now in his hands, or in the printer's. It is in the Manfred metaphysical style, and full of some Titanic declamation;

Lucifer being one of the dram. pers., who takes Cain a voyage among the stars, and afterwards to "Hades," where he shows him the phantoms of a former world, and its inhabitants. I have gone upon the notion of Cuvier, that the world has been destroyed three or four times, and was inhabited by mammoths, behemoths, and what not; but not by man till the Mosaic period, as, indeed, is proved by the strata of bones found; those of all unknown animals, and known, being dug out, but none of mankind. I have, therefore, supposed Cain to be shown, in the rational Preadamites, beings endowed with a higher intelligence than man, but totally unlike him in form, and with much greater strength of mind and person. You may suppose the small talk which takes place between him and Lucifer upon these matters is not quite canonical.

The consequence is, that Cain comes back and kills Abel in a fit of dissatisfaction, partly with the politics of Paradise, which had driven them all out of it, and partly because (as it is written in Genesis) Abel's sacrifice was the more acceptable to the Deity. I trust that the Rhapsody has arrived it is in three acts, and entitled "A Mystery," according to the former Christian custom, and in honour of what it probably will remain to the reader.

Yours, etc.

FROM "MARINO FALIERO, DOGE OF VENICE" ACT III. SCENE I-SCENE, the Space between the Canal and the Church of San Giovanni e San Paolo. An equestrian Statue before it. A Gondola lies in the Canal at some distance.

Enter the DOGE alone, disguised.

Doge (solus). I am before the hour, the hour whose voice,

Pealing into the arch of night, might strike
These palaces with ominous tottering,

And rock their marbles to the corner-stone,
Waking the sleepers from some hideous dream
Of indistinct but awful augury

Of that which will befall them. Yes, proud city!

Thou must be cleansed of the black blood which makes

thee

A lazar-house of tyranny: the task

Is forced upon me, I have sought it not;
And therefore was I punish'd, seeing this
Patrician pestilence spread on and on,
Until at length it smote me in my slumbers,
And I am tainted, and must wash away
The plague spots in the healing wave.
Where sleep my fathers, whose dim statues shadow
The floor which doth divide us from the dead,
Where all the pregnant hearts of our bold blood,
Moulder'd into a mite of ashes, hold

Tall fane!

In one shrunk heap what once made many heroes,
When what is now a handful shook the earth ·

Fane of the tutelar saints who guard our house!

Vault where two Doges rest my sires! who died
The one of toil, the other in the field,

With a long race of other lineal chiefs

And sages, whose great labours, wounds, and state
I have inherited, let the graves gape,

Till all thine aisles be peopled with the dead,
And pour them from thy portals to gaze on me!
I call them up, and them and thee to witness
What it hath been which put me to this task-
Their pure high blood, their blazon-roll of glories,
Their mighty name dishonour'd all in me,
Not by me, but by the ungrateful nobles

We fought to make our equals, not our lords: -
And chiefly thou, Ordelafo the brave,

Who perish'd in the field, where I since conquer'd,
Battling at Zara, did the hecatombs

Of thine and Venice' foes, there offer'd up
By thy descendant, merit such acquittance?
Spirits! smile down upon me; for my cause
Is
in all life now can be of
yours,
Your fame, your name, all mingled up in mine,
And in the future fortunes of our race!

yours,

Let me but prosper, and I make this city
Free and immortal, and our house's name
Worthier of what you were, now and hereafter!

1 "All that is said of his Ancestral Doges as buried in this church is altered from the fact, they being in St. Mark's. Make a note of this and put Editor as the subscription to it." (Byron, in a letter to Murray, Oct. 12, 1820.)

"Tall fane!

Where sleep my fathers, whose dim statues shadow The floor which doth divide us from the dead."

- Marino Faliero, Act III, Scene 1, p. 197.