Turner’s History is, I believe, strictly honest and impartial, and a work of prodigious labour and research.
But in our attention to prose writers, we must not forget the classical poets of our own country. Make yourself familiarly acquainted with Shakspeare, Milton, and Pope. The more you read of Young and Cowper, the better. Young is sometimes turgid, with a good deal of bad taste; but he abounds in real poetry, and in strong truths most forcibly expressed. Cowper sometimes carries simplicity to the verge of being prosaic; but he is generally graceful, often pathetic, and sometimes approaches to sublimity. Of both, it was the common object to increase the influence of genuine Christianity; of both, the perusal has a direct tendency to make you a better and a more religious man.
Two of our most distinguished living poets—Sir Walter Scott and Southey—have seen their poetry cast into shade by the popularity of their own prose. The poems of both will live, and have justice done them by posterity. “Madoc” was many years ago recommended to me by one of the most able, and most candid, of our living authors. I read it with much interest. “The Curse of Kehama” is full of high and wild poetry; and “Roderick, the last of the Goths” gives a noble picture of deep penitence and of devoted patriotism. You will hardly read any ten lines of the longer poems of Sir Walter Scott, without meeting with some striking beauty of expression or of sentiment.
I am afraid, however, that the English poets, both those of former times and those of the present day, have been, in great measure, superseded, among you young Oxonians, by Lord Byron. In almost every under-graduate’s room that I happen to enter, he seems to have taken possession. Lord Byron, as a poet, has certainly many transcendant merits,—merits which are peculiarly fascinating to young men. The interest which I,—which every one,—naturally must feel in the moral and intellectual habits and pursuits of such an important portion of the community, makes me deeply lament the noble poet’s excessive popularity among you. I am perfectly aware, that by the following remarks I shall expose myself to the indignation of some men, and, possibly, to the contempt of others: but I feel that my opinion on this subject is not taken up on slight grounds; and I must say my say.
The publication of Lord Byron’s life and correspondence has contributed, a good deal, to divest him of that mystery, which hung about him, and in which he himself so much delighted; and has brought him down rather more to the level of ordinary mortals. They show him to us as a man possessed of splendid talents, of extensive and various attainments, and of the seeds of many noble and generous qualities; but as a man actuated by ungovernable passions, and by an overweening opinion of his own superiority to all other mortals. Self, whether intellectual or sensual, seems to have been the idol that he worshipped. His own antient family, his own talents, his own attainments, his own whims, his own passions, his own excesses, seem all to have furnished food for his vanity, because they were his own.
I acknowledge that, in all the circumstances of his bringing up, he was singularly unfortunate. His early destitution, the character and habits of his mother, the neglect of his noble relations, the venal praises of his parasites and dependents, all acted upon his character with pernicious influence.
“Untaught in youth his heart to tame,
His springs of life were poison’d.”
He was sensitively alive to all the beauties and the sublimities of external nature, and had a most penetrating insight into the complicated feelings, and the various workings of the human heart, with all its passions and affections; consequently, he abounds in passages of great beauty, and of singular strength and power. The gratification derived from the perusal of such passages, however, to a man at least who really believes himself to be an immortal and a responsible being, is but a poor compensation for the moral effects of many of his poems, his later poems more especially[155:1]. They too often appear to breathe a spirit of engrossing selfishness; a spirit of captious and gloomy scepticism,—scepticism extending, not only to revelation, but to the primary truths of what is called natural religion, and even the most acknowledged bonds of moral obligation. The tendency of his writings is to make you dissatisfied with almost every thing, and every body in this world, and at the same time to unfit you for the world to come; indeed, to make you doubt, whether the idea of a world to come is not altogether a mere delusion.
Lord Byron particularly excels in describing female loveliness, and the effect which such loveliness produces upon the ardent temperament of youth. In fact, the feeling within themselves so much that responds to these descriptions, is one great cause of the popularity of Lord Byron among young people. The sensations to which I allude, however, are of themselves but too importunate. It is most unwise to excite them,—to give them additional energy,—by the perusal of the high-wrought and glowing descriptions of this poet of the passions.
I had heard much of Don Juan, and felt some curiosity to read it; but I was aware of the manner in which bold and flippant ribaldry sometimes takes hold of the mind, even when shocked at it. I knew well, that human nature has in itself but too much of passion and sensuality, without needing any additional stimulus. I was unwilling “to soil my mind” when I could avoid it. For my own sake, I was unwilling to see the most destructive vices treated as mere matter of jest, and the most awful truths of religion introduced in connexion with ludicrous images, and spoken of in the language of mockery. However much our judgment may disapprove of these things, yet the ludicrous passages and images are too apt to stick by us, even when we most wish to shake them off.