In the detail it was the reverse:  few men possessed more companionable qualities than Lord Byron did occasionally; and seen at intervals in those felicitous moments, I imagine it would have been difficult to have said, that a more interesting companion had been previously met with.  But he was not always in that fascinating state of pleasantry:  he was as often otherwise; and no two individuals could be more distinct from each other than Byron in his gaiety and in his misanthropy.  This antithesis was the great cause of that diversity of opinion concerning him, which has so much divided his friends and adversaries.  Of his character as a poet there can be no difference of opinion, but only a difference in the degree of admiration.

Excellence in talent, as in every other thing, is comparative; but the universal republic of letters will acknowledge, that in energy of expression and liveliness of imagery Byron had no equal in his own time.  Doubts, indeed, may be entertained, if in these high qualities even Shakspeare himself was his superior.

I am not disposed to think with many of those who rank the genius of Byron almost as supreme, that he has shown less skill in the construction of his plots, and the development of his tales, than might have been expected from one so splendidly endowed; for it has ever appeared to me that he has accomplished in them everything he proposed to attain, and that in this consists one of his great merits.  His mind, fervid and impassioned, was in all his compositions, except Don Juan, eagerly fixed on the catastrophe.  He ever held the goal full in view, and drove to it in the most immediate manner.  By this straightforward simplicity all the interest which intricacy excites was of necessity disregarded.  He is therefore not treated justly when it is supposed that he might have done better had he shown more art:  the wonder is, that he should have produced such magnificent effects with so little.  He could not have made the satiated and meditative Harold so darkling and excursive, so lone, “aweary,” and misanthropical, had he treated him as the hero of a scholastic epic.  The might of the poet in such creations lay in the riches of his diction and in the felicity with which he described feelings in relation to the aspect of scenes amid the reminiscences with which the scenes themselves were associated.

If in language and plan he be so excellent, it may be asked why should he not be honoured with that pre-eminent niche in the temple which so many in the world have by suffrage assigned to him?  Simply because, with all the life and beauty of his style, the vigour and truth of his descriptions, the boldness of his conceptions, and the reach of his vision in the dark abysses of passion, Lord Byron was but imperfectly acquainted with human nature.  He looked but on the outside of man.  No characteristic action distinguishes one of his heroes from another, nor is there much dissimilarity in their sentiments; they have no individuality; they stalk and pass in mist and gloom, grim, ghastly, and portentous, mysterious shadows, entities of the twilight, weird things like the sceptred effigies of the unborn issue of Banquo.