semblance with, or dissimilarity to, the original: in the course of which, I cannot deny, that the gloomy heat of an unbounded and exuberant despair becomes at last oppressive to us. Yet is the dissatisfaction we feel always connected with esteem and admiration. "We find thus, in this tragedy, the quintessence of the most astonishing talent, born to be its own tormentor. The character of Lord Byron's life and poetry hardly permits a just and equitable appreciation. He has often enough confessed what it is that torments him. He has repeatedly portrayed it; and scarcely any one feels compassion for this intolerable suffering, over which he is ever laboriously ruminating. There are, properly speaking, two females whose phantoms for ever haunt him, and which, in this piece also, perform principal parts-one under the name of Astarte, the other without form or actual presence, and merely a voice. Of the horrid occurrence which took place with the former, the following is related: -When a bold and enterprising young man, he won the affections of a Florentine lady. Her husband discovered the amour, and murdered his wife; but the murderer was the same night found dead in the street, and there was no one on whom any suspicion could be attached. Lord Byron removed from Florence, and these spirits haunted him all his life after. "This romantic incident is rendered highly probable by innumerable allusions to it in his poems. As, for instance, when, turning his sad contemplations inwards, he applies to himself the fatal history of the king of Sparta. It is as follows:--Pausanias, a Lacedæmonian general, acquires glory by the important victory at Platea, but afterwards forfeits the confidence of his countrymen through his ar rogance, obstinacy, and secret intrigues with the enemies of his country. This man draws upon himself the heavy guilt of innocent blood, which attends him to his end; for, while commanding the fleet of the allied Greeks, in the Black Sea, he is inflamed with a violent passion for a Byzantine maiden. After long resistance, he at length obtains her from her parents, and she is to be delivered up to him at night. She modestly desires the servant to put out the lamp, and, while groping her way in the dark, she overturns it. Pausanias is awakened from his sleep-apprehensive of an attack from murderers, he seizes his sword, and destroys his mistress. The horrid sight never leaves him. Her shade pursues him unceasingly, and he implores for aid in vain from the gods and the exorcising priests. "That poet must have a lacerated heart who selects such a scene from antiquity, appropriates it to himself, and burdens his tragic image with it. The following soliloquy, which is overladen with gloom and a weariness of life, is, by this remark, rendered intelligible. We recommend it as an exercise to all friends of declamation. Hamlet's soliloquy appears improved upon here."-Goethe here subjoins Manfred's soliloquy, beginning "We are the fools of time and terror," in which the allusion to Pausanias occurs. The reader will not be sorry to pass from this German criticism to that of the Edinburgh Review on Manfred:"This is, undoubtedly, a work of great genius and originality. Its worst fault, perhaps, is that it fatigues and overawes us by the uniformity of its terror and solemnity. Another is the painful and offensive nature of the circumstance on which its distress is ultimately founded. The lyrical songs of the Spirits are too long, and not all excellent. There is something of pedantry in them now and then; and even Manfred deals in classical allusions a little too much. If we were to consider it as a proper drama, or even as a finished poem, we should be obliged to add, that it is far too indistinct and unsatisfactory. But this we take to be according to the design and conception of the author. He contemplated but a dim and magnificent "The grave confidence with which the venerable critic traces the fancies of his brother poet to real persons and events, making no dif ficulty even of a double murder at Florence to furnish grounds for his theory, affords an amusing instance of the disposition so prevalent throughout Europe, to picture Byron as a man of marvels and mysteries, as well in his life as his poetry. To these exaggerated or wholly false notions of him, the numerous fictions palmed upon the world of his romantic tours and wonderful adventures, in places he never saw, and with persons that never existed, have, no doubt, considerably contributed; and the consequence is, so utterly out of truth and nature are the representations of his life and character long current upon the Continent, that it may be questioned whether the real flesh and blood hero of these pages,-the social, practicalminded, and, with all his faults and eccentricities, English Lord Byron, may not, to the over-exalted imaginations of most of his foreign admirers, appear but an ordinary, unromantic, and prosaic personage."-Moore.-L. E. sketch of a subject which did not admit of more accurate · drawing or more brilliant colouring. Its obscurity is a part of its grandeur;- and the darkness that rests upon it, and the smoky distance in which it is lost, are all devices to increase its majesty, to stimulate our curiosity, and to impress us with deeper awe.-It is suggested, in an ingenious paper in a late number of the Edinburgh Magazine, that the general conception of this piece, and much of what is excellent in the manner of its execution, have been borrowed from The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, of Marlow; and a variety of passages are quoted, which the author considers as similar, and, in many respects, superior to others in the poem before us. We cannot agree in the general terms of the conclusion; but there is no doubt a certain resemblance, both in some of the topics that are suggested, and in the cast of the diction in which they are expressed. Thus, to induce Faustus to persist in his unlawful studies, he is told that the Spirits of the Elements will serve him,'Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids, Shadowing more beauty in their ayrie browes, Than have the white breasts of the Queene of Love.' 0 thou art fairer than the evening ayre, The catastrophe, too, is bewailed in verses of great elegance and classical beauty Cut is the branch that might have growne full straight, That sometime grew within this learned man. But these and many other smooth and fanciful verses in this curious old drama prove nothing, we think, against the originality of Manfred; for there is nothing to be found there of the pride, the abstraction, and the heart-rooted misery in which that originality consists. Faustus is a vulgar sorcerer, tempted to sell his soul to the devil for the ordinary price of sensual pleasure, and earthly power and glory; and who shrinks and shudders in agony when the forfeit comes to be exacted. The style, too, of Marlow, though elegant and scholar-like, is weak and childish, compared with the depth and force of much of Lord Byron; and the disgusting buffoonery and low farce of which his piece is principally made up place it more in contrast, than in any terms of comparison, with that of his noble successor. In the tone and pitch of the composition, as well as in the character of the diction in the more solemn parts, Manfred reminds us much more of the Prometheus of Eschylus, than of any more modern performance. The tremendous solitude of the principal person-the superna. tural beings with whom alone he holds communion-the guilt the firmness-the misery-are all points of resemblance, to which the grandeur of the poetic imagery only gives a more striking effect. The chief differences are, that the subject of the Greek poet was sanctified and exalted by the established belief of his country, and that his terrors are nowhere tempered with the sweetness which breathes from so many passages of his English rival." Jeffrey.-L. E. On reading this, Lord Byron wrote from Venice - Jeffrey is very kind about Manfred, and defends its originality, which I did not i know that any body had attacked. As to the germs of it, they may be found in the Journal which I sent to Mrs. Leigh, shortly before I left Switzerland. I have the whole scene of Manfred before me, as if it was but yesterday, and could point it out, spot by spot, torrent and all."-L. E. "Of the Prometheus of Eschylus I was passionately fond as a boy (it was one of the Greek plays we read thrice a-year at Harrow); indeed, that and the Medea were the only ones, except the Seven be fore Thebes, which ever much pleased me. The Prometheus, if not exactly in my plan, has always been so much in my head, that I can easily conceive its influence over all or any thing that I have written; but I deny Marlow and his progeny, and beg that you will do the same."-B. Letters, 1817.-L. E. The Lament of Tasso. ADVERTISEMENT. AT Ferrara, in the Library, are preserved the original MSS. of Tasso's Gerusalemme and of Guarini's Pastor Fido, with letters of Tasso, one from Titian to Ariosto, and the inkstand and chair, the tomb and the house of the latter. But, as misfortune has a greater interest for posterity, and little or none for the cotemporary, the cell where Tasso was confined in the hospital of St. Anna attracts a more fixed attention than the residence or the monument of Ariosto -at least it had this effect on me. There are two inscriptions, one on the outer gate, the second over the cell itself, inviting, unnecessarily, the wonder and (1) The original MS. of this poem is dated, "The Apennines, April 20, 1817." It was written in consequence of Lord Byron having visited Ferrara, for a single day, on his way to Florence. In a letter from Rome, he says, "The Lament of Tasso, which I sent from Florence, has, I trust, arrived. I look upon it as a 'These be good rhymes as Pope's papa said to him when he was a boy." "In a moment of dissatisfaction with himself, or during some melancholy mood, when his soul felt the worthless. ness of fame and glory, Lord Byron told the world that his Muse should, for a long season, shroud herself in solitude; and every true lover of genius lamented that her lofty music was to cease. But there was a tide in his spirit obeying the laws of its nature, and not to be controlled by any human will. When he said that he was to be silent, he looked, perhaps, into the inner regions of his soul, and saw there a dim, hard, and cheerless waste, like the sand of the sea-shore; but the ebbed waves of passion in due course returned, and the scene was restored to its former beauty and magnificence,-its foam, its splendours, and its thunder. The mind of a mighty poet cannot submit even to chains of its own imposing when it feels most enslaved, even then, perhaps, is it about to become most free ; and one sudden flash may raise it from the darkness of its despondency up to the pure air of untroubled confidence. It required, therefore, but small knowledge of human nature, to assure ourselves that the obligation under which Lord Byron had laid himself could not bind, and that the potent spirit within him would laugh to scorn whatever dared to curb the frenzy of its own inspirations. "It was not long, therefore, till he again came forth in his perfect strength, and exercised that dominion over our spirits which is truly a power too noble to be possessed without being wielded. Though all his heroes are of one family, yet are they a noble band of brothers, whose countenances and whose souls are strongly distinguished by peculiar characteristics. Each personage, as he advances before us, reminds us of some other being, whose looks, thoughts, words, and deeds had troubled us by their wild and perturbed grandeur. But though all the same, yet are they all strangely different. We hail each successive existence with a profounder sympathy; and we are lost in wonder, in fear, and in sorrow, at the infinitely-varied struggles, the endless and agonising modifications of the human passions, as they drive along through every gate and avenue of the soul, darkening or brightening, elevating or laying prostrate. "From such agitating and terrific pictures, it is delightful to turn to those compositions in which Lord Byron has allowed his soul to sink down into gentler and more ordinary feelings. Many beautiful and pathetic strains have flowed from his heart, of which the tenderness is as touching as the grandeur of his nobler works is agitating and sublime. To those, indeed, who looked deeply into his poetry, there never was at any time a want of pathos; but it was a pathos so subduing and so profound, that even the poet himself seemed afraid of being delivered up unto it; nay, he seemed ashamed of being overcome by emotions, which the gloomy I the indignation of the spectator. Ferrara is much decayed, and depopulated: the castle still exists entire; and I saw the court where Parisina and Hugo were beheaded, according to the annal of Gibbon. (1) THE LAMENT OF TASSO. I. LONG years!-It tries the thrilling frame to bear, pride of his intellect often vainly strove to scorn; and he dashed the weakness from his heart, and the tear from his eyes, like a man suddenly assailed by feelings which he wished to hide, and which, though true to his nature, were inconsistent with the character which that mysterious nature had been forced, as in self-defence, to assume. "But there is one poem in which he has almost wholly laid aside all remembrance of the darker and stormier passions; in which the tone of his spirit and his voice at once is changed, and where he who seemed to care only for ago. nies, and remorse, and despair, and death, and insanity, in all their most appalling forms, shows that he has a heart that can feed on the purest sympathies of our nature, and deliver itself up to the sorrows, the sadness, and the melancholy of humbler souls. The Prisoner of Chillon is a poem over which Infancy has shed its first mysterious tears for sorrows so alien to its own happy innocence, over which the gentle, pure, and pious soul of Woman has brooded with ineffable, and yearning, and bursting tenderness of affection, and over which old Age, almost loosened from this world, has bowed his hoary head in delighted approbation of that fraternal love, whose beauty and simplicity fling a radiance over the earth he is about to leave, and exhibit our fallen nature in near approximation to the glories of its ultimate destiny. The Lament possesses much of the tenderness and pathos of the Prisoner of Chillon. Lord Byron has not delivered himself unto any one wild and fearful vision of the imprisoned Tasso,-he has not dared to allow himself to rush forward with headlong passion into the horrors of his dungeon, and to describe, as he could fearfully have done, the conflict and agony of his uttermost despair, but he shows us the poet sitting in his cell, and singing there-a low, melancholy, wailing lament, sometimes, indeed, bordering on utter wretchedness, but oftener partaking of a settled grief, occasionally subdued into mournful resignation, cheered by delightful remembrances, and elevated by the confident hope of an immortal fame. His is the gathered grief of many years, over which his soul has brooded, till she has in some measure lost the power of misery; and this soliloquy is one which we can believe he might have uttered to himself any morning, or noon, or night of his solitude, as he seemed to be half communing with own heart, and half addressing the ear of that human nature from which he was shut out, but of which he felt the continual and abiding presence within his imagination. "—— Wilson.-L. E. (2) Tasso's biographer, the Abate Serassi, has left it without doubt, that the first cause of the poet's punishment was his desire to be occasionally, or altogether, free from his servitude at the court of Alfonso. In 1575, Tasso resolved to visit Rome, and enjoy the indulgence of the jubilee; and this error," says the Abate, "increasing the suspicion already entertained, that he was in search of another service, was the origin of his misfortunes. On his return to Ferrara, the Duke refused to admit bim to an audience, and he was repulsed from the houses of all the dependants of the court; and not one of the promises which the Cardinal Albano had obtained for him were carried into And the mind's canker in its savage mood, And I can banquet like a beast of prey, Which is my lair, and it may be my grave. (1) How Salem's shrine was won, and how adored. II. But this is o'er-my pleasant task is done;-(2) effect. Then it was that Tasso-after having suffered these hardships for some time, seeing himself constantly discountenanced by the Duke and the Princesses, abandoned by his friends, and derided by his enemies-could no longer contain himself within the bounds of moderation, but, giving vent to his choler, publicly broke forth into the most injurious expressions imaginable, both against the Duke and all the house of Este, cursing his past service, and retracting all the praises he had ever given in his verses to those princes, or to any individual connected with them, declaring that they were all a gang of poltroons, ingrates, and scoundrels (poltroni, ingrati, e ribaldi). For this offence he was arrested, conducted to the hospital of St. Anna, and confined in a solitary cell as a madman.” Serassi, Vita del Tasso.-L. E. (1) "In the hospital of St. Anna, at Ferrara, they show a cell, over the door of which is the following inscription: -Rispettate, O posteri, la celebrità di questa stanza, dove Torquato Tasso, infermo più di tristezza che delirio, ditenuto dimorò anni vii. mesi ii., scrisse verse e prose, e fù ri messo in libertà ad instanza della città di Bergamo, nel giorno vi. Luglio, 1586.'--The dungeon is below the groundfloor of the hospital, and the light penetrates through its grated window from a small yard, which seems to have been common to other cells. It is nine paces long, between five and six wide, and about seven feet high. The bedstead, so they tell, has been carried off piecemeal, and the door half cut away by the devotion of those whom the verse and prose' of the prisoner have brought to Ferrara. was confined in this room from the middle of March 1579 to December 1580, when he was removed to a contiguous apartment much larger, in which, to use his own expressions, he could philosophise and walk about.' The in|scription is incorrect as to the immediate cause of his enlargement, which was promised to the city of Bergamo, but The poet With this last bruise upon a broken reed. Nor cause for such: they call'd me mad-and why? I was indeed delirious in my heart The wretched are the faithful; 'tis their fate But ours is fathomless, and hath no shore. III. Above me, hark! the long and maniac cry pass'd; 'Mid sights and sounds like these my life may close: So let it be for then I shall repose. was carried into effect at the intercession of Don Vincenzo Gonzago, Prince of Mantua." Hobhouse.-L. E. (2) The opening lines bring the poet before us at once, as if the door of the dungeon was thrown open. From this bitter complaint, how nobly the unconquered bard rises into calm, and serene, and dignified exultation over the beauty of that young creation, his soul's child,' the Ge rusalemme Liberata. The exultation of conscious genius then dies away, and we behold him, bound between distraction and disease,' no longer in an inspired mood, but sunk into the lowest prostration of human misery. There is something terrible in this transition from divine rapture to degraded agony." Wilson.-L. E. (3) In a letter to his friend Scipio Gonzaga, shortly after his confinement, Tasso exclaims,-"Ah, wretched me! I had designed to write, besides two epic poems of most noble argument, four tragedies, of which I had formed the plan. 1 had schemed, too, many works in prose, on subjects the most lofty, and most useful to human life; I had designed to write philosophy with eloquence, in such a manner that there might remain of me an eternal memory in the world. Alas! I had expected to close my life with glory and renown; but now, oppressed by the burden of so many calamities, I have lost every prospect of reputation and of honour. The fear of perpetual imprisonment increases my melaacholy; the indignities which I suffer augment it; and the squalor of my beard, my hair, and habit, the sordidness and filth, exceedingly annoy me. Sure am I that, if ssr, who so little has corresponded to my attachment-if she saw me in such a state, and in such affliction-she would have some compassion on me." Opere, t. x. p. 387.-L. E. (4) "For nearly the first year of his confinement Tasso endured all the horrors of a solitary cell, and was under the care of a gaoler whose chief virtue, although he was a poet and a man of letters, was a cruel obedience to the IV. I have been patient, let me be so yet, I had forgotten half I would forget, But it revives-Oh! would it were my lot Feel I not wroth with those who bade me dwell Which echoes Madness in her babbling moods;-- V. Look on a love which knows not to despair, (3) commands of his prince. His name was Agostino Mosti. Tasso says of him, in a letter to his sister, ed usa meco ogni sorte di rigore ed inumanità.'" Hobhouse.-L. E. (I) "This fearful picture is finely contrasted with that which Tasso draws of himself in youth, when nature and meditation were forming his wild, romantic, and impassioned genius. Indeed, the great excellence of the Lament consists in the ebbing and flowing of the noble prisoner's soul;-his feelings often come suddenly from afar off, -sometimes gentle airs are breathing, and then all at once arise the storins and tempest,-the gloom, though black as night while it endures, gives way to frequent bursts of radiance, and when the wild strain is closed, our pity and commiseration are blended with a sustaining and elevating sense of the grandeur and majesty of his character." Wilson.-L. E. (2) Not long after his imprisonment, Tasso appealed to the mercy of Alfonso, in a canzone of great beauty, couched in terms so respectful and pathetic, as must have moved, it might be thought, the severest bosom to relent. The heart of Alfonso was, however, impregnable to the appeal; and Tasso, in another ode to the princesses, whose pity he invoked in the name of their own mother, who had herself known, if not the like horrors, the like solitude of imprisonment, and bitterness of soul. "Considered merely as And yet my love without ambition grew; A something which all softness did surpass- But thou art dearest still, and I should be VI. It is no marvel-from my very birth My soul was drunk with love,-which did pervade And mingle with whate'er I saw on earth; Of objects all inanimate I made Idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers, poems," says Black, "these canzoni are extremely beautiful; (3) "As to the indifference which the Princess is said to have exhibited for the misfortunes of Tasso, and the little effort she made to obtain his liberty, this is one of the nega. tive arguments founded on an hypothesis, that may be easily destroyed by a thousand others equally plausible. Was not the Princess anxious to avoid her own ruin? In taking too warm an interest for the poet, did she not risk destroying herself, without saving him?" Foscolo.-L. E. (4) "Tasso's profound and unconquerable love for Leonora, sustaining itself without hope throughout years of darkness and solitude, breathes a moral dignity over all his sentiments, and we feel the strength and power of his noble spirit in the un-upbraiding devotedness of his passion." Wilson.-L. E. (5) It has been remarked by an anonymous author of Memoirs of Lord Byron, that "this is so far from being in character, that it is the very reverse; for, whether Tasso was in his senses or not, if his love was sincere he would have made the object of his affection the sole theme of his meditation, instead of generalizing his passion, and talking about the original sympathies of his nature."-P. E. And with my years my soul began to pant VII. I loved all solitude-but little thought VIII. Yet do I feel at times my mind decline, (2) (2) "Nor do 1 lament," wrote Tasso, shortly after his confinement, "that my heart is deluged with almost constant misery, that my head is always heavy and often pain. ful, that my sight and hearing are much impaired, and that all my frame is become spare and meagre; but passing all this with a short sigh, what I would bewail is the infirmity of my mind. My mind sleeps, not thinks; my fancy is chill, and forms no pictures; my negligent senses will no longer furnish the images of things; my hand is sluggish in writing, and my pen seems as if it shrunk from the office. I feel as if I were chained in all my operations, and as if I were overcome by an unwonted numbness and oppressive stupor."-Opere, t. viii. p. 258.-L. E. Why in this furnace is my spirit proved IX. I once was quick in feeling-that is o'er;- And woo Compassion to a blighted name, This-this-shall be a consecrated spot! But thou-when all that Birth and Beauty throws can, and, after a short struggle, or rather suspense, Ferrara passed away for ever from the dominion of the house of Este." Hobhouse.-L. E. (5) In July, 1586, after a confinement of more than seven ¦ years, Tasso was released from his dungeon. In the hope of receiving his mother's dowry, and of again beholding bis sister Cornelia, he shortly after visited Naples, where his presence was welcomed with every demonstration of esteem and admiration. Being on a visit at Mola di Gaeta, be received the following remarkable tribute of respect. Marco di Sciarra, the notorious captain of a numerous troop of banditti, hearing where the great poet was, sent to compli ment him, and offered him not only a free passage, but protection by the way, and assured him that he and his followers would be proud to execute his orders. See Manso, Vita del Tasso, p. 219. Mr. Rogers thus introduces the incident into his description of the life, "fearful and full of change," of the mountain-robber : "Time was, the trade was nobler, if not honest; |