His Grand Show: Byron and the Myth of Mythmaking

Abstract

‘I have been thinking over the other day on the various comparisons good or evil which I have seen published of myself in different journals English and foreign. — This was suggested to me by my accidentally turning over a foreign one lately — for I have made it a rule latterly never to search for anything of the kind — but not to avoid the perusal if presented by Chance. — To begin with — I have seen myself compared personally or poetically — in English French German (as interpreted to me) Italian and Portuguese within these nine years — to Rousseau — Goethe — Young — Aretine — Timon of Athens — ‘An Alabaster Vase lighted up within’, Satan — Shakespeare — Buonaparte — Tiberius — Aeschylus — Sophocles — Euripides — Harlequin — The Clown — Sternhold and Hopkins — to the Phantasmagoria — to Henry the 8th, to Chenier — to Mirabeau — to young R. Dallas (the Schoolboy) to Michael Angelo — to Raphael — to a petit maitre — to Diogenes, to Childe Harold — to Lara — to the Count in Beppo — to Milton — to Pope — to Dryden — To Burns — to Savage — to Chatterton — to ‘oft have I heard of thee my Lord Biron’ in Shakespeare, to Churchill the poet — to Kean the Actor — to Alfieri &c. &c. &c. — the likeness to Alfieri was asserted very seriously by an Italian who had known him in his younger days — it of course related merely to our apparent personal dispositions — he did not assert it to me (for we were not then good friends) but in society. —’1