LXXXIII.
I've seen some balls and revels in my time,
And stay'd them over for some silly reason,
And then I look'd (I hope it was no crime)

To see what lady best stood out the season;
And though I've seen some thousands in their prime,
Lovely and pleasing, and who still may please on,
I never saw but one (the stars withdrawn)
Whose bloom could after dancing dare the dawn.
LXXXIV.

The name of this Aurora I'll not mention,

Although I might, for she was nought to me
More than that patent work of God's invention,
A charming woman, whom we like to see;
But writing names would merit reprehension,
Yet if you like to find out this fair she,
At the next London or Parisian ball
You still may mark her cheek, out-blooming all.
LXXXV.

Laura, who knew it would not do at all

To meet the daylight after seven hours' sitting Among three thousand people at a ball,

To make her curtsy thought it right and fitting: The Count was at her elbow with her shawl,

And they the room were on the point of quitting, When lo those cursed gondoliers had got Just in the very place where they should not.

LXXXVI.

In this they 're like our coachmen, and the cause
Is much the same-the crowd, and pulling, hauling,
With blasphemies enough to break their jaws,

They make a never intermitted bawling.
At home, our Bow-street gemmen keep the laws,
And here a sentry stands within your calling;
But for all that, there is a deal of swearing,
And nauseous words past mentioning or bearing.

LXXXVII.

The Count and Laura found their boat at last,
And homeward floated o'er the silent tide,
Discussing all the dances gone and past;

The dancers and their dresses, too, beside;
Some little scandals eke: but all aghast

(As to their palace stairs the rowers glide) Sate Laura by the side of her Adorer, 1 When lo! the Mussulman was there before her. LXXXVIII.

"Sir," said the Count, with brow exceeding grave, "Your unexpected presence here will make

It necessary for myself to crave

Its import? But perhaps 't is a mistake;

I hope it is so; and, at once to waive

All compliment, I hope so for your sake: You understand my meaning, or you shall." "Sir," (quoth the Turk) "'tis no mistake at all:

LXXXIX.

"That lady is my wife!" Much wonder paints
The lady's changing cheek, as well it might;
But where an Englishwoman sometimes faints,
Italian females don't do so outright;

They only call a little on their saints,

And then come to themselves, almost or quite; Which saves much hartshorn,salts,and sprinkling faces, And cutting stays, as usual in such cases.

1 ["Sate Laura with a kind of comic horror."- MS.]

XC.

She said,-what could she say? Why, not a word :
But the Count courteously invited in
The stranger, much appeased by what he heard:
"Such things, perhaps, we'd best discuss within,"
Said he; "don't let us make ourselves absurd

In public, by a scene, nor raise a din,
For then the chief and only satisfaction
Will be much quizzing on the whole transaction."

XCL

They enter'd, and for coffee call'd-it came,
A beverage for Turks and Christians both,
Although the way they make it's not the same.
Now Laura, much recover'd, or less loth
To speak, cries "Beppo! what's your pagan name?
Bless me your beard is of amazing growth!
And how came you to keep away so long?
Are you not sensible 't was very wrong?

XCII.

"And are you really, truly, now a Turk? With any other women did you wive ? Is 't true they use their fingers for a fork?

Well, that's the prettiest shawl-as I'm alive! You'll give it me? They say you eat no pork. And how so many years did you contrive To-Bless me! did I ever? No, I never Saw a man grown so yellow! How 's your liver? XCIII.

"Beppo! that beard of yours becomes you not; It shall be shaved before you're a day older: Why do you wear it? Oh! I had forgot

Pray don't you think the weather here is colder? How do I look? You shan't stir from this spot

In that queer dress, for fear that some beholder Should find you out, and make the story known. How short your hair is! Lord! how gray it's

XCIV.

grown!"

What answer Beppo made to these demands
Is more than I know. He was cast away
About where Troy stood once, and nothing stands;
Became a slave of course, and for his pay
Had bread and bastinadoes, till some bands

Of pirates landing in a neighbouring bay,
He join'd the rogues and prosper'd, and became
A renegado of indifferent fame.

XCV.

But he grew rich, and with his riches grew so
Keen the desire to see his home again,
He thought himself in duty bound to do so,
And not be always thieving on the main;
Lonely he felt, at times, as Robin Crusoe,

And so he hired a vessel come from Spain,
Bound for Corfu: she was a fine polacca,
Mann'd with twelve hands, and laden with tobacco.

XCVI.

Himself, and much (Heaven knows how gotten!) cash,
He then embark'd, with risk of life and limb,
And got clear off, although the attempt was rash;
He said that Providence protected him—
For my part, I say nothing, lest we clash

In our opinions: -well, the ship was trim,
Set sail, and kept her reckoning fairly on,
Except three days of calm when off Cape Bonn.

"CELUI qui remplissait alors cette place était un gentilhomme Polonais, nommé Mazeppa, né dans le

1 ["You ask me," says Lord Byron, in a letter written in 1820," for a volume of Manners, &c. on Italy. Perhaps I am in the case to know more of them than most Englishmen, because I have lived among the natives, and in parts of the country where Englishmen never resided before (I speak of Romagna and this place particularly); but there are many reasons why I do not choose to treat in print on such a subject. Their moral is not your moral; their life is not your life; you would not understand it: it is not English, nor French, nor German, which you would all understand. The conventual education, the cavalier servitude, the habits of thought and living, are so entirely different, and the difference becomes so much more striking the more you live intimately with them, that I know not how to make you comprehend a people who are at once temperate and profligate, serious in their characters and buffoons in their amusements, capable of impressions and passions, which are at once sudden and durable (what you find in no other nation), and who actually have no society (what we would call so), as you may see by their comedies; they have no real comedy, not even in Goldoni, and that is because they have no society to draw it from. Their conversazioni are not society at all. They go to the theatre to talk, and into company to hold their tongues. The women sit in a circle, and the men gather into groups, or they play at dreary faro, or lotto reale," for small sums. Their academie are concerts like our own, with better music and more form. Their best things are the carnival balls and masquerades, when every body runs mad for six weeks. After their dinners and suppers they make extempore verses and buffoon one another; but it is in a humour which you would not enter into, ye of the north.

In their houses it is better. As for the women, from the fisherman's wife up to the nobil dama, their system has its rules, and its fitnesses, and its decorums, so as to be reduced to a kind of discipline or game at hearts, which admits few deviations, unless you wish to lose it. They are extremely tenacious, and jealous as furies, not permitting their lovers even to marry if they can help it, and keeping them always close to them in public as in private, whenever they can. In short, they transfer marriage to adultery, and strike the not out of that commandment. The reason is, that they marry for their parents, and love for themselves. They exact fidelity from a lover as a debt of honour, while they pay the husband as a tradesman, that is, not at all. You hear a person's character, male or female, canvassed, not as depending on their conduct to their husbands or wives, but to their mistress or lover. If I wrote a quarto, I don't know that I could do more than amplify what I have here noted."]

2 [This extremely clever and amusing performance affords a very curious and complete specimen of a kind of diction and composition of which our English literature has hitherto presented very few examples. It is, in itself, absolutely a thing of nothing-without story, characters, sentiments, or

palatinat de Podolie: il avait été élevé page de Jean Casimir, et avait pris à sa cour quelque teinture des belles-lettres. Une intrigue qu'il eut dans sa jeunesse avec la femme d'un gentilhomme Polonais ayant été

a sort

intelligible object; -a mere piece of lively and loquacious prattling, in short, upon all kinds of frivolous subjects, of gay and desultory babbling about Italy and England, Turks, balls, literature, and fish sauces. But still there is something very engaging in the uniform gaiety, politeness, and good humour of the author, and something still more striking and admirable in the matchless facility with which he has cast into regular, and even difficult, versification the unmingled, unconstrained, and unselected language of the most light, familiar, and ordinary conversation. With great skill and felicity, he has furnished us with an example of about one hundred stanzas of good verse, entirely composed of common words, in their common places; never presenting us with one sprig of what is called poetical diction, or even making use of a single inversion, either to raise the style or assist the rhyme, but running on in an inexhaustible series of good easy colloquial phrases, and finding them fall into verse by some unaccountable and happy fatality. In this great and characteristic quality it is almost invariably excellent. In some other respects, it is more unequal. About one half is as good as possible, in the style to which it belongs; the other half bears, perhaps, too many marks of that haste with which such a work must necessarily be written. Some passages are rather too snappish, and some run too much on the cheap and rather plebeian humour of out-of-the-way rhymes, and strange-sounding words and epithets. But the greater part is extremely pleasant, amiable, and gentlemanlike. - JEFFREY.]

[The following "lively, spirited, and pleasant tale," as Mr. Gifford calls it, on the margin of the MS., was written in the autumn of 1818, at Ravenna. We extract the following from a reviewal of the time:-"MAZEPPA is a very fine and spirited sketch of a very noble story, and is every way worthy of its author. The story is a well-known one; namely, that of the young Pole, who, being bound naked on the back of a wild horse, on account of an intrigue with the lady of a certain great noble of his country, was carried by his steed into the heart of the Ukraine, and being there picked up by some Cossacks, in a state apparently of utter hopelessness and exhaustion, recovered, and lived to be long after the prince and leader of the nation among whom he had arrived in this extraordinary manner. Lord Byron has represented the strange and wild incidents of this adventure, as being related in a half serious, half sportive way, by Mazeppa himself, to no less a person than Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, in some of whose last campaigns the Cossack Hetman took a distinguished part. He tells it during the desolate bivouack of Charles and the few friends who fled with him towards Turkey, after the bloody overthrow of Pultowa. There is not a little of beauty and gracefulness in this way of setting the picture; the age of Mazeppa-the calm, practised indifference with which he now submits to the worst of fortune's deeds- the heroic, unthinking coldness of the royal

découverte, le mari le fit lier tout nu sur un cheval farouche, et le laissa aller en cet état. Le cheval, qui était du pays de l'Ukraine, y retourna, et y porta Mazeppa, demi-mort de fatigue et de faim. Quelques paysans le secoururent: il resta long-tems parmi eux, et se signala dans plusieurs courses contre les Tartares. La supériorité de ses lumières lui donna une grande considération parmi les Cosaques : sa réputation s'augmentant de jour en jour obligea le Czar à le faire Prince de l'Ukraine."-VOLTAIRE, Hist. de Charles XII. p. 196.

"Le roi fuyant, et poursuivi, eut son cheval tué sous lui; le Colonel Gieta, blessé, et perdant tout son sang, lui donna le sien. Ainsi on remit deux fois à cheval, dans sa fuite, ce conquérant qui n'avait pu y monter pendant la bataille."- P. 216.

"Le roi alla par un autre chemin avec quelques cavaliers. Le carrosse où il était rompit dans la marche; on le remit à cheval. Pour comble de disgrace, il s'égara pendant la nuit dans un bois; là, son courage ne pouvant plus suppléer à ses forces épuisées, les douleurs de sa blessure devenues plus insupportables par la fatigue, son cheval étant tombé de lassitude, il se coucha quelques heures au pied d'un arbre, en danger d'être surpris à tout moment par les vainqueurs, qui le cherchaient de tous côtés." -P. 218. 1

Mazeppa.

I.

"TWAS after dread Pultowa's day, When fortune left the royal Swede, Around a slaughter'd army lay,

No more to combat and to bleed. The power and glory of the war,

Faithless as their vain votaries, men, Had pass'd to the triumphant Czar,

And Moscow's walls were safe again, Until a day more dark and drear, And a more memorable year, Should give to slaughter and to shame A mightier host and haughtier name; A greater wreck, a deeper fall,

A shock to one-a thunderbolt to all.

II.

Such was the hazard of the die;
The wounded Charles was taught to fly
By day and night through field and flood,
Stain'd with his own and subjects' blood;
For thousands fell that flight to aid:
And not a voice was heard t'upbraid
Ambition in his humbled hour,

When truth had nought to dread from power.
His horse was slain, and Gieta gave
His own and died the Russians' slave.

madman to whom he speaks- the dreary and perilous accompaniments of the scene around the speaker and the audience, all contribute to throw a very striking charm both of preparation and of contrast over the wild story of the Hetman. Nothing can be more beautiful, in like manner,

This too sinks after many a league
Of well sustain'd but vain fatigue;
And in the depth of forests, darkling
The watch-fires in the distance sparkling-
The beacons of surrounding foes—
A king must lay his limbs at length.
Are these the laurels and repose
For which the nations strain their strength?
They laid him by a savage tree,

In outworn nature's agony;

His wounds were stiff-his limbs were stark
The heavy hour was chill and dark;
The fever in his blood forbade

A transient slumber's fitful aid:
And thus it was; but yet through all,
Kinglike the monarch bore his fall,

• And made, in this extreme of ill,
His pangs the vassals of his will:
All silent and subdued were they,
As once the nations round him lay.

III.

A band of chiefs!- -alas! how few,
Since but the fleeting of a day
Had thinn'd it; but this wreck was true
And chivalrous: upon the clay
Each sate him down, all sad and mute,
Beside his monarch and his steed,
For danger levels man and brute,

And all are fellows in their need.
Among the rest, Mazeppa made
His pillow in an old oak's shade-
Himself as rough, and scarce less old,
The Ukraine's Hetman, calm and bold;
But first, outspent with this long course,
The Cossack prince rubb'd down his horse,
And made for him a leafy bed,

And smooth'd his fetlocks and his mane, And slack'd his girth, and stripp'd his rein, And joy'd to see how well he fed ;

For until now he had the dread
His wearied courser might refuse
To browse beneath the midnight dews:
But he was hardy as his lord,
And little cared for bed and board;
But spirited and docile too,
Whate'er was to be done, would do.
Shaggy and swift, and strong of limb,
All Tartar-like he carried him;
Obey'd his voice, and came to call,
And knew him in the midst of all:
Though thousands were around, —and Night,
Without a star, pursued her flight,-
That steed from sunset until dawn
His chief would follow like a fawn.

IV.

His sabre's hilt and scabbard felt,
And whether they had chafed his belt-
And next the venerable man,

From out his havresack and can,

Prepared and spread his slender stock;
And to the monarch and his men
The whole or portion offer'd then
With far less of inquietude

Than courtiers at a banquet would.
And Charles of this his slender share
With smiles partook a moment there,
To force of cheer a greater show,

And seem above both wounds and woe;
And then he said" Of all our band,
Though firm of heart and strong of hånd,
In skirmish, march, or forage, none
Can less have said or more have done
Than thee, Mazeppa! On the earth

So fit a pair had never birth,
Since Alexander's days till now,
As thy Bucephalus and thou:

All Scythia's fame to thine should yield
For pricking on o'er flood and field."
Mazeppa answer'd-" Ill betide

The school wherein I learn'd to ride!"
Quoth Charles-" Old Hetman, wherefore so,
Since thou hast learn'd the art so well?"
Mazeppa said-" "T were long to tell;
And we have many a league to go,
With every now and then a blow,

And ten to one at least the foe,
Before our steeds may graze at ease,
Beyond the swift Borysthenes :
And, sire, your limbs have need of rest,
And I will be the sentinel

Of this your troop.". "But I request,"
Said Sweden's monarch, "thou wilt tell
This tale of thine, and I may reap,
Perchance, from this the boon of sleep;
For at this moment from my eyes
The hope of present slumber flies."

"Well, sire, with such a hope, I'll track
My seventy years of memory back:
I think 'twas in my twentieth spring,-
Ay, 't was,-when Casimir was king-
John Casimir,-I was his page
Six summers, in my earlier age:
A learned monarch, faith! was he,
And most unlike your majesty:
He made no wars, and did not gain
New realms to lose them back again;
And (save debates in Warsaw's diet)
He reign'd in most unseemly quiet;
Not that he had no cares to vex;
He loved the muses and the sex;
And sometimes these so froward are,
They made him wish himself at war;
But soon his wrath being o'er, he took
Another mistress, or new book;
And then he gave prodigious fêtes-
All Warsaw gather'd round his gates
To gaze upon his splendid court,

And dames, and chiefs, of princely port:
He was the Polish Solomon,

So sung his poets, all but one,

Who, being unpension'd, made a satire, And boasted that he could not flatter.

It was a court of jousts and mimes,
Where every courtier tried at rhymes;
Even I for once produced some verses,
And sign'd my odes Despairing Thyrsis.'
There was a certain Palatine,

A count of far and high descent,
Rich as a salt or silver mine;
And he was proud, ye may divine,

As if from heaven he had been sent:
He had such wealth in blood and ore

As few could match beneath the throne;
And he would gaze upon his store,
And o'er his pedigree would pore,
Until by some confusion led,

Which almost look'd like want of head,
He thought their merits were his own.
His wife was not of his opinion;

His junior she by thirty years,
Grew daily tired of his dominion;
And, after wishes, hopes, and fears,
To virtue a few farewell tears,

A restless dream or two, some glances
At Warsaw's youth, some songs, and dances,
Awaited but the usual chances,
Those happy accidents which render
The coldest dames so very tender,
To deck her Count with titles given,
'Tis said, as passports into heaven;
But, strange to say, they rarely boast
Of these, who have deserved them most.

V.

"I was a goodly stripling then;

At seventy years I so may say,
That there were few, or boys or men,
Who, in my dawning time of day,
Of vassal or of knight's degree,
Could vie in vanities with me;
For I had strength, youth, gaiety,
A port, not like to this ye see,

But smooth, as all is rugged now;

For time, and care, and war, have plough'd My very soul from out my brow;

And thus I should be disavow'd
By all my kind and kin, could they
Compare my day and yesterday;
This change was wrought, too, long ere age
Had ta'en my features for his page:
With years, ye know, have not declined
My strength, my courage, or my mind,
Or at this hour I should not be
Telling old tales beneath a tree,
With starless skies my canopy.

But let me on: Theresa's form-
Methinks it glides before me now,
Between me and yon chestnut's bough,
The memory is so quick and warm
And yet I find no words to tell
The shape of her I loved so well:
She had the Asiatic eye,

Such as our Turkish neighbourhood, Hath mingled with our Polish blood, Dark as above us is the sky;

1 This comparison of a "salt mine" may, perhaps, be permitted to a Pole, as the wealth of the country consists greatly in the salt mines.