Ah! gentle, fleeting, wav’ring sprite,
   Friend and associate of this clay,
   To what unknown region borne
Wilt thou now wing thy distant flight? 
   No more with wonted humour gay,
   But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn.

“However, be this as it may, we fear his translations and imitations are great favourities with Lord Byron.  We have them of all kinds, from Anacreon to Ossian; and, viewing them as school-exercises, they may pass.  Only, why print them after they have had their day and served their turn?  And why call the thing in p. 79 a translation, where two words ([Greek]) of the original are expanded into four lines, and the other thing in p. 81, where [Greek] is rendered by means of six hobbling verses.  As to his Ossian poesy, we are not very good judges; being, in truth, so moderately skilled in that species of composition, that we should, in all probability, be criticising some bit of genuine Macpherson itself, were we to express our opinion of Lord Byron’s rhapsodies.  If, then, the following beginning of a Song of Bards is by his Lordship, we venture to object to it, as far as we can comprehend it; ’What form rises on the roar of clouds, whose dark ghost gleams on the red stream of tempests?  His voice rolls on the thunder; ’tis Oila, the brown chief of Otchona.  He was,’ etc.  After detaining this ‘brown chief’ some time, the bards conclude by giving him their advice to ’raise his fair locks’; then to ‘spread them on the arch of the rainbow’; and to ‘smile through the tears of the storm.’  Of this kind of thing there are no less than nine pages:  and we can so far venture an opinion in their favour, that they look very like Macpherson; and we are positive they are pretty nearly as stupid and tiresome.

“It is some sort of privilege of poets to be egotists; but they should ‘use it as not abusing it’; and particularly one who piques himself (though, indeed, at the ripe age of nineteen) on being an infant bard—­

The artless Helicon I boast is youth—­

should either not know, or should seem not to know, so much about his own ancestry.  Besides a poem, above cited, on the family-seat of the Byrons, we have another of eleven pages on the selfsame subject, introduced with an apology, ’he certainly had no intention of inserting it,’ but really ‘the particular request of some friends,’ etc. etc.  It concludes with five stanzas on himself, ’the last and youngest of the noble line.’  There is also a good deal about his maternal ancestors, in a poem on Lachion-y-Gair, a mountain, where he spent part of his youth, and might have learned that pibroach is not a bagpipe, any more than a duet means a fiddle.

“As the author has dedicated so large a part of his volume to immortalize his employments at school and college, we cannot possibly dismiss it without presenting the reader with a specimen of these ingenious effusions.