Glorious Orb! the idol Of early nature, and the vigorous race More beautiful than they, which did draw down Which gladden'd, on their mountain tops, the hearts | Who chose thee for his shadow! Thou chief star! And hearts of all who walk within thy rays! [Exit MANFRED. SCENE III. The Mountains-The Castle of Manfred at some distance-A Terrace before a Tower.-Time, Twilight. HERMAN, MANUEL, and other Dependants of MANFRED. Her. "Tis strange enough; night after night, for years, He hath pursued long vigils in this tower, 1 "And it came to pass, that the Sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair," &c. -"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."- Genesis, ch. vi. verses 2 and 4. [Pray, was Manfred's speech to the Sun still retained in Act third? I hope so: it was one of the best in the thing, and better than the Coliseum."— Byron Letters, 1817.] [Some strange things in these few years."- MS.] ◄ [The remainder of the third Act, in its original shape, ran thus: Or its contents, it were impossible To draw conclusions absolute, of aught His studies tend to. To be sure, there is One chamber where none enter: I would give How many years is't? Manuel. Ere Count Manfred's birth, I served his father, whom he nought resembles. Manuel. I speak not These walls Oh! I have seen Come, be friendly; Must change their chieftain first. Not that, if one, or two, or more, will join, I do not see precisely to what end. He's dead. 'Tis all in vain Her. (within). Not so-even now methought he moved; But it is dark-so bear him gently out Softly how cold he is! take care of his temples In winding down the staircase. Within a bowshot-where the Cæsars dwelt, A noble wreck in ruinous perfection! While Cæsar's chambers, and the Augustan halls, "T was such a night! "Tis strange that I recall it at this time; But I have found our thoughts take wildest flight Even at the moment when they should array Themselves in pensive order. Interior of the Tower. MANFRED alone. The stars are forth, the moon above the tops I learn'd the language of another world. And stedfastly; Not I; What dost mean? Look there! Nothing. Look there, I say, -now tell me what thou seest. With strange accompaniments and fearful signs - [MANFRED having said this expires. Her. His eyes are fixed and lifeless. He is gone. Manuel. Close them. My old hand quivers. He de parts Whither? I dread to think-but he is gone !] [The opening of this scene is, perhaps, the finest passage in the drama; and its solemn, calm, and majestic character throws an air of grandeur over the catastrophe, which was in danger of appearing extravagant, and somewhat too much in the style of the “ Devil and Dr. Faustus."— WILSON.] 2 ["Drove at midnight to see the Coliseum by moonlight: but what can I say of the Coliseum? It must be seen; to describe it I should have thought impossible, if I had not read 'Manfred.' To see it aright, as the Poet of the North tells us of the fair Melrose, one must see it by the pale moonlight. The stillness of night, the whispering echoes, the moonlight shadows, and the awful grandeur of the impending ruins, form a scene of romantic sublimity, such as Byron alone could describe as it deserves. His description is the very thing itself." — MATTHEWS's Diary of an Invalid.] We know ourselves, our mission, and thine order; [In the first edition, this line was accidentally left out. On discovering the omission, Lord Byron wrote to Mr. Murray" You have destroyed the whole effect and moral of the poem, by omitting the last line of Manfred's speaking."] 2 [In June, 1820, Lord Byron thus writes to Mr. Murray: - Enclosed is something which will interest you; to wit, the opinion of the greatest man in Germany - perhaps in Europe - upon one of the great men of your advertisements (all famous hands,' as Jacob Tonson used to say of his ragamuffins) in short, a critique of Goethe's upon Manfred. There is the original, an English translation, and an Italian one: keep them all in your archives; for the opinions Man. But thy many crimes -- What are they to such as thee? Must crimes be punish'd but by other crimes, And greater criminals ? — Back to thy hell! Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel; Thou never shalt possess me, that I know: What I have done is done; I bear within A torture which could nothing gain from thine: The mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughtsIs its own origin of ill and endAnd its own place and time - its innate sense, When stripp'd of this mortality, derives No colour from the fleeting things without; But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy, Born from the knowledge of its own desert. Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me; I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy preyBut was my own destroyer, and will be My own hereafter.- Back, ye baffled fiends! The hand of death is on me- but not yours! [The Demons disappear. Abbot. Alas! how pale thou art -thy lips are white And thy breast heaves-and in thy gasping throat The accents rattle-Give thy prayers to HeavenPray-albeit but in thought, -but die not thus. Man. 'Tis over-my dull eyes can fix thee not; But all things swim around me, and the earth Heaves as it were beneath me. Fare thee wellGive me thy hand. Abbot. Cold-cold- -even to the heartBut yet one prayer-Alas! how fares it with thee? Man. Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die. 1 [MANFRED expires. Abbot. He's gone-his soul hath ta'en his earthless flight Whither? I dread to think-but he is gone. ? of such a man as Goethe, whether favourable or not, are always interesting and this is more so, as favourable. His Faust I never read, for I don't know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it to me. viva voce, and I was naturally much struck with it but it was the Steinbach and the Jungfrau, and something else, much more than Faustus, that made me write Manfred. The first scene, however, and that of Faustus are very similar." The following is the extract from Goethe's Kunst und Altherthum (i. e. Art and Antiquity) which the above letter enclosed: "Byron's tragedy, Manfred,' was to me a wonderful phe nomenon, and one that closely touched me. This singularly intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strongest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius. The whole is in this way so completely formed anew, that it would be an interesting task for the critic to point out, not only the alterations he has made, but their degree of resemblance with, or dissimilarity to, the original: in the course of which I cannot deny, that the gloomy heat of an unbounded and exuberant despair becomes at last oppressive to us. Yet is the dissatisfaction we feel always connected with esteem and admiration. "We find thus, in this tragedy, the quintessence of the most astonishing talent born to be its own tormentor. The character of Lord Byron's life and poetry hardly permits a just and equitable appreciation. He has often enough confessed what it is that torments him. He has repeatedly portrayed it; and scarcely any one feels compassion for this intolerable suffering, over which he is ever laboriously ruminating. There are, properly speaking, two females whose phantoms for ever haunt him, and which, in this piece also, perform principal parts-one under the name of Astarte, the other without form or actual presence, and merely a voice. Of the horrid occurrence which took place with the former, the following is related: - When a bold and enterprising young man, he won the affections of a Florentine lady. Her husband discovered the amour, and murdered his wife; but the murderer was the same night found dead in the street, and there was no one on whom any suspicion could be attached. Lord Byron removed from Florence, and these spirits haunted him all his life after. "This romantic incident is rendered highly probable by innumerable allusions to it in his poems. As, for instance, when turning his sad contemplations inwards, he applies to himself the fatal history of the king of Sparta. It is as follows:Pausanias, a Lacedæmonian general, acquires glory by the important victory at Platæa, but afterwards forfeits the confidence of his countrymen through his arrogance, obstinacy, and secret intrigues with the enemies of his country. This man draws upon himself the heavy guilt of innocent blood, which attends him to his end; for, while commanding the fleet of the allied Greeks, in the Black Sea, he is inflamed with a violent passion for a Byzantine maiden. After long resistance, he at length obtains her from her parents, and she is to be delivered up to him at night. She modestly desires the servant to put out the lamp, and, while groping her way in the dark, she overturns it. Pausanias is awakened from his sleep apprehensive of an attack from murderers, he seizes his sword, and destroys his mistress. The horrid sight never leaves him. Her shade pursues him unceasingly, and he implores for aid in vain from the gods and the exorcising priests. That poet must have a lacerated heart who selects such a scene from antiquity, appropriates it to himself, and burdens his tragic image with it. The following soliloquy, which is overladen with gloom and a weariness of life, is, by this remark, rendered intelligible. We recommend it as an exercise to all friends of declamation. Hamlet's soliloquy appears improved upon here."- Goethe here subjoins Manfred's soliloquy, beginning, "We are the fools of time and terror," in which the allusion to Pausanias occurs. The reader will not be sorry to pass from this German criticism to that of the Edinburgh Review on Manfred." This is, undoubtedly, a work of great genius and originality. Its worst fault, perhaps, is that it fatigues and overawes us by the uniformity of its terror and solemnity. Another, is the painful and offensive nature of the circumstance on which its distress is ultimately founded. The lyrical songs of the Spirits are too long, and not all excellent. There is something of pedantry in them now and then; and even Manfred deals in classical allusions a little too much. If we were to consider it as a ["The grave confidence with which the venerable critic traces the fancies of his brother poet to real persons and events, making no difficulty even of a double murder at Florence to furnish grounds for his theory, affords an amusing instance of the disposition so prevalent throughout Europe, to picture Byron as a man of marvels and mysteries, as well in his life as his poetry. To these exaggerated, or wholly false notions of him, the numerous fictions palmed upon the world of his romantic tours and wonderful adventures, in places he never saw, and with persons that never existed, have, no doubt, considerably contributed; and the conse quence is, so utterly out of truth and nature are the representations of his life and character long current upon the Continent, that it may be questioned whether the real flesh and blood' hero of these pages, the social, practical-minded, and, with all his faults and eccentricities, English Lord Byron, - may not, to the over-exalted imaginations of most of his foreign admirers, appear but an ordinary, unromantic, and prosaic personage." MOORE.] proper drama, or even as a finished poem, we should be obliged to add, that it is far too indistinct and unsatisfactory. But this we take to be according to the design and conception of the author. He contemplated but a dim and magnificent sketch of a subject which did not admit of more accurate drawing or more brilliant colouring. Its obscurity is a part of its grandeur; and the darkness that rests upon it, and the smoky distance in which it is lost, are all devices to increase its majesty, to stimulate our curiosity, and to impress us with deeper awe. It is suggested, in an ingenious paper in a late number of the Edinburgh Magazine, that the general conception of this piece, and inuch 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 the 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. Thus, to induce Faustus to persist in his unlawful studies, he is told that the Spirits of the Elements will serve him, Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids, Than have the white breasts of the Queene of Love." And again, when the amorous sorcerer commands Helen of Troy to revive again to be his paramour, he addresses her, on her first appearance, in these rapturous lines Was this the face that launcht a thousand ships, The catastrophe, too, is bewailed in verses of great elegance and classical beauty Cut is the branch that might have growne fuil straight, That sometime grew within this learned man. But these, and many other smooth and fanciful verses in this As [On reading this, Lord Byron wrote from Venice "Jeffrey is very kind about Manfred, and defends its origieality, which I did not know that any body had attacked. to the germs of it, they may be found in the Journal which I sent to Mrs. Leigh, before I left Switzerland. I have the whole scene of Manfred before me, as if it was but yesterday, and could point it out, spot by spot, torrent and all.' ["Of the Prometheus' of Eschylus I was passionately fond as a boy (it was one of the Greek plays we read thrice a year at Harrow); indeed, that and the Medea' were the only ones, except the Seven before Thebes,' which ever much pleased me. The Prometheus, if not exactly in my plan, tas always been so much in my head, that I can easily conceive its influence over all or any thing that I have written; but I deny Marlow and his progeny, and beg that you will do the same."- - Byron Letters, 1817.] Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice: AN HISTORICAL TRAGEDY, IN FIVE ACTS. 1 "Dux inquieti turbidus Adriæ."— HORACE. PREFACE. THE Conspiracy of the Doge Marino Faliero is one of the most remarkable events in the annals of the 1 [On the original MS. sent from Ravenna, Lord Byron has written:-" Begun April 4th, 1820-completed July 16th, 1820-finished copying August 16th-17th, 1820; the which copying makes ten times the toil of composing, considering the weather-thermometer 90 in the shade-and my domestic duties." He at the time intended to keep it by him for six years before sending it to the press; but resolutions of this kind are, in modern days, very seldom adhered to. It was published in the end of the same year; and, to the poet's great disgust, and in spite of his urgent and repeated remonstrances, was produced on the stage of Drury Lane Theatre early in 1821. The extracts from his letters sufficiently explain his feelings on this occasion. It Marino Faliero was, greatly to his satisfaction, commended warmly for the truth of its adhesion to Venetian history and manners, as well as the antique severity of its structure and language, by that eminent master of Italian and classical Eterature, the late Ugo Foscolo. Mr. Gifford also delighted him by pronouncing it "English-genuine English." was, however, little favoured by the contemporary critics. There was, indeed, only one who spoke of it as quite worthy of Lord Byron's reputation." Nothing," said he," has for a long time afforded us so much pleasure, as the rich promise of dramatic excellence unfolded in this production of Lord Byron. Without question, no such tragedy as Marino Faliero has appeared in English, since the day when Otway also was inspired to his masterpiece by the interests of a Venetian story and a Venetian conspiracy. The story of which Lord Byron has possessed himself is, we think, by far the finer of the two, and we say possessed, because we believe he has adhered almost to the letter of the transactions as they really took place."- The language of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviewers, Mr. Jeffrey and Bishop Heber, was in a far different strain. The former says "Marino Faliero has undoubtedly considerable beauties, both dramatic and poetical; and might have made the fortune of any young aspirant for fame: but the name of Byron raises expectations which are not so easily satisfied; and, judging of it by the lofty standard which he himself has established, we are compelled to say, that we cannot but regard it as a failure, both as a poem and a play. This may be partly accounted for from the inherent difficulty of uniting these two sorts of excellence — of confining the daring and digressive genius of poetry within the forms and limits of a regular drama, and, at the same time, imparting its warm and vivifying spirit to the practical preparation and necessary details of a complete theatrical action. These, however, are difficulties with which dramatic adventurers have long had to struggle; and over which, though they are incomparably most formidable to the most powerful spirits, there is no reason to doubt that the powers of Lord Byron would have triumphed. The true history of his failure, therefore, we conceive, and the actual cause of his miscarriage on the present occasion, is to be found in the bad choice of his subject—his selection of a story which not only gives no scope to the peculiar and commanding graces of his genius, but runs continually counter to the master currents of his fancy. His great gifts are exquisite tenderness, and demoniacal sublimity; the power of conjuring up at pleasure those delicious visions of love and beauty, and pity and purity, which melt our hearts within us with a thrilling and etherial softness and of wielding, at the same time, that infernal fire which blasts and overthrows all things with the dark and capricious fulminations of its scorn, rancour, and revenge. With the consciousness of these great powers, and as if in wilful perversity to their suggestions, he has here chosen a story which, in a great measure, excludes the agency of either, and resolutely conducted it, so as to secure himself against their intrusion;-a story without love or hatred most singular government, city, and people of modern history. It occurred in the year 1355. Every thing about Venice is, or was, extraordinary—her aspect is like a dream, and her history is like a romance. misanthropy or pity-containing nothing voluptuous and nothing terrific-but depending, for its grandeur, on the anger of a very old and irritable man; and, for its attraction, on the elaborate representations of conjugal dignity and domestic honour, -the sober and austere triumphs of cold and untempted chastity, and the noble propriety of a pure and disciplined understanding. These, we think, are not the most promising themes for any writer whose business is to raise powerful emotions; nor very likely, in any hands, to redeem the modern drama from the imputation of want of spirit, interest, and excitement. But, for Lord Byron to select them for a grand dramatic effort, is as if a swift-footed racer were to tie his feet together at the starting, or a valiant knight to enter the lists without his arms. No mortal prowess could succeed under such disadvantages. The story, in so far as it is original in our drama, is extremely improbable, though, like most other very improbable stories, derived from authentic sources but, in the main, it is original; being, indeed, merely another 'Venice Preserved,' and continually recalling, though certainly without eclipsing, the memory of the first. Except that Jaffier is driven to join the conspirators by the natural impulse of love and misery, and the Doge by a resentment so outrageous as to exclude all sympathy, and that the disclosure, which is produced by love in the old play, is here ascribed to mere friendship, the general action and catastrophe of the two pieces are almost identical; while, with regard to the writing and management, it must be owned that, if Lord Byron has most sense and vigour, Otway has by far the most passion and pathos; and that though his conspirators are better orators and reasoners than the gang of Pierre and Reynault, the tenderness of Belvidere is as much more touching, as it is more natural, than the stoical and self-satisfied decorum of Angiolina." After an elaborate disquisition on the Unities, Bishop Heber thus concludes: "We cannot conceive a greater instance of the efficacy of system to blind the most acute perception, than the fact that Lord Byron, in works avowedly and exclusively intended for the closet, has piqued himself on the observance of rules, which (be their advantage on the stage what it may) are evidently, off the stage, a matter of perfect indifference. The only object of adhering to the unities is to preserve the illusion of the scene. To the reader they are obviously useless. It is true, that, in the closet, not only are their supposed advantages destroyed, but their inconveniences are also, in a great measure, neutralised; and it is true also, that poetry so splendid has often accompanied them, as to make us wholly overlook, in the blaze of greater excellences, whatever inconveniences result from them, either in the closet or the theatre. But even diminished difficulties are not to be needlessly courted, and though, in the strength and dexterity of the combatant, we soon lose sight of the cumbrous trappings by which he has chosen to distinguish himself; yet, it those trappings are at once cumbersome and pedantic, not only will his difficulty of success be increased, but his failure, if he fails, will be rendered the more signal and ridiculous. "Marino Faliero has, we believe, been pretty generally pronounced a failure by the public voice, and we see no reason to call for a revision of their sentence. It contains, beyond all doubt, many passages of commanding eloquence, and some of genuine poetry; and the scenes, more particularly, in which Lord Byron has neglected the absurd creed of his pseudoHellenic writers, are conceived and elaborated with great tragic effect and dexterity. But the subject is decidedly illchosen. In the main tissue of the plot, and in all the busiest and most interesting parts of it, it is, in fact, no more than another Venice Preserved,' in which the author has had to |