To this year belong the greater number
of the poet's Historical Dramas. What was said of these, at the time by
Jeffrey, Heber, and others, was said with justice; it is seldom that the
criticism of our day finds so little to reverse in that of sixty years
ago.
The author, having shown himself capable of being pathetic, sarcastic,
sentimental, comical, and sublime, we would be tempted to think that he
had written these plays to show, what no one before suspected, that he
could also be dull, were it not for his own exorbitant estimation of them.
Lord Byron had few of the powers of a great dramatist; he had little
architectural imagination, or capacity to conceive and build up a whole.
His works are mainly masses of fine, splendid, or humorous writing, heaped
together; the parts are seldom forged into one, or connected by any
indissoluble link. His so-called Dramas are only poems divided into
chapters. Further, he had little of what Mr. Ruskin calls penetrative
imagination. So it has been plausibly said that he made his men after his
own image, his women after his own heart. The former are, indeed, rather
types of what he wished to be than what he was.
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