_Manfred_ and _Cain_ were the products of all the psychological elements which have now been indicated. _Manfred_ is the less important of the two works. It does not bear the comparison with Goethe's _Faust_ which it invites and which has been so often instituted. Goethe himself said that an interesting lecture might be given on the subject. They have since been given in abundance; there is more originality and talent in Taine's than in any other known to me. At only one point does _Manfred_ rise superior to _Faust_. To the critic there is no surer criterion of the value of the different parts of a work than the circumstance that, after a certain length of time, he remembers this or that part and has forgotten the rest. I know with certainty that, a year after I had read _Manfred_, all that I remembered of it was the scene in which, in the hour of his death, the hero, who has judged himself so severely, first repulses the Abbot and such comfort as he would fain give, and then with proud contempt dismisses from his presence the evil spirits with whom he has nothing in common, and to whom he has never given the slightest power over him. The difference between this man and Faust, who sells himself to Mephistopheles and falls on his knees before the Earth Spirit, is very striking. The English poet has had before his eyes a higher ideal of independent manhood than has the German; Byron's hero is a typical man, Goethe's a typical human being. Alone in death as in life, Manfred has no more communion with hell than he has with heaven. He is his own accuser and his own judge. This is Byron's manly ethical standpoint. Not till he reaches the lonely heights above the snow-line, where human weakness and pliability do not thrive, does his soul breathe freely. And the Alpine landscape is the natural, inevitable background for his hero whose stern wildness is akin to such scenes. But in _Manfred_ only the egoistic side of Byron's nature reveals itself. His wide human sympathies find full expression for the first time in _Cain_. _Cain_ is Byron's confession of faith--that is to say, the confession of all his doubts and all his criticism. When we remember that he had neither, like Shelley and the great poets of Germany, attained by dint of thought to an emancipated, humanistic view of the world and life, nor, like the authors of our own days, had the advantage of being able to base his ideas and imaginings on the subject of the beliefs of the past and the present upon a groundwork of facts established by natural science and scientific Biblical criticism, we cannot but marvel at the intellectual power and earnestness which he in this work brings to bear on the most vital problems of life.