Manfred, his witch drama, as the author called it, has had a special attraction for inquisitive biographers, because it has been supposed in some dark manner to reveal the secrets of his prison house.  Its lines have been tortured, like the witches of the seventeenth century, to extort from them the meaning of the “all nameless hour,” and every conceivable horror has been alleged as its motif.  On this subject Goethe writes with a humorous simplicity:  “This singularly intellectual poet has extracted from my Faust the strongest nourishment for his hypochondria; but he has made use of the impelling principles for his own purposes....  When a bold and enterprising young man, he won the affections of a Florentine lady.  Her husband discovered the amour, and murdered his wife; but the murderer was the same night found dead in the street, and there was no one to whom any suspicion could be attached.  Lord Byron removed from Florence, but these spirits have haunted him all his life.  This romantic incident explains innumerable allusions,” e.g.,—­

                            I have shed
  Blood, but not hers,—­and yet her blood was shed.

Were it not for the fact that the poet had never seen the city in question when he wrote the poem, this explanation would be more plausible than most others, for the allusions are all to some lady who has been done to death.  Galt asserts that the plot turns on a tradition of unhallowed necromancy—­a human sacrifice, like that of Antinous attributed to Hadrian.  Byron himself says it has no plot, but he kept teasing his questioners with mysterious hints, e.g.  “It was the Staubbach and the Jungfrau, and something else more than Faustus, which made me write Manfred;” and of one of his critics he says to Murray, “It had a better origin than he can devise or divine, for the soul of him.”  In any case most methods of reading between its lines would, if similarly applied, convict Sophocles, Schiller, and Shelley of incest, Shakespeare of murder, Milton of blasphemy, Scott of forgery, Marlowe and Goethe of compacts with the devil.  Byron was no dramatist, but he had wit enough to vary at least the circumstances of his projected personality.  The memories of both Fausts—­the Elizabethan and the German—­mingle, in the pages of this piece, with shadows of the author’s life; but to these it never gives, nor could be intended to give, any substantial form.

Manfred is a chaos of pictures, suggested by the scenery of Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald, half animated by vague personifications and sensational narrative.  Like Harold, and Scott’s Marmion, it just misses being a great poem.  The Coliseum is its masterpiece of description, the appeal, “Astarte, my beloved, speak to me,” its nearest approach to pathos.  The lonely death of the hero makes an effective close to the moral tumult of the preceding scenes.  But the reflections, often striking, are seldom absolutely fresh:  that beginning,