smiling, sarcastic, joyous sinner, there can be neither pity
nor pardon. Our knowledge that it is committed by one of the most
powerful intellects our island ever has produced lends intensity a
thousand-fold to the bitterness of our indignation. Every high thought
that was ever kindled in our breasts by the Muse of Byron, every pure and
lofty feeling that ever responded from within us to the sweep of his
majestic inspirations, every remembered moment of admiration and
enthusiasm, is up in arms against him. We look back with a mixture of
wrath and scorn to the delight with which we suffered ourselves to be
filled by one, who, all the while he was furnishing us with delight,
must, we cannot doubt it, have been mocking us with a cruel mockery; less
cruel only, because less peculiar, than that with which he has now turned
him from the lurking-place of his selfish and polluted exile to pour the
pitiful chalice of his contumely on the surrendered devotion of a virgin
bosom, and the holy hopes of the mother of his child. It is indeed a sad
and a humiliating thing to know, that in the same year, there proceeded
from the same pen two productions in all things so different as the
fourth canto of "Childe Harold" and his loathsome "Don Juan."

'We have mentioned one, and, all will admit, the worst instance of the
private malignity which has been embodied in so many passages of "Don
Juan;" and we are quite sure the lofty-minded and virtuous men whom Lord
Byron has debased himself by insulting will close the volume which
contains their own injuries, with no feelings save those of pity for him
that has inflicted them, and for her who partakes so largely in the same
injuries.'--August, 1819.

* * * * *

'BLACKWOOD,'--iterum.

'We shall, like all others who say anything about Lord Byron, begin, sans
apologie, with his personal character. This is the great object of
attack, the constant theme of open vituperation to one set, and the
established mark for all the petty but deadly artillery of sneers,
shrugs, groans, to another. Two widely different matters, however, are
generally, we might say universally, mixed up here,--the personal
character of the man, as proved by his course of life; and his personal
character, as revealed in or guessed from his books. Nothing can be more
unfair than the style in which this mixture is made use of. Is there a
noble sentiment, a lofty thought, a sublime conception, in the book? "Ah,
yes!"