but it is plain that he was, at any rate,
familiar with the well-known fragment, "Concerning the 'Watchers'"
[[Greek: Peri\ ton E)grego/ron]], which is preserved in the
_Chronographia_ of Georgius Syncellus, and was first printed by J. J.
Scaliger in _Thes. temp. Euseb._ in 1606. In the prophecy of the Deluge
to which he alludes (_vide post_, p. 302, note 1), the names of the
delinquent seraphs (Semjaza and Azazel), and of the archangelic monitor
Raphael, are to be found in the fragment. The germ of _Heaven and Earth_
is not in the _Book of Genesis_, but in the _Book of Enoch_.

Medwin, who prints (_Conversations_, 1824, pp. 234-238) what purports to
be the prose sketch of a Second Part of _Heaven and Earth_ (he says that
Byron compared it to Coleridge's promised conclusion of
_Christabel_--"that, and nothing more!"), detects two other strains in
the composition of the "Mystery," an echo of Goethe's Faust and a
"movement" which recalls the _Eumenides_ of AEschylus. Byron told Murray
that his fourth tragedy was "more lyrical and Greek" than he at first
intended, and there is no doubt that with the _Prometheus Vinctus_ he
was familiar, if not at first hand, at least through the medium of
Shelley's rendering. But apart from the "Greek choruses," which "Shelley
made such a fuss about," Byron was acquainted with, and was not
untouched by, the metrical peculiarities of the _Curse of Kehama_, and
might have traced a kinship between his "angels" and Southey's
"Glendoveers," to say nothing of _their_ collaterals, the "glumms" and
"gawreys" of _Peter Wilkins_ (see notes to Southey's _Curse of Kehama_,
Canto VI., _Poetical Works_, 1838, viii. 231-233).

Goethe was interested in _Heaven and Earth_. "He preferred it," says
Crabb Robinson (_Diary_, 1869, ii. 434), "to all the other serious
poems of Byron.... 'A bishop,' he exclaimed, though it sounded almost
like satire, 'might have written it.' Goethe must have been thinking of
a _German_ bishop!" (For his daughter-in-law's translation of the
speeches of Anah and Aholibamah with their seraph-lovers, see
_Goethe-Jahrbuch_, 1899, pp. 18-21 [Letters, 1901, v. Appendix II. p.
518].)

_Heaven and Earth_ was reviewed by Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh Review_,
February, 1823, vol. 38, pp. 42-48; by Wilson in _Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine_, January, 1823, vol. xiii. pp. 71, 72; and in the _New Monthly
Magazine_, N.S., 1823, vol. 7, pp. 353-358.

DRAMATIS P