ith all his faults and eccentricities, _English_
Lord Byron,--may not, to the over-exalted imaginations of most of his
foreign admirers, appear but an ordinary, unromantic, and prosaic
personage.

[Footnote 75: Of this kind are the accounts, filled with all sorts of
circumstantial wonders, of his residence in the island of Mytilene;--his
voyages to Sicily,--to Ithaca, with the Countess Guiccioli, &c. &c. But
the most absurd, perhaps, of all these fabrications, are the stories
told by Pouqueville, of the poet's religious conferences in the cell of
Father Paul, at Athens; and the still more unconscionable fiction in
which Rizo has indulged, in giving the details of a pretended theatrical
scene, got up (according to this poetical historian) between Lord Byron
and the Archbishop of Arta, at the tomb of Botzaris, in Missolonghi.]

* * * * *

"GOETHE ON MANFRED.

[1820.]

"Byron's tragedy, Manfred, was to me a wonderful phenomenon, and one
that closely touched me. This singular intellectual poet has taken my
Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strongest nourishment for
his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in
his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the
same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire
his genius. The whole is in this way so completely formed anew, that it
would be an interesting task for the critic to point out not only the
alterations he has made, but their degree of resemblance with, or
dissimilarity to, the original: in the course of which I cannot deny
that the gloomy heat of an unbounded and exuberant despair becomes at
last oppressive to us. Yet is the dissatisfaction we feel always
connected with esteem and admiration.

"We find thus in this tragedy the quintessence of the most astonishing
talent born to be its own tormentor. The character of Lord Byron's life
and poetry hardly permits a just and equitable appreciation. He has
often enough confessed what it is that torments him. He has repeatedly
pourtrayed it; and scarcely any one feels compassion for this
intolerable suffering, over which he is ever laboriously ruminating.
There are, properly speaking, two females whose phantoms for ever haunt
him, and which, in this piece also, perform principal parts--one under
the name of Astarte, the other without form or actual presence, and
merely a voice. Of the horrid occurrence whi