public, and are aware that to make any successful impression on them the critic must appear to speak with perfect freedom.  I trust I have not abused this discretion.  I am sure I have not meant to do so, and yet during Lord Byron’s absence, and under the present circumstances, I should feel more grieved than at anything that ever befell me if there should have slipped from my pen anything capable of giving him pain.

There are some things in the critique which are necessarily and unavoidably personal, and sure I am if he attends to it, which is unlikely, he will find advantage from doing so.  I wish Mr. Gifford and you would consider every word carefully.  If you think the general tenor is likely to make any impression on him, if you think it likely to hurt him either in his feelings or with the public, in God’s name fling the sheets in the fire and let them be as not written.  But if it appears, I should wish him to get an early copy, and that you would at the same time say I am the author, at your opportunity.  No one can honour Lord Byron a genius more than I do, and no one had so great a wish to love him personally, though personally we had not the means of becoming very intimate.  In his family distress (deeply to be deprecated, and in which probably he can yet be excused) I still looked to some moment of reflection when bad advisers (and, except you were one, I have heard of few whom I should call good) were distant from the side of one who is so much the child of feeling and emotion.  An opportunity was once afforded me of interfering, but things appeared to me to have gone too far; yet, even after all, I wish I had tried it, for Lord Byron always seemed to give me credit for wishing him sincerely well, and knew me to be superior to what Commodore Trunnion would call “the trash of literary envy and petty rivalry.”

Lord Byron’s opinion of the article forms so necessary a complement to Walter Scott’s sympathetic criticism of the man and the poet, that we make no excuse for reproducing it, as conveyed in a letter to Mr. Murray (March 3, 1817).

“In acknowledging the arrival of the article from the Quarterly, which I received two days ago, I cannot express myself better than in the words of my sister Augusta, who (speaking of it) says, that it is written in a spirit ‘of the most feeling and kind nature.’

“It is, however, something more.  It seems to me (as far as the subject of it may be permitted to judge) to be very well written as a composition, and I think will do the journal no discredit, because even those who condemn its partiality, must praise its generosity.  The temptations to take another and a less favourable view of the question have been so great and numerous, that, what with public opinion, politics, etc., he must be a gallant as well as a good man who has ventured in that place, and at this time, to write such an article, even anonymously.  Such things, however, are their own reward; and I even