The present poem is certainly not without specimens of those talents, of which few have been greater admirers than ourselves, and none have more feelingly lamented the waste and abuse. The following address of Manfred to the "Witch of the Alps," rising beneath the arch of the sun-beam of the torrent, is full of Lord Byron's descriptive vigour.

"MAN. Beautiful Spirit! with thy hair of light,
And dazzling eyes of glory, in whose form
The charms of Earth's least-mortal daughters grow
To an unearthly stature, in an essence

Of purer elements; while the hues of youth,-
Carnation'd like a sleeping infant's cheek,
Rock'd by the beating of her mother's heart,
Or the rose tints, which summer's twilight leaves
Upon the lofty glacier's virgin snow,

The blush of earth embracing with her heaven,-
Tinge thy celestial aspect, and make tame

The beauties of the sunbow which bends o'er thee.
Beautiful Spirit! in thy calm clear brow,
Wherein is glass'd serenity of soul,
Which of itself shows immortality,
I read that thou wilt pardon to a Son
Of Earth, whom the abstruser powers permit
At times to commune with them-if that he
Avail him of his spells-to call thee thus,
And gaze on thee a moment." (P. 31, 32.)

The account which Manfred gives of himself, and his early addictions, it is impossible not to admire, notwithstanding it has so much of the mannerism of the poet.

"MAN. Well, though it torture me, 'tis but the same;
My pang shall find a voice. From my youth upwards

My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men,
Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers,
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh,
Nor midst the creatures of clay that girded me
Was there but one who-but of her anon.
I said, with men, and with the thoughts of men,
I held but slight communion; but instead,
My joy was in the wilderness, to breathe
The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,
Where the birds dare not build, nor insect's wing
Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge
Into the torrent, and to roll along

On the swift whirl of the new breaking wave

Of river-stream, or ocean, in their flow.
In these my early strength exulted; or
To follow through the night the moving moon,
The stars and their developement; or catch
The dazzling lightnings till my eyes grew dim;
Or to look, list'ning, on the scattered leaves,
While Autumn winds were at their evening song.
These were my pastimes, and to be alone;
For if the beings, of whom I was one,-
Hating to be so,-cross'd me in my path,
I felt myself degraded back to them,
And was all clay again. And then I dived,
In my lone wanderings, to the caves of death,
Searching its cause in its effect; and drew
From wither'd bones, and skulls, and heap'd up dust,
Conclusions most forbidden. Then I pass'd
The nights of years in sciences untaught,
Save in the old-time; and with time and toil,
And terrible ordeal, and such penance
As in itself hath power upon the air,
And spirits that do compass air and earth,
Space, and the peopled infinite, I made
Mine eyes familiar with Eternity,

Such as, before me, did the Magi.-" (P. 33-35.)

The effect of the Coloseum and surrounding scene of storied ruins, in a starry night, is the passage most laboured, and perhaps most successfully so, in the poem, and it would be scarcely just towards Lord Byron not to give it a place.

"SCENE IV.-Interior of the Tower.

MANFRED alone.

MAN. The stars are forth, the moon above the tops
Of the snow-shining mountains.-Beautiful!

I linger yet with Nature, for the night

Hath been to me a more familiar face

Than that of man; and in her starry shade

Of dim and solitary loveliness,

I learn'd the language of another world.
I do remember me, that in my youth,
When I was wandering,-upon such a night
I stood within the Coloseum's wall,
'Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome;
The trees which grew along the broken arches
Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the stars
Shone through the rents of ruin; from afar
The watchdog bayed beyond the Tiber; and
More near from out the Cæsars' palace came
The owl's long cry, and, interruptedly,
Of distant sentinels the fitful song

Begun and died upon the gentle wind.
Some cypresses beyond the time-worn breach
Appeared to skirt the horizon, yet they stood
Within a bowshot-where the Cæsars dwelt,
And dwell the tuneless birds of night, amidst
A grove which springs through levell'd battlements,
And twines its roots with the imperial hearths,
Ivy usurps the laurel's place of growth;-
But the gladiators' bloody Circus stands,
A noble wreck in ruinous perfection!

While Cæsar's chambers, and the Augustan halls,
Grovel on earth in indistinct decay.-

-

And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which soften'd down the boar austerity
Of rugged desolation, and fill'd up,
As 'twere, anew, the gaps of centuries;
Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
And making that which was not, till the place
Became religion, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old !—
The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns." (P. 68, 69.)

We trust we have done justice to this little poem, which, as a drama, or as a whole, we cannot praise; as a repetition of the old story of one of Lord Byron's pleasant fellows, full of crime, and yet full of conscious superiority, we cannot but condemn; but which, for its particular passages of poetical excellence, we consider as worthy of the fame of the author.

ART. VI.-A Physiological System of Nosology; with a corrected and simplified Nomenclature. By John Mason Good, F. R. S. &c. 8vo. pp. 566. Cox and Son. London, 1817.

It is not often that we carry our remarks into the regions of the healing art; but the present work has a claim upon our attention, as well from the sanction under which it appears before the world, being dedicated by permission (which permission is, we understand, never granted but upon examination of the work) to the royal college of physicians of London, as, from the extensive range it takes into the wider and more open tracks of physiology and general science.

"The main object of the present attempt is not so much to interfere with any existing system of nosology as to fill up a niche that still seems unoccupied in the great gallery of physiological study. It

is that, if it could be accomplished, of connecting the science of diseases more closely with the sister branches of natural knowledge; of giving it a more assimilated and family character; a more obvious and intelligible classification; an arrangement more simple in its principle, but more comprehensive in its compass; of correcting its nomenclature, where correction is called for, and can be accomplished without coercion; of following its distinctive terms as well upwards to their original sources, as downwards to their synonyms in the chief languages of the present day; and thus, not merely of producing a manual for the student, or a text-book for the lecturer, but a book that may stand on the same shelf with, and form a sort of appendix to, our most popular systems of Natural History; and may at the same time be perused by the classical scholar without disgust at that barbarous jargon, with which the language of medicine is so perpetually tesselated; and which every one has complained of for ages, though no one has hitherto endeavoured to remedy it." (P. i. ii.)

We cannot help regarding it as somewhat extraordinary that, notwithstanding all the zeal, industry, and success with which the different branches of the medical profession have been prosecuted for so many centuries, no writer or reasoner has hitherto been fortunate enough to devise an arrangement sufficiently wide, and at the same time sufficiently scientific, to be entitled to the character of a general system of diseases. There is not only no popular or pre-eminent plan at this moment which applies to the whole, but no one that can be called complete on any separate department of the profession; and hence, while the order under which the science of surgery is taught is at all times different from that which regulates the study of pathology, almost every teacher has a distinct order for each; is dissatisfied with all others; and scarcely in entire good humour with his own.

The most common arrangement of diseases among the Greeks was into acute and chronic. Celsus has, to a certain extent, adopted this arrangement; but, sensible of its insufficiency, has endeavoured to render it more definite by dividing diseases still further, into those affecting the entire frame, which he calls universal, and those limited to particular organs, which he calls partial; thus making the seat of the disease the foundation of its distinction. Jonston, Sennert, and Morgagni carried this principle still further, and classified, or endeavoured to classify, diseases according to the anatomy of the animal frame; a method which was strongly recommended by Dr. Mead; while Boerhaave, Riverius, and Hoffman laid hold of the supposed causes of diseases as determining their peculiar and distinctive character, and upon this basis erected a system which for some time continued popular, and to which they gave the name of etiological; till at length the principle of causes gave way to the principle of

symptoms, as supported and taught by Sauvages, Linnéus, Cullen, and all the most celebrated nosologists of our own times.

This last is, in effect, the only method in any degree worthy of attention; for it is the only one that will in any degree hold true to itself. Of the seat of diseases we often know but little; of their causes far oftener still less: but there are certain marks or characters in the usual progress of most diseases, which uniformly accompany and distinguish them, and to which, therefore, the epithet pathognomic has been correctly applied. It is not, indeed, to be contended that these distinctive signs are as constant and determinate as many of the distinctive signs that occur in zoology or botany. So complicated is the animal machinery, so perpetually alterable, by habit, climate, idiosyncrasy, and the many accidental circumstances by which life is diversified, that the general rule must admit of a variety of exceptions; and it is here, perhaps, rather than any where else, best established by such exceptions. Yet, after all, every distinct disease, occur where it may, so generally agrees with itself in its progress and developement, and is so generally attended by its own train of symptoms, or coincidents,-which is the literal rendering of symptoms,-that he who steadily attends to these will not often be greatly deceived, and if he should be, he can find no other guide to set him right.

And

But if the true mode of distinguishing and defining diseases has been discovered, we have hitherto been still as far from any mode of classifying them agreably to any clear natural order, or perspicuous artificial arrangement, as ever. hence Mr. Good, before he enters upon an elucidation of his own system, paves the way for its introduction by a dissertation of considerable length, in which he adverts to the chief nosological systems of the day, the nomenclature in actual use, and the improvements proposed in both respects by the present attempt.

After a rapid survey of the earlier methods, the systems principally discussed are those of Plater, Sauvages, Linnéus, Vogel, Sagar, Cullen, Selle, Plouquet, Pinel, Macbride, Crichton, Darwin, Parr, and Young, independently of those laid down by the monographists, or those who have treated in a classific form of a single set or family of diseases alone, among whom are especially enumerated the names of Plenck, Willan, Abernethy, and Bateman. The last have their use, though it is obvious they never can supply the place of a general system; while several of them are so peculiarly constructed, that they cannot, without great force, and a considerable degree of decomposition, be incorporated into general service. Of the former, notwithstanding all the ingenuity and contrivance they exhibit, there is not, per