That Manfred is the greatest of Byron’s works will probably not be disputed.  It has more than the fatal mysticism of Macbeth, with the satanic grandeur of the Paradise Lost, and the hero is placed in circumstances, and amid scenes, which accord with the stupendous features of his preternatural character.  How then, it may be asked, does this moral phantom, that has never been, bear any resemblance to the poet himself?  Must not, in this instance, the hypothesis which assigns to Byron’s heroes his own sentiments and feelings be abandoned?  I think not.  In noticing the deep and solemn reflections with which he was affected in ascending the Rhine, and which he has embodied in the third canto of Childe Harold, I have already pointed out a similarity in the tenour of the thoughts to those of Manfred, as well as the striking acknowledgment of the “filed” mind.  There is, moreover, in the drama, the same distaste of the world which Byron himself expressed when cogitating on the desolation of his hearth, and the same contempt of the insufficiency of his genius and renown to mitigate contrition—­all in strange harmony with the same magnificent objects of sight.  Is not the opening soliloquy of Manfred the very echo of the reflections on the Rhine?

My slumbers—­if I slumber—­are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not; in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within—­and yet I live and bear
The aspect and the form of breathing man.

But the following is more impressive:  it is the very phrase he would himself have employed to have spoken of the consequences of his fatal marriage: 

My in juries came down on those who lov’d me,
On those whom I best lov’d; I never quell’d
An enemy, save in my just defence—­
But my embrace was fatal.

He had not, indeed, been engaged in any duel of which the issue was mortal; but he had been so far engaged with more than one, that he could easily conceive what it would have been to have quelled an enemy in just defence.  But unless the reader can himself discern, by his sympathies, that there is the resemblance I contend for, it is of no use to multiply instances.  I shall, therefore, give but one other extract, which breathes the predominant spirit of all Byron ’s works--that sad translation of the preacher’s “vanity of vanities; all is vanity!”

Look on me! there is an order
Of mortals on the earth, who do become
Old in their youth and die ere middle age,
Without the violence of warlike death;
Some perishing of pleasure—­some of study—­
Some worn with toil—­some of mere weariness—­
Some of disease—­and some insanity—­
And some of wither’d or of broken hearts;
For this last is a malady which slays
More than are number’d in the lists of Fate;
Taking all shapes, and bearing many names. 
Look upon me! for even of all these things
Have I partaken—­and of all these things
One were enough; then wonder not that I
Am what I am, but that I ever was,
Or, having been, that I am still on earth.