INTRODUCTION TO _MANFRED_

Byron passed four months and three weeks in Switzerland. He arrived at
the Hotel d'Angleterre at Secheron, on Saturday, May 25, and he left the
Campagne Diodati for Italy on Sunday, October 6, 1816. Within that
period he wrote the greater part of the Third Canto of _Childe Harold_,
he began and finished the _Prisoner of Chillon_, its seven attendant
poems, and the _Monody_ on the death of Sheridan, and he began
_Manfred_.

A note to the "Incantation" (_Manfred_, act i. sc. 1, lines 192-261),
which was begun in July and published together with the _Prisoner of
Chillon_, December 5, 1816, records the existence of "an unfinished
Witch Drama" (First Edition, p. 46); but, apart from this, the first
announcement of his new work is contained in a letter to Murray, dated
Venice, February 15, 1817 (_Letters_, 1900, iv. 52). "I forgot," he
writes, "to mention to you that a kind of Poem in dialogue (in blank
verse) or drama ... begun last summer in Switzerland, is finished; it is
in three acts; but of a very wild, metaphysical, and inexplicable kind."
The letter is imperfect, but some pages of "extracts" which were
forwarded under the same cover have been preserved. Ten days later
(February 25) he reverts to these "extracts," and on February 28 he
despatches a fair copy of the first act. On March 9 he remits the third
and final act of his "dramatic poem" (a definition adopted as a second
title), but under reserve as to publication, and with a strict
injunction to Murray "to submit it to Mr. G[ifford] and to whomsoever
you please besides." It is certain that this third act was written at
Venice (Letter to Murray, April 14), and it may be taken for granted
that the composition of the first two acts belongs to the tour in the
Bernese Alps (September 17-29), or to the last days at Diodati
(September 30 to October 5, 1816), when the _estro_ (see Letter to
Murray, January 2, 1817) was upon him, when his "Passions slept," and,
in spite of all that had come and gone and could not go, his spirit was
uplifted by the "majesty and the power and the glory" of Nature.

Gifford's verdict on the first act was that it was "wonderfully
poetical" and "merited publication," but, as Byron had foreseen, he did
not "by any means like" the third act. It was, as its author admitted
(Letter to Murray, April 14) "damnably bad," and savoured of the "dregs
of a fever," for which the Carnival (Le