ng the Island, he exclaims--"Byron! the sorcerer! He can do with
me according to his will. If it is to throw me headlong upon a desert
island; if it is to place me on the summit of a dizzy cliff--his power
is the same. I wish he had a friend, or a servant, appointed to the
office of the slave, who was to knock every morning at the
chamber-door of Philip of Macedon, and remind him he was mortal." From
Parr's life we learn that Sardanapalus affected him even more
strongly. "In the course of the evening the doctor cried out, 'Have
you read Sardanapalus?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Right; and you couldn't sleep a
wink after it?' 'No.' 'Right, right--now don't say a word more about
it to-night.' The memory of that fine poem seemed to act like a spell
of horrible fascination upon him." Perhaps from a few anecdotes like
this, we gain a much more vivid impression of the sensation which
Byron's poems excited on their first appearance, and their strong hold
upon the imagination and passions of the public, than we could obtain
from the most elaborate description of their effects. If such was
their power upon an old scholar like Parr, what must have been their
influence upon younger and more inflammable minds?

The editor's preface to Don Juan is no less valuable than
entertaining. It contains not merely the opinions expressed of the
poem by the reviews and magazines, but those of the newspapers, and
enables us to gather the judgment of the English people upon that
strange combination of sublimity and ribaldry, sentiment and wit,
tenderness and mockery, at the time it first blazed forth from the
press. The suppressed dedication of the poem to Southey is also given
in full, with all its brutal blackguardism and drunken brilliancy. In
truth, the volume conveys an accurate impression of all the sides of
Byron's versatile nature, and from its very completeness is the less
likely to be injurious. There is no edition of his poems which we
could more safely commend to the reader, as it exhibits Byron the
poet, Byron the scoffer, Byron the roue, in his true colors and real
dimensions; and if, after reading it, a person should adopt the old
cant about his brilliant rascalities, and the old drivel about his
sentimental misanthropy, the fault is in the reader rather than the
volume. For our own part we are acquainted with no edition of any
celebrated author, equaling this in the remorselessness with which the
man is stripped of all the factitious coverings