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could not meet with a single twig upon it. Mr. O'Reilly has our permission to print this further elucidation' in the second edition of his quarto.

To be serious for a moment-General Valencey, (from whom most of this rambling stuff is taken,) though a man of learning, wrote more nonsense than any man of his time; and has unfortunately been the occasion of much more than he wrote. His reveries which, as they came from him, afforded occasional glimpses of ingenuity, when taken up by those who, like Bernard O'Reilly, have neither learning, nor taste, nor judgment, nor even common sense to direct them, degenerate into mere absurdities, too mad for reason, too foolish for mirth.

He, however, is so elated with his success,' in the etymological line,' that he pursues his inquiries with increased vigour. He has actually collected a vocabulary of no less than six and twenty words of pure Esquimaux, among which are piccaninny, a child-canoe, a boat, &c.; and he has set the people themselves right as to the true manner of writing and pronouncing their name, which, it appears, is Uskee. From Uskee comes (we know not how) yak, and from yak, yankee;-of doodle Mr. O'Reilly says nothing. His most surprising discovery, however, is that of the derivation of the word Uskee itself, with which we should have favoured our readers had not the author, unfortunately for his literary fame,' contrived, in imitation of his betters, to mix up so much filth and obscenity with his speculations as to render it quite unfit for the public eye

or ear.

We shall not trouble our readers with all the instances in which we have caught our learned author tripping, though, for the sake of doing justice to our own character for sagacity, we are under the necessity of noticing a few of them. Thus we apprehend there is a trifling mistake in the information now first communicated to the world, that' Columbus came to Britain,' and that he was refused protection,' (Introduction, p. 10); that two noble Venetians, following his example, obtained a ship in Ireland, and sailed to West Friesland in 1380,' not many years after he, whose example they followed, was born. But though they got their ship in Ireland, and though Ireland traded with West Friezeland, the Irish, it seems, know nothing of the matter, and for this plain reason, because Queen Elizabeth deprived them of their records. (p. 10.) Still more unluckily for the Irish, this extensive island, peopled with polished inhabitants dwelling in a hundred towns, was, shortly after its discovery, suddenly overwhelmed in the ocean, and disappeared with every living creature on its surface,' (p. 10)—those beneath its surface, we take for granted, floated off in safety. It was situated, we are informed, ' in the fifty-eighth degree, between Ice

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land and Greenland,' (p. 11.) both of which, of course, must then have extended, at least, as far south as that parallel, though they have since receded towards the North Pole. That there was a West Friezeland Mr. O'Reilly assures us is by no means doubtful; that it was not the Greenland of late note' is equally certain; and that it is now named the Sunken Land of Buss cannot be called in question:—yet in the very next page he says: Quære? May not this land of Buss, so sunken, bear some probable reference to the Old or Lost Greenland, or the Atlantis of the Greek writers? It would not be easy to disprove this.' (p. 12). We will not contest the point with the learned author, especially as, after all, this island, with its hundred cities, which was metamorphosed from West Friezeland to Buss, from Buss to West Greenland, and from West Greenland to the Atlantis of the Greek writers,' turns out to be neither more nor less than the famed Ultima Thule of the ancients'!' aud as whole valleys of dreadful soundings, and peaks of tremendous and destructive contact, buried in the ocean water, forbid an exact inquiry regarding its actual position.' (p. 12.)

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But if Mr. O'Reilly has perplexed us a little with this multinominal country, in return, he has set us at ease with regard to Spitzbergen, which we had supposed to be a cluster of islands, but which he has ascertained, from his two months cruize in Davis's Strait, to be one island.' (p. 47). We are moreover instructed that this one island (Spitzbergen) is utterly uninhabitable in the winter months,' and, finally, that the attempt has never yet been made.' Will not the Dutch and the Russians take shame to themselves for publishing in the face of the world, that their people have frequently wintered there! We are also informed that the bergy fragments' from the icy continent' seldom pass the latitude of Statenhoek before they become finally dissolved;' of course, the accounts of ice-islands seen in the Atlantic are false. And by way of further consolation, it is added, that the icy continent itself must finally disappear, as the melted snow has eaten deep and tremendous chasms into its sides.

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One word more-We are not much in the habit of deciding on the price of books, considering that as not within the critic's province; yet when, as on the present occasion, the enormous sum of fifty shillings is charged for a very thin quarto,' we cannot but think it fair that the public should be apprized of what it is composed.It is this consideration alone which has led us to waste a word on a composition so utterly worthless as the volume before us.

ART.

ART. IX.-Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto IV. By Lord
Byron. 1818.

Farewell! a word that must be, and hath been-
A sound which makes us linger;-yet-farewell!
Ye! who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene
Which is his last, if in your memories dwell
A thought which once was his, if on ye swell
A single recollection, not in vain

He wore his sandal-shoon, and scallop-shell;
Farewell! with him alone may rest the pain,

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If such there were--with you, the moral of his strain!' THIS solemn valediction, the concluding stanza of Lord Byron's poem, forms at once a natural and an impressive motto to our essay. There are few things,' says the moralist, not purely evil, of which we can say, without some emotion of uneasiness, this is the last. Those who could never agree together shed tears when mutual discontent has determined them to final separation, and of a place that has been frequently visited, though without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness of heart.' When we resume, therefore, our task of criticism, and are aware that we are exerting it for the last time upon this extraordinary work, we feel no small share of reluctance to part with the Pilgrim, whose wanderings have so often beguiled our labours, and diversified our pages. We part from Childe Harold' as from the pleasant and gifted companion of an interesting tour, whose occasional waywardness, obstinacy and caprice are forgotten in the depth of thought with which he commented upon subjects of interest as they passed before us, and in the brilliancy with which he coloured such scenery as addressed itself to the imagination. His faults, if we at all remember them, are recollected only with pity, as affecting himself indeed, but no longer a concern of ours:-his merits acquire double value in our eyes when we call to mind that we may perhaps never more profit by them. The scallop-shell and staff are now laid aside, the pilgrimage is accomplished, and Lord Byron, in his assumed character, is no longer to delight us with the display of his wondrous talents, or provoke us by the use he sometimes condescends to make of them, —an use which at times has reminded us of his own powerful simile, 'It was as is a new-dug grave,

Closing o'er one we sought to save.'

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Before we part, however, we feel ourselves impelled to resume a consideration of his Pilgrimage,' not as consisting of detached accounts of foreign scenery and of the emotions suggested by them, but as a whole poem, written in the same general spirit, and pervaded by the same cast of poetry. In doing this, we are con

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scious we must repeat much which has perhaps been better said by others, and even be guilty of the yet more unpardonable crime of repeating ourselves. But if we are not new we will at least be brief, and the occasion seems to us peculiarly favourable for placing before our readers the circumstances which secured to the Pilgrimage of Childe Harold a reception so generally popular. The extrinsic circumstances, which refer rather to the state of the public taste than to the genius and talent of the author, claim precedence in order because, though they are not those on which the fame of the poet must ultimately rest, they are unquestionably the scaffolding by means of which the edifice was first raised which now stands independent of them.

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Originality, as it is the highest and rarest property of genius, is also that which has most charms for the public. Not that originality is always necessary, for the world will be contented, in the poverty of its mental resources, with mere novelty or singularity, and must therefore be enchanted with a work that exhibits both qualities. The vulgar author is usually distinguished by his treading, or attempting to tread, in the steps of the reigning favourite of the day. He is didactic, sentimental, romantic, epic, pastoral, according to the taste of the moment, and his fancies and delights,' like those of Master Justice Shallow, are sure to be adapted to the tunes which the carmen whistle. The consequence is, not that the herd of imitators gain their object, but that the melody which they have profaned becomes degraded in the sated ears of the public -its original richness, wildness and novelty are forgotten when it is made manifest how easily the leading notes can be caught and parodied, and whatever its intrinsic merit may have been, it becomes, for the time, stale and fulsome. If the composition which has been thus hunted down possesses intrinsic merit, it may—indeed it will-eventually revive and claim its proper place amid the poetical galaxy; deprived, indeed, of the adventitious value which it may at first have acquired from its novelty, but at the same time no longer over-shaded and incumbered by the croud of satellites now consigned to aos and primæval night. When the success of Burns, writing in his native dialect with unequalled vigour and sweetness, had called from their flails an hundred peasants to cudgel their brains for rhymes, we can well remember that even the bard of Coila was somewhat injured in the common estimationterpiece of painting is degraded by being placed amid the flaring colours and ill-drawn figures of imitative daubers. The true poet attempts the very reverse of the imitator. He plunges into the stream of public opinion even when its tide is running strongest, crosses its direction, and bears his crown of laurel as Cæsar did his imperial mantle, triumphant above the waves. Such a phenomenon sel

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dom fails at first to divide and at length to alter the reigning taste of the period, and if the bold adventurer has successfully buffeted the ebbing tide which bore up his competitor, he soon has the benefit of the flood in his own favour.

In applying these general remarks to Lord Byron's gravest and most serious performance, we must recal to the reader's recollection that since the time of Cowper he has been the first poet who, either in his own person, or covered by no very thick disguise, has directly appeared before the public, an actual living man expressing his own sentiments, thoughts, hopes and fears. Almost all the poets of our day, who have possessed a considerable portion of public attention, are personally little known to the reader, and can only be judged from the passions and feelings assigned by them to persons totally fictitious. Childe Harold appeared-we must not say in the character of the author-but certainly in that of a real existing person, with whose feelings as such the public were disposed to associate those of Lord Byron. Whether the reader acted right or otherwise in persisting to neglect the shades of distinction which the author endeavoured to point out betwixt his pilgrim and himself, it is certain that no little power over the public attention was gained from their being identified. Childe Harold may not be, nor do we believe he is, Lord Byron's very self, but he is Lord Byron's picture, sketched by Lord Byron himself, arrayed in a fancy dress, and disguised perhaps by some extrinsic attributes, but still bearing a sufficient resemblance to the original to warrant the conclusion that we have drawn. This identity is so far acknowledged in the preface to the Canto now before us, where Lord Byron thus expresses himself.

'The poem also, or the pilgrim, or both, have accompanied me from first to last; and perhaps it may be a pardonable vanity which induces me to reflect with complacency on a composition which in some degree connects me with the spot where it was produced, and the objects it would fain describe; and however unworthy it may be deemed of those magical and memorable abodes, however short it may fall of our distant conceptions and immediate impressions, yet as a mark of respect for what is venerable, and of feeling for what is glorious, it has been to me a source of pleasure in the production, and I part with it with a kind of regret, which I hardly suspected that events could have left me for imaginary objects.'-pp. vi, vii.

But besides the pleasing novelty of a traveller and a poet, throwing before the reader his reflections and opinions, his loves and his hates, his raptures and his sorrows; besides the novelty and pride which the public felt, upon being called as it were into familiarity with a mind so powerful, and invited to witness and partake of its

deep

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