If Mr. Moore has not suffered enough personally, Lord Byron (judging from the tone of his writings) might be thought to have suffered too much to be a truly great poet.  If Mr. Moore lays himself too open to all the various impulses of things, the outward shews of earth and sky, to every breath that blows, to every stray sentiment that crosses his fancy; Lord Byron shuts himself up too much in the impenetrable gloom of his own thoughts, and buries the natural light of things in “nook monastic.”  The Giaour, the Corsair, Childe Harold, are all the same person, and they are apparently all himself.  The everlasting repetition of one subject, the same dark ground of fiction, with the darker colours of the poet’s mind spread over it, the unceasing accumulation of horrors on horror’s head, steels the mind against the sense of pain, as inevitably as the unwearied Siren sounds and luxurious monotony of Mr. Moore’s poetry make it inaccessible to pleasure.  Lord Byron’s poetry is as morbid as Mr. Moore’s is careless and dissipated.  He has more depth of passion, more force and impetuosity, but the passion is always of the same unaccountable character, at once violent and sullen, fierce and gloomy.  It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying upon itself, and disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things.  There is nothing less poetical than this sort of unaccommodating selfishness.  There is nothing more repulsive than this sort of ideal absorption of all the interests of others, of the good and ills of life, in the ruling passion and moody abstraction of a single mind, as if it would make itself the centre of the universe, and there was nothing worth cherishing but its intellectual diseases.  It is like a cancer, eating into the heart of poetry.  But still there is power; and power rivets attention and forces admiration.  “He hath a demon:”  and that is the next thing to being full of the God.  His brow collects the scattered gloom:  his eye flashes livid fire that withers and consumes.  But still we watch the progress of the scathing bolt with interest, and mark the ruin it leaves behind with awe.  Within the contracted range of his imagination, he has great unity and truth of keeping.  He chooses elements and agents congenial to his mind, the dark and glittering ocean, the frail bark hurrying before the storm, pirates and men that “house on the wild sea with wild usages.”  He gives the tumultuous eagerness of action, and the fixed despair of thought.  In vigour of style and force of conception, he in one sense surpasses every writer of the present day.  His indignant apothegms are like oracles of misanthropy.  He who wishes for “a curse to kill with,” may find it in Lord Byron’s writings.  Yet he has beauty lurking underneath his strength, tenderness sometimes joined with the phrenzy of despair.  A flash of golden light sometimes follows from a stroke of his pencil, like a falling meteor.  The flowers that adorn his poetry bloom over charnel-houses and the grave!