And truth and fiction with such art compounds,
We know not where to fix their several bounds.

If you would please the Public, deign to hear
What soothes the many-headed monster's ear: ii.
If your heart triumph when the hands of all
Applaud in thunder at the curtain's fall,
Deserve those plaudits-study Nature's page,
And sketch the striking traits of every age;
While varying Man and varying years unfold
Life's little tale, so oft, so vainly told;
Observe his simple childhood's dawning days,
His pranks, his prate, his playmates, and his plays :
Till time at length the mannish tyro weans,

And prurient vice outstrips his tardy teens!

iii.

Behold him Freshman! forced no more to groan

O'er Virgil's1 devilish verses and his own;

iv.

220

i. Through deeds we know not, though already done.—[MS. L. (a).] ii. What soothes the people's, Peer's, and Critic's ear.—[MS. L. (a).] iii. And Vice buds forth developed with his Teens.—[MS. M.]

iv. The beardless Tyro freed at length from school.

[MSS. L. (b), M. erased.] And blushing Birch disdains all College rule.-[MS. M. erased.] And dreaded Birch.—[MS. L. (a and b).]

I. Harvey, the circulator of the circulation of the blood,

Prayers are too tedious, Lectures too abstruse,

He flies from Tavell's frown to "Fordham's Mews; (Unlucky Tavell!1 doomed to daily cares i

By pugilistic pupils, and by bears,)

Fines, Tutors, tasks, Conventions threat in vain,
Before hounds, hunters, and Newmarket Plain.
Rough with his elders, with his equals rash,

Civil to sharpers, prodigal of cash;

Constant to nought-save hazard and a whore,

i. Unlucky Tavell! damned to daily cares

ii.

By pugilistic Freshmen, and by Bears.-[MS. M. erased.] ii. Ready to quit whate'er he loved before,

230

Constant to nought, save hazard and a whore.-[MS. L. (a).] used to fling away Virgil in his ecstasy of admiration_and say, "the book had a devil." Now such a character as I am copying would probably fling it away also, but rather wish that "the devil had the book;" not from dislike to the poet, but a well-founded horror of hexameters. Indeed, the public school penance of "Long and Short" is enough to beget an antipathy to poetry for the residue of a man's life, and, perhaps, so far may be an advantage.

I. "Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem." I dare say Mr. Tavell (to whom I mean no affront) will understand me; and it is no matter whether any one else does or no.To the above events, "quæque ipse miserrima vidi, et quorum pars magna fui,” all times and terms bear testimony. [The Rev. G. F. Tavell was a fellow and tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge, during Byron's residence, and owed this notice to the "zeal with which he protested against his juvenile vagaries." During a part of his residence at Trinity, Byron kept a tame bear in his rooms in Neville's Court. (See English Bards, 1. 973, note, and postcript to the Second Edition, ante, p. 383. See also letter to Miss Pigot,

October 26, 1807.)

The following copy of a bill (no date) tells its own story :— The Honble. Lord Byron.

To John Clarke.

£

...

To Bread & Milk for the Bear deliv
to Haladay

Cambridge Reve.

...

9 7 A Clarke.]

Yet cursing both--for both have made him sore:
Unread (unless since books beguile disease,

The P-x becomes his passage to Degrees);

Fooled, pillaged, dunned, he wastes his terms away,
And unexpelled, perhaps, retires M.A.;
Master of Arts! as hells and clubs 1 proclaim,ii.
Where scarce a blackleg bears a brighter name!

Launched into life, extinct his early fire,

He apes the selfish prudence of his Sire;
Marries for money, chooses friends for rank,

Buys land, and shrewdly trusts not to the Bank ;
Sits in the Senate; gets a son and heir;

Sends him to Harrow-for himself was there.

Mute, though he votes, unless when called to cheer,
His son's so sharp-he'll see the dog a Peer!

Manhood declines-Age palsies every limb;
He quits the scene-or else the scene quits him;
Scrapes wealth, o'er each departing penny grieves,
And Avarice seizes all Ambition leaves;

iii.

i.

240

250

i. The better years of youth he wastes away.—[MS. L. (a).] ii. Master of Arts, as all the Clubs proclaim.—[MS. L. (b).] iii. Scrapes wealth, o'er Grandam's endless jointure grieves.— [MS. erased.]

O'er Grandam's mortgage, or young hopeful's debts.—

O'er Uncle's mortgage.-[MS. L. (b).]

[MS. L. (a).]

1. "Hell," a gaming-house so called, where you risk little, and are cheated a good deal. "Club," a pleasant purgatory, where you lose more, and are not supposed to be cheated

at all.

Counts cent per cent, and smiles, or vainly frets,
O'er hoards diminished by young Hopeful's debts;
Weighs well and wisely what to sell or buy,
Complete in all life's lessons-but to die ;
Peevish and spiteful, doting, hard to please,
Commending every time, save times like these;

Crazed, querulous, forsaken, half forgot,
Expires unwept-is buried-Let him rot!

But from the Drama let me not digress,

260

270

Nor spare my precepts, though they please you less..
Though Woman weep, and hardest hearts are stirred,ii.
When what is done is rather seen than heard,
Yet many deeds preserved in History's page
Are better told than acted on the stage;
The ear sustains what shocks the timid eye,
And Horror thus subsides to Sympathy,
True Briton all beside, I here am French-
Bloodshed 'tis surely better to retrench :
The gladiatorial gore we teach to flow
In tragic scenes disgusts though but in show;
We hate the carnage while we see the trick,
And find small sympathy in being sick.
Not on the stage the regicide Macbeth
Appals an audience with a Monarch's death; iii.

i. Your plot is told or acted more or less.—[MS. M.]

ii. To greater sympathy our feelings rise

When what is done is done before our eyes.--[MS. L. (a).] iii. Appalls an audience with the work of Death

To gaze when Hubert simply threats to sere.-[MS. L. (a).]