The investigation of the "sources" of _Cain_ does not lead to any very definite conclusion (see _Lord Byron's Cain und Seine Quellen_, von Alfred Schaffner, 1880). He was pleased to call his play "a Mystery," and, in his Preface (_vide post_, p. 207), Byron alludes to the Old Mysteries as "those very profane productions, whether in English, French, Italian, or Spanish." The first reprint of the _Chester Plays_ was published by the Roxburghe Club in 1818, but Byron's knowledge of Mystery Plays was probably derived from _Dodsley's Plays_ (ed. 1780, l., xxxiii.-xlii.), or from John Stevens's Continuation of Dugdale's _Monasticon_ (_vide post_, p. 207), or possibly, as Herr Schaffner suggests, from Warton's _History of English Poetry_, ed. 1871, ii. 222-230. He may, too, have witnessed some belated _Rappresentazione_ of the Creation and Fall at Ravenna, or in one of the remoter towns or villages of Italy. There is a superficial resemblance between the treatment of the actual encounter of Cain and Abel, and the conventional rendering of the same incident in the _Ludus Coventriæ_, and in the _Mistère du Viel Testament_; but it is unlikely that he had closely studied any one Mystery Play at first hand. On the other hand, his recollections of Gessner's _Death of Abel_ which "he had never read since he was eight years old," were clearer than he imagined. Not only in such minor matters as the destruction of Cain's altar by a whirlwind, and the substitution of the Angel of the Lord for the _Deus_ of the Mysteries, but in the Teutonic domesticities of Cain and Adah, and the evangelical piety of Adam and Abel, there is a reflection, if not an imitation, of the German idyll (see Gessner's _Death of Abel_, ed. 1797, pp. 80, 102).