expect from the distinguished author. It is vigorous, and free from the defects so much criticised in Werner. Its style is so different that it is difficult to believe that they were written by the same man. The whole of this fragment will be printed in the next volume of Mr. Murray's edition of Byron, which contains Werner. He has in the meantime kindly allowed me to make a few extracts from it in support of my contention. The opening lines give a vivid description of the utter desolation of Werner's surroundings, and the last two speeches of Josepha and Werner appear to me to have great merit : Josepha. The storm is at its height. How the wind howls And the rain patters on the flapping casement Which quivers in its frame; the night is starless, Not cheerly, Werner-still our hearts are warm. The tempest is without, or should be so, For we are sheltered here, where Fortune's clouds May roll all harmless over us, as the wrath Of these wild elements that menace now, But do not reach us. Werner (without attending, and walking disturbedly, speaking to himself). No. 'Tis past, 'tis blighted; The last faint hope, to which my withered fortunes Clung with a feeble and a fluttering grasp, Yet clung convulsively, for 'twas the last, Is broken with the rest. Would that my heart were! Which give my heart vitality to suffer, As it has suffered through long years till now. Again, the following lines seem to me touchingly to reveal Josepha's tender devotion: Oh! banish these discomfortable thoughts So we have ever been, but I remember The time when thy Josepha's smile could turn So let it now-Alas! you hear me not. Werner. What said you? Let it pass, no matter what. Think me not churlish, Sweet; I am not well, My brain is hot and busy; long fatigue And last night's watchings have oppressed me much. Werner. I'll to no bed to-night. What fearful words are these? What may they mean? I know not what Thy mystery may bind to, but my fate, My heart, my will, my love, are linked with thine, And I would share thy sorrow-lay it open. Werner. I forfeited the name in wedding thee. A wayward son. 'Tis a long tale, too long, And I am heart-sick of the heavy thought. Josepha. Oh! I could weep, but that were little solace; Yet say why through long years from me withheld This fearful secret that has gnawed thy soul? Werner. Why, had it not been base to call on thee The thirst of grandeur in thy gentle spirit ; To tell thee what thou should'st have been, the wife Of one in power, birth, wealth pre-eminent, Then sudden quailing in that lofty tone, To bid thee soothe thy husband, peasant Werner? Josepha. I would thou wert indeed the peasant Werner, And suited to thy lot. Werner. And I have loved thee deeply, long and dearly, And most of all the last, has maddened me, Josepha. Would thou never hadst, Since I have been a blight upon thy hope, Werner. Yet say not so, for all that I have known Has been with thee and from thee. Wert thou not, Ulric has left us. All save thou have left me Father and son, fortune, fame, power, ambition, All save the long remorse, the consciousness, Misspent in miserably gazing upward, While others soared. Away! I'll think no more. I may doubtless be blamed for publishing facts unfavourable to one of our greatest poets. But eminent men have their failings no less than ordinary mortals, and it would be wrong to suppress all knowledge of them, and thereby give a faulty and incomplete impression of their character. Their faults may indeed be dealt with tenderly, but not at the expense of truth. Byron's admirers might indeed rejoice if nothing worse could be alleged against him than the fact disclosed in this article. After all, his motive was good, and he injured no one living. He was ready, in order to promote the emancipation of Greece, a cause to which he had devoted his life, to give his name to a work which, to say the least, was not likely to add to his fame. It must not, however, be imagined that Werner was without any merit. It is a bad poem but a fairly good drama. It was the only one of the dramas published in Byron's name which kept the stage for any time. I myself remember seeing it acted, with Macready as Werner, in 1836, when it was still popular. Although it reflected no honour on its assumed author, it was a creditable performance for the Duchess of Devonshire, whose literary pretensions were slight. She died many years before I was born, but from all accounts she was a most delightful person, amiable, charming, and cultivated. She wrote some verses which were admired by her contemporaries, an admiration which did not survive her. The following lines, which breathe a glowing love of liberty, occur in her ode on the passage of the Mount St. Gothard.' And hail the chapel! Hail the platform wild! Where Tell directed the avenging dart With well-strung arm that first preserved the child, No blood demanded and no slaves enchain'd; It was this poem which caused Coleridge to write an ode to her and address her in these words 2- Thenceforth your soul rejoiced to see O beautiful! O Nature's child! Beneath the shaft of Tell! O! lady nursed in pomp and pleasure, F. LEVESON GOWER. 1 Published in the Morning Post on the 21st of December, 1799. THE MARLBOROUGH GEMS To amateurs of engraved gems, the recent sale by auction at Christie's of the famous Marlborough cabinet has been a very memorable event. Although the collection included not a single Assyrian cylinder, not one of the archaic Greek scaraboids, no Phoenician, Egyptian, or Etruscan scarabs, and nothing of Sassanian or Byzantine origin, yet this great assemblage of gems was peculiarly rich both in cameos and intaglios of later Greek and Roman, Renaissance, Cinque-cento, and modern date. It had all the prestige which naturally belongs to a collection begun so far back as the reign of Charles the First, continually added to during the whole of a second century, and kept together till the latter end of a third. Every critic had written upon it, folios of admirable engravings by Bartolozzi, from drawings by no less an artist than Cipriani, had made some of its masterpieces familiar to students, and an unusually full catalogue, describing every gem, had whetted the appetite of connoisseurs, both by what it revealed and by what it left to the imagination. Yet the stones themselves had been seen by only a few. Not many can recollect the exhibition at the Archæological Institute in 1861, when the Royal gems and those of the Dukes of Marlborough and Devonshire were shown in London for a short space of time. Fourteen years later, when in 1875 the seventh Duke of Marlborough decided to part with this ancestral possession, it was exposed to view at Christie's for a few days, and was then snatched, like the cup of Tantalus, from a crowd of expectant buyers, with the startling announcement that all the 736 lots had been sold together privately to one person, Mr. Bromilow. From that day to this those who have been privileged to set eyes on the hidden treasure have not been numerous, and the sudden advertisements that it was again for sale aroused the intensest curiosity. Of course all the leading English amateurs of note rushed at once to examine the collection, and they were elbowed around the glass show-cases by an eager public, and by connoisseurs and collectors from Germany, France, and America. At first sight the impression produced was rather a disappointing one. The wheat and the chaff were too intimately mixed. But as the gems were examined one by one, it became apparent that if quite half of them had no right to a place in such a gathering, at least one moiety of the remainder were of exceptional value, and some few of notable consequence. That this was the general view was soon amusingly clear. Collectors who prefer intaglios went about saying to their friends that the cameos were really very important indeed, while the cameophils let it be freely understood how highly they esteemed the intaglios. Both opinions were right, and each marked with the same degree of candour. No amateur could fail to be keenly interested in having such a unique chance to observe the result of centuries of collecting by rich dilettanti who enjoyed quite unusual opportunities. A critical survey soon showed that while many opportunities had been seized, many more must have been lost. For the number of gems of high rank bears a small proportion to the whole, possibly about one to seven, and the acquisition of one such gem about every three years does not seem a rapid rate of progress. It may also be said with truth that antique intaglios as fine as or finer than the best in the Marlborough collection are even in these days now and then unearthed and brought for sale to England. As to cameos, the case is different. To begin with, they were never so numerous, and perhaps the greater part of the large antique cameos of note have come down to us from treasury to treasury, in royal or episcopal ownership. Such gems are rarely dug out of graves or the débris of ruined cities. So it is but seldom indeed that a modern connoisseur has the chance which this sale afforded of adding to his collection even a single antique cameo of importance for its size. Naturally, therefore, the hardest battles of bidding centred about the large cameos, the surface beauties of which appeal vividly to those who have no vision for the delicate and microscopic details of the finest intaglios. It is a curious coincidence that the aggregate sum for which the cabinet was lately sold by auction, stone by stone, came within a few hundred pounds of the 35,000l. which Mr. Bromilow gave for it as a whole in 1875. The history of the Marlborough gems reads quite like a page from a peerage. Mr. Story-Maskelyne tells it at length in his introduction to the elaborate catalogue which, with some friendly assistance from such well-known connoisseurs as the late Rev. C. W. King, and Mr. Newton, Mr. Vaux, and Mr. Poole of the British Museum, he prepared for his own pleasure and use nearly thirty years ago, and presented to the seventh Duke, who had it printed for private distribution in 1870. It was under the numbers which are borne by the gems in this book that the various lots were sold in the |