The sea-born city's walls;
Loved by the bard and ho

My own Venetia now sha And with her spell enchain ou "Proud defiance," "gild ou enchain," are phrases not mere the pen of so vivid and unin but also utterly prosaic and co business of "graceful towers,"

on Venice :

"Underneath day's
Ocean's nursling,
A peopled labyrin
Amphitrite's desti
Which her hoary

With his blue and

Sun-girt city! th
Ocean's child, and
Now is come a da

And thou soon m

An eminent but unimagi

writes, in reference to the ep

difficult not to believe that the correct reading is sea-girt.” Shelley was looking down from the Euganean Hills on "the waveless plain of Lombardy;" he beheld Venice circled by the glory of the sun; he said so. But sea-girt, you know, is an approved poetical epithet, so the critic marks an erratum. Similarly, Mr. Disraeli having, as representative of Shelley, to write about Venice, calls it a "sea-born city." Novelists and critics cannot understand the intense insight and inviolate originality of the true poet; and the worst of it is, they think they can.

As we have said, Mr. Disraeli was more fortunate in his supposititious Byron, since he has something in common with this stronger and coarser poet. Byron and Shelley were the Herakles and Hylas of poetry; Shakespeare its Apollo. He is only a demigod, this Byron of ours, but he is the strongest of them. In Venetia, we find the daring eccentricities of his character cleverly reflected; his boyish violence is well described, and the energetic irregularities of his early manhood, till at last he was forced on a war with society.

"Society had outraged him, and now he resolved to outrage society. . . . He delivered them all to the most absolute contempt, disgust, and execration; he resolved, from this time, nothing should ever induce him again to enter society, or admit the advances of a single civilised ruffian who affected to be social. The country, the people, their habits, laws, manners, customs, opinions, and everything connected with them, were viewed with the same jaundiced eye; and his only object now was to quit England, to which he resolved never to return."

This is sufficiently Byronic, but we cannot congratulate the author on similar success throughout. "As for philo

and was a Pantheist and Platonist not at all reflect the mysterious mind. He makes Marmion Hel possibility of the length of the life increased, until in time the body Shelley could never have felt an alike unphilosophical and undesi the legend of Tithonus, and read t brugs. These are the protests immortality of matter. The truth chosen to make Shelley old enoug was obliged to ignore that youth which was the poet's inalienable po form him into a hazy prosy retail was not in any degree the char: Queen Mab and the Prometheus T the errors that clung to his wild was always youthful in his aspira above the region of materialism.

The chronological order of Mr.

has been anticipated.

Reverting, we find The Young Duke among his earliest books; this, however, we defer to notice, as it contains the germ of Lothair. The next notion which seized his fertile brain was to treat a subject. virgin in the imaginative literature of every country— namely, the development and formation of the poetic character." A noble ambition! Goethe and Alfieri have done something towards the theme, but in Disraeli's opinion there is no "ideal and complete picture." He decided, for excellent reasons, that "the autobiographical form was a necessary condition of a successful fulfilment." Nobody, as he puts it in finer words than we care to use, can very well know how the poet came to be a poet except the poet himself. "What narrative by a third person" [why third ?] "could sufficiently paint the melancholy and brooding childhood, the first indications of the predisposition, the growing consciousness of power, the reveries, the loneliness, the doubts, the moody misery, the ignorance of art, the failures, the despair?" Hereon it may be remarked that certain poets, and those the highest, have developed in a region above melancholy and misery. Pure health of mind and body is the first essential of the noblest poetry. A disciple of Byron, Mr. Disraeli may perchance be excused for assuming that the poetic temperament is necessarily morbid and cynical: the truth is, that Byron, if unwarped by circumstances of position and education, would have done far greater things in poetry. Unfortunately, admirers and imitators always seize on the peculiarities and defects of their idol, and are unable to see that his greatness is based upon his humanity and health.

Contarini Fl

included by the less. apprehension, turn out a poet aft amusing youngster, who worries hi is turbulent at school and college, h waymen formed from his Universi a short time, with some success, as ] father, a Minister of State; trave wife, and then pours forth an inexha pedalian soliloquy. Roi ne puis, as t hath it: Contarini would be a poe the power. If, therefore, the book and trace the growth of the poetic curious as the autobiography of one a poet if he could. Its final paragra to show the style of the book :

:

"What is the arch of the conque of the poet? I think of the infinit nothingness. Yet if I am to be remem bered as one who, in a sad night of savage bigotry was prescient of the fla bright philosophy-as one who deepl