The mind, which is immortal, makes itself
  Requital for its good or evil thoughts,
  Is its own origin of ill and end,
  And its own place and time,

is transplanted from Milton with as little change as Milton made in transplanting it from Marlowe.  The author’s own favourite passage, the invocation to the sun (act iii., sc. 2), has some sublimity, marred by lapses.  The lyrics scattered through the poem sometimes open well, e.g.,—­

  Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains;
    They crowned him long ago,
  On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,
    With a null of snow;

but they cannot sustain themselves like true song-birds, and fall to the ground like spent rockets.  This applies to Byron’s lyrics generally; turn to the incantation in the Deformed Transformed:  the first line and a half are in tune,—­

  Beautiful shadow of Thetis’s boy,
  Who sleeps in the meadow whose grass grows o’er Troy.

Nor Sternhold nor Hopkins has more ruthlessly outraged our ears than the next two—­

  From the red earth, like Adam, thy likeness I shape,
  As the Being who made him, whose actions I ape(!)

Of his songs:  “There be none of Beauty’s daughters,” “She walks in beauty,” “Maid of Athens,” “I enter thy garden of roses,” the translation “Sons of the Greeks,” and others, have a flow and verve that it is pedantry to ignore; but in general Byron was too much of the earth earthy to be a great lyrist.  Some of the greatest have lived wild lives, but their wings were not weighted with the lead of the love of the world.

The summer and early months of the autumn of 1817 were spent at La Mira, and much of the poet’s time was occupied in riding along the banks of the Brenta, often in the company of the few congenial Englishmen who came in his way; others, whom he avoided, avenged themselves by retailing stories, none of which wore “too improbable for the craving appetites of their slander-loving countrymen.”  In August he received a visit from Mr. Hobhouse, and on this occasion drew up the remarkable document afterwards given to Mr. M. G. Lewis for circulation in England, which appeared in the Academy of October 9th, 1869.  In this document he says, “It has been intimated to me that the persons understood to be the legal advisers of Lady Byron have declared their lips to be sealed up on the cause of the separation between her and myself.  If their lips are sealed up they are not sealed up by me, and the greatest favour they can confer upon me will be to open them.”  He goes on to state, that he repents having consented to the separation—­will be glad to cancel the deed, or to go before any tribunal, to discuss the matter in the most public manner; adding, that Mr. Hobhouse (in whose presence he was writing) proposed, on his part, to go into court, and ending with a renewed asseveration of his ignorance of the allegations against