Lectures On The English Poets William Hazlitt

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mind, the dark and glittering ocean, the frail bark hurrying before the
storm, pirates and men that "house on the wild sea with wild usages." He
gives the tumultuous eagerness of action, and the fixed despair of
thought. In vigour of style and force of conception, he in one sense
surpasses every writer of the present day. His indignant apothegms are
like oracles of misanthropy. He who wishes for "a curse to kill with,"
may find it in Lord Byron's writings. Yet he has beauty lurking
underneath his strength, tenderness sometimes joined with the phrenzy of
despair. A flash of golden light sometimes follows from a stroke of his
pencil, like a falling meteor. The flowers that adorn his poetry bloom
over charnel-houses and the grave!
There is one subject on which Lord Byron is fond of writing, on which
I wish he would not write--Buonaparte. Not that I quarrel with his
writing for him, or against him, but with his writing both for him and
against him. What right has he to do this? Buonaparte's character, be it
what else it may, does not change every hour according to his Lordship's
varying humour. He is not a pipe for Fortune's finger, or for his
Lordship's Muse, to play what stop she pleases on. Why should Lord Byron
now laud him to the skies in the hour of his success, and then peevishly
wreak his disappointment on the God of his idolatry? The man he writes
of does not rise or fall with circumstances: but "looks on tempests and
is never shaken." Besides, he is a subject for history, and not for
poetry.
"Great princes' favourites their fair leaves spread,
But as the marigold at the sun's eye,
And in themselves their pride lies buried;
For at a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior, famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foil'd,
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toil'd."
If Lord Byron will write any thing more on this hazardous theme, let him
take these lines of Shakspeare for his guide, and finish them in the
spirit of the original--they will then be worthy of the subject.
Walter Scott is the most popular of all the poets of the present day,
and deservedly so. He describes that which is most easily and generally
understood with more vivacity and effect than any body else. He has no