h a discovery that "two entire lines" of
Southey's--

"And water shall see thee,
And fear thee, and flee thee"--

were imbedded in one of his "Songs," touched Byron so deeply that he
"threw the poem into the fire," and concealed the existence of a second
copy for more than two years. It is a fact that Byron's correspondence
does not contain the remotest allusion to _The Deformed Transformed_;
but, with regard to the plagiarism from Southey, in the play as written
in 1822 there is neither Song nor Incantation which could have contained
two lines from _The Curse of Kehama_.

As a dramatist, Byron's function, or _metier_, was twofold. In
_Manfred_, in _Cain_, in _Heaven and Earth_, he is concerned with the
analysis and evolution of metaphysical or ethical notions; in _Marino
Faliero_, in _Sardanapalus_, and _The Two Foscari_, he set himself "to
dramatize striking passages of history;" in _The Deformed Transformed_
he sought to combine the solution of a metaphysical puzzle or problem,
the relation of personality to individuality, with the scenic rendering
of a striking historical episode, the Sack of Rome in 1527.

In the note or advertisement prefixed to the drama, Byron acknowledges
that "the production" is founded partly on the story of a forgotten
novel, _The Three Brothers_, and partly on "the _Faust_ of the great
Goethe."

Arnaud, or Julian, the hero of _The Three Brothers_ (by Joshua
Pickersgill, jun., 4 vols., 1803), "sells his soul to the Devil, and
becomes an arch-fiend in order to avenge himself for the taunts of
strangers on the deformity of his person" (see _Gent. Mag._, November,
1804, vol. 74, p. 1047; and _post_, pp. 473-479). The idea of an escape
from natural bonds or disabilities by supernatural means and at the
price of the soul or will, the _un_-Christlike surrender to the tempter,
which is the _grund-stoff_ of the Faust-legend, was brought home to
Byron, in the first instance, not by Goethe, or Calderon, or Marlowe,
but by Joshua Pickersgill. A fellow-feeling lent an intimate and
peculiar interest to the theme. He had suffered all his life from a
painful and inconvenient defect, which his proud and sensitive spirit
had magnified into a deformity. He had been stung to the quick by his
mother's taunts and his sweetheart's ridicule, by the jeers of the base
and thoughtless, by slanderous and brutal paragraphs in newspapers. He
could not forget that he was lame. If his enemies had but possess