brig of Balgounie on a mare's foal,* she gets out of a difficulty in a very ingenious manner. The first line runs thus:

Brig of Balgounie, though wight be thy wa'.

The English reader need not be told that wight is an old Saxon word, signifying strong; but as Madame did not know this, and as no gallant English wight was at hand to explain it, she substitutes another word, which is proverbially different from white, and gives the English line

and translates it

Brig of Balgounie, black's thy wa';

Pont de Balgounie, votre mur est noir.

In another place she wonders very much that, after the coroner's jury had given a verdict of wilful murder against William Lord Byron, and he had been found guilty of homicide upon his trial, he should be liberated on pleading the privilege of his peerage. It is not surprising that she should not know the difference between the crime of murder (for which in England we hang lords and commoners alike) and homicide, nor that the verdict of a coroner's jury is not conclusive as to a party's guilt; but it is a little astonishing that she did not ask some Englishman, and there is not a footman in Paris who could not have told her. She says, however, that she has great difficulty in believing that the English legislation contains a law which exempls peers of the realm from being sentenced in a case of murder;' and we hope this is a difficulty which she will not get over, since, with all her prejudices against England, we are really not quite such barbarians as she takes us for.

Notwithstanding the little faults we have mentioned, and many others which we could point out, Madame Belloc's is a very ingenious book; very creditable to her good taste as well as to her talents; and one for which we ought to be very grateful to her, because its end and aim are to make Lord Byron more universally and accurately known among her countrymen. For ourselves, we assure her that we are deeply impressed with this sentiment, and that, if our homage be worth the acceptance, we lay it with all humility at her feet; begging her to believe, that, although we have taken the liberty of laughing at her, it has been in perfect good humour, and that we do not like people at

* Vide page 38.

all the less because they give us an opportunity of laughing at them. In their turn they may-as they will-laugh at us, and they are heartily welcome.

Lord Byron, with a singular inconsistency, seemed to have transferred all the fondness which he once had for Childe Harold,' the first love of his young Muse, to Don Juan,' the production of his later and less amiable years. It was like some of those instances which the perverseness of human minds occasionally displays in the world, where men, who have lived during the best and happiest part of their lives in the uninterrupted joy of an honest affection, become, after death shall have torn from them the object of their first passion, the bond-slaves of a dissolute and meretricious affection, which has nothing to recommend it but the facility which it affords them for indulging in forbidden pleaLord Byron wasted upon Don Juan' the full splendour of his rare talents, and polluted the purity of his mind by suffering it to be occupied with licentious descriptions and degrading efforts. In this poem, blamable and unworthy as it is in many respects, there are passages of such rare and original beauty, that they cannot be surpassed; and yet the poem is one which persons of honesty and feeling must reprobate; and which ladies will not read, because they cannot do so without feeling that modesty, which is their purest and brightest ornament, offended by many of its passages and allusions.

sures.

In order to remedy this inconvenience as much as may be practicable, we have proposed to ourselves the task of selecting such passages from the poem as are worthy of their author and the age in which he wrote, accompanying them with an analysis of the subject, so as to render its course intelligible to those readers to whom, for the reasons we have stated, it must, without such assistance, remain for ever a book scaled.' This task is highly pleasing to ourselves, because it is a tribute which we are delighted with the opportunity of paying to the memory of the first genius of our age; and we can testify our regard for him in no more cordial a manner than by drawing a veil over his errors and indiscretions, while we give to the public view those beauties which need only be seen to challenge universal admiration.

In order to accomplish this purpose we shall not regard the chronological order in which the subsequent parts of Don Juan' were published, but proceed, without marking the intervals which ensued between the different cantos, succinctly to describe the nature of the poem.

The third canto begins by resuming the story of Juan and Haidee. The beauty of the opening stanzas is almost incomparable :

We left Juan sleeping,

Pillowed upon a fair and happy breast,

And watched by eyes that never yet knew weeping,
And loved by a young heart, too deeply blessed
To feel the poison through her spirit creeping,
Or know who rested there; a foe to rest
Had soiled the current of her sinless years,
And turned her pure heart's purest blood to tears.

Oh, Love! what is it in this world of ours

Which makes it fatal to be loved? Ah! why
With cypress branches hast thou wreathed thy bowers,
And made thy best interpreter a sigh?

As those who dote on odours pluck the flowers,

And place them on their breast-bat place to die-
Thus the frail beings we would fondly cherish.

Are laid within our bosoms but to perish.

After some badinage on the subject of love and marriage as they usually occur in the world, and in the course of which the poet's jokes are not very new nor very good, he goes on to describe the happiness of Juan and his young bride, which was so great that Haidee 'forgot the island was her sire's.'

That respectable old gentleman, who carried on the trade of a pirate, had been long detained from home by cross winds and the course of his occupations, during all which time Haidee ruled the whole island, and was cheerfully obeyed by its inhabitants. At length Lambro (for that is the name of the father) returns home, and arrives when he is least expected. A few stanzas are devoted to the description of that throng of sensations which crowd upon the heart when the distant view of home first falls upon the eyes after a long absence, and in this the poet has singularly mixed up feeling and whimsicality. The scene which Lambro now beheld is strikingly and delightfully painted, and is better than all the Travels in the East' which have been published in the last century:

Still more nearly to the place advancing,
Descending rather quickly the declivity,

Through the waved branches, o'er the green sward glancing,
'Midst other indications of festivity,

Seeing a troop of his domestics dancing

Like dervises, who turn as on a pivot, he