ADVERTISEMENT. THE rule of arranging chronologically the poetical productions of Lord Byron is, of necessity, in so far violated in this volume - since it comprises the whole romance of Childe Harold, the composition of which was begun in 1809, and ended in 1818. The propriety of the course we have on this occasion adopted must, however, be quite obvious. Commenced before, perhaps, the Author's powers had reached their utmost developement, the work was always, at whatever intervals, some of them considerable, -taken up by him as one which he desired and designed to render complete in itself; the realisation of a plan and conception entirely novel and peculiar, —that of presenting in a continuous stream of verse, the essence of the thoughts and feelings elicited from his individual mind, during a succession of years, and at different stages, con sequently, of his intellectual and moral being, by the contemplation of those chosen scenes of external nature, whether in themselves ex traordinarily beautiful or sublime, or raised to immortal interest by the transactions which they had witnessed, and the personages with whose names they had come to be inextricably interwoven, which it had been his own fortune to traverse in the course of his earthly pilgrimage. Taken as a whole, this Poem is, undoubtedly, the most original and felicitous of all Lord Byron's serious efforts. It opens the first specimen of an absolutely new species of composition; — perhaps the only such specimen that European literature had received during a period of two centuries in other words, since Shakspeare founded the Romantic Drama, and Cervantes the Romantic Novel of modern Europe. Of the general history of the Poem, it cannot be necessary to say much to the readers of the preceding volumes of this collection. The first Canto was commenced, as Lord Byron's diaries inform us, at Joannina in Albania, on the 31st of October, 1809; and the second was finished on the 28th of March, in the succeeding year, at Smyrna. These two Cantos, after having received numberless corrections |