his den,
Roused up and answered with a sullen growl,
Low-breathed and long; and at the uproar scared,
The brooding eagle from her nest took wing."

A sentence in a letter to Moore, dated January 10, 1815 (_Letters_,
1899, iii. 168), "_I_ have tried the rascals (i.e. the public) with my
Harrys and Larrys, Pilgrims and Pirates. Nobody but S....y has done any
thing worth a slice of bookseller's pudding, and _he_ has not luck
enough to be found out in doing a good thing," implies that Byron had
read and admired Southey's _Roderick_--an inference which is curiously
confirmed by a memorandum in Murray's handwriting: "When Southey's poem,
_Don Roderick_ (_sic_), was published, Lord Byron sent in the middle of
the night to ask John Murray if he had heard any opinion of it, for he
thought it one of the finest poems he had ever read." The resemblance
between the two passages, which is pointed out by Professor Koelbing, is
too close to be wholly unconscious, but Byron's expansion of Southey's
lines hardly amounts to a plagiarism.]

PARISINA.

INTRODUCTION TO _PARISINA_.

_Parisina_, which had been begun before the _Siege of Corinth_, was
transcribed by Lady Byron, and sent to the publisher at the beginning of
December, 1815. Murray confessed that he had been alarmed by some hints
which Byron had dropped as to the plot of the narrative, but was
reassured when he traced "the delicate hand that transcribed it." He
could not say enough of this "Pearl" of great price. "It is very
interesting, pathetic, beautiful--do you know I would almost say moral"
(_Memoir of John Murray_, 1891, i. 353). Ward, to whom the MS. of
_Parisina_ was shown, and Isaac D'Israeli, who heard it read aloud by
Murray, were enthusiastic as to its merits; and Gifford, who had mingled
censure with praise in his critical appreciation of the _Siege_,
declared that the author "had never surpassed _Parisina_."

The last and shortest of the six narrative poems composed and published
in the four years (the first years of manhood and of fame, the only
years of manhood passed at home in England) which elapsed between the
appearance of the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_ and the third,
_Parisina_ has, perhaps, never yet received its due. At the time of its
appearance it shared the odium which was provoked by the publication of
_Fare Thee Well_ and _A Sketch_, and before there was time