respect, as well as in many others, he is a most striking and interesting character."[275] Nevertheless Scott found it easy to criticise Southey’s poems adversely, as we may see from his correspondence.  Writing to Miss Seward he pointed out flaws in the story and the characterization of Madoc,[276] yet after repeated readings he saw enough to convince him that Madoc would in the future “assume his real place at the feet of Milton."[277] Thalaba was one of the poems he liked to have read aloud on Sunday evenings.[278] A review of The Curse of Kehama, in which he seemed to express the opinion that this surpassed the poet’s previous work, illustrates his professed creed as to criticism.  He wrote to Ellis concerning his article:  “What I could I did, which was to throw as much weight as possible upon the beautiful passages, of which there are many, and to slur over the absurdities, of which there are not a few....  This said Kehama affords cruel openings for the quizzers, and I suppose will get it roundly in the Edinburgh Review.  I could have made a very different hand of it, indeed, had the order of the day been pour dechirer."[279] If Scott had to make an effort in writing the review, he made it with abundant energy.  Some absurdities are indeed mentioned, but various particular passages are characterized in the most enthusiastic way, with such phrases as “horribly sublime,” “impressive and affecting,” “reminds us of the Satan of Milton, yet stands the comparison,” “all the gloomy power of Dante.”  It may be noted that Scott used Milton’s name rather freely in comparisons, and that for Dante his admiration was altogether unimpassioned,[280] but the review, after all, is on the whole very laudatory.[281] In it Scott awards to Southey the palm for a surpassing share of imagination, which he elsewhere gave to Coleridge.  Possibly Scott was the less inclined to be severe over the absurdities of Kehama because Southey agreed with his own theory as to the evil of fastidious corrections.[282] At any rate he seems to have been quite sincere in saying to Southey, in connection with the poet-laureateship which, according to Scott’s suggestion, was offered to him in 1813, “I am not such an ass as not to know that you are my better in poetry, though I have had, probably but for a time, the tide of popularity in my favour."[283]

Much as Scott admired Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, he considered Byron the great poetical genius of the period.  He once spoke of Byron as the only poet of transcendent talents that England had had since Dryden.[284] At another time his comment was:  “He wrote from impulse, never from effort; and therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetical geniuses of my time, and half a century before me.  We have ... many men of high poetical talent, but none, I think, of that ever-gushing and perennial fountain of natural water."[285] The likenesses between Byron’s poetical manner and