tenance, and his eyes were so
piercing that they seemed to penetrate at a single
glance into the hearts of men, and to read their most
secret thoughts--few persons could endure their
scrutiny or even endure to meet them twice ... he could
adapt himself to the tempers and passions of persons,
whom he wished to conciliate, with astonishing
facility."

The type undoubtedly owes something to Milton's Satan. Like
Lucifer, he is proud and ambitious, and like him he retains
traces of his original grandeur. Hints from Shakespeare helped to
fashion him. Like Cassius, seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a
sort

"As if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spirit
That could be moved to smile at anything."

Like King John,

"The image of a wicked heinous fault
Lives in his eye: that close aspect of his
Does show the mood of a much-troubled breast."

By the enormity of his crimes he inspires horror and repulsion,
but by his loneliness he appeals, for a moment, like the
consummate villain Richard III., to our pity:

"There is no creature loves me
And if I die, no soul will pity me.
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?"

Karl von Moor, the famous hero of Schiller's _Die Raeuber_ (1781),
is allied to this desperado. He is thus described in the
advertisement of the 1795 edition:

"The picture of a great, misguided soul, endowed with
every gift of excellence, yet lost in spite of all its
gifts. Unbridled passions and bad companionship corrupt
his heart, urge him on from crime to crime, until at
last he stands at the head of a band of murderers,
heaps horror upon horror, and plunges from precipice to
precipice in the lowest depths of despair. Great and
majestic in misfortune, by misfortune reclaimed and led
back to the paths of virtue. Such a man shall you pity
and hate, abhor yet love in the robber Moor."

Among the direct progeny of these grandiose villains are to be
included those of Lewis and Maturin, and the heroes of Scott and
Byron. We know them by their world-weariness, as well as by their
piercing eyes and passion-marked faces, their "verra wrinkles
Gothic." In _The Giaour_ we are told:

"Dark and unearthly is the scowl
That glares beneath his dusky cowl:

"The flash of that dilating eye
Reveals too much of times gone by.
Though varying, indistinct its hue