The Life of Lord Byron. John Galt
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you will he live, or like you will he perish,
When decay’d, may he mingle his dust with your own.
“Now, we positively do assert, that there is nothing better than these stanzas in the whole compass of the noble minor’s volume.
“Lord Byron should also have a care of attempting what the greatest poets have done before him, for comparisons (as he must have had occasion to see at his writing-master’s) are odious. Gray’s Ode to Eton College should really have kept out the ten hobbling stanzas on a distant view of the village and school at Harrow.
Where fancy yet joys to trace the resemblance
Of comrades in friendship or mischief allied,
How welcome to me your ne’er-fading remembrance,
Which rests in the bosom, though hope is denied.
“In like manner, the exquisite lines of Mr Rogers, On a Tear, might have warned the noble author of these premises, and spared us a whole dozen such stanzas as the following:
Mild charity’s glow,
To us mortals below,
Shows the soul from barbarity clear;
Compassion will melt
Where the virtue is felt.
And its dew is diffused in a tear.
The man doom’d to sail
With the blast of the gale,
Through billows Atlantic to steer,
As he bends o’er the wave,
Which may soon be his grave,
The green sparkles bright with a tear.
“And so of instances in which former poets had failed. Thus, we do not think Lord Byron was made for translating, during his nonage, Adrian’s Address to his Soul, when Pope succeeded indifferently in the attempt. If our readers, however, are of another opinion, they may look at it.
Ah! gentle, fleeting, wav’ring sprite,
Friend and associate of this clay,
To what unknown region borne
Wilt thou now wing thy distant flight?
No more with wonted humour gay,
But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn.
“However, be this as it may, we fear his translations and imitations are great favourities with Lord Byron. We have them of all kinds, from Anacreon to Ossian; and, viewing them as school-exercises, they may pass. Only, why print them after they have had their day and served their turn? And why call the thing in p. 79 a translation, where two words (θελο λεyειν) of the original are expanded into four lines, and the other thing in p. 81, where μεσονυκτικις ποθ’ οραις is rendered by means of six hobbling verses. As to his Ossian poesy, we are not very good judges; being, in truth, so moderately skilled in that species of composition, that we should, in all probability, be criticising some bit of genuine Macpherson itself, were we to express our opinion of Lord Byron’s rhapsodies. If, then, the following beginning of a Song of Bards is by his Lordship, we venture to object to it, as far as we can comprehend it; ‘What form rises on the roar of clouds, whose dark ghost gleams on the red stream of tempests? His voice rolls on the thunder; ’tis Oila, the brown chief of Otchona. He was,’ etc. After detaining this ‘brown chief’ some time, the bards conclude by giving him their advice to ‘raise his fair locks’; then to ‘spread them on the arch of the rainbow’; and to ‘smile through the tears of the storm.’ Of this kind of thing there are no less than nine pages: and we can so far venture an opinion in their favour, that they look very like Macpherson; and we are positive they are pretty nearly as stupid and tiresome.
“It is some sort of privilege of poets to be egotists; but they should ‘use it as not abusing it’; and particularly one who piques himself (though, indeed, at the ripe age of nineteen) on being an infant bard —
The artless Helicon I boast is youth —
should either not know, or should seem not to know, so much about his own ancestry. Besides a poem, above cited, on the family-seat of the Byrons, we have another of eleven pages on the selfsame subject, introduced with an apology, ‘he certainly had no intention of inserting it,’ but really ‘the particular request of some friends,’ etc. etc. It concludes with five stanzas on himself, ‘the last and youngest of the noble line.’ There is also a good deal about his maternal ancestors, in a poem on Lachion-y-Gair, a mountain, where he spent part of his youth, and might have learned that pibroach is not a bagpipe, any more than a duet means a fiddle.
“As the author has dedicated so large a part of his volume to immortalize his employments at school and college, we cannot possibly dismiss it without presenting the reader with a specimen of these ingenious effusions.
“In an ode, with a Greek motto, called Granta, we have the following magnificent stanzas: —
There, in apartments small and damp,
The candidate for college prizes
Sits poring by the midnight lamp,
Goes late to bed, yet early rises:
Who reads false quantities in Seale,
Or puzzles o’er the deep triangle,
Depriv’d of many a wholesome meal,
In barbarous Latin doomed to wrangle.
Renouncing every pleasing page
From authors of historic use;
Preferring to the letter’d sage
The square of the hypotenuse.
Still harmless are these occupations,
That hurt none but the hapless student,
Compared with other recreations
Which bring together the imprudent.
“We are sorry to hear so bad an account of the college-psalmody, as is contained in the following attic stanzas
Our choir could scarcely be excused,
Even as a band of raw beginners;
All mercy now must be refused
To such a set of croaking sinners.
If David, when his toils were ended,
Had heard these blockheads sing before him,
To us his psalms had ne’er descended —
In furious mood he would have tore ’em.
“But whatever judgment may be passed on the poems of this noble minor, it seems we must take them as we find them, and be content for they are the last we shall ever have from him. He is at best, he says, but an intruder into the groves of Parnassus; he never lived in a garret, like thoroughbred poets, and though he once roved a careless mountaineer in the Highlands of Scotland, he has not of late enjoyed this advantage. Moreover, he expects no profit from his publication; and whether it succeeds or not, it is highly improbable, from his situation and pursuits, that he should again condescend to become an author. Therefore, let us take what we get and be thankful. What right have we poor devils to be nice? We are well off to have got so much from a man of this lord’s station, who does not live in a garret, but has got the sway of Newstead Abbey. Again we say, let us be thankful; and, with honest Sancho, bid God bless the giver, nor look the gift-horse in the mouth.”
The criticism is ascribed to Mr Francis Jeffrey, an eloquent member of the Scottish bar, and who was at that time supposed to be the editor of the Edinburgh Review. That it was neither just nor fair is sufficiently evident, by the degree of care and artificial point with which it has been drawn up. Had the poetry been as insignificant as the critic affected to consider it, it would have argued little for the judgment of Mr Jeffrey, to take