Introduction to Manfred. THE Overwrought mental excitement from which Lord Byron was suffering when he gave birth to the Third Canto of the "Childe Harold," also produced" Manfred." He wrote to his publisher from Venice in the early part of 1817-"I forgot to mention to you that a kind of poem in dialogue (in blank verse) or drama, from which The Incantation' is an extract, begun last summer in Switzerland, is finished. It is in three acts; but of a very wild, metaphysical, and inexplicable kind. Almost all the persons-but two or three-are spirits of the earth and air, or the waters; the scene is in the Alps; the hero a kind of magician, who is tormented by a species of remorse, the cause of which is left half unexplained. He wanders about invoking these spirits, which appear to him, and are of no use; he at last goes to the very abode of the Evil Principle in propria persona, to evocate a ghost, which appears, and gives him an ambiguous and disagreeable answer; and in the Third Act he is found by his attendants dying in a tower, where he had studied his art. may perceive by this outline that I have no great opinion of this piece of fantasy; but I have at least rendered it quite impossible for the stage, for which my intercourse with Drury Lane has given me the greatest contempt." You The Third Act of this dramatic poem was written at Venice, when Lord Byron was worn-out both bodily and mentally. The manuscript was fortunately ordered to be submitted to Mr Gifford, who condemned it as feeble in execution, and unworthy of the first two Acts. It was therefore in greater part re-written, and "Manfred" in its present state will be ranked very high among the poet's works. Although Byron had never read Goethe's Faust (having, indeed, no knowledge of German), he had heard extracts from it translated by Monk Lewis, and his powers of assimilation and unconscious reproduction were wonderful. The great German poet, |