He is more nearly a dwarf Shakespeare than a giant
Popo. This defect was most mischievous where he was weakest, in his dramas
and his lyrics, least so where he was strongest, in his mature satires. It
is almost transmuted into an excellence in the greatest of these, which
is by design and in detail a temple of incongruity.
If we turn from his manner to his matter, we cannot claim for Byron any
absolute originality. His sources have been found in Rousseau, Voltaire,
Chateaubriand, Beaumarchais, Lauzun, Gibbon, Bayle, St. Pierre, Alfieri,
Casti, Cuvier, La Bruyore, Wieland, Swift, Sterne, Le Sage, Goethe, scraps
of the classics, and the Book of Job. Absolute originality in a late age
is only possible to the hermit, the lunatic, or the sensation novelist.
Byron, like the rovers before Minos, was not ashamed of his piracy. He
transferred the random prose of his own letters and journals to his
dramas, and with the same complacency made use of the notes jotted down
from other writers as he sailed on the Lake of Geneva. But he made them
his own by smelting the rough ore into bell metal. He brewed a cauldron
like that of Macbeth's witches, and from it arose the images of crowned
kings.
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