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LORD BYRON.

Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott are among writers now living[A] the two, who would carry away a majority of suffrages as the greatest geniuses of the age.  The former would, perhaps, obtain the preference with the fine gentlemen and ladies (squeamishness apart)—­the latter with the critics and the vulgar.  We shall treat of them in the same connection, partly on account of their distinguished pre-eminence, and partly because they afford a complete contrast to each other.  In their poetry, in their prose, in their politics, and in their tempers no two men can be more unlike.  If Sir Walter Scott may be thought by some to have been

  “Born universal heir to all humanity,”

it is plain Lord Byron can set up no such pretension.  He is, in a striking degree, the creature of his own will.  He holds no communion with his kind; but stands alone, without mate or fellow—­

  “As if a man were author of himself,
  And owned no other kin.”

He is like a solitary peak, all access to which is cut off not more by elevation than distance.  He is seated on a lofty eminence, “cloud-capt,” or reflecting the last rays of setting suns; and in his poetical moods, reminds us of the fabled Titans, retired to a ridgy steep, playing on their Pan’s-pipes, and taking up ordinary men and things in their hands with haughty indifference.  He raises his subject to himself, or tramples on it:  he neither stoops to, nor loses himself in it.  He exists not by sympathy, but by antipathy.  He scorns all things, even himself.  Nature must come to him to sit for her picture—­he does not go to her.  She must consult his time, his convenience, and his humour; and wear a sombre or a fantastic garb, or his Lordship turns his back upon her.  There is no ease, no unaffected simplicity of manner, no “golden mean.”  All is strained, or petulant in the extreme.  His thoughts are sphered and crystalline; his style “prouder than when blue Iris bends;” his spirit fiery, impatient, wayward, indefatigable.  Instead of taking his impressions from without, in entire and almost unimpaired masses, he moulds them according to his own temperament, and heats the materials of his imagination in the furnace of his passions.—­Lord Byron’s verse glows like a flame, consuming every thing in its way; Sir Walter Scott’s glides like a river, clear, gentle, harmless.  The poetry of the first scorches, that of the last scarcely warms.  The light of the one proceeds from an internal source, ensanguined, sullen, fixed; the other reflects the hues of Heaven, or the face of nature, glancing vivid and various.  The productions of the Northern Bard have the rust and the freshness of antiquity about them; those of the Noble Poet cease to startle from their extreme ambition of novelty, both in style and matter.  Sir Walter’s rhymes are “silly sooth”—­