all nameless hour," and every conceivable horror
has been alleged as its _motif_. On this subject Goethe writes with a
humorous simplicity: "This singularly intellectual poet has extracted from
my _Faust_ the strongest nourishment for his hypochondria; but he has made
use of the impelling principles for his own purposes.... 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 to whom any
suspicion could be attached. Lord Byron removed from Florence, but these
spirits have haunted him all his life. This romantic incident explains
innumerable allusions," e.g.,--

I have shed
Blood, but not hers,--and yet her blood was shed.

Were it not for the fact that the poet had never seen the city in question
when he wrote the poem, this explanation would be more plausible than most
others, for the allusions are all to some lady who has been done to death.
Galt asserts that the plot turns on a tradition of unhallowed
necromancy--a human sacrifice, like that of Antinous attributed to
Hadrian. Byron himself says it has no plot, but he kept teasing his
questioners with mysterious hints, e.g. "It was the Staubbach and the
Jungfrau, and something else more than Faustus, which made me write
_Manfred_;" and of one of his critics he says to Murray, "It had a better
origin than he can devise or divine, for the soul of him." In any case
most methods of reading between its lines would, if similarly applied,
convict Sophocles, Schiller, and Shelley of incest, Shakespeare of murder,
Milton of blasphemy, Scott of forgery, Marlowe and Goethe of compacts with
the devil. Byron was no dramatist, but he had wit enough to vary at least
the circumstances of his projected personality. The memories of both
Fausts--the Elizabethan and the German--mingle, in the pages of this
piece, with shadows of the author's life; but to these it never gives, nor
could be intended to give, any substantial form.

_Manfred_ is a chaos of pictures, suggested by the scenery of
Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald, half animated by vague personifications and
sensational narrative. Like _Harold_, and Scott's _Marmion_, it just
misses being a great poem. The Coliseum is its masterpiece of description,
the appeal, "Astarte, my beloved, speak to me," its nearest approach to
pathos. The l