"Very truly,
"Walter Scott.
"To John Murray, Esq."-Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, by J. G. Lockhart, Esq., 1838, iii. 92, 93.]
[[*] "However, the praise often given to Byron has been so exaggerated as to provoke, perhaps, a reaction in which he is unduly disparaged. 'As various in composition as Shakespeare himself, Lord Byron has embraced,' says Sir Walter Scott, 'every topic of human life, and sounded every string on the divine harp, from its slightest to its most powerful and heart-astounding tones.... In the very grand and tremendous drama of Cain,' etc.... 'And Lord Byron has done all this,' Scott adds, 'while managing his pen with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality.'"—Poetry of Byron, chosen and arranged by Matthew Arnold, 1881, p. xiii.
Scott does not add anything of the kind. The comparison with Shakespeare was written after Byron's death in May, 1824; the appreciation of Cain in December, 1821 (vide supra); while the allusion to "a man of quality" is to be found in an article contributed to the Quarterly Review in 1816!]
[[**] The first number of John Bull, "For God, the King, and the People," was published Sunday, December 17, 1820. Theodore Hook was the editor, and it is supposed that he owed his appointment to the intervention of Sir Walter Scott. The raison d'être of John Bull was to write up George IV., and to write down Queen Caroline. "The national movement (in favour of the Queen) was arrested; and George IV. had mainly John Bull to thank for that result."—A Sketch, [by J. G. Lockhart], 1852, p. 45.] ]
[87] {207}["Mysteries," or Mystery Plays, were prior to and distinct from "Moralities." Byron seems to have had some acquaintance with the archæology of the drama, but it is not easy to divine the source or extent of his knowledge. He may have received and read the Roxburghe reprint of the Chester Plays, published in 1818; but it is most probable that he had read the pages devoted to mystery plays in Warton's History of Poetry, or that he had met with a version of the Ludus Coventriæ (reprinted by J. O. Halliwell Phillipps, in 1841), printed in Stevens's continuation of Dugdale's Monasticon, 1722, i. 139-153. There is a sixteenth-century edition of Le Mistère du Viel Testament, which was reprinted by the Baron James de Rothschild, in 1878 (see for "De la Mort d'Abel et de la Malediction Cayn," pp. 103-113); but it is improbable that it had come under Byron's notice. For a quotation from an Italian Mystery Play, vide post, [p. 264]; and for Spanish "Mystery Plays," see Teatro Completo de Juan del Encina, "Proemio," Madrid, 1893, and History of Spanish Literature, by George Ticknor, 1888, i. 257. For instances of the profanity of Mystery Plays, see the Towneley Plays ("Mactacio Abel," p. 7), first published by the Surtees Society in 1836, and republished by the Early English Text Society, 1897, E.S. No. lxxi.]
[88] {208}[For the contention that "the snake was the snake"—no more (vide post, [p. 211]), see La Bible enfin Expliquée, etc.; Œuvres Complètes de Voltaire, Paris, 1837, vi. 338, note. "La conversation de la femme et du serpent n'est point racontée comme une chose surnaturelle et incroyable, comme un miracle, ou conune une allégorie." See, too, Bayle (Hist. and Crit. Dictionary, 1735, ii. 851, art. "Eve," note A), who quotes Josephus, Paracelsus, and "some Rabbins," to the effect that it was an actual serpent which tempted Eve; and compare Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures, by the Rev. Alexander Geddes, LL.D., 1800, p. 42.]
[89] [Richard Watson (1737-1816), Bishop of Llandaff, 1782, was appointed Moderator of the Schools in 1762, and Regius Professor of Divinity October 31, 1771. According to his own story (Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson, 1817, p. 39), "I determined to study nothing but my Bible.... I had no prejudice against, no predilection for, the Church of England, but a sincere regard for the Church of Christ, and an insuperable objection to every degree of dogmatical intolerance. I never troubled myself with answering any arguments which the opponents in the Divinity Schools brought against the articles of the Church, ... but I used on such occasions to say to them, holding the New Testament in my hand, 'En sacrum codicem! Here is the foundation of truth! Why do you follow the streams derived from it by the sophistry, or polluted by the passions, of man?'" It may be conceived that Watson's appeal to "Scripture" was against the sentence of orthodoxy. His authority as "a school Divine" is on a par with that of the author of Cain, or of an earlier theologian who "quoted Genesis like a very learned clerk"!]
[90] [Byron breaks through his self-imposed canon with regard to the New Testament. There are allusions to the doctrine of the Atonement, act i. sc. I, lines 163-166: act iii. sc. I, lines 85-88; to the descent into Hades, act i. sc. I, lines 541, 542; and to the miraculous walking on the Sea of Galilee, act ii. se. i, lines 16-20.]