manuscript sermons by him, the morality of which, we will venture to say, is quite as pure, as orthodox, as that of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan; yet we doubt whether Mr. Murray, the Mæcenas of poetry and orthodoxy, would give as much for the one as for the other. We do not look for the flowers of fancy in moral treatises, nor for a homily in his Lordship's irregular stanzas. The Decalogue, as a practical prose composition, or as a body of moral laws and precepts, is of sufficient weight and authority; but we should not regard the putting of this into heroic verse as an effort of the highest poetry. That "Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms" is no imputation on the pious rapture of the Hebrew bard: and we suspect his Lordship himself would object to the allegory in Spenser, as a drawback on the poetry, if it is in other respects to his Lordship's taste, which is more than we can pretend to determine. The Noble Letter-writer thus moralizes on this subject, and transposes the ordinary critical canons somewhat arbitrarily and sophistically.

"The depreciation of Pope is partly founded upon a false idea of the dignity of his order of poetry, to which he has partly contributed by the ingenuous boast,

That not in Fancy's maze he wandered long,
But stoop'd to Truth, and moraliz'd his song.

He should have written

rose to truth.' In my mind the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth. Religion does not make a part of my subject; it is something beyond human powers, and has failed in all human hands except Milton's and Dante's, and even Dante's powers are involved in his delineation of human passions, though in supernatural circumstances. What made Socrates the greatest of men? His moral truth-his ethics. What proved Jesus Christ the Son of God hardly less than his miracles? His moral precepts. And if ethics have made a philosopher the first of men, and have not been disdained as an adjunct to his Gospel by the Deity himself, are we to be told that ethical poetry, or didactic poetry, or by whatever name you term it, whose object is to make men better and wiser, is not the very first order of poetry; and are we to be told this too by one

of the priesthood? It requires more mind, more wisdom, more power, than all the 'forests' that ever were 'walked' for their 'description' and all the ethics that ever were founded upon fields of battle. The Georgics are indisputably, and, I believe, undisputedly, even a finer poem than the Æneid. Virgil knew this: he did not order them to be burnt.

The proper study of mankind is man.

"It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call 'imagination' and 'invention,'-the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem. If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems. What then has ruined it? His ethics. Pope had not this defect: his moral is as pure as his poetry is glorious." p. 42.

Really this is very inconsequential, incongruous reasoning. An Irish peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, would not fall upon more blunders, contradictions, and defective conclusions. Lord Byron talks of the ethical systems of Socrates and Jesus Christ. What made the former the great man he supposes? The invention of his system-the discovery of sublime moral truths. Does Lord Byron mean to say that the mere repetition of the same precepts in prose, or the turning of them into verse, will make others as great, or will make a great man at all? The two things compared are wholly disparates. The finding out the 48th proposition in Euclid made Pythagoras a great man. Shall we say that the putting this into a grave, didactic distich would make either a great mathematician or a great poet? It would do neither the one nor the other; though, according to Lord Byron, this distich would belong to the highest class of poetry, "because it would do that in verse which one of the greatest of men had wished to accomplish in prose." Such is the way in which his lordship transposes the common sense of the question, because it is his humour! The value of any moral truth depends on the philosophic invention implied in it. But this rests with the first author, and the general idea,

which forms the basis of didactic poetry, remains the same, through all its mechanical transmissions afterwards. The merit of the ethical poet must therefore consist in his manner of adorning and illustrating a number of these general truths which are not his own, that is, in the poetical invention and imagination he brings to the subject, as Mr. Bowles has well shown, with respect to the episodes in the Essay on Man, the description of the poor Indian, and the lamb doomed to death, which are all the unsophisticated reader ever remembers of that much-talkedof production. Lord Byron clownishly chooses to consider all poetry but what relates to this ethical or didactic truth as "a lie." Is Lear a lie? Or does his Lordship prefer the story, or the moral, in Æsop's Fables? He asks "why must the poet mean the liar, the feigner, the tale-teller? A man may make and create better things than these."-He may make and create better things than a common-place, and he who does not makes and creates nothing. The ethical or didactic poet necessarily repeats after others, because general truths and maxims are limited. The individual instances and illustrations, which his Lordship qualifies as "lies," "feigning," and "tale-telling," are infinite, and give endless scope to the genius of the true poet. The rank of poetry is to be judged of by the truth and purity of the moral-so we find it "in the bond,"—and yet Cowper, we are told, was no poet. Is there any keeping in this, or is it merely an air? Again, we are given to understand that didactic poetry "requires more mind, more power than all the descriptive or epic poetry that ever was written:" and as a proof of this, his Lordship lays it down that the Georgics are a finer poem than the Æneid. We do not perceive the inference here. "Virgil knew this: he did not order them to be burnt.

Does our author mean that this was Virgil's reason for liking his pastoral poetry better than his description of Dido and Æneas? But farther, there is a Latin poem (that of Lucretius) superior even to the Georgics; nay, it would have been so to any poem now in existence, but for one unlucky circumstance. And what is that? "Its ethics!" So that ethics have spoiled

the finest poem in the world. This is the rub that makes didactic poetry come in such a questionable shape. If original, like Lucretius, there will be a difference of opinion about it. If trite and acknowledged, like Pope, however pure, there will be little valuable in it. It is the glory and the privilege of poetry to be conversant about those truths of nature and the heart that are at once original and self-evident. His Lordship ought to have known this. In the same passage, he speaks of imagination and invention as "the two commonest of qualities." We will tell his Lordship what is commoner-the want of them. "An Irish peasant," he adds, "with a little whiskey in his head, will imagine and invent more than"-(What? Homer, Spenser, and Ariosto? No: but than)-" would furnish forth a modern poem." That we will not dispute. But at any rate, when sober the next morning, he would be as "full of wise saws and modern instances as his Lordship; and in either case, equally positive, tetchy, and absurd!

out reason.

His Lordship, throughout his pamphlet, makes a point of contradicting Mr. Bowles, and, it would seem, of contradicting himself. He cannot be said to have any opinions of his own, but whatever any one else advances, he denies out of mere spleen and rashness. "He hates the word invariable," and not with"What is there of human, be it poetry, philosophy, wit, wisdom, science, power, glory, mind, matter, life, or death, which is invariable?"-There is one of the particulars in this enumeration which seems pretty invariable, which is death. One would think that the principles of poetry are so too, notwithstanding his peevish disclaimer: for towards the conclusion of this letter he sets up Pope as a classic model, and considers all modern deviations from it as grotesque and barbarous.

"They have raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest architecture; and, more barbarous than the barbarians from whose practice I have borrowed the figure, they are not contented with their own grotesque edifice, unless they destroy the prior and purely beautiful fabric which preceded,* and which shames them and theirs for ever and ever."

*We have "purest architecture" just before; and "the prior fabric which preceded," is rather more than an inelegant pleonasm.

Lord Byron has here substituted his own invariable principles for Mr. Bowles's, which he hates as bad as Mr. Southey's variable politics. Will nothing please his Lordship-neither dull fixtures nor shining weather-cocks?-We might multiply instances of a want of continuous reasoning, if we were fond of this sort of petty cavilling. Yet we do not know that there is any better quarry in the book. Why does his Lordship tell us that "ethical poetry is the highest of all poetry," and yet that "Petrarch the sonnetteer" is esteemed by good judges the very highest poet of Italy? Mr. Bowles is a sonnetteer, and a very good one. Why does he assert that "the poet who executes the best is the highest, whatever his department," and then affirm in the next page that didactic poetry ❝ requires more mind, more wisdom, more power, than all the forests that ever were walked for their description ;" and then again, two pages after, that "a good poet can make a silk purse of a sow's ear:" that is, as he interprets it, "can imbue a pack of cards with more poetry than inhabits the forests of America?" That's a Non Sequitur, as Partridge has it. Why, contending that all subjects are alike indifferent to the genuine poet, does he turn round upon himself, and assume that "the sun shining upon a warming pan cannot be made sublime or poetical?" Why does he say that "there is nothing in nature like the bust of the Antinous, except the Venus," which is not in nature ?* Why does he call the first "that wonderful creation of perfect beauty," when it is a mere portrait, and on that account so superior to his favourite coxcomb the Apollo? Why does he state that (6 more poetry cannot be gathered into existence" than we here see, and yet that this poetry arises neither from nature nor moral exaltednes; Mr. Bowles and he being at issue on this very point, viz. the one affirming that the essence of poetry is derived from nature, and his Lordship, that it consists in moral truth? Why does he consider a shipwreck as an artificial incident? Why does he make the excellence of Falconer's Shipwreck consist in its technicalities, and not in its faithful description of common feelings and inevitable calamity? Why does he say

*See Mr. Bowles's Two Letters,