aemmtliche
Werke_ ... Stuttgart, 1874, xiii. 640-642; see _Letters_, 1901, v.
Appendix II. "Goethe and Byron," pp. 503-521): "His _Faust_ I never
read, for I don't know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis (_sic_), in 1816,
at Coligny, translated most of it to me _viva voce_, and I was naturally
much struck with it; but it was the _Staubach_ (_sic_) 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" (Letter to Murray, June 7, 1820, _Letters_, 1901, v. 36).
Medwin (_Conversations, etc._, pp. 210, 211), who of course had not seen
the letters to Murray of 1817 or 1820, puts much the same story into
Byron's mouth.

Now, with regard to the originality of _Manfred_, it may be taken for
granted that Byron knew nothing about the "Faust-legend," or the
"Faust-cycle." He solemnly denies that he had ever read Marlowe's
_Faustus_, or the selections from the play in Lamb's _Specimens, etc._
(see Medwin's _Conversations, etc._, pp. 208, 209, and a hitherto
unpublished Preface to _Werner_, vol. v.), and it is highly improbable
that he knew anything of Calderon's _El Magico Prodigioso_, which
Shelley translated in 1822, or of "the beggarly elements" of the legend
in Hroswitha's _Lapsus et Conversio Theophrasti Vice-domini_. But
Byron's _Manfred_ is "in the succession" of scholars who have reached
the limits of natural and legitimate science, and who essay the
supernatural in order to penetrate and comprehend the "hidden things of
darkness." A predecessor, if not a progenitor, he must have had, and
there can be no doubt whatever that the primary conception of the
character, though by no means the inspiration of the poem, is to be
traced to the "Monk's" oral rendering of Goethe's _Faust_, which he gave
in return for his "bread and salt" at Diodati. Neither Jeffrey nor
Wilson mentioned _Faust_, but the writer of the notice in the _Critical
Review_ (June, 1817, series v. vol. 5, pp. 622-629) avowed that "this
scene (the first) is a gross plagiary from a great poet whom Lord Byron
has imitated on former occasions without comprehending. Goethe's _Faust_
begins in the same way;" and Goethe himself, in a letter to his friend
Knebel, October, 1817, and again in his review in _Kunst und Alterthum_,
June, 1820, emphasizes whilst he justifies and applauds the use which
Byron had made of his work. "This singular intellectual poet has taken
my _Faus