verse a wide berth, instead of
setting himself boldly on a course which, as he evidently knew, is
full of peril for fast-sailing, free-going versifiers. He saw that he
could not approach the great masters of this measure, he was resolved
not to imitate them; and so he appears to have chosen the singular
alternative of writing nothing that should in the least resemble them.
His general object as a playwriter is stated, in a letter about
_Sardanapalus_, to have been 'to dramatise striking passages of
history and mythology.'

'You will find,' he adds most truly, 'all this very unlike
Shakespeare; and so much the better in one sense, for I look upon
him to be the worst of models, though the most extraordinary of
writers. It has been my object to be as simple and severe as
Alfieri, and I have broken down the poetry as nearly as I could to
common language.'

And undoubtedly he did break it down so effectually that much of his
blank verse hobbles like a lame horse, being often mere prose printed
in short lines. Here are two specimens, not cut into lengths, which
have no metrical construction at all:

'Unless you keep company with him, and you seem scarce used to such
high society, you can't tell how he approaches.'[26]

'Where thou shalt pass thy days in peace, but on condition that the
three young princes are given up as hostages,'[27]

Many others of the same quality might be given, in which the
_disjecti membra poetae_ would be exceedingly hard to find. It is
surprising that a writer of Byron's experience should have fallen into
the error of supposing that simplicity could be attained by the mere
use of common language. For even Wordsworth, who is a master of simple
strength, could never allow his peasants to talk their ordinary
vernacular without a fatal drop into the commonplace; and all verse
that is to be plain and unaffected in style and thought requires the
most studious composition. Byron seems scarcely to have understood
that blank verse has any rules of scansion, and his signal failure in
this metre has become less tolerable and more conspicuous, since Keats
in his day, and Tennyson after him, have carefully studied the
construction of blank verse, and have left us admirable examples of
its capacity for romantic expression. It is indeed strange that Byron
should have fancied that he could use so delicate an instrument with a
rough unpractised hand.

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