active himself in bespeaking the public sympathy against his
lady. It is true that but for that error the world might never have
seen the verses written by him on the occasion; and perhaps it was
the friends who were about him at the time who ought chiefly to be
blamed for having given them circulation: but in saying this, I am
departing from the rule I had prescribed to myself, while I ought
only to have remarked that the compositions alluded to, both the
Fare-thee-well and the Anathema on Mrs Charlemont, are splendid
corroborations of the metaphysical fact which it is the main object
of this work to illustrate, namely, that Byron was only original and
truly great when he wrote from the dictates of his own breast, and
described from the suggestions of things he had seen. When his
imagination found not in his subject uses for the materials of his
experience, and opportunities to embody them, it seemed to be no
longer the same high and mysterious faculty that so ruled the tides
of the feelings of others. He then appeared a more ordinary poet----
a skilful verse-maker. The necromancy which held the reader
spellbound became ineffectual; and the charm and the glory which
interested so intensely, and shone so radiantly on his configurations
from realities, all failed and faded; for his genius dealt not with
airy fancies, but had its power and dominion amid the living and the
local of the actual world.

I shall now return to the consideration of his works, and the first
in order is The Corsair, published in 1814. He seems to have been
perfectly sensible that this beautiful composition was in his best
peculiar manner. It is indeed a pirate's isle, peopled with his own
creatures.

It has been alleged that Lord Byron was indebted to Sir Walter
Scott's poem of Rokeby for the leading incidents of The Corsair, but
the resemblance is not to me very obvious: besides, the whole style
of the poem is so strikingly in his own manner, that even had he
borrowed the plan, it was only as a thread to string his own original
conceptions upon; the beauty and brilliancy of them could not be
borrowed, and are not imitations.

There were two islands in the Archipelago, when Lord Byron was in
Greece, considered as the chief haunts of the pirates, Stampalia, and
a long narrow island between Cape Colonna and Zea. Jura also was a
little tainted in its reputation. I think, however, from the
description, that the pirate's isle of The Corsa