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196 in Æschylus; in both, we hear the solemn choral songs of old men and virgins; and in both, the object of the poet's art is to shew that the stain of unhallowed passion must ever have its origin in a curse, and be blotted out in the blood of some tearful expiation. Who does not remember the woeful cry of Isabella?

The daring spirit of Byron has twice ventured to tread upon the same awful ground. He has represented, both in Manfred and in Parasina, the mutual love of conscious incest. In the first, indeed, we gather only from mysterious hints, that the inexplicable being before us has had his heart torn asunder by the agonies of an unlawful passion for his sister. But we feel not for him the same sympathy which makes us partakers in the thoughts and actions of ordinary men. We perceive that he holds strange converse with spirits and demons, and we do not wonder that he should be the victim of an unearthly flame. Besides, before his guilt is revealed to us, his punishment, like that of Cain, has been greater than he could bear. We see in him a weary wasted hater of the world, and of himself; Let us hear his own words:

The frail partner of his guilt has already died, not of violence but of grief; and when she appears, we see in her, not the sinful woman, but the judged and pardoned spirit. He who derives a single stain of impurity from Manfred, must come to its perusal with a soul which is not worthy of being clean.

To none of these poems, however, does the subject of Rimini bear so great a resemblance as to Parasina, and it is this very circumstance of likeness which brings before us in the strongest colours the difference between the incest of Leigh Hunt and the incest of Byron. In Parasina, we are scarcely permitted to have a single glance at the guilt before our attention is rivetted upon the punishment. We have scarcely had time to condemn, within our own hearts, the sinning, though injured son, when—

The fatal guilt of the Princess is in like manner swallowed up in the dreary contemplation of her uncertain fate. We forbear to think of her as an adulteress, after we have heard that horrid voice which is sent up to heaven at the death of her paramour:

Not only has Lord Byron avoided all the details of this unhallowed love, he has also contrived to mingle in the very incest which he condemns the idea of retribution; and our horror for the sin of Hugo is diminished by our belief that it was brought about by some strange and super-human fatality, to revenge the ruin of Bianca. That gloom of righteous visitation, which invests in the old Greek tragedies the fated house of Atreus, seems here to impend with some portion of its ancient horror over the line of Esté. We hear, in the language of Hugo, the voice of the same prophetic solemnity which announced to Agamemnon, in the very moment of his triumph, the