The following is the article from Goethe’s “Kunst und Alterthum,” enclosed in this letter.  The grave confidence with which the venerable critic traces the fancies of his brother poet to real persons and events, making no difficulty even of a double murder at Florence to furnish grounds for his theory, affords an amusing instance of the disposition so prevalent throughout Europe, to picture Byron as a man of marvels and mysteries, as well in his life as his poetry.  To these exaggerated, or wholly false notions of him, the numerous fictions palmed upon the world of his romantic tours and wonderful adventures in places he never saw, and with persons that never existed[75], have, no doubt, considerably contributed; and the consequence is, so utterly out of truth and nature are the representations of his life and character long current upon the Continent, that it may be questioned whether the real “flesh and blood” hero of these pages,—­the social, practical-minded, and, with all his faults and eccentricities, English Lord Byron,—­may not, to the over-exalted imaginations of most of his foreign admirers, appear but an ordinary, unromantic, and prosaic personage.

[Footnote 75:  Of this kind are the accounts, filled with all sorts of circumstantial wonders, of his residence in the island of Mytilene;—­his voyages to Sicily,—­to Ithaca, with the Countess Guiccioli, &c. &c.  But the most absurd, perhaps, of all these fabrications, are the stories told by Pouqueville, of the poet’s religious conferences in the cell of Father Paul, at Athens; and the still more unconscionable fiction in which Rizo has indulged, in giving the details of a pretended theatrical scene, got up (according to this poetical historian) between Lord Byron and the Archbishop of Arta, at the tomb of Botzaris, in Missolonghi.]

* * * * *

“GOETHE ON MANFRED.

[1820.]

“Byron’s tragedy, Manfred, was to me a wonderful phenomenon, and one that closely touched me.  This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strongest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour.  He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius.  The whole is in this way so completely formed anew, that it would be an interesting task for the critic to point out not only the alterations he has made, but their degree of resemblance with, or dissimilarity to, the original:  in the course of which I cannot deny that the gloomy heat of an unbounded and exuberant despair becomes at last oppressive to us.  Yet is the dissatisfaction we feel always connected with esteem and admiration.