ecollections, and to rekindle the earliest aspirations of the mind after
greatness and true glory with a pen of fire. The names of Tasso, of
Ariosto, of Dante, of Cincinnatus, of Caesar, of Scipio, lose nothing of
their pomp or their lustre in his hands, and when he begins and continues
a strain of panegyric on such subjects, we indeed sit down with him to a
banquet of rich praise, brooding over imperishable glories,

"Till Contemplation has her fill."

Lord Byron seems to cast himself indignantly from "this bank and shoal of
time," or the frail tottering bark that bears up modern reputation, into
the huge sea of ancient renown, and to revel there with untired, outspread
plume. Even this in him is spleen--his contempt of his contemporaries
makes him turn back to the lustrous past, or project himself forward to
the dim future!--Lord Byron's tragedies, Faliero,[140] Sardanapalus, etc.
are not equal to his other works. They want the essence of the drama. They
abound in speeches and descriptions, such as he himself might make either
to himself or others, lolling on his couch of a morning, but do not carry
the reader out of the poet's mind to the scenes and events recorded. They
have neither action, character, nor interest, but are a sort of _gossamer_
tragedies, spun out, and glittering, and spreading a flimsy veil over the
face of nature. Yet he spins them on. Of all that he has done in this way,
the _Heaven and Earth_ (the same subject as Mr. Moore's _Loves of the
Angels_) is the best. We prefer it even to _Manfred_. _Manfred_ is merely
himself with a fancy-drapery on: but in the dramatic fragment published in
the _Liberal_, the space between Heaven and Earth, the stage on which his
characters have to pass to and fro, seems to fill his Lordship's
imagination; and the Deluge, which he has so finely described, may be said
to have drowned all his own idle humours.

We must say we think little of our author's turn for satire. His "English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is dogmatical and insolent, but without
refinement or point. He calls people names, and tries to transfix a
character with an epithet, which does not stick, because it has no other
foundation than his own petulance and spite; or he endeavours to degrade
by alluding to some circumstance of external situation. He says of Mr.
Wordsworth's poetry, that "it is his aversion." That may be: but whose
fault is it? This is the satire of a lord, who is accustomed to have a