A Kfy&eryftr the Byron-Critics. [MARCH, 



animal high in air, until it is clashed to fragments among the rocks ; and 

 when the creature is immolated to his fury, he moralizes over its 

 reeking entrails, on organization, " life, sense, and sentiment," in a style 

 that irresistibly collates in the reader's mind, with Byron's well-known 

 reflections on a human skull in his great poem of " Childe Harold." 



Whether the indescribable figure that appears to Manfred (but to his 

 sense alone), while the Abbot is present with him in the last scene of the 

 drama, may have been suggested by the " tremendous apparition" of 

 the murdered Gervase in this romance, which more than once (vol. iii. 

 pp. 216, 223, and vol. iv. p. 201, c.), comes in the shape of " an indis- 

 tinct something/' a figure so horrible that he who saw it, stood with 

 " cheeks pallid with terror, and eyes half unsocketed by intenseness of 

 gaze," it is probably not worth while to inquire. But when we read 

 the unhappy Arnaud's apostrophe to the manes of his faithful dog, and 

 hear him saying after his rash act et By my soul we are fellows of the 

 game nature, nor can any distinction of exterior shape justify the caprice 

 or cruelty that slayeth thee : nay, there is a vice of ingratitude in it, for 

 thou art knit to me by an attachment that doth me daily service ; thou 

 humourest my humours, adoptest my instructions, and exchangest thine 

 own nature for mine," &c. the whole tone as well as the thoughts are 

 irresistibly compared in the reader's mind with Byron's beautiful epitaph 

 on his Newfoundland canine companion, and with the affecting allusions 

 he at various times makes to that true and tried friend. 



To pursue these coincidences much farther would be tedious, and 

 might become fanciful and unjust. In them all, we see the great poet, 

 the discriminating and the intense mind, at least refining and rationaliz- 

 ing the crude though grand conceptions, of another poetical but ill- 

 trained intellect, which seems not to have understood its own power-i- 

 and which though remarkably similar to Byron's, certainly had ribt v a 

 tithe of his chastened good taste. Hence the sentiments and conceptions 

 in these volumes, may have strongly commended themselves to the poet's 

 mental constitution ; but they are in general ill brought out, and often 

 so wild that they can only have their effect on minds more or less like 

 his own. Many examples might be given of this, but one may suffice. 

 I have already quoted the answer of the deformed hero to the young 

 lady who had asked him what it was to love ; namely, that " it is to die 

 in yourself to live in another." Now mark how Byron in " The Dream," 

 expresses and amplifies this beautiful sentiment, in reference to the 

 breathing light of his youth, and the dark cloud of his manhood Miss 

 Chaworth : 



" He had no breath, no being but in her's ; 

 She was his voice ; he did not speak to her, 

 But trembled on her words ; she was his sight, 

 For his eye followed her's, and saw with her's, 

 Which coloured all his objects : he had ceased 

 To live within himself; she was his life, 

 The ocean to the river of his thoughts, 

 Which terminated all." 



I might further pursue this subject by referring to this romance (vol. 

 iv. p. 11), for those well-known sentiments of Byron upon that dubious 

 matter, a woman's age ; to the beginning of the tale of Manfred 

 already alluded to (ib. p. 145, &c.), for many of those original senti- 

 ments regarding friendship, scattered through the writings of the npble 



