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youth, and might have learnt that pibroch is not a bagpipe, any more thau duet means a fiddle.

As the author has dedicated so large a part of his volume to immortalise 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 :

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We are sorry to hear so bad an account of the college psalmody as is contained in the following Attic stanzas :

"Our choir would 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 thorough-bred 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 hereafter," 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 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.*

[It is authoritatively stated by his biographer, that Jeffrey-the Editor-was not the author of the article. Lord Byron, who at first supposed him the sole aggressor, settled down later into the belief that his antagonist was the versatile Henry Brougham, to whose pen the attack is now very generally attributed. The Monthly Review, in those days the next in circulation to the Edinburgh, gave a much more favourable notice of the "Hours of Idleness." "These compositions (it said) are generally of a plaintive or an amatory cast, with an occasional mixture of satire; and they display both ease and strength-both pathos and fire. It will be expected that marks of juvenility and of haste should be discovered in these productions; and we seriously advise our young bard to fulfil with submissive perseverance the duties of revision and correction. We discern, in Lord Byron, a degree of mental power, and a turn of mental disposition, which render us solicitous that both should be well cultivated and wisely directed, in his career of life."-Lord Byron repaid the Edinburgh Critique with a Satire-and became himself a Monthly Reviewer.

INTRODUCTION 10 HOURS OF IDLENESS.

EARLY in the year 1806 Lord Byron was sitting with Miss Pigot at Southwell, listening to the poems of Burns, when he told the fair reciter that he too was a poet, and wrote down the lines "In thee I fondly hoped to clasp." Then it was that the idea occurred to him of printing his manuscripts for private circulation, and he immediately set about revising old and composing new pieces. The volume was completed in November, and a copy sent to his friend Mr. Beecher, who returned a remonstrance in verse against some licentious stanzas. Lord Byron acknowledged the justice of the rebuke, and the same evening burnt the whole edition, with the exception of a copy retained by Mr. Beecher, and another which had been forwarded to Mr. Pigot at Edinburgh. In January, 1807, he had a second private and enlarged edition of a hundred copies ready for distribution. His favoured correspondents commended the contents, and he was encouraged to prepare an edition for sale, which was published in the course of the summer by Mr. Ridge, a bookseller of Newark,-the printer of the previous private volumes. Twenty poems equal, in Moore's opinion, if not superior to those retained, were now omitted, and others inserted. A second public impression, with further curtailments and additions, came out in the spring of 1808, almost simultaneously with the famous article in the Edinburgh Review. Hitherto the notices of his book had been mostly favourable, and the contemptuous reversal in the high court of criticism of the decision pronounced by inferior judges was gall and wormwood to the author. He affected indifference at the time, and pretended that, "as he had been lucky enough on the whole, his repose and appetite were not discomposed." Afterwards, when the mortification had been swallowed up in victory, he acknowledged how his spirit had fired at the blow. "It knocked me down," he said, "but I got up again. The effect upon me was rage and resistance; but not despondency nor despair. I was bent on falsifying their raven predictions, and determined to show them, croak as they would, that it was not the last time they should hear from me.' He refreshed his spirits with three bottles of claret, and on that very day commenced "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." After the first twenty lines he felt considerably better, -a sense of the smart he was about to inflict operating like a charm upon the wound he had received. He affirmed at the time that the Edinburgh reviewers had not performed their task well, but later in life he called the critique “a master-piece of low wit." The injustice of the article was not, as is often alleged, in the insensibility it showed to poetic genius, for those who could see the germs of "Childe Harold" in the "Hours of Idleness," might detect the oak in an Nine pieces out of ten are rather vapid imitations of preceding writers, and though the acute and benignant eye of Walter Scott had already distinguished

acorn.

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HOURS OF IDLENESS.

ON THE DEATH OF A YOUNG LADY.

COUSIN TO THE AUTHOR, AND VERY DEAR TO HIM.

HUSH'D are the winds, and still the evening gloom,
Not e'en a zephyr wanders through the grove,
Whilst I return to view my Margaret's tomb,
And scatter flowers on the dust I love.

Within this narrow cell reclines her clay,

That clay, where once such animation beam'd;
The King of Terrors seized her as his prey,
Not worth, nor beauty, have her life redeem'd.

Oh! could that King of Terrors pity feel,

Or Heaven reverse the dread decrees of fate,
Not here the mourner would his grief reveal,
Not here the muse her virtues would relate.

But wherefore weep? Her matchless spirit soars
Beyond where splendid shines the orb of day;
And weeping angels lead her to those bowers,
Where endless pleasures virtue's deeds repay.

And shall presumptuous mortals Heaven arraign,
And, madly, godlike Providence accuse?
Ah! no, far fly from me attempts so vain ;-
I'll ne'er submission to my God refuse.

1 The author claims the indulgence of the reader more for this piece than, perhaps, any other in the collection; but as it was written at an earlier period than the rest (being composed at the age of fourteen), and his first essay, he preferred submitting it to the indulgence of his friends in its present state, to making either addition or alteration.

VOL. 1.

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