occasional short burst of pathos or splendour, than to interrupt thus a
prolonged tone of solemnity by any descent into the ludicrous or
burlesque.[43] In the former case, the transition may have the effect of
softening or elevating, while, in the latter, it almost invariably
shocks;--for the same reason, perhaps, that a trait of pathos or high
feeling, in comedy, has a peculiar charm; while the intrusion of comic
scenes into tragedy, however sanctioned among us by habit and authority,
rarely fails to offend. The noble poet was, himself, convinced of the
failure of the experiment, and in none of the succeeding Cantos of
Childe Harold repeated it.

Of the satiric parts, some verses on the well-known traveller, Sir John
Carr, may supply us with, at least, a harmless specimen:--

"Ye, who would more of Spain and Spaniards know,
Sights, saints, antiques, arts, anecdotes, and war,
Go, hie ye hence to Paternoster Row,--
Are they not written in the boke of Carr?
Green Erin's Knight, and Europe's wandering star.
Then listen, readers, to the Man of Ink,
Hear what he did, and sought, and wrote afar:
All these are coop'd within one Quarto's brink,
This borrow, steal (don't buy), and tell us what you think."

Among those passages which, in the course of revisal, he introduced,
like pieces of "rich inlay," into the poem, was that fine stanza--

"Yet if, as holiest men have deem'd, there be
A land of souls beyond that sable shore," &c.

through which lines, though, it must be confessed, a tone of scepticism
breathes, (as well as in those tender verses--

"Yes,--I will dream that we may meet again,")

it is a scepticism whose sadness calls far more for pity than blame;
there being discoverable, even through its very doubts, an innate warmth
of piety, which they had been able to obscure, but not to chill. To use
the words of the poet himself, in a note which it was once his intention
to affix to these stanzas, "Let it be remembered that the spirit they
breathe is desponding, not sneering, scepticism,"--a distinction never
to be lost sight of; as, however hopeless may be the conversion of the
scoffing infidel, he who feels pain in doubting has still alive within
him the seeds of belief.

At the same time with Childe Harold, he had three other works in the
press,--his "Hints from Horace," "The Curse of Minerva," and a fifth
edition of "English Bards and Scotch Re