I. BER.  Such ties are not
  For those who are called to the high destinies
  Which purify corrupted commonwealths: 
  We must forget all feelings save the one,
  We must resign all passions save our purpose,
  We must behold no object save our country,
  And only look on death as beautiful
  So that the sacrifice ascend to heaven,
  And draw down freedom on her evermore.

  CAL.  But if we fail—?

  I. BER.  They never fail who die
  In a great cause:  the block may soak their gore;
  Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs
  Be strung to city gates and castle walls,
  But still their spirit walks abroad.

—­a passage which, after his wont, he spoils by platitudes about the precisian Brutus, who certainly did not give Rome liberty.

Byron’s other Venetian Drama, the Two Foscari, composed at Ravenna, between the 11th of June and the 10th of July, 1821, and published in the following December, is another record of the same failure and the same mortification, due to the same causes.  In this play, as Jeffrey points out, the preservation of the unities had a still more disastrous effect.  The author’s determination to avoid rant did not hinder his frequently adopting an inflated style; while professing to follow the ancient rules, he forgets the warning of Horace so far as to permit the groans of the tortured Foscari to be heard on the stage.  The declamations of Marina produce no effect on the action, and the vindictiveness of Loridano, though effectively pointed in the closing words, “He has paid me,” is not rendered interesting, either by a well established injury, or by any trace of Iago’s subtle genius.

In the same volume appeared Sardanapalus, written in the previous May, and dedicated to Goethe.  In this play, which marks the author’s last reversion to the East, we are more arrested by the majesty of the theme—­

                   Thirteen hundred years
  Of empire ending like a shepherd’s tale,

by the grandeur of some of the passages, and by the development of the chief character, made more vivid by its being distinctly autobiographical.  Sardanapalus himself is Harold, raised “high on a throne,” and rousing himself at the close from a life of effeminate lethargy.  Myrrha has been often identified with La Guiccioli, and the hero’s relation to his Queen Zarina compared with that of the poet to his wife; but in his portrait of the former the author’s defective capacity to represent national character is manifest:  Myrrha is only another Gulnare, Medora, or Zuleika.  In the domestic play of Werner—­completed at Pisa in January, 1822, and published in November, there is no merit either of plan or execution; for the plot is taken, with little change, from “The German’s Tale,” written by Harriet Lee, and the treatment is throughout prosaic.  Byron was never a master of blank verse; but Werner, his solo success on the modern British stage, is written in a style fairly parodied by Campbell, when he cut part of the author’s preface into lines, and pronounced them as good as any in the play.