THE

BRITISH REVIEW,

AND .

LONDON CRITICAL JOURNAL.

JUNE, 1812.

ART. XVI. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; a Romaunt. By Lord Byron. London: J. Murray. 1812.

AT a time when so many of those who by birth are called to the councils of the state are conspiring against their own order by a voluntary degradation of themselves into grooms and stagecoachmen; and while, on the other hand, every thing is done to raise the condition of the vulgar, to improve their discernment, and to dissipate their prejudices,-any young nobleman who, by his intellectual attainments and occupations, brings dignity to the peerage, so far at least, deserves well of his country. As it has been the constant heresy of the British Reviewers to impute the dangers of our church establishment to the supineness, the thoughtlessness, and the misconduct of some of the clergy themselves, so are they also of opinion, that if the aristocratical part of our civil constitution is in peril, it is chiefly so from the consequences of an infatuated neglect of the interests of their own order, so conspicuous in a portion (we tremble to think how large a portion!) of the nobility themselves.

As the church offers no sanctuary even to her own sons when they seek a shelter within its pale from the obloquy created by their own misconduct, so neither will political privileges, or emblems of distinction, devices, or muniments, or coats of arms, rescue the noble from the consequences of their self-devoting acts of infamy and folly. What is illustrious, as well as what is sacred, in a free state, has no proper fulcrum but the common

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opinion. Not that flux thing called opinion, which vents itself in common halls and tumultuous assemblies, excited by the hypocritical harangues of designing men, but that permanent sentiment which involuntarily decides the unprejudiced mind in favour of truth and virtue, attests the motion of the divinity within us, and points at once to our origin and our destination. This native sense of the preference due to virtue, is that which we mean by opinion; and which is in fact that right constitution of our nature, which, though a thousand accidents may suspend its operation at particular times, and in particular places, will, wherever good institutions and a free comniunication of mind exist, ultimately recover its ascendancy. In this nation of free men, and this age of free inquiry, when the very zeal so laudably shewn by the great for diffusing the blessings of instruction, is raising up critics upón greatness itself from the plough, the loom, and the forge, the call for circumspection is deep and loud in the ears of those who perceive that their titles are nothing but splendid obligations, and pledges of superior worth.

In directing our attention to the commendable addictions of the noble author whose work is before us, we have felt ourselves irresistibly impelled to make some allusion to the present exposed state of dignities and authorities. It was impossible in touching upon this subject not to breathe out our impotent wishes for the improvement of the habits of a class of persons with whose elevation of character the fortune of the nation is so obviously connected-impossible not to deplore the inverted ambition of noblemen who aspire to be less than gentlemenimpossible, at the same time, not to dread the mad career of others who betray the common interest to gratify the malice of party, and who, to revenge their exclusion from power, do their utmost to furnish false accusation against government, and to expose the just and necessary exercise of authority to permanent and hopeless embarrassments.

Valuing, therefore, as we do, whatever tends to render nobility an object of merited respect, we are pleased at seeing a young lord wave his privilege to be foolish, and renounce the intellectual immunities of his birth. Lord Byron stands before the tribunal of criticism well prepared to challenge his accusers. Reviewers have already felt the chastisement of his offended muse; and that, not in their corporate but their individual capacities. The British Reviewers will neither deprecate nor deserve his poetical vengeance. They look neither to the right hand, or to the left, to consult the power or disposition of the person whose work is under their review. Their business is

with the work itself, its tendency, and its execution; and in strict adherence to the motto of their publication they will perform their duty like gentlemen; but their duty they will perform.

Before we enter upon our allotted task of criticism, let us congratulate our author upon the capability of improvement of which he has shewn himself to be possessed. We have read his second edition of his poems original and translated, and must avow ourselves of the same opinion, as to their merits, with those reviewers, who, by their contemptuous treatment of them, provoked such a signal retort from the irritated bard. Their satire, such as it was, shook the prætexta from the shoulders of the noble minor,

"Strung every nerve and braced the boy to man.”

By this time, we doubt not, the manlier mind of his lordship has forgiven the severity of the reviewers, and acquiesced in the justice, if not in the style, of their criticism. We were sorry however to see a second edition of these rhyming puerilities. A second edition should have been reserved for the amusement of his second childhood, leaving the vigorous intervening period undisgraced by the repetition of such insipidities; if he does not rather owe it to himself and to the dignity of his present muse, to abandon them to their own alacrity of sinking, till they fall into those realms of everlasting quiet, which, according to some lines in the poem under review, is the final destiny of all things appertaining to man.

We feel a strong sympathy with many of the sentiments so vigorously and poetically expressed in the satire on English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers; and from that specimen, as well as from some passages in the poem now before us, we are induced to think the author is eminently qualified for serious, ethical, and extended satire; according to the Roman model. We mean that which aims rather at the reformation of an age than the chastisement of an individual. The poem upon bards and reviewers is one of the happiest of those productions, to which the Dunciad has been the great pattern. But of the different kinds of satiric composition, the lowest and easiest is that which seeks to gratify private hostility, or the general appetite for personal ridicule, by ludicrous exhibitions of individual infirmity or folly. Lord Byron has, however, made his work the vehicle of good poetry, and useful lessons pointedly and melodiously expressed. Allowing too for the excrescences of wit, the levity which is so apt to accompany personal satire, and the lack of discretion pardonable in youth, the muse of his lordship seems to us to have grown both wiser and better during the interval between his first and second performance. His

praise of and sympathy with poor Little, as he calls him, in a stanza of one of the original poems, is turned to a juster and more manly sentiment on the character of that gentleman's muse, in the poem on bards and reviewers. The revels of unquiet old ladies of fashion; the pimping employments of some of our caterers of debauch in high life; the excitements and buffooneries of the opera; the sickly gloatings of amorous old peers; and the dangerous discomposure of maidenish modesty before those exotic scenes of privileged indecency, are all touched upon with a master's hand, and a poet's fire, we had almost said with the indignation of an ingenuous young English nobleman, who feels as he ought for his country, and his country's character. We must thank him too for his tender tribute to the memory of poor Henry Kirke White and we think that some credit for candour is due to his lordship, for bringing to his reader's mind the great disparity between his own boyish efforts, and those of a youth, who at a much greener age, uncomplimented, unassisted, uncaressed, in numbers as chaste as they were glowing, gave his first raptures to the cause of virtue and truth, strewing his humble and solitary path with the blossoms of original genius.

When we first heard of the poem of Childe Harold-a Romaunt-what could we expect, but a new assortment of chivalrous tales, of amours and battles, of giants and deliverers, of knights and Saracens, of dwarfs and demons? In this we were mistaken. And our puzzle is now to account for those portentous titles of a poem, the subject of which is certainly neither chastity, nor valour, nor truth; nor fairies, nor damsels, nor deliverers; nor heroes baptized, or infidel; but the narrative of a modern tourist, passing from place to place, with little or no incident, but with local descriptions most poetically dressed, and reflections which might occur to a mind like Lord Byron's without the pain or peril of travel. But to produce all this, what need was there of Childe Harold, or a Romaunt?

The origin of the word 'Romaunt' is well known to be thus derived. When the Latin tongue had been nearly corrupted and forgotten, its successor was the Romanse, or Provençal; being partly the Romana,' till then the language of the Romana provincia of Gaul, and partly the Frank, introduced by the conquering nation of that name. In this adulterated state

it was long the colloquial language of the vulgar, till it was, by degrees, refined into a proper vehicle of the literature of that middle æra. The metrical legends of chivalry being for a long time the most popular compositions in that language, came to assume, by way of emphasis, the very name of the language as

their own; and thus were distinguished by the appellations of Romans or Romants, and in the style of our old English diction, Romaunts. Lord Byron has adopted the most antique orthography of the word, and has thereby, for reasons unguessed at by us, given to his book a name the furthest removed that the English language could supply from the real description and character of its contents.

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With respect to the true meaning of the word 'Childe,' there appear to be considerable doubts among commentators. It seems to be a word of chivalrous import, and is found frequently in the old romances and ballads. Prefixed to the ballad of Childe Waters, in Percy's Relicks, there are some remarks on the word which are not very satisfactory. Notice is there taken of Mr. Theobald's opinion, that it was received, along with their romances, from the Spaniards, with whom infante signifies prince; and of that of another critic, who tells us, that "in the old times of chivalry, the noble youths who were candidates for knighthood, during the time of their probation were called infans, varlets, damoysels, bacheliers. The most noble of the youth particularly were called infants." The word is very common in the Faerie Queen. Thus, in book v. canto ii. stanza viii. Prince Arthur is called the childe: and it is to be observed, in corroboration of Theobald's conjecture, that in the fight between Prince Arthur and the souldan, in the eighth canto of the fifth book, Prince Arthur is called both the childe and the infant. See the stanzas xxxii. and xli.; and also book vi. canto viii. stanza xxv. So Fairfax, book xvi. xxxiv. of Rinaldo. Again, in the old ballad quoted in Shakespear's King Lear, the hero of Ariosto is called Childe Roland. One of the commentators on Spenser, however, observes, that the Saxon word cnihʊ, knight, signifies also a child. See Upton's Gloss to the Faerie Queen. In the Scottish ballad of Gil Morrice, the old title of which was Childe Maurice, the hero was an earl's son, of tender years and great beauty. Sir Tryamoure, in the romance under that title, is repeatedly called the chylde, before he was made a knight: and so, young Tristram, when just past the age of boy, and at the time of his being dubbed a squire by Sir Caledore, is called the chylde, in the sixth book and second canto of the Faerie Queen. Upon the whole, therefore, we may gather, that this appellation, though in some of its uses its original sense might be a little departed from, was chiefly bestowed on persons of princely descent, in the bloom of youth, rarely and richly endowed, and candidates for the office and renown of chivalry.

We have dwelt a little minutely upon the sense of this term,