if they are gratified, to the misery of satiety. His principal heroes are men who have arrived by different roads at the same goal of despair, who are sick of life, who are at war with society, who are supported in their anguish only by an unconquerable pride, resembling that of Prometheus on the rock, or of Satan in the burning marl; who can master their agonies by the force of their will, and who, to the last, defy the whole power of earth and heaven. He always described himself as a man of the same kind with his favourite creations, as a man whose heart had been withered, whose capacity for happiness was gone, and could not be restored; but whose invincible spirit dared the worst that could befall him here or hereafter.

How much of this morbid feeling sprang from an original disease of mind, how much from real misfortune, how much from the nervousness of dissipation, how much of it was fanciful, how much of it was merely affected, it is impossible for us, and would probably have been impossible for the most intimate friends of Lord Byron, to decide. Whether there ever existed, or can ever exist, a person answering to the description which he gave of himself, may be doubted: but that he was not such a person, is beyond all doubt. It is ridiculous to imagine that a man, whose mind was really imbued with scorn of his fellowcreatures, would have published three or four books every year to tell them so; or that a man, who could say with truth that he neither sought sympathy nor needed it, would have admitted all Europe to hear his farewell to his wife, and his blessings on his child. In the second canto of Childe Harold, he tells us that he is insensible to fame and obloquy :

"Ill may such contest now the spirit move,

Which heeds nor keen reproof nor partial praise."

Yet we know, on the best evidence, that a day or two before he published these lines, he was greatly, indeed childishly, elated, by the compliments paid to his maiden speech in the House of Lords.

We are far, however, from thinking that his sadness was altogether feigned. He was naturally a man of great sensibility; he had been ill-educated; his feelings had been early exposed to sharp trials; he had been crossed in his

boyish love; he had been mortified by the failure of his first literary efforts; he was straitened in pecuniary circumstances; he was unfortunate in his domestic relations; the public treated him with cruel injustice; his health and spirits suffered from his dissipated habits of life; he was, on the whole, an unhappy man. He early discovered that, by parading his unhappiness before the multitude, he excited an unrivalled interest. The world gave him couragement to talk about his mental sufferings. The effect which his first confessions produced, induced im to affect much that he did not feel; and the affectation probably reacted on his feelings. How far the character in which he exhibited himself was genuine, and how far theatrical, would probably have puzzled himself to say.

every en

What our grandchildren may think of the character of Lord Byron, as exhibited in his poetry, we will not pretend to guess. It is certain, that the interest which he excited during his life, is without a parallel in literary history. The feeling with which young readers of poetry regarded him, can be conceived only by those who have experienced it. To people who are unacquainted with real calamity, "nothing is so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy." This faint image of sorrow has in all ages been considered by young gentlemen as an agreeable excitement. Old gentlemen and middle-aged gentlemen have so many real causes of sadness, that they are rarely inclined "to be as sad as night, only for wantonness." Indeed, they want the power almost as much as the inclination. We know very few persons engaged in active life, who, even if they were to procure stools to be melancholy upon, and were to sit down with all the premeditation of Master Stephen, would be able to enjoy much of what somebody calls the "ecstasy of wo."

Among the large class of young persons whose reading is almost entirely confined to works of imagination, the popularity of Lord Byron was unbounded. They bought pictures of him, they treasured up the smallest relics of him; they learned his poems by heart, and did their best to write like him, and to look like him. Many of them practised at the glass, in the hope of catching the curl of the upper lip, and the scowl of the brow, which appear in some of his portraits. A few discarded their neckcloths in imita

tion of their great leader. For some years, the Minerva press sent forth no novel without a mysterious, unhappy, Lara-like peer. The number of hopeful undergraduates and medical students who became things of dark imaginings, on whom the freshness of the heart ceased to fall like dew, whose passions had consumed themselves to dust, and to whom the relief of tears was denied, passes all calculation. This was not the worst. There was created in the minde many of these enthusiasts, a pernicious and absurd association between intellectual power and moral depravity. From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness.

This affectation has passed away; and a few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron. To us he is still a man, young, noble, and unhappy. To our children he will be merely a writer; and their impartial judgment will appoint his place among writers, without regard to his rank or to his private history. That his poetry will undergo a severe sifting; that much of what has been admired by his contemporaries will be rejected as worthless, we have little doubt. But we have as little doubt, that, after the closest scrutiny, there will still remain much that can only perish with the English language.

LESSON LV.

Origin of the French Revolution.-CHANNING.

COMMUNITIES fall by the vices of the great, not the small. The French Revolution is perpetually sounded in our ears, as a warning against the lawlessness of the people. But whence came this revolution? Who were the regicides? Who beheaded Louis XVI.? You tell me the Jacobins ; but history tells a different tale. I will show you the be headers of Louis XVI. They were Louis XIV., and the Regent who followed him, and Louis XV. These brought their descendant to the guillotine.

The priesthood, who invoked the edict of Nantz, and drove from France the skill and industry, and virtue and pi

ety, which were the sinews of her strength; the statesmen who intoxicated Louis XIV. with the scheme of universal empire; the profligate, prodigal, shameless Orleans; and the still more brutalized Louis the XV., with his court of panders and prostitutes; these made the nation bankrupt, broke asunder the bond of loyalty, and overwhelmed the throne and altar in ruins. We hear of the horrors of the Revolution; but in this as in other things, we recollect the effect without thinking of the guiltier cause.

The revolution was indeed a scene of horror; but when I look back on the reigns which preceded it, and which made Paris almost one great stew and gaming house, and when I see altar and throne desecrated by a licentiousness unsurpassed in any former age, I look on scenes as shocking to the calm and searching eye of reason and virtue, as the tenth of August and the massacres of September. Bloodshed is indeed a terrible spectacle; but there are other things almost as fearful as blood. There are crimes that do not make us start and turn pale like the guillotine, but are deadlier in their workings.

God forbid, that I should say a word to weaken the thrill of horror, with which we contemplate the outrages of the French Revolution. But when I hear that revolution quoted to frighten us from reform, to show us the danger of lifting up the depressed and ignorant mass, I must ask whence it came ? and the answer is, that it came from the intolerable weight of misgovernment and tyranny, from the utter want of culture among the mass of the people, and from a corruption of the great, too deep to be purged away except by destruction.

I am almost compelled to remember, that the people, in this their singular madness, wrought far less woe than kings and priests have wrought, as a familiar thing, in all ages of the world. All the murders of the French Revolution did not amount, I think, by one-fifth, to those of the "Massacre of St. Bartholomew." The priesthood and the throne, in one short night and day, shed more blood, and that the best blood of France, than was spilled by Jacobinism and all other forms of violence during the whole revolution. Even the atheism and infidelity of France were due chiefly to a licentious priesthood and a licentious court. It was religion, so called, that dug her own grave.

In offering this plea for the multitude, I have no desire to transfer to the multitude uncontrolled political power. I look at power in all hands with jealousy. I wish neither rich nor poor to be my masters. What I wish is, the improvement, the elevation of all classes, and especially of the most numerous class, because the most numerous, because the many are mankind, and because no social progress can be hoped but from influences which penetrate and raise the mass of men. The mass must not be confined and kept down through a vague dread of revolutions. A social order requiring such a sacrifice, would be too dearly bought. No order should satisfy us, but that which is in harmony with universal improvement and freedom.

LESSON LVI.

The Might with the Right.-ANONYMOUS.

MAY every year

but draw more near

The time when strife shall cease,

And truth and love all hearts shall move

To live in joy and peace.

Now sorrow reigns, and earth complains,
maintains ;

For folly still her

power

But the day shall yet appear

When the might with the right and the truth shall be;
And come what there may, to stand in the way,
That day the world shall see.

Let good men ne'er of truth despair,
Though humble efforts fail ;

We'll give not o'er, until once more

The righteous cause prevail.

In vain and long, enduring wrong,

The weak may strive against the strong;

But the day shall yet appear,

When the might with the right and the truth shall be;
And come what there may, to stand in the way,
That day the world shall see.