This we think is out of place at least, if we must not say out of character; and though the author may tell us that human calamities are naturally subjects of derision to the Ministers of Vengeance, yet we cannot be persuaded that satirical and political allusions are at all compatible with the feelings and impressions which it was here his business to maintain. When the Fatal Sisters are again assembled before the throne of Arimanes, Manfred suddenly appears among them, and refuses the prostrations which they require. The First Destiny thus loftily announces him :

"Prince of the Powers invisible! This man

Is of no common order, as his port

And presence here denote; his sufferings
Have been of an immortal nature, like

Our own; his knowledge and his powers and will,
As far as is compatible with clay,

Which clogs the ethereal essence, have been such
As clay hath seldom borne; his aspirations
Have been beyond the dwellers of the earth,
And they have only taught him what we know-
That knowledge is not happiness, and science
But an exchange of ignorance for that
Which is another kind of ignorance.

This is not all;-the passions, attributes'

Of earth and heaven, from which no power, nor being,

Nor breath from the worm upwards is exempt,

Have pierced his heart; and in their consequence

Made him a thing, which I, who pity not,

Yet pardon those who pity. He is mine,
And thine, it may be-be it so, or not,

No other Spirit in this region hath

A soul like his-or power upon his soul." P. 47, 48.

At his desire, the ghost of his beloved Astarte is then called up, and appears-but refuses to speak at the command of the powers who have raised her, till Mandfred breaks out into this passionate and agonising address :

"Hear me, hear me

Astarte! my beloved! speak to me:

I have so much endured-so much endure

Look on me! the grave hath not changed thee more
Than I am changed for thee. Thou lovedst me

Too much, as I loved thee: we were not made

To torture thus each other, though it were
The deadliest sin to love as we have loved.
Say that thou loath'st me not-that I do bear
This punishment for both-that thou wilt be
One of the blessed-and that I shall die,
For hitherto all hateful things conspire
To bind me in existence-in a life
Which makes me shrink from immortality-
A future like the past. I cannot rest.
I know not what I ask, nor what I seek;

I feel but what thou art-and what I am;

And I would hear yet once, before I perish,
The voice which was my music-Speak to me!
For I have call'd on thee in the still night,

Startled the slumbering birds from the hush'd boughs,
And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves
Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name,

Which answer'd me-many things answer'd me-
Spirits and men-but thou wert silent all.
Yet speak to me! I have outwatch'd the stars,
And gazed o'er heaven in vain in search of thee.
Speak to me! I have wander'd o'er the earth,
And never found thy likeness-Speak to me!
Look on the fiends around-they feel for me:
I fear them not, and feel for thee alone-
Speak to me! though it be in wrath ;-but say-

PHAN. Farewell!
MAN.

PHAN. Manfred!
NEM.

Say, shall we meet again?

One word for mercy! Say, thou lovest me.
[The Spirit of ASTARTE disappears.
She's gone, and will not be recall'd." P. 50-52.

The last act, though in many passages very beautifully written, seems to us less powerful. It passes altogether in Manfred's castle, and is chiefly occupied in two long conversations between him and a holy abbot, who comes to exhort and absolve him, and whose counsel he repels with the most reverent gentleness, and but few bursts of dignity and pride. The following passages are full of poetry and feeling :

"Ay-father! I have had those earthly visions
And noble aspirations in my youth,

To make my own the mind of other men,
The enlightener of nations; and to rise
I knew not whither-it might be to fall;
But fall, even as the mountain-cataract,

Which having leapt from its more dazzling height,
Even in the foaming strength of its abyss,
(Which casts up misty columns that become
Clouds raining from the re-ascended skies),
Lies low but mighty still.-But this is past,
My thoughts mistook themselves.

ABBOT. And why not live and act with other men?
MAN. Because my nature was averse from life;
And yet not cruel; for I would not make,

But find a desolation :-like the wind,

The red-hot breath of the most lone Simoom,

Which dwells but in the desert, and sweeps o'er

The barren sands which bear no shrubs to blast,

And revels o'er their wild and arid waves,

And seeketh not, so that it is not sought,
But being met is deadly; such hath been

The course of my existence; but there came

Things in my path which are no more." P. 59, 60.

There is also a fine address to the setting sun-and a singular miscellaneous soliloquy, in which one of the author's Roman recollections is brought in, we must say, somewhat unnaturally :

"The stars are forth, the moon above the tops
Of the snow-shining mountains.-Beautiful!

I linger yet with Nature, for the Night

Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade

Of dim and solitary loveliness,

I learn'd the language of another world.

I do remember me, that in my youth,

When I was wandering,-upon such a night
I stood within the Coliseum's wall,

'Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome:
The trees which grew along the broken arches
Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the stars
Shone through the rents of ruin; from afar
The watchdog bay'd beyond the Tiber;
More near from out the Cæsars' palace came
The owl's long cry, and, interruptedly,

and

Of distant sentinels the fitful song

Begun and died upon the gentle wind.

Some cypresses beyond the time-worn breach
Appear'd to skirt the horizon, yet they stood
Within a bowshot.-

And thou didst shine, thou rolling Moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which soften'd down the hoar austerity
Of rugged desolation, and fill'd up,

As 'twere, anew, the gaps of centuries;
Leaving that beautiful which still was so,

And making that which was not, till the place

Became religion, and the heart ran o'er

With silent worship of the great of old!" P. 68, 69.

In his dying hour he is beset with Demons, who pretend to claim him as their forfeit but he indignantly and victoriously disputes their claim, and asserts his freedom from their thraldrom.

"Must crimes be punish'd but by other crimes,
And greater criminals?-Back to thy hell!
Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel;
Thou never shalt possess me, that I know:
What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain from thine:
The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or ill-derives

No colour from the fleeting things without;
But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy,

Born from the knowledge of its own desert.

Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me;
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey-

But was my own destroyer, and will be

My own hereafter.-Back, ye baffled fiends!
The hand of death is on me-but not yours!

[The Demons disappear." P. 74, 75.

There are great faults, it must be admitted, in this poem ;-but it is undoubtedly a work of genius and originality. Its worst fault, perhaps, is, that it fatigues and overawes us by the uniformity of its terror and solemnity. Another is the painful and offensive nature of the circumstance on which its distress is ultimately founded. It all springs from the disappointment or fatal issue of an incestuous passion; and incest, according to our modern ideas-for it was otherwise in antiquity-is not a thing to be at all brought before the imagination. The lyrical songs of the Spirits are too long, and not all excellent. There is something of pedantry in them now and then; and even Manfred deals in classical allusions a little too much. If we were to consider it as a proper drama, or even a finished poem, we should be obliged to add, that it is far too indistinct and unsatisfactory. But this we take to be according to the design and conception of the author. He contemplated but a dim and magnificent sketch of a subject which did not admit of more accurate drawing, or more brilliant colouring. Its obscurity is a part of its grandeur;-and the darkness that rests upon it, and the smoky distance in which it is lost, are all devices to increase its majesty, to stimulate our curiosity, and to impress us with deeper awe.

It is suggested, in an ingenious paper in a late Number of the Edinburgh Magazine, that the general conception of this piece, and much of what is excellent in the manner of its execution, have been borrowed from "the Tragical History of Dr. Faustus" of Marlow; and a variety of passages are quoted, which the author considers as similar, and, in many respects, superior to others in the poem before us. We cannot agree in the general terms of this conclusion;-but there is, no doubt, a certain resem

blance, both in some of the topics that are suggested, and in the cast of the diction in which they are expressed. Thus, to induce Faustus to persist in his unlawful studies, he is told that the Spirits of the Elements will serve him

"Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids,
Shadowing more beauty in their ayrie browes

Than have the white breasts of the Queene of Love."

And again, when the amorous sorcererer commands Helen of Troy to revive again to be his paramour, he addresses her, on her first appearance, in these rapturous lines

"Was this the face that launcht a thousand ships,

And burn'd the toplesse towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen! make me immortal with a kiss!

Her lips sucke forth my soule !-see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come give me my soule againe.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in that lip,

And all is dross that is not Helena.

O! thou art fairer than the evening ayre,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand starres;
More lovely than the monarch of the skies
In wanton Arethusa's azure arms!"

The catastrophe, too, is bewailed in verses of great elegance and classical beauty:

in

"Cut is the branch that might have growne full straight,

And burned is Apollo's laurel bough

That sometime grew within this learned man.
Faustus is gone!-regard his hellish fall,

Whose fiendful torture may exhort the wise,

Only to wonder at unlawful things."

But these, and many other smooth and fanciful verses in this curious old drama, prove nothing, we think, against the originality of Manfred; for there is nothing to be found there of the pride, the abstraction, and the heart-rooted misery in which that originality consists. Faustus is a vulgar sorcerer, tempted to sell his soul to the Devil for the ordinary price of sensual pleasure, and earthly power and glory-and who shrinks and shudders agony when the forfeit comes to be exacted. The style, too, of Marlow, though elegant and scholarlike, is weak and childish compared with the depth and force of much of what we have quoted from Lord Byron; and the disgusting buffoonery and low farce of which his piece is principally made up, place it much more in contrast, than in any terms of comparison with that of his noble successor. In the tone and pitch of the composition, as well as in the character of the diction in the more solemn parts, the piece before us reminds us much more of the Prometheus of Æschylus, than of any more modern performance. The tremendous solitude of the principal person that the supernatural beings with whom alone he holds communion-the guilt-the firmness-the misery-are all points of resemblance to which the grandeur of the poetic imagery only gives a more striking effect. The chief differences are, that the subject of the Greek poet was sanctified and exalted by the established belief of his country, and that his terrors are nowhere tempered with the sweetness which breathes from so many passages of his English rival.

LALLA ROOKH.*

There is a great deal of our recent poetry derived from the East; but this is the finest orientalism we have had yet. The land of the Sun has never shone out so brightly on the children of the North-nor the sweets of Asia been poured forth, nor her gorgeousness displayed so profusely to the delighted senses of Europe. The beauteous forms, the dazzling splendours, the breathing odours of the East, seem at last to have found a kindred poet in that Green Isle of the West, whose Genius has long been suspected to be derived from a warmer clime, and now wantons and luxuriates in these voluptuous regions, as if it felt that it had at length regained its native element. It is amazing, indeed, how much at home Mr. Moore seems to be in India, Persia, and Arabia; and how purely and strictly Asiatic all the colouring and imagery of his books appears. He is thoroughly imbued with the character of the scenes to which he transports us; and yet the extent of his knowledge is less wonderful than the dexterity and apparent facility with which he has turned it to account in the elucidation and embellishment of his poetry. There is not a simile or description, a name, a trait of history or allusion of romance, which belongs to European experience; or does not indicate an entire familiarity with the life, nature, and learning of the East. Nor are these barbaric onaments thinly scattered to make up a show. They are showered lavishly over all the work; and form, perhaps too much, the staple of the poetry-and the riches of that which is chiefly distinguished for its richness. We would confine this remark, however, to the descriptions of external objects and the allusions to literature and history-to what may de termed the matériel of the poetry before us. The characters and sentiments are of a different order. They cannot, indeed, be said to be copies of European nature; but they are still less like that of any other region. They are, in truth, poetical imaginations ;—but it is to the poetry of of rational, honourable, considerate, and humane Europe, that they belong-and not to the childishness, cruelty, and profligacy of Asia. So far as we have yet seen, there is no sound sense, firmness of purpose, or principled goodness, except among the natives of Europe and their genuine descendants.

There is something very extraordinary, we think, in the work before us -and something which indicates in the author, not only a great exuberance of talent, but a very singular constitution of genius. While it is more splendid in imagery—and for the most part in very good taste-more rich in sparkling thoughts and original conceptions, and more full indeed of exquisite pictures, both of all sorts of beauties and virtues, and all sorts of sufferings and crimes, than any other poem that has yet come before us : we rather think we speak the sense of all classes of readers when we add, that the effect of the whole is to mingle a certain feeling of disappointment with that of admiration-to excite admiration rather than any warmer sentiment of delight-to dazzle, more than to enchant-and, in the end, more frequently to startle the fancy, and fatigue the attention, with the constant succession of glittering images and high-strained emotions, than to maintain a rising interest, or win a growing sympathy, by a less profuse or more systematic display of attractions.

* Lalla Rookh, by Thomas Moore.-Vol. xxix. p. 1. November, 1817.