contempt for the Gothic.  Shelley, too, was a Hellenist; and to both, in their angry break with authority and their worship of liberty, the naked freedom, the clear light, the noble and harmonious forms of the antique were as attractive as the twilight of the “ages of faith,” with their mysticism, asceticism, and grotesque superstitions, were repulsive.  Remote as their own feverish and exuberant poetry was from the unexcited manner of classical work, the latter was the ideal towards which they more and more inclined.  The points at which these two poets touch our history, then, are few.  Byron, to be sure, cast “Childe Harold” into Spenserian verse, and gave it a ballad title.[1] In the first canto there are a few archaisms; words like fere, shent, and losel occur, together with Gothic properties, such as the “eremite’s sad cell” and “Paynim shores” and Newstead’s “monastic dome.”  The ballad “Adieu, adieu my native shore,” was suggested by “Lord Maxwell’s Good-Night” in the “Border Minstrelsy,” and introduces some romantic appurtenances:  the harp, the falcon, and the little foot-page.  But this kind of falsetto, in the tradition of the last-century Spenserians, evidently hampered the poet; so he shook himself free from imitation after the opening stanzas, and spoke in his natural voice.[2] “Lara” is a tale of feudal days, with a due proportion of knights, dames, vassals, and pages; and an ancestral hall with gloomy vaults and portrait galleries, where

        “—­the moonbeam shone
  Through the dim lattice o’er the floor of stone,
  And the high fretted roof and saints that there
  O’er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer. . . . 
  The waving banner and the clapping door,
  The rustling tapestry and the echoing floor;
  The long dim shadows of surrounding trees,
  The flapping bats, the night-song of the breeze,
  Aught they behold or hear their thought appalls,
  As evening saddens o’er the dark grey walls.”

But these things are unimportant in Byron—­mere commonplaces of description inherited from Scott and Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe.  Neither is it of importance that “Parisina” is a tale of the year 1405, and has an echo in it of convent bells and the death chant of friars; nor that the first scene of “Manfred” passes in a “Gothic gallery,” and includes an incantation of spirits upon the model of “Faust”; nor that “Marino Faliero” and “The Two Foscari” are founded on incidents of Venetian history which happened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively; nor yet that Byron translated the Spanish ballad “Woe is me Alhama” and a passage from Pulci’s “Morgante Maggiore.” [3] Similarly Shelley’s experimental versions of the “Prolog im Himmel,” and “Walpurgisnacht” in “Faust,” and of scenes from Calderon’s “Magico Prodigioso” are felt to be without special significance in comparison with the body of his writings.  “Faust” impressed him, as it did Byron, and he urged Coleridge to translate