Scott, like all hale men of sound sense, regretted the almost fatal incontinence which, in the year of his greatest private troubles, led his friend to make a parade of them before the public.  He speaks more than once of his unhappy tendency to exhibit himself as the dying gladiator, and even compares him to his peacock, screeching before his window because he chooses to bivouack apart from his mate; but he read a copy of the Ravenna diary without altering his view that his lordship was his own worst maligner.  Scott, says Lockhart, considered Byron the only poet of transcendent talents we had had since Dryden.  There is preserved a curious record of his meeting with a greater poet than Dryden, but one whose greatness neither he nor Scott suspected.  Mr. Crabb Robinson reports Wordsworth to have said, in Charles Lamb’s chambers, about the year 1808, “These reviewers put me out of patience.  Here is a young man who has written a volume of poetry; and these fellows, just because he is a lord, set upon him.  The young man will do something, if he goes on as he has begun.  But these reviewers seem to think that nobody may write poetry unless he lives in a garret.”  Years after, Lady Byron, on being told this, exclaimed, “Ah, if Byron had known that, he would never have attacked Wordsworth.  He went one day to meet him at dinner, and I said, ’Well, how did the young poet get on with the old one?’ ‘Why, to tell the truth,’ said he, ’I had but one feeling from the beginning of the visit to the end, and that was reverence.’” Similarly, he began by being on good terms with Southey, and after a meeting at Holland House, wrote enthusiastically of his prepossessing appearance.

Byron and the leaders of the so-called Lake School were, at starting, common heirs of the revolutionary spirit; they were, either in their social views or personal feelings, to a large extent influenced by the most morbid, though in some respects the most magnetic, genius of modern France, J.J.  Rousseau; but their temperaments were in many respects fundamentally diverse; and the pre-established discord between them ere long began to make itself manifest in their following out widely divergent paths.  Wordsworth’s return to nature had been preluded by Cowper; that of Byron by Burns.  The revival of the one ripened into a restoration of simpler manners and old beliefs; the other was the spirit of the storm.  When they had both become recognized powers, neither appreciated the work of the other.  A few years after this date Byron wrote of Wordsworth, to a common admirer of both:  “I take leave to differ from you as freely as I once agreed with you.  His performances, since the Lyrical Ballads, are miserably inadequate to the ability that lurks within him.  There is, undoubtedly, much natural talent spilt over the Excursion; but it is rain upon rocks, where it stands and stagnates; or rain upon sand, where it falls without fertilizing.”  This criticism with others in like strain, was addressed to Mr. Leigh Hunt, to whom, in 1812, when enduring for radicalism’s sake a very comfortable incarceration, Byron had, in company with Moore, paid a courteous visit.