Now, with regard to the originality of _Manfred_, it may be taken for granted that Byron knew nothing about the "Faust-legend," or the "Faust-cycle." He solemnly denies that he had ever read Marlowe's _Faustus_, or the selections from the play in Lamb's _Specimens, etc._ (see Medwin's _Conversations, etc._, pp. 208, 209, and a hitherto unpublished Preface to _Werner_, vol. v.), and it is highly improbable that he knew anything of Calderon's _El Mágico Prodigioso_, which Shelley translated in 1822, or of "the beggarly elements" of the legend in Hroswitha's _Lapsus et Conversio Theophrasti Vice-domini_. But Byron's _Manfred_ is "in the succession" of scholars who have reached the limits of natural and legitimate science, and who essay the supernatural in order to penetrate and comprehend the "hidden things of darkness." A predecessor, if not a progenitor, he must have had, and there can be no doubt whatever that the primary conception of the character, though by no means the inspiration of the poem, is to be traced to the "Monk's" oral rendering of Goethe's _Faust_, which he gave in return for his "bread and salt" at Diodati. Neither Jeffrey nor Wilson mentioned _Faust_, but the writer of the notice in the _Critical Review_ (June, 1817, series v. vol. 5, pp. 622-629) avowed that "this scene (the first) is a gross plagiary from a great poet whom Lord Byron has imitated on former occasions without comprehending. Goethe's _Faust_ begins in the same way;" and Goethe himself, in a letter to his friend Knebel, October, 1817, and again in his review in _Kunst und Alterthum_, June, 1820, emphasizes whilst he justifies and applauds the use which Byron had made of his work. "This singular intellectual poet has taken my _Faustus_ to himself, and extracted from it the strangest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius." Afterwards (see record of a conversation with Herman Fürst von Pückler, September 14, 1826, _Letters_, v. 511) Goethe somewhat modified his views, but even then it interested him to trace the unconscious transformation which Byron had made of his Mephistopheles. It is, perhaps, enough to say that the link between _Manfred_ and _Faust_ is formal, not spiritual. The problem which Goethe raised but did not solve, his counterfeit presentment of the eternal issue between soul and sense, between innocence and renunciation on the one side, and achievement and satisfaction on the other, was not the struggle which Byron experienced in himself or desired to depict in his mysterious hierarch of the powers of nature. "It was the _Staubach_ and the _Jungfrau_, and something else," not the influence of _Faust_ on a receptive listener, which called up a new theme, and struck out a fresh well-spring of the imagination. The _motif_ of _Manfred_ is