Lord Byron, in his letter to Bowles in defence of Pope, alludes to Falconer's Shipwreck, and cites it in proof of the poetical use which may be made of the works of art. But it has justly been remarked by Hazlitt, in his very masterly reply, published in the 'London Magazine', that the finest parts of the Shipwreck are not those in which he appears to versify parts of his own Marine Dictionary, or in which he makes vain efforts to describe the vestiges of Grecian grandeur, but those in which, as in the above passage, he mates with the sublime and terrible 'natural' phenomena he meets in his voyage--the gathering of the storm--the treacherous lull of the sea, breathing itself like a tiger for its fatal spring--the ship, now walking the calm waters of the glassy sea, and now wrestling like a demon of kindred power and fury with the angry billows--the last fearful onset of the maddened surge--and the secret stab given by the assassin rock from below, which completes the ruin of the doomed vessel, and scatters its fragments o'er the tide, growling in joy--these, as the poet describes them, constitute the poetical glory of "The Shipwreck," and these have little connexion with art, and much with nature. Lord Byron was better at emulating than at criticising Falconer's 'chef-d'oeuvre'. We have already once or twice alluded to 'his' Shipwreck--surely the grandest and most characteristic effort of his genius, in its demoniac force, and demoniac spirit. As we have elsewhere said, "he describes the horrors of a shipwreck, like a fiend who had, invisible, sat amid the shrouds, choked with laughter--with immeasurable glee had heard the wild farewell rising from sea to sky--had leaped into the long-boat as it put off with its pale crew--had gloated o'er the cannibal repast--had leered, unseen, into the 'dim eyes of those shipwreck'd men'--and with a loud and savage burst of derision had seen them at length sinking into the waves." The superiority of his picture over Falconer's, lies in the simplicity and strength of the style, in the ease of the narrative, in the variety of the incidents and characters, and in certain short masterly touches, now of pathos, now of infernal humour, and now of description, competent only to Byron and to Shakspeare. Such are,-- "Then shriek'd the timid and stood still the brave." "The bubbling cry Of some strong swimmer in his agony." "For he, poor fellow, had a wife and children, Two things to dying people quite bewildering,"-- and the inimitable description of the rainbow, closing with,-- "Then changed like to a bow that's bent, and then-- Forsook the dim eyes of these shipwreck'd men."