Then, in the last gasp of thine agony,

Amidst thy many murders, think of mine!
Thou den of drunkards with the blood of princes!
Gehenna of the waters! thou sea Solom!

Thus I devote thee to the infernal gods!

Thee and thy serpent seed!

[Here the Doge turns, and addresses the Executioner.

Strike as I struck the foe!

Have struck those tyrants!
Strike-and but once!

Slave, do thine office!

Strike as I would

Strike deep as my curse!

[The Doge throws himself upon his knees, and as the Executioner raises his sword the scene closes.

Notwithstanding the merit of this work as a poem, it was in many respects deficient as a tragedy, and was not less generally disapproved of, on merely critical grounds, than his Don Juan' had been, for the evil it was likely to do to the morals of society. We have before expressed an opinion that Lord Byron's blank verse was defective, and that his amazing facility in every other species of composition was in this always baffled. A common fault in it is, that he ends his lines frequently with insignificant monosyllables and expletives, thus weakening the sentiment, and destroying at once the harmony and the emphasis, in a description of verse so much in need of both, that it is almost worthless without them.

Lord Byron chose to write an ill-tempered preface to this tragedy, in which he took great credit to himself for having preserved the dramatic unities, the neglect of which, he chose to say, was 'the reproach of the English theatrical compositions;' as if, with the example of Shakspeare and the other English dramatists before their eyes, his countrymen cared one straw about the unities, or those who first invented or since had followed them. For this he was justly blamed, because his arrogance was unbecoming, and his assertions untrue. In this same preface he announced that, in composing this tragedy, he had no view to the stage. Certainly never was any tragedy written that could be less available for such a purpose, and yet afterwards Mr. Elliston thought fit to bring it out at Drury Lane. The representation was interdicted by the authority of the Court of Chancery, and it was not less fortunate for the author's reputation than for the manager's profit that its performance was prevented.

In the opinion of the public The Doge of Venice' was decidedly a failure. The main cause of this was its want of interest. It possessed some of the first and more rare requisites for a tragedy-sublimity, terror, and pathos; but it was deficient in that without which the rest are unavailing-interest. The subject was badly chosen. The passion of the Doge for revenge is absurd and extravagant, when compared with the cause which is supposed to have produced it. A ribald slander, one of those insignificant lies which swarm like summer gnats in the hot air of a court, and which sting even less than those insects, is here made to be the moving cause by which an old experienced prince-a wise, brave, and not a bad man-is induced to peril his crown and life, and risk the detsruction of his country, in a conspiracy with a band of very ordinary ruffians. The character of the Duchess is too cold to excite any but the most slender sympathy. She is a good sort of woman enough, but as frigid and as formal as an old Quaker of the old school. She seems made to bear sorrow with the utmost fortitude; and she makes a long speech, in the midst of her affliction, in a very learned but not lady-like style. She is as different from the passionate and truly feminine women of Lord Byron's other poems as this stiff and labored tragedy is from the more congenial productions of his warm and sensitive mind.

To turn, however, from the faults to the beauties of this play-there are some passages of genuine poetry, and more which are full of the rich and commanding, though somewhat verbose eloquence, which characterizes the best periods of our drama. The soliloquy of Leoni is an exquisite composition: it has all that an elegant combination of senti.. ment and expression can give to it, and makes us regret still more that the poet who was capable of such a flight should load his free wing with the despised fetters of the critical unities.

Subjoined to this tragedy is a long poetical rhapsody; in four cantos, called The Prophecy of Dante.' It has all the impulse and feeling of real poetry; but it is obscure, and the subject is not the most interesting to English readers. It is put into the mouth of the great poet, and consists of a strain of reproaches and prophetic denunciations of the future fate of Italy, over which the seer weeps while he pronounces the doom. This, though perhaps the least pleasing, is not the least powerful, of Lord Byron's productions. He says, in his preface to this poem, that it was suggested to him in the course of a visit to the city of Ravenna, in the summer of 1819, that, as he had composed a poem on the subject of Tasso's confinement, he ought to be induced by the

sight of Dante's tomb, which is in Ravenna, to pay a similar homage to the memory of the latter. The person by whom this suggestion was made is known to have been the Countess Guiccioli; and to her the poem was dedicated in a sonuet, which we have inserted at `page 373 of this volume. It is written in the Terza Rima-a species of composition of which this was the first successful specimen in the English language. Notwithstanding that Lord Byron produced a beautiful poem in this style, it seems still questionable whether its beauty is commensurate to the effort which is necessary for its production.

Dante is supposed to address the reader in the interval between the conclusion of the Divina Commedia and his death, and, shortly before the latter event, foretelling in his swan-like song the fortunes of Italy in general in the ensuing centuries. The apostrophe to Florence is touching, and has a character of sublimity partly intrinsic, and partly derived from the resemblance which it bears to the lamentation of our Saviour over Jerusalem:

Oh Florence! Florence! unto me thou wast
Like that Jerusalem which the Almighty He
Wept over, but thou wouldst not;' as the bird
Gathers its young, I would have gathered thee
Beneath a parent pinion, hadst thou heard

My voice; but as the adder, deaf and fierce,
Against the breast that cherished thee was stirred
Thy venom, and my state thou didst amerce,
And doom this body forfeit to the fire.
Alas! how bitter is his country's curse
To him who for that country would expire,
But did not merit to expire by her,

And loves her, loves her even in her ire.
The day may come when she will cease to err,
The day may come she would be proud to have
The dust she dooms to scatter, and transfer
Of him, whom she denied a home, the grave.

But this shall not be granted; let my dust
Lie where it falls; nor shall the soil which gave

Me breath, but in her sudden fury thrust

Me forth to breathe elsewhere, so reassume
My indignant bones, because her augry gust
Forsooth is over, and repealed her doom;

No, she denied me what was mine—my roof,

And shall not have what is not hers-my tomb..

In the following extract there is a pathetic display of the bitter feelings which crowd upon the heart of the exiled patriot and parent, and which are mingled with the proud swellings of indignation and a sense of his own worth and wrongs:

I am not of this people, nor this age,
And yet my harpings will unfold a tale
Which shall preserve these times when not a page

Of their perturbed annals could attract

An eye to gaze upon their civil rage

Did not my verse embalm full many an act

Worthless as they who wrought it 'tis the doom
Of spirits of my order to be racked

In life, to wear their hearts out, and consume
Their days in endless strife, and die alone;
Then future thousands crowd around their tomb,
And pilgrims come from climes where they have known
The name of him-who now is but a name,
And, wasting homage o'er the sullen stone,
Spread his-by him unheard, unheeded fame ;
And mine at least hath cost me dear: to die.
Is nothing; but to wither thus to tame
My mind down from its own infinity-
To live in narrow ways with little men,
A common sight to every common eye,
A wanderer, while e'en wolves can find a den,

Ripped from all kindred, from all home, all things
That make communion sweet, and soften pain-
To feel me in the solitude of kings

Without the power that makes them bear a crown-
To envy every dove his nest and wings
Which waft him where the Apennine looks down
On Arno, till he perches, it may be,
Within my all inexorable town,

Where yet my boys are, and that fatal she,

Their mother, the cold partner who hath brought

Destruction for a dowry-this to see

And feel, and know without repair, hath taught
A bitter lesson; but it leaves me free:

. I have not vilely found, nor basely sought,

They made an exile-not a slave of me.

The second canto contains a beautiful apostrophe to Italy, and an enumeration of all the evils which she has endured from the weakness or vice of her own sons, and from the spoliation of invaders. The fallen and fettered state to which his native country is doomed draws from the prophetic bard deep lamentations, and he concludes with an emphatic call to his countrymen to do that one deed by which they may break their chains, and restore the beauty of their country, only by uniting.

The third canto is in a more cheerful strain. He sees, through the shades of time yet to. come, the glories which Italy shall derive from the painters and poets to whom her genial soil shall give birth: but here too the sombre colour of his feelings throws a gloom over the subject, and he turns from revelling in the splendour, which the fame of Tasso and of Ariosto shall shed upon their country, to groan over the penury and hardships which must attend their lives:

Not Hellas can unroll

Through her olympiads two such names, though one
Of hers be mighty;-and is this the whole

Of such men's destiny beneath the sun ?

Must all the finer thoughts, the thrilling sense,
The electric blood with which their arteries run,
Their body's self turned soul with the intense

Feeling of that which is, and fancy of

That which should be, to such a recompense
Conduct? shall their bright plumage on the rough
Storm be still scattered? Yes, and it must bé,
For, formed of far too penetrable stuff,

These birds of Paradise but long to flee

Back to their native mansion; soon they find
Earth's mist with their pure pinions not agree,

And die or are degraded; for the mind

Succumbs to long infection; and despair,
And vulture passions flying close behind,

Await the moment to assail and tear;