less desultory reading with the
enjoyment of fine passages. He gives us too much of his local
colouring, he checks the rush of his verse by superfluous metaphors,
he has weak and halting lines. The style is heated and fuming, yet the
dainty art-critic who lays hands on such metal thrown red hot from the
forge may chance to burn his fingers over it. Nor must we forget that
in these poems Byron brought the classic lands of Greece and the
Levant within the sphere of modern romance, and has unquestionably
added some 'deathless pages' to English literature.

Byron has told us why he adopted for the _Corsair_, and afterwards for
_Lara_, 'the good old and now neglected heroic couplet':

'The stanza of Spenser is, perhaps, too slow and dignified for
narrative, though I confess it is the measure after my own heart;
Scott alone, of the present generation, has hitherto triumphed
completely over the fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse; and
this is not the least victory of his fertile and mighty genius; in
blank verse Milton, Thomson, and our dramatists are the beacons
that shine along the deep, but warn us from the rough and barren
rocks on which they are kindled.'[25]

We doubt much, from a comparison of the poems, whether the experiment
of changing his metre was successful. The short eight-syllabled line
displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement;
it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow
processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room
for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of
describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy
heroes, instead of letting them act and speak for themselves. At
moments when inspiration is running low, and a gap has to be filled
up, the shorter line needs less padding, and can be more rapidly run
over when it is weak. Whereas a feeble heroic couplet becomes
ponderous and sinks more quickly into bathos--as in the following
sample from the _Corsair_:

'Oh! burst the Haram, wrong not on your lives
One female form--remember--_we_ have wives.'

And the consequence has been that _Lara_ and the _Corsair_ are now,
we believe, the least readable of Byron's metrical romances.

Of Byron's dramas we are obliged to say that, to borrow his own
metaphor, he would have fared better as a poet if he had taken warning
from the beacons, and had given blank