[[*] "However, the praise often given to Byron has been so exaggerated as to provoke, perhaps, a reaction in which he is unduly disparaged. 'As various in composition as Shakespeare himself, Lord Byron has embraced,' says Sir Walter Scott, 'every topic of human life, and sounded every string on the divine harp, from its slightest to its most powerful and heart-astounding tones.... In the very grand and tremendous drama of Cain,' etc.... 'And Lord Byron has done all this,' Scott adds, 'while managing his pen with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality.'"--_Poetry of Byron, chosen and arranged by Matthew Arnold_, 1881, p. xiii. Scott does not add anything of the kind. The comparison with Shakespeare was written after Byron's death in May, 1824; the appreciation of Cain in December, 1821 (_vide supra_); while the allusion to "a man of quality" is to be found in an article contributed to the _Quarterly Review_ in 1816!] [[**] The first number of _John Bull_, "For God, the King, and the People," was published Sunday, December 17, 1820. Theodore Hook was the editor, and it is supposed that he owed his appointment to the intervention of Sir Walter Scott. The _raison d'être_ of _John Bull_ was to write up George IV., and to write down Queen Caroline. "The national movement (in favour of the Queen) was arrested; and George IV. had mainly _John Bull_ to thank for that result."--_A Sketch_, [by J. G. Lockhart], 1852, p. 45.]] [87] {207}["Mysteries," or Mystery Plays, were prior to and distinct from "Moralities." Byron seems to have had some acquaintance with the archæology of the drama, but it is not easy to divine the source or extent of his knowledge. He may have received and read the Roxburghe reprint of the _Chester Plays_, published in 1818; but it is most probable that he had read the pages devoted to mystery plays in _Warton's History of Poetry_, or that he had met with a version of the _Ludus Coventriæ_ (reprinted by J. O. Halliwell Phillipps, in 1841), printed in Stevens's continuation of Dugdale's _Monasticon_, 1722, i. 139-153. There is a sixteenth-century edition of _Le Mistère du Viel Testament_, which was reprinted by the Baron James de Rothschild, in 1878 (see for "De la Mort d'Abel et de la Malediction Cayn," pp. 103-113); but it is improbable that it had come under Byron's notice. For a quotation from an Italian Mystery Play, _vide post_, p. 264; and for Spanish "Mystery Plays," see _Teatro Completo de Juan del Encina_, "Proemio," Madrid, 1893, and _History of Spanish Literature_, by George Ticknor, 1888, i. 257. For instances of the profanity of Mystery Plays, see the _Towneley Plays_ ("Mactacio Abel," p. 7), first published by the Surtees Society in 1836, and republished by the Early English Text Society, 1897, E.S. No. lxxi.]