likeness it seemed to him to bear to his lost friend's

melancholy deathplace, Missolonghi.

On a tablet of white marble in the chancel of the Church of Hucknall is the following inscription :

IN THE VAULT BENEATH,

WHERE MANY OF HIS ANCESTORS AND HIS MOTHER ARE

BURIED,

LIE THE REMAINS OF

GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON,

LORD BYRON, OF ROCHDALE,

IN THE COUNTY OF LANCASTER,

THE AUTHOR OF CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE.'

HE WAS BORN IN LONDON ON THE

22D OF JANUARY, 1788.

HE DIED AT MISSOLONGHI,

IN WESTERN GREECE, ON THE

19TH OF APRIL, 1824,

ENGAGED IN THE GLORIOUS ATTEMPT TO RESTORE THAT
COUNTRY TO HER ANCIENT FREEDOM AND RENOWN.

HIS SISTER, THE HONOURABLE

AUGUSTA MARIA LEIGH,

PLACED THIS TABLET TO HIS MEMORY.

From among the tributes that have been offered, in prose and verse, and in almost every language of Europe, to his memory, I shall select two which appear to me worthy of peculiar notice, as being, one of them, -so far as my limited scholarship will allow me to judge, a simple and happy imitation of those laudatory inscriptions with which the Grecce of other times honoured the tombs of her heroes; and the other as being the production of a pen, once engaged controversially against Byron, but not the less ready, as these affecting verses prove, to offer the homage of a manly sorrow and admiration at his grave.

Eis

Τὸν ἐν τῇ Ἑλλάδι τηλευτήσαντα
Ποιητήν,

Οὐ τὸ ζῆν ταναὸν βίον εὐκλεὶς, οὐδ ̓ ἐναριθμεῖν
Αρχαίας προγόνων εὐγενίων ἀρετὰς·

Τὸν δ ̓ εὐδαιμονίας μοῖρ ̓ ἀμφέπει, ὅσπερ ἀπάντων
Αἰὲν ἀριστεύων γίγνεται ἀθάνατος.—

Εὔδεις οὖν σὺ, τέκνον, χαρίτων ἔαρ; οὐκ ἔτι θάλλει
*Ακμαῖος μελέων ἡδυπνίων στέφανος;

̓Αλλὰ τεὸν, τριπόθητε, μόρον πενθοῦσιν ̓Αθήνη,
Μοῦσαι, πατρὶς, "Αρης, Ἑλλὰς, ἐλευθερία.

CHILDE HAROLD'S LAST PILGRIMAGE.

BY THE REV. W. L. BOWLES.

'SO ENDS CHILDE HAROLD HIS LAST PILGRIMAGE!—
Upon the shores of Greece he stood, and cried
"LIBERTY!" and those shores, from age to age
Renown'd, and Sparta's woods and rocks replied
"Liberty!" But a Spectre, at his side,

6.66

'Stood mocking;—and its dart, uplifting high,

Smote him ;-he sank to earth in life's fair pride:

SPARTA! thy rocks then heard another cry,

And old Ilissus sigh'd-"Die, generous exile, die!"

'I will not ask sad Pity to deplore

His wayward errors, who thus early died;

Still less, CHILDE HAROLD, now thou art no more,

Will I say aught of genius misapplied;

Of the past shadows of thy spleen or pride:

But I will bid th' Arcadian cypress wave,

Pluck the green laurel from Peneus' side,

And pray thy spirit may such quiet have,

That not one thought unkind be murmur'd o'er thy grave.

* By John Williams, Esq.-The following translation of this inscription will not be unacceptable to my readers:—

'Not length of life-not an illustrious birth,
Rich with the noblest blood of all the earth;-
Nought can avail, save deeds of high emprize,
Our mortal being to immortalize.

Sweet child of song, thou sleepest !-ne'er again
Shall swell the notes of thy melodious strain:
Yet, with thy country wailing o'er thy urn,

Pallas, the Muse, Mars, Greece, and Freedom mourn.'

H. H. Joy.

'SO HAROLD Ends, in GreecE, HIS PILGRIMAGE!—

There fitly ending,—in that land renown'd,

Whose mighty genius lives in Glory's page,—

He, on the Muses' consecrated ground,

Sinking to rest, while his young brows are bound

• With their unfading wreath !—To bands of mirth,
No more in TEMPE let the pipe resound!
'HAROLD, I follow to thy place of birth

The slow hearse-and thy LAST sad PILGRIMAGE on earth.

'Slow moves the plumed hearse, the mourning train,—
I mark the sad procession with a sigh,

Silently passing to that village fane,

Where, HAROLD, thy forefathers mouldering lie;-
There sleeps THAT MOTHER, Who with tearful eye
Pondering the fortunes of thy early road,
'Hung o'er the slumbers of thine infancy;

Her son, released from mortal labour's load,

Now comes to rest, with her, in the same still abode.

Bursting Death's silence-could that mother speak⚫ (Speak when the earth was heap'd upon his head) — In thrilling, but with hollow accent weak,

'She thus might give the welcome of the dead :—

"Here rest, my son, with me ;-the dream is fled;

'The motley mask and the great stir is o'er:

'Welcome to me, and to this silent bed,

'Where deep forgetfulness succeeds the roar

'Of Life, and fretting passions waste the heart no more."

By his Lordship's Will, a copy of which will be found in the Appendix, he bequeathed to his executors, in trust for the benefit of his sister, Mrs. Leigh, the monies arising from the sale of all his real estates at Rochdale and elsewhere, together with such part of his other property as was not settled upon Lady Byron and his daughter Ada, to be by Mrs. Leigh enjoyed, free from her husband's control, during her life, and, after her decease, to be inherited by her children.

We have now followed to its close a life which, brief as was its span, may be said, perhaps, to have com

prised within itself a greater variety of those excitements and interests which spring out of the deep workings of passion and of intellect than any that the pen of biography has ever before commemorated. As there still remain among the papers of my friend some curious gleanings which, though in the abundance of our materials I have not hitherto found a place for them, are too valuable towards the illustration of his character to be lost, I shall here, in selecting them for the reader, avail myself of the opportunity of trespassing, for the last time, on his patience with a few general remarks.

It must have been observed, throughout these pages, and by some, perhaps, with disappointment, that into the character of Lord Byron, as a poet, there has been little, if any, critical examination; but that, content with expressing generally the delight which, in common with all, I derive from his poetry, I have left the task of analysing the sources from which this delight springs to others*. In thus evading, if it must be so considered, one of my duties as a biographer, I have been influenced no less by a sense of my own inaptitude for the office of critic than by recol

*It may be making too light of criticism to say with Gray that even a bad verse is as good a thing or better than the best observation that ever was made upon it; but there are surely few tasks that appear more thankless and superfluous than that of following, as Criticism sometimes does, in the rear of victorious genius (like the commentators on a field of Blenheim or of Waterloo), and either labouring to point out to us why it has triumphed, or still more unprofitably contending that it ought to have failed. The well-known passage of La Bruyère, which even Voltaire's adulatory application of it to some work of the King of Prussia has not spoiled for use, puts perhaps in its true point of view the very subordinate rank which Criticism must be content to occupy in the train of successful Genius:-‘Quand une lecture vous élève l'esprit et qu'elle vous inspire des sentimens nobles, ne cherchez pas une autre règle pour juger de l'ouvrage; il est bon et fait de main de l'ouvrier: La Critique, après ça, peut s'exercer sur les petites choses, relever quelques expressions, corriger des phrases, parler de syntaxe,' &c. &c.