His criticism of Don Juan is, however, to be gathered only from short and incidental remarks, as he never reviewed the poem.  A satire written by R.P.  Gillies is commemorated thus in Scott’s Journal:  “This poem goes to the tune of Don Juan, but it is the champagne after it has stood two days with the cork drawn."[294] He called Byron “as various in composition as Shakspeare himself”; and added, “this will be admitted by all who are acquainted with his Don Juan....  Neither Childe Harold, nor any of the most beautiful of Byron’s earlier tales, contain more exquisite morsels of poetry than are to be found scattered through the cantos of Don Juan."[295] The defence of Cain which Scott wrote in accepting the dedication of that poem to himself is well known.[296] He calls it a “very grand and tremendous drama,” and continues, “Byron has certainly matched Milton on his own ground.  Some part of the language is bold, and may shock one class of readers, whose tone will be adopted by others out of affectation or envy.  But then they must condemn the Paradise Lost, if they have a mind to be consistent.”

Scott’s comments on Byron are closely paralleled by those of Goethe, who considered that Byron had the greatest talent of any man of his century.[297] The opinions of continental critics in general were similar.  Among English critics Matthew Arnold aroused many protests when he ranked Byron as one of the two greatest English poets of the nineteenth century, but his views seem perfectly rational now; and though he remarked upon the extravagance of Scott’s phrases his own verdict was not very unlike that we have been considering.

Scott’s enthusiasm about the literature of his own time seems natural enough when we consider that the list of his notable contemporaries is far from exhausted after Burns, the Lake Poets, and Byron have been named.  Campbell was a poet of whose powers he thought very highly, but who, he believed had given only a sample of the great things he might do if he would cease to “fear the shadow of his own reputation.”  Before he wrote about Byron Scott had given in his review of Gertrude of Wyoming an exposition of his opinion as to the dangers of extreme care in revision.  “The truth is,” he says, “that an author cannot work upon a beautiful poem beyond a certain point without doing it real and irreparable injury in more respects than one."[298] He felt that Campbell had worked, in many cases, beyond the “certain point.”  For the “impetuous lyric sally,” like the Mariners of England and the Battle of the Baltic, Scott rightly thought that Campbell excelled all his contemporaries.  Moore was another lyrist whose poetry Scott greatly admired.  In Moore’s case, as in Southey’s, the contemporary estimate was higher than can now be maintained, but Moore is to-day underrated.  From what Scott says about him we conclude that the man’s personality and his way of singing added