In the grey square turret swinging,
  With a deep sound, to and fro,
  Heavily to the heart they go.

These romances belong to the same period of the author’s poetic career as the first two cantos of Childe Harold.  They followed one another like brilliant fireworks.  They all exhibit a command of words, a sense of melody, and a flow of rhythm and rhyme, which mastered Moore and even Scott on their own ground.  None of them are wanting in passages, as “He who hath bent him o’er the dead,” and the description of Alp leaning against a column, which strike deeper than any verse of either of those writers.  But there is an air of melodrama in them all.  Harmonious delights of novel readers, they will not stand against the winnowing wind of deliberate criticism.  They harp on the same string, without the variations of a Paganini.  They are potentially endless reproductions of one phase of an ill-regulated mind—­the picture of the same quasi-melancholy vengeful man, who knows no friend but a dog, and reads on the tombs of the great only “the glory and the nothing of a name,” the exile who cannot flee from himself, “the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind,” who has not loved the world nor the world him,—­

  Whose heart was form’d for softness, warp’d by wrong,
  Betray’d too early, and beguiled too long—­

all this, decies repetita, grows into a weariness and vexation.  Mr. Carlyle harshly compares it to the screaming of a meat-jack.  The reviewers and the public of the time thought differently.  Jeffrey, penitent for the early faux pas of his Review, as Byron remained penitent for his answering assault, writes of Lara, “Passages of it may be put into competition with anything that poetry has produced in point either of pathos or energy.”  Moore—­who afterwards wrote, not to Byron, that seven devils had entered into Manfred—­professes himself “enraptured with it.”  Fourteen thousand copies of the Corsair wore sold in a day.  But hear the author’s own half-boast, half-apology:  “Lara I wrote while undressing after coming home from balls and masquerades, in the year of revelry 1814.  The Bride was written in four, the Corsair in ten days.  This I take to he a humiliating confession, as it proves my own want of judgment in publishing, and the public’s in reading, things which cannot have stamina for permanence.”

The pecuniary profits accruing to Byron from his works began with Lara, for which he received 700_l_.  He had made over to Mr. Dallas, besides other gifts to the same ungrateful recipient, the profits of Harold, amounting to 600_l_, and of the Corsair, which brought 525_l_.  The proceeds of the Giaour and the Bride were also surrendered.