Byron was romantic and would seem to have had little in common with Pope.  But there was another side to Byron—­and William Rossetti thinks his most characteristic side—­viz., his wit and understanding; and this side sympathised heartily with Pope.  It is well known that when Byron came back from the East he had in his trunk besides the manuscript of “Childe Harold,” which he thought little of, certain “Hints from Horace” which the world thinks less of, but which he was eager to have published, while Dallas was urging him to print “Childe Harold.”  “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” is a thoroughly Popeian satire, and “The Vision of Judgment,” though not in couplets but in ottava rima, is one of the best personal satires in English.  It has all of Pope’s malicious wit, with a sweep and glow, which belonged to Byron as a poet rather than as a satirist, and which Pope never had.  Lowell thinks, too, that what Byron admired in Pope was “that patience in careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of his contemporaries.”

With all this there probably mingled something of perversity and exaggeration in Byron’s praises of Pope.  He hated the Lakers, and he delighted to use Pope against them as a foil and a rod.  He at least was everything that they were not.  Doubtless in the Pope controversy, his “object was mainly mischief,” as Lowell says.  Byron loved a fight; he thought the Rev. W. L. Bowles an ass, and he determined to have some fun with him.  Besides the two letters to Murray in 1821, an open letter of Byron’s to Isaac Disraeli, dated March 15, 1820, and entitled “Some Observations upon an article in Blackwood’s Magazine,” [15] contains a long passage in vindication of Pope and in denunciation of contemporary poetry—­a passage which is important not only as showing Byron’s opinions, but as testifying to the very general change in taste which had taken place since 1756, when Joseph Warton was so discouraged by the public hostility to his “Essay on Pope” that he withheld the second volume for twenty-six years.  “The great cause of the present deplorable state of English poetry,” writes Byron, “is to be attributed to that absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope in which, for the last few years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence.  Men of the most opposite opinions have united upon this topic.”  He then goes on to praise Pope and abuse his own contemporaries, especially the Lake poets, both in the most extravagant terms.  Pope he pronounces the most perfect and harmonious of poets.  “Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge,” he says, “had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope . . . but they have been joined in it by . . . the whole heterogeneous mass of living English poets excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope’s poetry