87 



THE BYRONS. 



The disciples of the Byronic school are, without doubt, the most 

 numerous and mirth-provoking of the poetic genera. Liston or 

 Mathews never tickled the risibilities of an audience more convul- 

 sively than have these mourners, the cachinnatory organs of their 

 readers j and yet that they would be annihilated at the suspicion 

 of being susceptible of happiness, no man will have the temerity 

 to question. " Miserrimus" is their motto, " a scull and cross- 

 bones" their device. Withered hopes and affections, a bosom 

 throbbing with the pulse of despair, and a brain scourged by 

 unhallowed memories are the desirables, coveted by each of these 

 young gentlemen) and his lucubrations, his out-pourings of in- 

 spiration, embody the very soul of wretchedness. In fact he 

 asserts his infelicity so forcibly and repeatedly, that we must 

 imagine he has some exclusive privilege — some monopoly — some 

 mysterious droit-d" ainesse to its enjoyment, and that the rest of 

 the world is consequently bathed in the sunshine of plebeian 

 delight. An undiscovered source of sorrow touched upon and no 

 more, is the key-note of his effusions, and ever preludes the micro- 

 scopic detail of its effects. The blenched and burning brow, the 

 eye unvisited by tears, the cheek now pale as sculpture, and now 

 flushed with sudden hectic, the mouth fixed in a stern despair, or 

 curled in proud mockery of hope, the sigh bursting from the 

 recesses of a bleeding and lacerated heart, or the hollow laugh 

 wild and sepulchral as that of Mephistophelex, form principal part 

 of his stock-in-trade. What shears are to a tailor, or the cup and 

 balls to a conjuror, are these precious commodities to the young 

 gentleman-follower of Byron — this Byron, or rather, as he 

 modestly opines, this greater than Byron. Did he know any thing 

 of the schools of painting, Caravaggio, EspagnoLet, and Michael 

 Atigelo would be the masters he quoted with as much compre- 

 hension, of course, as he has of his poetical archetype. To the 

 credit of his liberality, it must be admitted that his fustian is as 

 plentifully interwoven with the materiel as the bushes are laden 

 with blackberries in October, and that rather than stint the reader 

 in quantum the writer would treat him with ihe hospitality of the 

 Northlander, and surfeit him in the end. 



The major number of the followers of the bard of Newstead 

 consist of inspired shopmen, apprentices, and clerks, who prac- 

 tise transcendently at the desk, wooing the superb conceits which 

 are to convey their names to posterity in a halo of inextinguish- 

 able light. Spenser, Chaucer, Cowley, Ben Jonson, Shakspeare, 

 Milton, and Dryden, reverently descend from their pedestals, and 

 veil their laurels and their pretensions to these still happier bards. 

 The splendours of past ages are subdued and dimmed, even to 

 ecHpse, by the kindling lustres of the present time; a flood of 

 brightness pours from the counting-house of Theodore Snooks, 



