wards the close of
October, he says they have been expecting him any day those six weeks.
Byron, however, did not leave till the morning of the 29th. On his road,
there occurred at Imola the accidental meeting with Lord Clare. Clare--who
on this occasion merely crossed his friend's path on his way to Rome--at a
later date came on purpose from Geneva before returning to England to
visit the poet, who, then at Leghorn, recorded in a letter to Moore his
sense of this proof of old affection undecayed. At Bologna--his next
stage--he met Rogers by appointment, and the latter has preserved his
memory of the event in well-known lines. Together they revisited Florence
and its galleries, where they were distracted by the crowds of
sight-seeing visitors. Byron must have reached Pisa not later than the 2nd
of November (1821), for his first letter from there bears the date of the
3rd.

The later months of the poet's life at Ravenna were marked by intense
literary activity. Over a great part of the year was spread the
controversy with Bowles about Pope, i.e. between the extremes of Art
against Nature, and Nature against Art. It was a controversy for the most
part free from personal animus, and on Byron's part the genuine expression
of a reaction against a reaction. To this year belong the greater number
of the poet's Historical Dramas. What was said of these, at the time by
Jeffrey, Heber, and others, was said with justice; it is seldom that the
criticism of our day finds so little to reverse in that of sixty years
ago.

The author, having shown himself capable of being pathetic, sarcastic,
sentimental, comical, and sublime, we would be tempted to think that he
had written these plays to show, what no one before suspected, that he
could also be dull, were it not for his own exorbitant estimation of them.
Lord Byron had few of the powers of a great dramatist; he had little
architectural imagination, or capacity to conceive and build up a whole.
His works are mainly masses of fine, splendid, or humorous writing, heaped
together; the parts are seldom forged into one, or connected by any
indissoluble link. His so-called Dramas are only poems divided into
chapters. Further, he had little of what Mr. Ruskin calls penetrative
imagination. So it has been plausibly said that he made his men after his
own image, his women after his own heart. The former are, indeed, rather
types of what he wished to be than what he was. They are better, an