tained a considerable diminution; though this is no longer supposed to be progressive. The Kamtschadales are described to be as formerly, honest, gentle, lazy, drunken, servile, disburthened of all care and consideration for the future. The population of the peninsula is reckoned at 4574, of whom 2760 are Kamtschadales, with nearly the same number of dogs; 1260 Russians; 598 Koriaks, and other races. These particulars exceed the total by 44, for which the author must answer.

Captain Cochrane now returned by the same route, and through nearly the same places; but we have generally incorporated his second observations with his first, and need not accompany him back. He visited Kiakhta, and the corresponding Chinese city of Maimatshin, but found nothing to add to the account given by Cox, of the commercial intercourse between these two great empires.

THE obituary of this year presented few names that appear entitled to a place in this department of the volume. There fell, however, one name, mighty beyond any other; an individual who, with one great and past exception, ranked perhaps prominent in the eye of the world. The mighty ruler and conqueror of Europe scarcely, in a literary and refined age, held a more conspicuous place than the monarch of the realms of poesy. The individual, who must be at once recognized under this title, has not been less marked by his life than by his poems, and pursued in both a daring and eccentric orbit, whose aspect, though doubtful and perilous, rivetted continually the gaze of mankind. A painful task devolves on the writer who must trace a career at once so bright and so dark; who must neither forget the reverence due to gifts so exalted, nor suffer their splendour, by the associating power of the human heart, to be transferred to other qualities which the fate of our frail and erring nature causes to be combined in the same character.

The Byron lineage was ancient and

illustrious, being to be traced back to the Conquest. Two Byrons fell at the battle of Cressy; and Sir John de Byron distinguished himself on the field of Bosworth. But their most distinguished figure was in the civil wars, when Sir John, then the family representative, had eleven sons who fought in the cause of Charles. Of these, seven were present, and four fell, at the fatal battle of Marston Moor. Sir John Byron, one of the few survivors, received for these and other services, the title of Lord, which ever after remained in his family. Another ancestor was Commodore Byron, noted for his unfortunate voyage and perilous adventures on the coast of Patagonia. He maintained always the reputation of a good seaman, but a most unfortunate one, and passed among the sailors under the appellation of " Foul Weather Jack."

John, the son of Commodore Byron, and father to the subject of the present memoir, is one of whom everything that is evil is related. He was called "Mad Jack Byron," and his dissoluteness was so extreme, that it was considered a

disgrace to be seen in his company. After ruining his fortune, he endeavoured to patch it up by marrying Miss Catherine Gordon, an Aberdeenshire heiress. In a few years, he squandered her property, went abroad, and left her almost destitute. In this situation, being shunned by all his family, Mrs Byron went to reside at Aberdeen, where she lived in the most retired manner, and carried on the early education of her son. Considering" that she had nothing on earth but him to live for," she is alleged to have shown an extreme and injudicious fondness, which tended to strengthen the defects of his character. At school, it was observed, that he did not show any peculiar delight in study, and was chiefly ambitious to excel in hardy sports, particularly in swimming, fishing, and steering a boat. His powers were, however, shown when absence occasionally threw him behind his school-fellows, by the rapidity with which he made up to them; when, having redeemed his loss, he contented himself with maintaining the character of a tolerable scholar.

When George Byron Gordon, as he was then called, was little more than ten years old, his uncle, Lord Byron, a man of violent and ungovernable passions, and who had killed a near relation in a duel, died without issue. The deserted orphan became thus heir to his title and estate, and had an entirely new prospect before him. His education was immediately put in the usual train of that of Englishmen of rank, and he was sent successively to Harrow, and to Cambridge. Both at school and at college, he had the reputation of a wild, clever boy, who trampled upon all rules, and distinguished himself more without the class than within. His tone of disdainful sarcasm was already shown at college, by keeping a bear, with the declared purpose of making the animal a graduate. Before the age

of sixteen, he formed a boyish passion for a Miss Chaworth, whom he met at Newstead during his vacations. She married another, to the deep distress of her youthful lover, who had, erroneously as he afterwards admitted, ascribed to her all the perfections which belong to heroines of romance. It seems too much, however, with some of his biographers, to impute to this disappointment much of the gloom of his future character. Such early mishaps must be pretty common, and the impression, probably, would not be of very long duration. Doubtless, however, this adventure would have an influence in developing his character, and making him feel the depths of his own heart.

At nineteen, Lord Byron retired to Newstead, and appeared to employ himself chiefly in country sports. Although, however, there is so little record of any regular study, it is plain he must somehow or other have imbibed habits of reading, and a taste for literature, since, at this very time, there came forth " Hours of Idleness," which could not have been the product of an uncultivated mind. Though considerably crude and juvenile, they have many passages marked by that vigour of thought and fancy which rendered him afterwards the first poet of his age. The volume, however, was overtaken by a woful disaster. The leading critical journal of the nation, though in an article we believe not written by its editor himself, not only pronounced sentence of condemnation, but held it up to ridicule and contempt. Such treatment could not fail to call forth all that gall which was copiously lodged in the breast of the injured bard. Fecit indignatio versus. He produced "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," a very keen and powerful satire, and certainly a wonderful performance for a boy of twenty. It was of too popular a nature to be neglected, and

gained him considerable reputation. Unfortunately, his own conduct afforded room for the satire which he thus exercised upon others. Repairing to London, he plunged into that vortex of dissipation which was but too tempting to a youth in full possession of wealth, and freed from any restraint. In so powerful a mind, this mode of life was soon found to be empty and unsatisfactory, while the false principles which he had early imbibed indisposed him to turn into any better career. "At this period of his life," says Mr Dallas, "his mind was full of bitter discontent. Already satiated with pleasure, and disgusted with those companions who have no other resource, he had resolved on mastering his appetite; he broke up his harams, and he reduced his appetite to a diet the most simple and abstemious; but the passions of his heart were too mighty; nor did it ever enter into his mind to overcome them; resentment, anger, and hatred, held full sway over him, and his greatest gratification at that time was in overcharging his pen with gall, which flowed in every direction, against individuals, his country, the world, the universe, creation, and his Creator. He might have become, he ought to have been, a different creature; and he but too well accounts for the unfortunate bias of his disposition in the following lines:

"E'en I, least thinking of a thoughtless throng, Just skill'd to know the right, and choose the wrong,

Forced at that age when reason's shield is lost, To fight my course through passion's countless host,

When every path of Pleasure's flowery way Has lured in turn, and all have led astray."

He was, besides, in a situation peculiarly solitary, having never received any notice from the relations of his family. The Earl of Carlisle, with whom he was nearly connected, and whose notice he courted as a man of letters, treated him with extreme coldness.

When he went to take his seat in the House of Peers, he had not an individual of his own rank to introduce him. When there, indeed, the disdainful manner in which he met the cordial reception of the Lord Chancellor, cannot be justified. On leaving England, he told Mr Dallas, "I do not believe I shall leave behind me, yourself and family excepted, and perhaps my mother, a single being who will care what becomes of me."

Thus, the young peer left England in a state, apparently, of entire disgust with the world, and apathy to everything. Yet close observers might have foreseen this as the era of a great crisis in his destiny. The human heart has an elastic power, which causes it to rise with augmented force from out of its moments of deepest depression. The soul, as it emerges out of this state of living death, feels objects with a force, and receives impressions of a depth, to which it is a stranger in its easy and happy hours. The scene which now met his eyes was one undoubtedly calculated to kindle the highest pitch of poetic enthusiasm. He viewed the scenery and monuments of ancient Greece, both equally awful and magnificent; he had the opportunity of treading the theatre of those mighty achievements, which we are taught to regard with almost religious veneration. Man, indeed, and the existing state of society, presented itself under a gloomy and degraded aspect. the oriental mind, that is deeply poetic. Yet is there not wanting something in Recluse and serious, all their passions possess a solemn depth to which Europeans are strangers. We may particularly notice their veneration for ancestors, the intimate and almost gay communion between the living and the dead. Hence that singular celebration, the weekly feast of the dead, when the family repairs to the tombs of their ancestors, and hold it as a period of festival.

Lord Byron returned thus with a rich, untouched mine of high poetic ideas. When Mr Dallas saw him soon after, Childe Harold already existed, but was stated only as a series of stanzas carelessly thrown out, and which the opinion of an eminent critic had led him to think unworthy of publication. He himself was full of an imitation of Horace, which he intended to make a sort of sequel to the "English Bards." The public are certainly indebted to Mr Dallas for inspiring him with more just conceptions upon this head, and for at least obtaining permission to publish it. It was still some time before he would grant permission to affix his name to it; but occasional glimpses obtained of it in the literary circle at Murray's, brought such flattering judgments, that he ceased to be very apprehensive. The work, on its appearance, was received with an acclaim of admiration of which there is scarcely any example, and the author took his station at once in the first class of English poets. The whole train of thought is grand, daring, and original; but the classic and solemn enthusiasm inspired by the view of the departed glories of Greece, has inspired strains which nothing, perhaps, in the whole circle of poetry, has surpassed.

"And yet how lovely in thine age of woe,
Land of lost gods and godlike men, art thou!
Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow,
Proclaim thee nature's varied favourite now;
Thy fanes, thy temples, to thy surface bow,
Commingling slowly with heroic earth,
Broke by the share of every rustic plough."

"Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild, Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy

fields;

Among the attractions of this poem for the public, one of the most powerful was the impression so irresistibly suggested, that the wanderings and feelings pourtrayed in it were those of the poet himself. In spite of repeated protests, the public continued to believe, in respect to every successive poem, that the model of its hero had not been sought for in the world at large, but had been found in his own heart. It has often struck us, considering that egotism, in ordinary cases, is the most dull and tiresome of all things, how the egocommunicate to their writings so pecutism of a Byron and a Rousseau should liar a charm. It is evident that it is not genius overcoming a difficulty, but possessing an advantage which heightens its effect. Perhaps the chief reason is, that the one egotize on little individual objects and occurrences which concern nobody but themselves; the others, on