These romances belong to the same period of the author's poetic career as the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_. They followed one another like brilliant fireworks. They all exhibit a command of words, a sense of melody, and a flow of rhythm and rhyme, which mastered Moore and even Scott on their own ground. None of them are wanting in passages, as "He who hath bent him o'er the dead," and the description of Alp leaning against a column, which strike deeper than any verse of either of those writers. But there is an air of melodrama in them all. Harmonious delights of novel readers, they will not stand against the winnowing wind of deliberate criticism. They harp on the same string, without the variations of a Paganini. They are potentially endless reproductions of one phase of an ill-regulated mind--the picture of the same quasi-melancholy vengeful man, who knows no friend but a dog, and reads on the tombs of the great only "the glory and the nothing of a name," the exile who cannot flee from himself, "the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind," who has not loved the world nor the world him,-- Whose heart was form'd for softness, warp'd by wrong, Betray'd too early, and beguiled too long-- all this, _decies repetita_, grows into a weariness and vexation. Mr. Carlyle harshly compares it to the screaming of a meat-jack. The reviewers and the public of the time thought differently. Jeffrey, penitent for the early _faux pas_ of his _Review_, as Byron remained penitent for his answering assault, writes of _Lara_, "Passages of it may be put into competition with anything that poetry has produced in point either of pathos or energy." Moore--who afterwards wrote, not to Byron, that seven devils had entered into _Manfred_--professes himself "enraptured with it." Fourteen thousand copies of the _Corsair_ wore sold in a day. But hear the author's own half-boast, half-apology: "_Lara_ I wrote while undressing after coming home from balls and masquerades, in the year of revelry 1814. The _Bride_ was written in four, the _Corsair_ in ten days. This I take to he a humiliating confession, as it proves my own want of judgment in publishing, and the public's in reading, things which cannot have stamina for permanence." The pecuniary profits accruing to Byron from his works began with _Lara_, for which he received 700_l_. He had made over to Mr. Dallas, besides other gifts to the same ungrateful recipient, the profits of _Harold_, amounting to 600_l_, and of the _Corsair_, which brought 525_l_. The proceeds of the _Giaour_ and the _Bride_ were also surrendered.