Scott’s own must have made it easy for the elder poet to recognize the power of the younger, since Scott was innocent of all repining or envy over the fact which he so freely acknowledged in later years, that Byron “beat” him out of the field.[286] From the time of the appearance of the first two cantos of Childe Harold he acknowledged the author’s “extraordinary power,"[287] and even before that he had tried to soften Jeffrey’s harsh treatment of Hours of Idleness.[288] In 1814 he was ready to say, “Byron hits the mark where I don’t even pretend to fledge my arrow."[289]

It was Byron, rather than Scott, who realized the debt of the new popular favorite to the old; and their personal relations were of the pleasantest, though they were never intimate as Scott was with Southey and Wordsworth.  As poets, Scott and Byron seem to have understood each other thoroughly.[290] None of the other great poets of the period did justice to Scott, nor did he succeed so well in defining the power of any of the others.  His first review of Childe Harold is the most important of all his articles on the poetry of his time; and his remarks written at the death of Lord Byron, though brief, are not less full of good judgment.  Originality, spontaneity, and the ability and inclination to write rapidly were traits Scott admired most in Byron, and in the vigor and beauty of the poems he found the fine flower of all these qualities.  “We cannot but repeat our conviction,” he says, “that poetry, being, in its higher classes, an art which has for its elements sublimity and unaffected beauty, is more liable than any other to suffer from the labour of polishing....  It must be remembered that we speak of the higher tones of composition; there are others of a subordinate character where extreme art and labour are not bestowed in vain.  But we cannot consider over-anxious correction as likely to be employed with advantage upon poems like those of Lord Byron, which have for their object to rouse the imagination and awaken the passions."[291]

Byron’s temperament was far from being of a sort that Scott could admire, though he was very susceptible to his personal charm:  “Byron’s countenance is a thing to dream of,” he once said;[292] but he felt that popular estimation did Byron injustice.  His articles on this poet contain some of his most characteristic moral reflections.  Something of Byron’s gloominess Scott attributes to the sensitive poetic organization which he felt that Byron had in an extreme degree; but more to the perverted habit of looking within rather than around upon the realities of life, in which Providence intended men to find their happiness.  The philosophy is not novel or brilliant; it is only very sincere and very just; and it supplies to Scott’s criticism of Byron that element of moral reflection which we feel was necessary to the occasion.[293]

But though Scott never failed to express disapproval of Byron’s attitude toward life, he kept his criticism on this point essentially distinct from his judgment on the poetry.  In a way it was impossible to separate the two subjects, and the public demanded some discussion of the man when his poetry was reviewed.  But Scott’s verdict on the importance of the poems as such was unaffected by his disapproval of the author’s point of view.  He praised Don Juan no less heartily than Childe Harold.