successful at the time, are mostly, as stories, poor things, not only in subject but in treatment. The Giaour, he said himself, was but a string of passages. The Bride of Abydos is an anecdote. In the Corsair there is a tale, but it is swamped in declamation. The Siege of Corinth, with its rough but not ineffective variations on the subtle rhythms of Christabel, has a splendid descriptive energy. The picture of the siege lives; but it is hardly a story. In Parisina something does happen; there is at least one tragic moment; it is the most genuine of all these early tales; and there is a note of high-strained but sincere pathos. The Prisoner of Chillon does not profess to be a story, except for the slow tortures of the dungeon. In all these poems there is a great momentum, a profusion of rhetorical and passionate matter, which is rather dull to-day, and a halfpennyworth of story. Byron’s lays displaced those of Scott in the ear of the many; and Scott, in his modest way, accepted the finding of the many; too modestly; for his own lays, I think, wear far better than most of Byron’s. His Battle of Flodden and his Lord of the Isles leave a far more satisfactory and distinct impression; and, as the sequel was to show, he was a tale-teller born. But Byron had not come to the end of his tether. He got these lays behind him, and then he found out a better method. And he found it, the moment that he brought to bear, or rather that he ceased to forgo, his gift of humour, of irony, and of portraying real life. This change is evident in Mazeppa, written while he was already deep in Don Juan. Mazeppa, as a poem, and also as a tale, is alive. There is not only the speed and magnificence of the ride, in which Scott for once is matched on Scott’s own ground, but there is the light vivacity of the setting:
There was a certain Palatine,
A count of far and high descent,
Rich as a salt or silver mine;
And he was proud, ye may divine,
As if from heaven he had been sent;
He had such wealth in blood and ore
As few could match beneath the throne;
And he would gaze upon his store,
And o’er his pedigree would pore,
Until by some confusion led,
Which almost look’d like want of head,
He thought their merits were his own.
His wife was not of his opinion;
His junior she by thirty years,
Grew daily tired of his dominion….
And in the same strain the story closes. Mazeppa has been telling
