yne Knight, share the
same fate.

"I am sorry--but 'Childish Recollections' must be suppressed during
this edition. I have altered, at your suggestion, the _obnoxious
allusions_ in the sixth stanza of my last ode.

"And now, my dear Becher, I must return my best acknowledgments for
the interest you have taken in me and my poetical bantlings, and I
shall ever be proud to show how much I esteem the _advice_ and the
_adviser_.

Believe me, most truly," &c.

Soon after this letter appeared the dreaded article,--an article
which, if not "witty in itself," deserved eminently the credit of
causing "wit in others." Seldom, indeed, has it fallen to the lot of
the justest criticism to attain celebrity such as injustice has
procured for this; nor as long as the short, but glorious race of
Byron's genius is remembered, can the critic, whoever he may be, that
so unintentionally ministered to its first start, be forgotten.

It is but justice, however, to remark,--without at the same time
intending any excuse for the contemptuous tone of criticism assumed by
the reviewer,--that the early verses of Lord Byron, however
distinguished by tenderness and grace, give but little promise of
those dazzling miracles of poesy with which he afterwards astonished
and enchanted the world; and that, if his youthful verses now have a
peculiar charm in our eyes, it is because we read them, as it were, by
the light of his subsequent glory.

There is, indeed, one point of view, in which these productions are
deeply and intrinsically interesting. As faithful reflections of his
character at that period of life, they enable us to judge of what he
was in his yet unadulterated state,--before disappointment had begun
to embitter his ardent spirit, or the stirring up of the energies of
his nature had brought into activity also its defects. Tracing him
thus through these natural effusions of his young genius, we find him
pictured exactly such, in all the features of his character, as every
anecdote of his boyish days proves him really to have been, proud,
daring, and passionate,--resentful of slight or injustice, but still
more so in the cause of others than in his own; and yet, with all this
vehemence, docile and placable, at the least touch of a hand
authorised by love to guide him. The affectionateness, indeed, of his
disposition, traceable as it is through every page of this volume, is
yet but faintly done justice to, even by himself;--his whole yo