“China.—­I never heard of any Chinese poet but the Emperor Kien Long, and his ode to Tea.  What a pity their philosopher Confucius did not write poetry, with his precepts of morality!

“Africa.—­In Africa some of the native melodies are plaintive, and the words simple and affecting; but whether their rude strains of nature can be classed with poetry, as the songs of the bards, the Skalds of Europe, &c. &c., I know not.

“This brief list of poets I have written down from memory, without any book of reference; consequently some errors may occur, but I think, if any, very trivial.  The works of the European, and some of the Asiatic, I have perused, either in the original or translations.  In my list of English, I have merely mentioned the greatest;—­to enumerate the minor poets would be useless, as well as tedious.  Perhaps Gray, Goldsmith, and Collins, might have been added, as worthy of mention, in a cosmopolite account.  But as for the others, from Chaucer down to Churchill, they are ’voces et praeterea nihil;’—­sometimes spoken of, rarely read, and never with advantage.  Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible:—­he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity, which he does not deserve so well as Pierce Plowman, or Thomas of Ercildoune.  English living poets I have avoided mentioning;—­we have none who will not survive their productions.  Taste is over with us; and another century will sweep our empire, our literature, and our name, from all but a place in the annals of mankind.

     “November 30. 1807.

     BYRON.”

Among the papers of his in my possession are several detached poems (in all nearly six hundred lines), which he wrote about this period, but never printed—­having produced most of them after the publication of his “Hours of Idleness.”  The greater number of these have little, besides his name, to recommend them; but there are a few that, from the feelings and circumstances that gave rise to them, will, I have no doubt, be interesting to the reader.  When he first went to Newstead, on his arrival from Aberdeen, he planted, it seems, a young oak in some part of the grounds, and had an idea that as it flourished so should he.  Some six or seven years after, on revisiting the spot, he found his oak choked up by weeds, and almost destroyed.  In this circumstance, which happened soon after Lord Grey de Ruthen left Newstead, originated one of these poems, which consists of five stanzas, but of which the few opening lines will be a sufficient specimen:—­

    “Young Oak, when I planted thee deep in the ground,
      I hoped that thy days would be longer than mine;
    That thy dark-waving branches would flourish around,
      And ivy thy trunk with its mantle entwine.

    “Such, such was my hope, when, in infancy’s years,
      On the land of my fathers I rear’d thee with pride;
    They are past, and I water thy stem with my tears,—­
      Thy decay, not the weeds that surround thee can hide.