1830.] Moore s Notices of Lord Byron. 197 



Lawyers' consciences, and lover's brains, 



And statesmen's feelings float, and Laureate's strains. 



Of Byron's poetic powers there can be no doubt ; and as little of his 

 possessing some qualities which circumstances might have softened and 

 improved into social good. But he was, in the strongest sense of the 

 word, unlucky. He had but two friends, Hobhouse and Moore, both 

 gentlemen, and fitted to have led him away from the hollow and hazard- 

 ous pursuits which bad company and bad habits had made second 

 nature. But the Shelleys and the Matthewses, and the Guicciolis, 

 had higher captivations for him ; and he flung away himself, his 

 fortune, and his fame ; a memorable example of great powers ren- 

 dered a source of misery to the possessor ; and of the highest advantages 

 of society consigning him, by a direct and almost fated progress, to the 

 life of an exile, to an empty struggle for empty objects, and to a foreign 

 grave, among the obscure haunts of banditti and barbarians. 



THEATRICAL MATTERS. 



Miss KEMBLE has appeared in a third character, Euphrasia, in the ''Grecian 

 Daughter." The choice was injudicious : the play is intolerable. Murphy had 

 some liveliness as a farce writer, and by the help of plundering from the 

 French, might have been endured in a comedy ; though there, his dialogue 

 is deplorably dry, or relieved from dryness only by the worse quality of gross- 

 ness. But in tragedy he was beyond all endurance. The frigidity of his 

 French model, for he was an eternal plagiarist, was uncompensated by any 

 dexterity of his own. The inflexible and didactic dulness of the foreign dia- 

 logue was transferred with desperate fidelity through his pen; and away he 

 prosed in the idle belief that he was actually writing blank verse until he 

 mercilessly murdered the heroine and the subject together. Mrs. Siddons 

 gave some popularity to Euphrasia, as her acting would have given popularity 

 to any thing. But the part is forced, and is not capable of powerful effect, 

 let it be placed in what hands it will. Kemble's Evander was an example of 

 personal ability, struggling against a disadvantageous part. Bennett is a melo- 

 drame player, on the Macready plan, a plan which he must utterly abandon 

 before he is fit for tragedy or any thing but sitting before blue fire and raving 

 to demons. Warde's voice is still unmanageable ; the weather, we suppose, 

 has made a malicious combination with nature to render him formidable to 

 the human ear, and he is the most calamitous of lovers and heroes. 



Drury-lane promises a multitude of pleasantries, when the frost shall let 

 people enjoy them ; till now the power of laughter has been frozen on the lips, 

 and the genius of theatres has been buried in a cold bath of sleet. However, 

 sunshine and summer airs must come at last ; and we shall then be able to 

 enjoy the dozen comedies which Lord Normanby has just brought over with 

 him from his repertoire on the classic shores of the Arno. Kean plays frequently 

 and with success, retarded only by a thermometer fifty degrees below the point 

 of human endurance. Morton was said to have a drama on the subject of Baron 

 Trenck. The dramatist has indignantly denied the imputation, and says, that 

 though the secret of his having a drama with a person of that name in it, his 

 is not the Baron : perhaps Morton is irate with the report that could fasten on 

 him any connexion with the memory of so notorious a prison-breaker, or, per- 

 haps, the whole is a pleasant, though by no means new theatrical expedient to 

 awake the public curiosity to the drama by a little previous controversy. 



Macready, who, it seems, will engage with nobody, or whom nobody will 

 engage, is mentioned in the Portsmouth paper as exhibiting his Macbeth 

 before an audience of ten persons in the boxes, and a proportionate number 

 in the pit. Macready is a clever fellow in his way, but deplorably given to 

 think very highly of himself, and very lowly of all who differ with him on.i 



