their poems. The _Loves of the Angels_ is the finished composition of an
accomplished designer of Amoretti, one of the best of his kind, _Heaven
and Earth_ is the rough and unpromising sketch thrown off by a great
master.

Both the one and the other have passed out of the ken of readers of
poetry, but, on the whole, the _Loves of the Angels_ has suffered the
greater injustice. It is opined that there may be possibilities in a
half-forgotten work of Byron, but it is taken for granted that nothing
worthy of attention is to be found in Moore. At the time, however, Moore
scored a success, and Byron hardly escaped a failure. It is to be noted
that within a month of publication (January 18, 1823) Moore was at work
upon a revise for a fifth edition--consulting D'Herbelot "for the
project of turning the poor 'Angels' into Turks," and so "getting rid of
that connection with the Scriptures," which, so the Longmans feared,
would "in the long run be a drag on the popularity of the poem"
(_Memoirs, etc._, 1853, iv. 41). It was no wonder that Murray was
"timorous" with regard to Byron and his "scriptural dramas," when the
Longmans started at the shadow of a scriptural allusion.

Byron, in his innocence, had taken for his motto the verse in _Genesis_
(ch. vi. 2), which records the intermarriage of the "sons of God" with
the "daughters of men." In _Heaven and Earth_ the angels _are_ angels,
members, though erring members, of Jehovah's "thundering choir," and the
daughters of men are the descendants of Cain. The question had come up
for debate owing to the recent appearance of a translation of the _Book
of Enoch_ (by Richard Laurence, LL.D., Oxford, 1821); and Moore, by way
of safeguarding himself against any suspicion of theological
irregularity, is careful to assure his readers ("Preface" to _Loves of
the Angels_, 1823, p. viii. and note, pp. 125-127) that the "sons of
God" were the descendants of Seth, and not beings of a supernatural
order, as a mis-translation by the LXX., assisted by Philo and the
"rhapsodical fictions of the _Book of Enoch_" had induced the ignorant
or the profane to suppose. Nothing is so dangerous as innocence, and a
little more of that _empeiria_ of which Goethe accused him, would have
saved Byron from straying from the path of orthodoxy.

It is impossible to say for certain whether Laurence's translation of
the whole of the _Book of Enoch_ had come under Byron's notice before he
planned his new "Mystery,"