MANFRED, a dramatic poem.

8vo in fours, pp. 81; lightly browned, but otherwise a fine copy, in contemporary sprinkled boards, green roan spine. A very rare early reprint of Byron's supernatural verse drama, which had ben written in 1816-17 and published in London in June 1817. This Brussels edition is dated to about 1830 by CBEL, but it could well be earlier. There is additional endmatter added to the text: a section headed 'Observations' on pp. 75-81 gives a contemporary view by one assumes a foreign reader of contemporary English literature. The writer defends the morality of good drama, asserting that the evils of the stage are 'from bad management, rather than the inherent tendency of the drama itself. The pure air of Heaven may be changed into a noxious element.' Although Byron has been charged with 'an utter absence of moral feeling, and with hostility to religion', this was only true of his earliest works, and in Manfred 'the contrary is apparent. In the character of Manfred, are delineated with a masterly hand, the horrors of a guilty conscience, labouring with some undivulged crime, which, like a spectre, starts forth to alarm'. Scarce: there are copies at the British Library, Bodleian and Liverpool in the UK, and at Harvard and Princeton in the US. CBEL3 261.…