d_ lie on the surface; but it is difficult
for the modern reader, familiar with the sight, if not the texture, of
"the purple patches," and unattracted, perhaps demagnetized, by a
personality once fascinating and always "puissant," to appreciate the
actual worth and magnitude of the poem. We are "o'er informed;" and as
with Nature, so with Art, the eye must be couched, and the film of
association removed, before we can see clearly. But there is one
characteristic feature of _Childe Harold_ which association and
familiarity have been powerless to veil or confuse--originality of
design. "By what accident," asks the Quarterly Reviewer (George Agar
Ellis), "has it happened that no other English poet before Lord Byron
has thought fit to employ his talents on a subject so well suited to
their display?" The question can only be answered by the assertion that
it was the accident of genius which inspired the poet with a "new song."
_Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_ had no progenitors, and, with the exception
of some feeble and forgotten imitations, it has had no descendants. The
materials of the poem; the Spenserian stanza, suggested, perhaps, by
Campbell's _Gertrude of Wyoming_, as well as by older models; the
language, the metaphors, often appropriated and sometimes stolen from
the Bible, from Shakespeare, from the classics; the sentiments and
reflections coeval with reflection and sentiment, wear a familiar hue;
but the poem itself, a pilgrimage to scenes and cities of renown, a song
of travel, a rhythmical diorama, was Byron's own handiwork--not an
inheritance, but a creation.

But what of the eponymous hero, the sated and melancholy "Childe," with
his attendant page and yeoman, his backward glances on "heartless
parasites," on "laughing dames," on goblets and other properties of "the
monastic dome"? Is Childe Harold Byron masquerading in disguise, or is
he intended to be a fictitious personage, who, half unconsciously,
reveals the author's personality? Byron deals with the question in a
letter to Dallas (October 31): "I by no means intend to identify myself
with _Harold_, but to _deny_ all connection with him. If in parts I may
be thought to have drawn from myself, believe me it is but in parts, and
I shall not own even to that." He adds, with evident sincerity, "I would
not be such a fellow as I have made my hero for all the world." Again,
in the preface, "Harold is the child of imagination." This pronouncement
was not the whol