been preserved, would have been
very different from Chateaubriand's elaborate autobiography.

It was the spectacle of Christians groaning under Turkish oppression,
and of their heroic resistance, that inspired three of Byron's finest
poems, the _Giaour_, the _Bride of Abydos_, the _Siege of Corinth_. On
this subject he was so heartily in earnest that he could even lose
sight of his own woes; and notwithstanding the exuberance of colour
and sentiment, these tales still hold their place in the first rank of
metrical romance. Their construction is imperfect, even fragmentary;
yet while Scott could put together and tell his story much better, not
even Scott could drive it onward and sustain the verse at a high level
with greater energy, or decorate his narrative with finer description
of scenery, or give more intensity to the moments of fierce action.
The splendid apostrophe to Greece in the _Giaour_--

'Clime of the unforgotten brave!
Whose land from plain to mountain cave
Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave'--

has forty lines of unsurpassed beauty and fire, written in the
manuscript, as a note tells us, in a hurried and almost illegible
hand--an authentic example of true improvisation which the elaborate
poets of our own day may match if they can. The tumid phrase and
melodramatic figuring--

'Dark and unearthly is the scowl
That glares beneath his dusky cowl'--

are now worn-out theatrical properties; yet those who have seen the
untamed Asiatic might find it hard to overdraw the murderous hate and
sullen ferocity that his face, or his victim's, will occasionally
disclose. The heroes, at any rate, love and die in a masculine way; it
is the old tragic theme of bitter unmerited misfortune, of daring
adventure that ends fatally, without any of the wailing sensuality
that infects the more harmonious poetry of a later day. There are,
perhaps, for modern taste, too many outlandish words and references to
Eastern customs or beliefs, requiring glossaries and marginal
explanations; nor does the profuse annotation of the present edition
lighten a reader's burden in this respect. Byron had no business to
write 'By pale Phingari's trembling light,' leaving us at the mercy of
assiduous editors to expound that 'Phingari' is the Greek [Greek:
phengarion], and stands here for the moon. And if he could have spared
us such Orientalisms as 'Al Sirat's arch,' or 'avenging Monkir's
scythe,' we should have mixed up