inspired Byron to write this satire, which was first published anonymously. The following selection from the review of Hours of Idleness shows the tenor of that criticism:

...

"The poesy of this young lord belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit. Indeed we do not recollect to have seen a quantity of verse with so few deviations in either direction from that exact standard. His effusions are spread over a dead flat, and can no more get above or below the level than if they were so much stagnant water. We must beg leave seriously to assure him that the mere rhyming of the final syllable, even when accompanied by the presence of a certain number of feet,-nay, although (which does not always happen) those feet should scan regularly, and have been all counted accurately upon the fingers, is not the whole art of poetry. We could entreat him to believe that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem; and that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain at least one thought either in a little degree different from the ideas of former writers or differently expressed. But whatever judgment may be passed on the poems of this noble minor, it seems we must take them as we find them, and be content; for they are the last we shall ever have from him. He is at best, he says, but an intruder into the groves of Parnassus; he never lived in a garret, like thoroughbred poets; and though he once roved a careless mountaineer in the Highlands of Scotland,' he has not of late enjoyed this advantage. Moreover, he expects no profit from his publication; and whether it succeeds or not, 'it is highly improbable, from his situation and pursuits hereafter,' that he should again condescend to be an author. Therefore let us take what we get and be thankful. What right have we poor devils to be nice? We are well off to have got so much from a man of this lord's station, who does not live in a garret, but 'has the sway' of Newstead Abbey. Again we say, let us be thankful; and, with honest Sancho, bid God bless the giver, nor look the gift-horse in the mouth.-The Edinburgh Review, January, 1808. (The article, formerly attributed to Francis Jeffrey, was written by Henry Brougham, one of the founders of The Edinburgh Review, and Lord Chancellor of England, 1830-34.)

Byron's original purpose was to satirize only contemporary poetry, of which he held a very low opinion. After reading Lalla Rookh, by Thomas Moore, Byron wrote Murray, Sept. 15, 1817, as follows: "With regard to poetry in general, I am convinced, the more I think of it, that he and all of us-Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, I-are all in the wrong, one as much as another; that we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system, or systems, not worth a damn in itself, and from which none but Rogers and Crabbe

are free.... I am the more confirmed in this by having lately gone over some of our classics, particularly Pope, whom I tried in this way-I took Moore's poems and my own and some others, and went over them side by side with Pope's, and I was really astonished (I ought not to have been so) and mortified at the ineffable distance in point of sense, harmony, effect, and even imagination, passion, and invention, between the little Queen Anne's man and us of the Lower Empire." Byron shortly came to disapprove of his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. In 1816, he wrote in the margin, "The greater part of this satire I most sincerely wish had never been written-not only on account of the injustice of much of the critical and some of the personal part of it, but the tone and temper are such as I cannot approve."

486. 82. "This was not just. Neither the heart nor the head of these gentlemen are at all what they are here represented. At the time this was written, I was personally unaequainted with either."-Byron, in ed. of 1816. 488. 222. Southey's Madoc is in two parts; the first is "Madoc in Wales"; the second is "Madoc in Aztlan" (Mexico, from a tribe of Indians living there).

489. 2351. In the annotated copy of the fourth edition Byron has written "Unjust" opposite the criticism on Wordsworth and Coleridge, lines 235-48 and 255-58.

490. 331. In 1807, Bowles issued an edition of Pope's Works in which he declared that Pope was only a second-class poet. A heated controversy followed, in which Byron and Bowles were the chief opponents. For a summary of the dispute see Byron's Letters and Journals (ed. by R. E. Prothero), Vol. 5, p. 522; also Saintsbury's A History of Criticism, 3, 279-82.

491. 391. Byron first wrote Helicon instead of Hippocrene. He made the correction in the edition of 1816.

406. "Mr. Cottle, Amos, Joseph, I don't know which, but one or both, once sellers of books they did not write, and now writers of books they do not sell, have published a pair of epics-Alfred (poor Alfred! Pye has been at him too!)-Alfred and The Fall of Cambria.” -Byron, in ed. of 1816.

492, 432-53. "Too ferocious-this is mere insanity."-Byron, in ed. of 1816. Вугод thought that Jeffrey wrote the review of Hours of Idleness. When Jeffrey praised Byron's later poems, Byron wrote to Moore (April 9, 1814): "As for Jeffrey, it is a very handsome thing of him to speak well of an old antagonist, and what a mean mind dared not do;" and in 1822 he wrote in Don Juan (10, 16):

464.

I do not know you, and may never know Your face-but you have acted on the whole Most nobly, and I own it from my soul.

"All this is bad, because personal."-Byron, in ed, of 1816.

493. 539. In the portions omitted, Byron pays his respects to a number of minor writers including the dramatists of the period. 494. 857. "I consider Crabbe and Coleridge as the first of these times, in point of power and genius."-Byron, in ed. of 1816.

This was first entitled Zuleika. Byron says that he wrote it in four nights. "Whether it succeeds or not is no fault of the public, against whom I have no complaint. But I am much more indebted to the tale than I can ever be to the most partial reader, as it wrung my thoughts from reality to imagination-from selfish regrets to vivid recollec- 511. tions and recalled me to a country replete with the brightest and darkest, but always most lively colors of my memory."-Byron, in Journal, Dec. 5, 1813.

Byron had fallen in love with Lady Frances, wife of his friend James Wedderburn Webster, whom he had been visiting at Ashton Hall, Rotherham. From Byron's letters it is to be Inferred that he sought safety in flight. The poem was written to allay the distress of the love-affair. Abydos is a town in Asia Minor on the Hellespont, the scene of the romance of Hero and Leander.

513.

"The undoubted fact that The Bride of Abydos, as well as The Giaour, embodies recollections of actual scenes and incidents which had burnt themselves into the memory of an eye-witness, accounts not only for the fervent heat at which these Turkish tales were written, but for the extraordinary glamor which they threw over contemporary readers, to whom the local coloring was new and attractive, and who were not out of conceit with 515. 'good Monsieur Melancholy.'"-E. H. Coleridge, in Introduction to The Bride of Abydos.

1. This line was probably suggested by Goethe's "Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen blühn?" 502. 70.

The Koorsee text, or verse of the throne (Sura II, "Chapter of the Heifer," 257), is as follows: "God, there is no God but He, the living, the self-subsistent. Slumber takes Him not, nor sleep. His is what is in the heavens and what is in the earth. Who is it that intercedes with Him, save by His permission? He knows what is before them and what behind them, and they comprehend not aught of His knowledge but of what He pleases. His throne extends over the heavens and the earth, and it tires Him not to guard them both, for He is high and grand."- -The Qur'an, translated by E. H. Palmer, Sacred Books of

the East (1880), 6, 40. 506. 388. Ocean-Patriarch.-Noah.

ODE TO NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE

"I don't know-but I think I, even I (an insect compared with this creature), have set my life on casts not a millionth part of this man's. But, after all, a crown may not be worth dying for. Yet, to outlive Lodi for this!!! Oh that Juvenal or Johnson could rise from the dead! 'Expende-quot libras in duce summo invenies?' I knew they were light in the balance of mortality; but I thought their living dust weighed more carats. Alas! this imperial diamond hath a flaw in it, and is now hardly fit to stick in a glazier's pencil; the pen of the historian won't rate it worth a ducat. Psha! 'something too much of this."3 But I won't give him up even now; though all his admirers have, like the thanes, fallen from him.'" Byron, in Journal, April 9, 1814.

SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY

The following six poems were included in Byron's Hebrew Melodies. The first two are not Hebrew melodies, but genuine love-songs.

MY SOUL IS DARK

See Macpherson's Oina-Morul (p. 92a, 3233).

HEROD'S LAMENT FOR MARIAMNE

Herod, surnamed "The Great," was King of Judea (40-4, B. C.). In a fit of jealousy he executed his beautiful wife Mariamne. The story is the theme of Stephen Phillips's Herod, A Tragedy (1900).

THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB

Sennacherib was a king of Assyria who invaded Palestine in the 7th century B. C. See 2 Kings, 18:13.

516. 107-111. In respect of accuracy and inaccuracy of detail, Ruskin states that these lines fulfill the conditions of poetry in contradistinction to history. "Instead of finding, as we expected, the poetry distinguished from the history by the omission of details, we find it consisting entirely in the addition of details; and instead of its being characterized by regard only of the invariable, we find its whole power to consist in the clear expression of what is singular and particular!" -Ruskin, Modern Painters, Part IV, ch. 1, sec. 9.

519.

521.

522.

523.

EPISTLE TO AUGUSTA

The Quarterly Review for Jan., 1831 (44:202) says that there is nothing in the whole body of Byron's poetry "more mournfully and desolately beautiful" than these stanzas.

DARKNESS

This poem should be compared with Campbell's The Last Man (p. 423). See note on The Last Man, p. 1229.

PROMETHEUS

Byron was always a lover and a worshipper of Prometheus and frequently alludes to him in his poems. "The conception of an immortal sufferer at once beneficent and defiant, appealed alike to his passions and his convictions and awoke a peculiar enthusiasm."-E. H. Coleridge, Note to Prometheus in his edition of Byron's Poetical Works.

SONNET TO LAKE LEMAN

Lake Leman is Lake Geneva, situated between Switzerland and France.

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE

"The following poem was written, for the most part, amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe. It was begun in Albania; and the parts relative to Spain and Portugal were composed from the author's observations in those countries. Thus much it may be necessary to state for the correctness of the descriptions. The scenes attempted to be sketched are in Spain, Portugal, Epirus, Acarnania, and Greece. There, for the present, the poem stops; its reception will determine whether the author may venture to conduct his readers to the capital of the East, through Ionia and Phrygia: these two cantos are merely experimental.

"A fictitious character is introduced for the sake of giving some connection to the piece, which, however, makes no pretension to regularity. It has been suggested to me by friends, on whose opinions I set a high value, that in this fictitious character, Childe Harold, I may incur the suspicion of having intended some real personage: this I beg leave, once for all, to disclaim-Harold is the child of imagination, for the purpose I have stated. In some

very trivial particulars, and those merely lo-
cal, there might be grounds for such a notion;
but in the main points, I should hope, none
whatever."...-From Preface to the First
and Second Cantos.

"What helps it now, that Byron bore,
With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart,
Through Europe to the Etolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart?
That thousands counted every groan,
And Europe made his woe her own?"

-Arnold, in Stanzas from the Grande
Chartreuse.

Childe is used by Byron as in the old ballads and romances, signifying a youth of noble birth, usually one awaiting knighthood. 528. 32, 9. "Have you never seen a stick broken in the middle, and yet cohering by the rind? The fibres, half of them actually broken and the rest sprained, and, though tough, unsustaining? Oh, many, many are the brokenhearted for those who know what the moral and practical heart of the man is."-Coleridge, Anima Poeta (ed. E. H. Coleridge, 1895), 303. 537. 90. See Shelley's Adonais, 54 (p. 737). Shelley's idealistic pantheism evidently influenced Byron here; the two were frequently together during the week when this Canto was written.

91."It is to be recollected that the most beautiful and impressive doctrines of the divine Founder of Christianity were delivered, not in the Temple, but on the Mount. . . . Were the early and rapid progress of what is called Methodism to be attributed to any cause beyond the enthusiasm excited by its vehement faith and doctrines (the truth or error of which I presume neither to canvass nor to question), I should venture to ascribe it to the practice of preaching in the fields, and the unstudied and extemporaneous effusions of its teachers. The Mussulmans, whose erroneous devotion (at least in the lower orders) is most sincere, and therefore impressive, are accustomed to repeat their prescribed orisons and prayers, wherever they may be, at the stated hours of course, frequently in the open air, kneeling upon a light mat (which they carry for the purpose of a bed or cushion as required); the ceremony lasts some minutes, during which they are totally absorbed, and only living in their supplication: nothing can disturb them. On me the simple and entire sincerity of these men, and the spirit which appeared to be within and upon them, made a far greater impression than any general rite which was ever performed in places of worship."-Byron.

92. "The thunder-storm to which these lines refer occurred on the 13th of June, 1816, at midnight. I have seen, among the Acroceraunian mountains of Chimari, several more terrible, but none more beautiful.”— Byron.

94, 1-9. The similarity between these lines and Coleridge's probably is due to the fact that Byron had seen Christabel in manuscript.

540, 111. Cf. this stanza with Burns's Epistle

132. The appeal to Nemesis in this stanza should be compared with Byron's Fare Thee Well (p. 513), Stanza to Augusta (p. 518), Epistle to Augusta (p. 519), Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 3, 69-75 and 111-18 (pp. 534-41), and Manfred, I, 1, 192-261 (p. 552).

547, 175. In the stanzas omitted Byron writes of the Pantheon, the dungeon of the Church of St. Nicholas, the Mole of Hadrian, the Church of St. Peter's, the art treasures in the Vatican, the death of Princess Charlotte, and the village of Nemi,

a

"from out the temple where the dead Are honor'd by the nations."

543, 25. In the stanzas omitted Byron reflects upon the influence of suffering upon the human heart and mind.

544. 79. In the stanzas omitted Byron writes of various Italian cities, temples, castles, etc., and of the famous men associated with eachPetrarch, Tasso, Galileo, Michelangelo, Dante, Boccaccio, and others.

80. The Goths sacked Rome in 410 and later. The Christians destroyed temples to satisfy religious frenzy and to secure building material.

95. In the stanzas omitted Byron writes of the great conquerors of Rome-Sylla, Pompey, and Cæsar-, and of the nothingness of man. 97, 7. Some editors take the "base pageant" to be the empire and court of Napoleon. 545. 98. This stanza furnishes an example of Byron's vigorous optimism and keen political foresight. His passion for freedom led him to believe and to proclaim that democracy was the most powerful force of the time and that it finally would prevail,

128. In the stanzas omitted Byron writes of several tombs, columns, and other objects and places of note, of the persons concerned with each, and of the influence of love on human life. 130, 2. When visited by Byron, and for long afterwards, the ruins of the Coliseum were covered with shrubs and flowers.

548. 180, 9. Byron made the same error in The Adieu, 94: "Where now my head must lay." This error was more common in Byron's day than it is now.

MANFRED

John Wilson suggested in an article in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, July, 1817, that Manfred was borrowed from Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. From this opinion Jeffrey dissented in his review of Manfred published in The Edinburgh Review, Aug., 1817 (Vol. 28, 430-31). He says: "It is suggested in an ingenious paper in a late number of The Edinburgh Magazine that the general conception of this piece and much of what is excellent in the manner of its execution have been borrowed from The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus of Marlow, and a variety of passages are quoted which the author considers as similar and, in many respects, superior to others in the poem before us. We cannot agree in the general terms of this conclusion, but there is, no doubt, a certain resemblance, both in some of the topics that are suggested and in the cast of the diction in which they are expressed. But these and many other smooth and fanciful verses in this curious old drama prove nothing, we think, against the originality of Manfred; for there is nothing to be found there of the pride, the abstraction, and the heart-rooted misery in which that originality consists. Faustus is a vulgar sorcerer, tempted to sell his soul to the devil for the ordinary price of sensual pleasure and earthly power and glory-and who shrinks and shudders in agony when the forfeit comes to be exacted. The style, too, of Marlow, though elegant and scholar-like, is weak and childish compared with the depth and force of much of what we have quoted from Lord Byron; and the disgusting buffoonery and low farce of which his piece is principally made up place it much more in contrast, than in any terms of comparison, with that of his noble successor. In the tone and pitch of the composition, as well as in the character of the diction in the more solemn parts, the piece before us reminds us much more of the Prometheus of Eschylus than of any more modern performance. The tremendous solitude of the principal person-the supernatural beings with whom alone he holds communion -the guilt-the firmness-the misery—are all