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"Speak one of you at a time," said Manfred; "I ask you, where is the Princess?" "We do not know," said they both together; "but we are frightened out of our wits." "So I think, blockheads," said Manfred; "what is it has scared you thus?" "Oh! my Lord," said Jaquez, "Diego has seen such a sight! your Highness would not believe our eyes."
I was particularly captivated by the personality of that gifted Emperor Frederick II., whose fortunes aroused my sympathy so keenly that I vainly sought for a fitting artistic setting for them. The fate of his son Manfred, on the other hand, provoked in me an equally well-grounded, but more easily combated, feeling of opposition.
"Well, little one! You're good now, eh? Does my little sugar lamb want a treat?" Polly knew that when he called her his little sugar lamb it meant that he was in high good-humour. "It won't be much of a treat to stay at home and do the civil to that old Mrs. Bauer," she said, and looked up at him coquettishly. There were good points about Manfred.
"Thou guiltless but unhappy woman! unhappy by my crimes!" replied Manfred, "my heart at last is open to thy devout admonitions. Oh! could but it cannot be ye are lost in wonder let me at last do justice on myself! To heap shame on my own head is all the satisfaction I have left to offer to offended heaven.
With a little searching they found the trap-door; the stranger lifted it, and Isabella descended to some stone steps below. The stranger was about to follow, when the voice of Manfred was heard in the distance. "Make haste or we are ruined!" cried Isabella. But the door slipped out of his hands and fell with a crash.
In the meantime, while Manfred is marching on from victory to victory in his reconquest of the whole kingdom of Apulia, the tragic centre of my action still continues to be the unvoiced longing of the lovelorn victor for the marvellous heroine. She is the child of the great Emperor's love for a noble Saracen maiden.
The bigoted victor refused him honorable burial, on the score of heresy, but the French soldiers, nobler-hearted than their leader, and touched by the beauty and valor of their unfortunate opponent, cast each of them a stone upon his body, which was thus buried under a mound which the natives still know as the "rock of roses." The wife and children of Manfred met with a pitiable fate.
"That I will show you, my Lord," said the peasant; and, taking up a fragment of stone that had fallen from above, he laid himself on the trap-door, and began to beat on the piece of brass that covered it, meaning to gain time for the escape of the Princess. This presence of mind, joined to the frankness of the youth, staggered Manfred.
Manfred, whose spirits were inflamed, and whom Isabella had driven from her on his urging his passion with too little reserve, did not doubt but the inquietude she had expressed had been occasioned by her impatience to meet Theodore. Provoked by this conjecture, and enraged at her father, he hastened secretly to the great church.
Dobell's Balder, and parodied in Firmilian may have been the basis of a report afterwards circulated, and accepted among others by Goethe, that his lordship had committed a murder; hence, obviously, the character of Lara, and the mystery of Manfred! They then separated, and Byron went on to Patras in the Morea, where he had business with the Consul. He dates from there at the close of July.
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