No More Learning

He represented nobody but himself. He was an example
of an ingenious man, a clever talker, but he was out of his place in the
House of Commons; where people did not come (as in his own house) to
admire or break a lance with him, but to get through the business of
the day, and so adjourn! He wanted effect and _momentum_. Each of his
sentences told very well in itself, but they did not all together make
a speech. He left off where he began. His eloquence was a succession
of drops, not a stream. His arguments, though subtle and new, did not
affect the main body of the question. The coldness and pettiness of
his manner did not warm the hearts or expand the understandings of his
hearers. Instead of encouraging, he checked the ardour of his friends;
and teazed, instead of overpowering his antagonists. The only palpable
hit he ever made, while he remained there, was the comparing his own
situation in being rejected by the House, on account of the supposed
purity of his clerical character, to the story of the girl at the
Magdalen, who was told "she must turn out and qualify. "[A] This met with
laughter and loud applause. It was a _home_ thrust, and the House (to do
them justice) are obliged to any one who, by a smart blow, relieves
them of the load of grave responsibility, which sits heavy on their
shoulders. --At the hustings, or as an election-candidate, Mr. Tooke did
better. There was no great question to move or carry--it was an affair
of political _sparring_ between himself and the other candidates. He
took it in a very cool and leisurely manner--watched his competitors
with a wary, sarcastic eye; picked up the mistakes or absurdities that
fell from them, and retorted them on their heads; told a story to the
mob; and smiled and took snuff with a gentlemanly and becoming air, as
if he was already seated in the House. But a Court of Law was the place
where Mr. Tooke made the best figure in public. He might assuredly be
said to be "native and endued unto that element. " He had here to stand
merely on the defensive--not to advance himself, but to block up the
way--not to impress others, but to be himself impenetrable. All he
wanted was _negative success_; and to this no one was better qualified
to aspire. Cross purposes, _moot-points_, pleas, demurrers, flaws in
the indictment, double meanings, cases, inconsequentialities, these were
the play-things, the darlings of Mr. Tooke's mind; and with these he
baffled the Judge, dumb-founded the Counsel, and outwitted the Jury. The
report of his trial before Lord Kenyon is a master-piece of acuteness,
dexterity, modest assurance, and legal effect. It is much like his
examination before the Commissioners of the Income-Tax--nothing could
be got out of him in either case! Mr. Tooke, as a political leader,
belonged to the class of _trimmers_; or at most, it was his delight to
make mischief and spoil sport. He would rather be _against_ himself than
_for_ any body else. He was neither a bold nor a safe leader. He enticed
others into scrapes, and kept out of them himself. Provided he could
say a clever or a spiteful thing, he did not care whether it served or
injured the cause. Spleen or the exercise of intellectual power was the
motive of his patriotism, rather than principle. He would talk treason
with a saving clause; and instil sedition into the public mind, through
the medium of a third (who was to be the responsible) party. He made Sir
Francis Burdett his spokesman in the House and to the country, often
venting his chagrin or singularity of sentiment at the expense of his
friend; but what in the first was trick or reckless vanity, was in the
last plain downright English honesty and singleness of heart. In the
case of the State Trials, in 1794, Mr. Tooke rather compromised his
friends to screen himself. He kept repeating that "others might have
gone on to Windsor, but he had stopped at Hounslow," as if to go farther
might have been dangerous and unwarrantable. It was not the question how
far he or others had actually gone, but how far they had a right to go,
according to the law. His conduct was not the limit of the law, nor did
treasonable excess begin where prudence or principle taught him to stop
short, though this was the oblique inference liable to be drawn from his
line of defence. Mr. Tooke was uneasy and apprehensive for the issue of
the Government-prosecution while in confinement, and said, in speaking
of it to a friend, with a morbid feeling and an emphasis quite unusual
with him--"They want our blood--blood--blood! " It was somewhat
ridiculous to implicate Mr. Tooke in a charge of High Treason (and
indeed the whole charge was built on the mistaken purport of
an intercepted letter relating to an engagement for a private
dinnerparty)--his politics were not at all revolutionary. In this
respect he was a mere pettifogger, full of chicane, and captious
objections, and unmeaning discontent; but he had none of the grand
whirling movements of the French Revolution, nor of the tumultuous glow
of rebellion in his head or in his heart. His politics were cast in
a different mould, or confined to the party distinctions and court-
intrigues and pittances of popular right, that made a noise in the time
of Junius and Wilkes--and even if his understanding had gone along with
more modern and unqualified principles, his cautious temper would have
prevented his risking them in practice. Horne Tooke (though not of the
same side in politics) had much of the tone of mind and more of the
spirit of moral feeling of the celebrated philosopher of Malmesbury. The
narrow scale and fine-drawn distinctions of his political creed made
his conversation on such subjects infinitely amusing, particularly
when contrasted with that of persons who dealt in the sounding
_common-places_ and sweeping clauses of abstract politics. He knew all
the cabals and jealousies and heart-burnings in the beginning of the
late reign, the changes of administration and the springs of secret
influence, the characters of the leading men, Wilkes, Barrè, Dunning,
Chatham, Burke, the Marquis of Rockingham, North, Shelburne, Fox, Pitt,
and all the vacillating events of the American war:--these formed a
curious back-ground to the more prominent figures that occupied the
present time, and Mr. Tooke worked out the minute details and touched in
the evanescent _traits_ with the pencil of a master. His conversation
resembled a political _camera obscura_--as quaint as it was magical. To
some pompous pretenders he might seem to narrate _fabellas aniles_ (old
wives' fables)--but not to those who study human nature, and wish to
know the materials of which it is composed. Mr. Tooke's faculties might
appear to have ripened and acquired a finer flavour with age. In a
former period of his life he was hardly the man he was latterly; or else
he had greater abilities to contend against. He no where makes so poor a
figure as in his controversy with Junius. He has evidently the best of
the argument, yet he makes nothing out of it. He tells a long story
about himself, without wit or point in it; and whines and whimpers like
a school-boy under the rod of his master. Junius, after bringing a hasty
charge against him, has not a single fact to adduce in support of it;
but keeps his ground and fairly beats his adversary out of the field by
the mere force of style. One would think that "Parson Horne" knew who
Junius was, and was afraid of him. "Under him his genius is" quite
"rebuked. " With the best cause to defend, he comes off more shabbily
from the contest than any other person in the LETTERS, except Sir
William Draper, who is the very hero of defeat.

The great thing which Mr. Horne Tooke has done, and which he has left
behind him to posterity, is his work on Grammar, oddly enough entitled
THE DIVERSIONS OF PURLEY. Many people have taken it up as a description
of a game--others supposing it to be a novel. It is, in truth, one of
the few philosophical works on Grammar that were ever written. The
essence of it (and, indeed, almost all that is really valuable in it) is
contained in his _Letter to Dunning_, published about the year 1775.
Mr. Tooke's work is truly elementary. Dr. Lowth described Mr. Harris's
_Hermes_ as "the finest specimen of analysis since the days of
Aristotle"--a work in which there is no analysis at all, for analysis
consists in reducing things to their principles, and not in endless
details and subdivisions. Mr. Harris multiplies distinctions, and
confounds his readers. Mr. Tooke clears away the rubbish of school-boy
technicalities, and strikes at the root of his subject. In accomplishing
his arduous task, he was, perhaps, aided not more by the strength and
resources of his mind than by its limits and defects. There is a web of
old associations wound round language, that is a kind of veil over its
natural features; and custom puts on the mask of ignorance. But this
veil, this mask the author of _The Diversions of Purley_ threw aside and
penetrated to the naked truth of things, by the literal, matter-of-fact,
unimaginative nature of his understanding, and because he was not
subject to prejudices or illusions of any kind. Words may be said to
"bear a charmed life, that must not yield to one of woman born"--with
womanish weaknesses and confused apprehensions. But this charm was
broken in the case of Mr. Tooke, whose mind was the reverse of
effeminate--hard, unbending, concrete, physical, half-savage--and who
saw language stripped of the clothing of habit or sentiment, or the
disguises of doting pedantry, naked in its cradle, and in its primitive
state. Our author tells us that he found his discovery on Grammar among
a number of papers on other subjects, which he had thrown aside and
forgotten. Is this an idle boast? Or had he made other discoveries
of equal importance, which he did not think it worth his while to
communicate to the world, but chose to die the churl of knowledge? The
whole of his reasoning turns upon shewing that the Conjunction _That_
is the pronoun _That_, which is itself the participle of a verb, and
in like manner that all the other mystical and hitherto unintelligible
parts of speech are derived from the only two intelligible ones, the
Verb and Noun. "I affirm _that_ gold is yellow," that is, "I affirm
_that_ fact, or that proposition, viz. gold is yellow. " The secret of
the Conjunction on which so many fine heads had split, on which so many
learned definitions were thrown away, as if it was its peculiar province
and inborn virtue to announce oracles and formal propositions, and
nothing else, like a Doctor of Laws, is here at once accounted for,
inasmuch as it is clearly nothing but another part of speech, the
pronoun, _that_, with a third part of speech, the noun, _thing_,
understood. This is getting at a solution of words into their component
parts, not glossing over one difficulty by bringing another to parallel
it, nor like saying with Mr. Harris, when it is asked, "what a
Conjunction is? " that there are conjunctions copulative, conjunctions
disjunctive, and as many other frivolous varieties of the species as any
one chooses to hunt out "with laborious foolery. " Our author hit
upon his parent-discovery in the course of a law-suit, while he was
examining, with jealous watchfulness, the meaning of words to prevent
being entrapped by them; or rather, this circumstance might itself be
traced to the habit of satisfying his own mind as to the precise sense
in which he himself made use of words. Mr. Tooke, though he had no
objection to puzzle others, was mightily averse to being puzzled or
_mystified_ himself. All was, to his determined mind, either complete
light or complete darkness. There was no hazy, doubtful _chiaro-scuro_
in his understanding. He wanted something "palpable to feeling as to
sight. " "What," he would say to himself, "do I mean when I use the
conjunction _that? _ Is it an anomaly, a class by itself, a word sealed
against all inquisitive attempts? Is it enough to call it a _copula_,
a bridge, a link, a word connecting sentences? That is undoubtedly its
use, but what is its origin? " Mr. Tooke thought he had answered this
question satisfactorily, and loosened the Gordian knot of grammarians,
"familiar as his garter," when he said, "It is the common pronoun,
adjective, or participle, _that_, with the noun, _thing or proposition_,
implied, and the particular example following it. " So he thought, and
so every reader has thought since, with the exception of teachers and
writers upon grammar. Mr. Windham, indeed, who was a sophist, but not a
logician, charged him with having found "a mare's-nest;" but it is not
to be doubted that Mr. Tooke's etymologies will stand the test, and
last longer than Mr. Windham's ingenious derivation of the practice of
bull-baiting from the principles of humanity!

Having thus laid the corner-stone, he proceeded to apply the same method
of reasoning to other undecyphered and impracticable terms. Thus the
word, _And_, he explained clearly enough to be the verb _add_, or a
corruption of the old Saxon, _anandad_. "Two _and_ two make four," that
is, "two _add_ two make four. " Mr. Tooke, in fact, treated words as
the chemists do substances; he separated those which are compounded of
others from those which are not decompoundable. He did not explain the
obscure by the more obscure, but the difficult by the plain, the complex
by the simple. This alone is proceeding upon the true principles of
science: the rest is pedantry and _petit-maitreship. _ Our philosophical
writer distinguished all words into _names of things_, and directions
added for joining them together, or originally into _nouns_ and _verbs_.
It is a pity that he has left this matter short, by omitting to define
the Verb. After enumerating sixteen different definitions (all of which
he dismisses with scorn and contumely) at the end of two quarto volumes,
he refers the reader for the true solution to a third volume, which
he did not live to finish. This extraordinary man was in the habit
of tantalizing his guests on a Sunday afternoon with sundry abstruse
speculations, and putting them off to the following week for a
satisfaction of their doubts; but why should he treat posterity in the
same scurvy manner, or leave the world without quitting scores with it?
I question whether Mr. Tooke was himself in possession of his pretended
_nostrum_, and whether, after trying hard at a definition of the verb as
a distinct part of speech, as a terrier-dog mumbles a hedge-hog, he did
not find it too much for him, and leave it to its fate. It is also a
pity that Mr. Tooke spun out his great work with prolix and dogmatical
dissertations on irrelevant matters; and after denying the old
metaphysical theories of language, should attempt to found a
metaphysical theory of his own on the nature and mechanism of language.
The nature of words, he contended (it was the basis of his whole system)
had no connection with the nature of things or the objects of thought;
yet he afterwards strove to limit the nature of things and of the human
mind by the technical structure of language. Thus he endeavours to shew
that there are no abstract ideas, by enumerating two thousand instances
of words, expressing abstract ideas, that are the past participles of
certain verbs. It is difficult to know what he means by this. On the
other hand, he maintains that "a complex idea is as great an absurdity
as a complex star," and that words only are complex. He also makes out a
triumphant list of metaphysical and moral non-entities, proved to be
so on the pure principle that the names of these non-entities are
participles, not nouns, or names of things. That is strange in so close
a reasoner and in one who maintained that all language was a masquerade
of words, and that the class to which they grammatically belonged had
nothing to do with the class of ideas they represented.

It is now above twenty years since the two quarto volumes of the
_Diversions of Purley_ were published, and fifty since the same theory
was promulgated in the celebrated _Letter to Dunning_. Yet it is a
curious example of the _Spirit of the Age_ that Mr. Lindley Murray's
Grammar (a work out of which Mr. C---- helps himself to English, and Mr.
M---- to style[B]) has proceeded to the thirtieth edition in complete
defiance of all the facts and arguments there laid down. He defines a
noun to be the name of a thing. Is quackery a thing, _i. e. _ a substance?
He defines a verb to be a word signifying _to be, to do, or to suffer_.
Are being, action, suffering verbs? He defines an adjective to be the
name of a quality. Are not _wooden, golden, substantial_ adjectives? He
maintains that there are six cases in English nouns [C], that is, six
various terminations without any change of termination at all, and that
English verbs have all the moods, tenses, and persons that the Latin
ones have. This is an extraordinary stretch of blindness and obstinacy.
He very formally translates the Latin Grammar into English (as so many
had done before him) and fancies he has written an English Grammar; and
divines applaud, and schoolmasters usher him into the polite world, and
English scholars carry on the jest, while Horne Tooke's genuine
anatomy of our native tongue is laid on the shelf. Can it be that our
politicians smell a rat in the Member for Old Sarum? That our clergy
do not relish Parson Horne? That the world at large are alarmed at
acuteness and originality greater than their own? What has all this
to do with the formation of the English language or with the first
conditions and necessary foundation of speech itself? Is there nothing
beyond the reach of prejudice and party-spirit? It seems in this, as in
so many other instances, as if there was a patent for absurdity in the
natural bias of the human mind, and that folly should be _stereotyped_!


[Footnote A: "They receive him like a virgin at the Magdalen--_Go thou
and do likewise_. "--JUNIUS. ]


[Footnote B: This work is not without merit in the details and examples
of English construction. But its fault even in that part is that he
confounds the genius of the English language, making it periphrastic and
literal, instead of elliptical and idiomatic. According to Mr. Murray,
hardly any of our best writers ever wrote a word of English. ]

[Footnote C: At least, with only one change in the genitive case,]





* * * * *





SIR WALTER SCOTT



Sir Walter Scott is undoubtedly the most popular writer of the age--the
"lord of the ascendant" for the time being. He is just half what the
human intellect is capable of being: if you take the universe, and
divide it into two parts, he knows all that it _has been_; all that
it _is to be_ is nothing to him. His is a mind brooding over
antiquity--scorning "the present ignorant time. " He is "laudator
temporis acti"--a "_prophesier_ of things past. " The old world is to him
a crowded map; the new one a dull, hateful blank. He dotes on all well-
authenticated superstitions; he shudders at the shadow of innovation.
His retentiveness of memory, his accumulated weight of interested
prejudice or romantic association have overlaid his other faculties. The
cells of his memory are vast, various, full even to bursting with life
and motion; his speculative understanding is empty, flaccid, poor, and
dead. His mind receives and treasures up every thing brought to it by
tradition or custom--it does not project itself beyond this into the
world unknown, but mechanically shrinks back as from the edge of a
prejudice. The land of pure reason is to his apprehension like _Van
Dieman's Land_;--barren, miserable, distant, a place of exile, the
dreary abode of savages, convicts, and adventurers. Sir Walter would
make a bad hand of a description of the _Millennium_, unless he could
lay the scene in Scotland five hundred years ago, and then he would
want facts and worm-eaten parchments to support his drooping style.
Our historical novelist firmly thinks that nothing _is_ but what _has
been_--that the moral world stands still, as the material one was
supposed to do of old--and that we can never get beyond the point where
we actually are without utter destruction, though every thing changes
and will change from what it was three hundred years ago to what it is
now,--from what it is now to all that the bigoted admirer of the good
old times most dreads and hates!

It is long since we read, and long since we thought of our author's
poetry. It would probably have gone out of date with the immediate
occasion, even if he himself had not contrived to banish it from our
recollection. It is not to be denied that it had great merit, both of
an obvious and intrinsic kind. It abounded in vivid descriptions, in
spirited action, in smooth and flowing versification. But it wanted
_character_. It was poetry "of no mark or likelihood. " It slid out of
the mind as soon as read, like a river; and would have been forgotten,
but that the public curiosity was fed with ever-new supplies from the
same teeming liquid source. It is not every man that can write six
quarto volumes in verse, that are caught up with avidity, even by
fastidious judges. But what a difference between _their_ popularity and
that of the Scotch Novels! It is true, the public read and admired the
_Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion_, and so on, and each individual was
contented to read and admire because the public did so: but with
regard to the prose-works of the same (supposed) author, it is quite
_another-guess_ sort of thing. Here every one stands forward to applaud
on his own ground, would be thought to go before the public opinion,
is eager to extol his favourite characters louder, to understand them
better than every body else, and has his own scale of comparative
excellence for each work, supported by nothing but his own enthusiastic
and fearless convictions. It must be amusing to the _Author of Waverley_
to hear his readers and admirers (and are not these the same thing? [A])
quarrelling which of his novels is the best, opposing character to
character, quoting passage against passage, striving to surpass each
other in the extravagance of their encomiums, and yet unable to settle
the precedence, or to do the author's writings justice--so various,
so equal, so transcendant are their merits! His volumes of poetry were
received as fashionable and well-dressed acquaintances: we are ready
to tear the others in pieces as old friends. There was something
meretricious in Sir Walter's ballad-rhymes; and like those who keep
opera _figurantes_, we were willing to have our admiration shared, and
our taste confirmed by the town: but the Novels are like the betrothed
of our hearts, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, and we are
jealous that any one should be as much delighted or as thoroughly
acquainted with their beauties as ourselves. For which of his poetical
heroines would the reader break a lance so soon as for Jeanie Deans?
What _Lady of the Lake_ can compare with the beautiful Rebecca? We
believe the late Mr. John Scott went to his death-bed (though a painful
and premature one) with some degree of satisfaction, inasmuch as he had
penned the most elaborate panegyric on the _Scotch Novels_ that had as
yet appeared! --The _Epics_ are not poems, so much as metrical romances.
There is a glittering veil of verse thrown over the features of nature
and of old romance. The deep incisions into character are "skinned and
filmed over"--the details are lost or shaped into flimsy and insipid
decorum; and the truth of feeling and of circumstance is translated into
a tinkling sound, a tinsel _common-place_. It must be owned, there is a
power in true poetry that lifts the mind from the ground of reality to
a higher sphere, that penetrates the inert, scattered, incoherent
materials presented to it, and by a force and inspiration of its own,
melts and moulds them into sublimity and beauty. But Sir Walter (we
contend, under correction) has not this creative impulse, this plastic
power, this capacity of reacting on his first impressions. He is a
learned, a literal, a _matter-of-fact_ expounder of truth or fable:[B]
he does not soar above and look down upon his subject, imparting his own
lofty views and feelings to his descriptions of nature--he relies
upon it, is raised by it, is one with it, or he is nothing. A poet is
essentially a _maker_; that is, he must atone for what he loses in
individuality and local resemblance by the energies and resources of his
own mind. The writer of whom we speak is deficient in these last. He has
either not the faculty or not the will to impregnate his subject by an
effort of pure invention. The execution also is much upon a par with
the more ephemeral effusions of the press. It is light, agreeable,
effeminate, diffuse. Sir Walter's Muse is a _Modern Antique_.
The
smooth, glossy texture of his verse contrasts happily with the quaint,
uncouth, rugged materials of which it is composed; and takes away any
appearance of heaviness or harshness from the body of local traditions
and obsolete costume. We see grim knights and iron armour; but then they
are woven in silk with a careless, delicate hand, and have the softness
of flowers. The poet's figures might be compared to old [C] tapestries
copied on the finest velvet:--they are not like Raphael's _Cartoons_,
but they are very like Mr. Westall's drawings, which accompany, and are
intended to illustrate them. This facility and grace of execution is the
more remarkable, as a story goes that not long before the appearance of
the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ Sir Walter (then Mr. ) Scott, having, in
the company of a friend, to cross the Frith of Forth in a ferry-boat,
they proposed to beguile the time by writing a number of verses on a
given subject, and that at the end of an hour's hard study, they found
they had produced only six lines between them. "It is plain," said the
unconscious author to his fellow-labourer, "that you and I need never
think of getting our living by writing poetry! " In a year or so after
this, he set to work, and poured out quarto upon quarto, as if they had
been drops of water. As to the rest, and compared with true and great
poets, our Scottish Minstrel is but "a metre ballad-monger. " We would
rather have written one song of Burns, or a single passage in Lord
Byron's _Heaven and Earth_, or one of Wordsworth's "fancies and
good-nights," than all his epics. What is he to Spenser, over whose
immortal, ever-amiable verse beauty hovers and trembles, and who has
shed the purple light of Fancy, from his ambrosial wings, over all
nature? What is there of the might of Milton, whose head is canopied in
the blue serene, and who takes us to sit with him there? What is there
(in his ambling rhymes) of the deep pathos of Chaucer? Or of the
o'er-informing power of Shakespear, whose eye, watching alike the
minutest traces of characters and the strongest movements of passion,
"glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven," and with the
lambent flame of genius, playing round each object, lights up the
universe in a robe of its own radiance? Sir Walter has no voluntary
power of combination: all his associations (as we said before) are those
of habit or of tradition. He is a mere narrative and descriptive poet,
garrulous of the old time. The definition of his poetry is a pleasing
superficiality.

Not so of his NOVELS AND ROMANCES. There we turn over a new
leaf--another and the same--the same in matter, but in form, in power
how different! The author of Waverley has got rid of the tagging of
rhymes, the eking out of syllables, the supplying of epithets, the
colours of style, the grouping of his characters, and the regular march
of events, and comes to the point at once, and strikes at the heart
of his subject, without dismay and without disguise. His poetry was a
lady's waiting-maid, dressed out in cast-off finery: his prose is a
beautiful, rustic nymph, that, like Dorothea in Don Quixote, when she is
surprised with dishevelled tresses bathing her naked feet in the brook,
looks round her, abashed at the admiration her charms have excited! The
grand secret of the author's success in these latter productions is that
he has completely got rid of the trammels of authorship; and torn off at
one rent (as Lord Peter got rid of so many yards of lace in the _Tale of
a Tub_) all the ornaments of fine writing and worn-out sentimentality.
All is fresh, as from the hand of nature: by going a century or two back
and laying the scene in a remote and uncultivated district, all becomes
new and startling in the present advanced period. --Highland manners,
characters, scenery, superstitions, Northern dialect and costume, the
wars, the religion, and politics of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, give a charming and wholesome relief to the fastidious
refinement and "over-laboured lassitude" of modern readers, like the
effect of plunging a nervous valetudinarian into a cold-bath. The
_Scotch Novels_, for this reason, are not so much admired in Scotland as
in England. The contrast, the transition is less striking. From the top
of the Calton-Hill, the inhabitants of "Auld Reekie" can descry, or
fancy they descry the peaks of Ben Lomond and the waving outline of Rob
Roy's country: we who live at the southern extremity of the island can
only catch a glimpse of the billowy scene in the descriptions of the
Author of Waverley. The mountain air is most bracing to our languid
nerves, and it is brought us in ship-loads from the neighbourhood
of Abbot's-Ford. There is another circumstance to be taken into the
account. In Edinburgh there is a little opposition and something of
the spirit of cabal between the partisans of works proceeding from Mr.
Constable's and Mr. Blackwood's shops. Mr. Constable gives the highest
prices; but being the Whig bookseller, it is grudged that he should
do so. An attempt is therefore made to transfer a certain share of
popularity to the second-rate Scotch novels, "the embryo fry, the little
airy of _ricketty_ children," issuing through Mr. Blackwood's shop-door.
This operates a diversion, which does not affect us here. The Author of
Waverley wears the palm of legendary lore alone. Sir Walter may, indeed,
surfeit us: his imitators make us sick! It may be asked, it has been
asked, "Have we no materials for romance in England? Must we look to
Scotland for a supply of whatever is original and striking in this
kind? " And we answer--"Yes! " Every foot of soil is with us worked up:
nearly every movement of the social machine is calculable. We have no
room left for violent catastrophes; for grotesque quaintnesses; for
wizard spells. The last skirts of ignorance and barbarism are seen
hovering (in Sir Walter's pages) over the Border. We have, it is true,
gipsies in this country as well as at the Cairn of Derncleugh: but they
live under clipped hedges, and repose in camp-beds, and do not perch
on crags, like eagles, or take shelter, like sea-mews, in basaltic
subterranean caverns. We have heaths with rude heaps of stones upon
them: but no existing superstition converts them into the Geese of
Micklestane-Moor, or sees a Black Dwarf groping among them. We have
sects in religion: but the only thing sublime or ridiculous in that way
is Mr. Irving, the Caledonian preacher, who "comes like a satyr staring
from the woods, and yet speaks like an orator! " We had a Parson Adams
not quite a hundred years ago--a Sir Roger de Coverley rather more than
a hundred! Even Sir Walter is ordinarily obliged to pitch his angle
(strong as the hook is) a hundred miles to the North of the "Modern
Athens" or a century back. His last work,[A] indeed, is mystical,
is romantic in nothing but the title-page. Instead of "a
holy-water sprinkle dipped in dew," he has given us a fashionable
watering-place--and we see what he has made of it. He must not come down
from his fastnesses in traditional barbarism and native rusticity: the
level, the littleness, the frippery of modern civilization will undo him
as it has undone us!

Sir Walter has found out (oh, rare discovery) that facts are better than
fiction; that there is no romance like the romance of real life; and
that if we can but arrive at what men feel, do, and say in striking and
singular situations, the result will be "more lively, audible, and full
of vent," than the fine-spun cobwebs of the brain. With reverence be it
spoken, he is like the man who having to imitate the squeaking of a pig
upon the stage, brought the animal under his coat with him. Our author
has conjured up the actual people he has to deal with, or as much as he
could get of them, in "their habits as they lived. " He has ransacked old
chronicles, and poured the contents upon his page; he has squeezed out
musty records; he has consulted wayfaring pilgrims, bed-rid sibyls; he
has invoked the spirits of the air; he has conversed with the living and
the dead, and let them tell their story their own way; and by borrowing
of others, has enriched his own genius with everlasting variety, truth,
and freedom. He has taken his materials from the original, authentic
sources, in large concrete masses, and not tampered with or too much
frittered them away. He is only the amanuensis of truth and history. It
is impossible to say how fine his writings in consequence are, unless we
could describe how fine nature is. All that portion of the history of
his country that he has touched upon (wide as the scope is) the manners,
the personages, the events, the scenery, lives over again in his
volumes. Nothing is wanting--the illusion is complete. There is a
hurtling in the air, a trampling of feet upon the ground, as these
perfect representations of human character or fanciful belief come
thronging back upon our imaginations. We will merely recall a few of
the subjects of his pencil to the reader's recollection; for nothing we
could add, by way of note or commendation, could make the impression
more vivid.

There is (first and foremost, because the earliest of our acquaintance)
the Baron of Bradwardine, stately, kind-hearted, whimsical, pedantic;
and Flora MacIvor (whom even _we_ forgive for her Jacobitism), the
fierce Vich Ian Vohr, and Evan Dhu, constant in death, and Davie
Gellatly roasting his eggs or turning his rhymes with restless
volubility, and the two stag-hounds that met Waverley, as fine as ever
Titian painted, or Paul Veronese:--then there is old Balfour of Burley,
brandishing his sword and his Bible with fire-eyed fury, trying a
fall with the insolent, gigantic Bothwell at the 'Change-house, and
vanquishing him at the noble battle of Loudonhill; there is Bothwell
himself, drawn to the life, proud, cruel, selfish, profligate, but with
the love-letters of the gentle Alice (written thirty years before), and
his verses to her memory, found in his pocket after his death: in the
same volume of _Old Mortality_ is that lone figure, like a figure in
Scripture, of the woman sitting on the stone at the turning to the
mountain, to warn Burley that there is a lion in his path; and
the fawning Claverhouse, beautiful as a panther, smooth-looking,
blood-spotted; and the fanatics, Macbriar and Mucklewrath, crazed with
zeal and sufferings; and the inflexible Morton, and the faithful Edith,
who refused to "give her hand to another while her heart was with her
lover in the deep and dead sea. " And in _The Heart of Mid-Lothian_ we
have Effie Deans (that sweet, faded flower) and Jeanie, her more than
sister, and old David Deans, the patriarch of St. Leonard's Crags, and
Butler, and Dumbiedikes, eloquent in his silence, and Mr. Bartoline
Saddle-tree and his prudent helpmate, and Porteous swinging in the
wind, and Madge Wildfire, full of finery and madness, and her ghastly
mother. --Again, there is Meg Merrilies, standing on her rock, stretched
on her bier with "her head to the east," and Dirk Hatterick (equal to
Shakespear's Master Barnardine), and Glossin, the soul of an attorney,
and Dandy Dinmont, with his terrier-pack and his pony Dumple, and the
fiery Colonel Mannering, and the modish old counsellor Pleydell, and
Dominie Sampson,[D] and Rob Roy (like the eagle in his eyry), and
Baillie Nicol Jarvie, and the inimitable Major Galbraith, and Rashleigh
Osbaldistone, and Die Vernon, the best of secret-keepers; and in the
_Antiquary_, the ingenious and abstruse Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, and the
old beadsman Edie Ochiltree, and that preternatural figure of old Edith
Elspeith, a living shadow, in whom the lamp of life had been long
extinguished, had it not been fed by remorse and "thick-coming"
recollections; and that striking picture of the effects of feudal
tyranny and fiendish pride, the unhappy Earl of Glenallan; and the Black
Dwarf, and his friend Habbie of the Heughfoot (the cheerful hunter), and
his cousin Grace Armstrong, fresh and laughing like the morning; and the
_Children of the Mint_, and the baying of the blood-hound that tracks
their steps at a distance (the hollow echoes are in our ears now), and
Amy and her hapless love, and the villain Varney, and the deep voice of
George of Douglas--and the immoveable Balafre, and Master Oliver the
Barber in Quentin Durward--and the quaint humour of the Fortunes of
Nigel, and the comic spirit of Peveril of the Peak--and the fine old
English romance of Ivanhoe. What a list of names! What a host of
associations! What a thing is human life! What a power is that of
genius! What a world of thought and feeling is thus rescued from
oblivion! How many hours of heartfelt satisfaction has our author given
to the gay and thoughtless! How many sad hearts has he soothed in pain
and solitude! It is no wonder that the public repay with lengthened
applause and gratitude the pleasure they receive. He writes as fast as
they can read, and he does not write himself down. He is always in the
public eye, and we do not tire of him. His worst is better than any
other person's best. His _backgrounds_ (and his later works are little
else but back-grounds capitally made out) are more attractive than the
principal figures and most complicated actions of other writers. His
works (taken together) are almost like a new edition of human nature.
This is indeed to be an author!

The political bearing of the _Scotch Novels_ has been a considerable
recommendation to them. They are a relief to the mind, rarefied as it
has been with modern philosophy, and heated with ultra-radicalism. At a
time also, when we bid fair to revive the principles of the Stuarts,
it is interesting to bring us acquainted with their persons and
misfortunes. The candour of Sir Walter's historic pen levels our
bristling prejudices on this score, and sees fair play between
Roundheads and Cavaliers, between Protestant and Papist. He is a writer
reconciling all the diversities of human nature to the reader. He does
not enter into the distinctions of hostile sects or parties, but treats
of the strength or the infirmity of the human mind, of the virtues or
vices of the human breast, as they are to be found blended in the whole
race of mankind. Nothing can shew more handsomely or be more gallantly
executed. There was a talk at one time that our author was about to take
Guy Faux for the subject of one of his novels, in order to put a more
liberal and humane construction on the Gunpowder Plot than our "No
Popery" prejudices have hitherto permitted. Sir Walter is a professed
_clarifier_ of the age from the vulgar and still lurking old-English
antipathy to Popery and Slavery. Through some odd process of _servile_
logic, it should seem, that in restoring the claims of the Stuarts by
the courtesy of romance, the House of Brunswick are more firmly seated
in point of fact, and the Bourbons, by collateral reasoning, become
legitimate! In any other point of view, we cannot possibly conceive
how Sir Walter imagines "he has done something to revive the declining
spirit of loyalty" by these novels. His loyalty is founded on _would-be_
treason: he props the actual throne by the shadow of rebellion. Does
he really think of making us enamoured of the "good old times" by the
faithful and harrowing portraits he has drawn of them? Would he carry us
back to the early stages of barbarism, of clanship, of the feudal system
as "a consummation devoutly to be wished? " Is he infatuated enough,
or does he so dote and drivel over his own slothful and self-willed
prejudices, as to believe that he will make a single convert to the
beauty of Legitimacy, that is, of lawless power and savage bigotry, when
he himself is obliged to apologise for the horrors he describes, and
even render his descriptions credible to the modern reader by referring
to the authentic history of these delectable times? [E] He is indeed
so besotted as to the moral of his own story, that he has even the
blindness to go out of his way to have a fling at _flints_ and _dungs_
(the contemptible ingredients, as he would have us believe, of a modern
rabble) at the very time when he is describing a mob of the twelfth
century--a mob (one should think) after the writer's own heart, without
one particle of modern philosophy or revolutionary politics in their
composition, who were to a man, to a hair, just what priests, and kings,
and nobles _let_ them be, and who were collected to witness (a spectacle
proper to the times) the burning of the lovely Rebecca at a stake for
a sorceress, because she was a Jewess, beautiful and innocent, and the
consequent victim of insane bigotry and unbridled profligacy. And it is
at this moment (when the heart is kindled and bursting with indignation
at the revolting abuses of self-constituted power) that Sir Walter
_stops the press_ to have a sneer at the people, and to put a spoke (as
he thinks) in the wheel of upstart innovation! This is what he "calls
backing his friends"--it is thus he administers charms and philtres to
our love of Legitimacy, makes us conceive a horror of all reform, civil,
political, or religious, and would fain put down the _Spirit of the
Age_. The author of Waverley might just as well get up and make a speech
at a dinner at Edinburgh, abusing Mr. Mac-Adam for his improvements in
the roads, on the ground that they were nearly _impassable_ in many
places "sixty years since;" or object to Mr. Peel's _Police-Bill_, by
insisting that Hounslow-Heath was formerly a scene of greater interest
and terror to highwaymen and travellers, and cut a greater figure in
the Newgate-Calendar than it does at present. --Oh! Wickliff, Luther,
Hampden, Sidney, Somers, mistaken Whigs, and thoughtless Reformers in
religion and politics, and all ye, whether poets or philosophers, heroes
or sages, inventors of arts or sciences, patriots, benefactors of the
human race, enlighteners and civilisers of the world, who have (so far)
reduced opinion to reason, and power to law, who are the cause that we
no longer burn witches and heretics at slow fires, that the thumb-screws
are no longer applied by ghastly, smiling judges, to extort confession
of imputed crimes from sufferers for conscience sake; that men are no
longer strung up like acorns on trees without judge or jury, or hunted
like wild beasts through thickets and glens, who have abated the cruelty
of priests, the pride of nobles, the divinity of kings in former times;
to whom we owe it, that we no longer wear round our necks the collar of
Gurth the swineherd, and of Wamba the jester; that the castles of great
lords are no longer the dens of banditti, from whence they issue with
fire and sword, to lay waste the land; that we no longer expire in
loathsome dungeons without knowing the cause, or have our right hands
struck off for raising them in self-defence against wanton insult; that
we can sleep without fear of being burnt in our beds, or travel without
making our wills; that no Amy Robsarts are thrown down trap-doors by
Richard Varneys with impunity; that no Red Reiver of Westburn-Flat sets
fire to peaceful cottages; that no Claverhouse signs cold-blooded
death-warrants in sport; that we have no Tristan the Hermit, or Petit-
Andrè, crawling near us, like spiders, and making our flesh creep, and
our hearts sicken within us at every moment of our lives--ye who have
produced this change in the face of nature and society, return to earth
once more, and beg pardon of Sir Walter and his patrons, who sigh at not
being able to undo all that you have done! Leaving this question, there
are two other remarks which we wished to make on the Novels. The one
was, to express our admiration at the good-nature of the mottos, in
which the author has taken occasion to remember and quote almost every
living author (whether illustrious or obscure) but himself--an indirect
argument in favour of the general opinion as to the source from which
they spring--and the other was, to hint our astonishment at the
innumerable and incessant in-stances of bad and slovenly English in
them, more, we believe, than in any other works now printed. We should
think the writer could not possibly read the manuscript after he has
once written it, or overlook the press.

If there were a writer, who "born for the universe"--

"-----------Narrow'd his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for
mankind--"


who, from the height of his genius looking abroad into nature, and
scanning the recesses of the human heart, "winked and shut his
apprehension up" to every thought or purpose that tended to the future
good of mankind--who, raised by affluence, the reward of successful
industry, and by the voice of fame above the want of any but the most
honourable patronage, stooped to the unworthy arts of adulation, and
abetted the views of the great with the pettifogging feelings of the
meanest dependant on office--who, having secured the admiration of the
public (with the probable reversion of immortality), shewed no respect
for himself, for that genius that had raised him to distinction, for
that nature which he trampled under foot--who, amiable, frank, friendly,
manly in private life, was seized with the dotage of age and the fury
of a woman, the instant politics were concerned--who reserved all his
candour and comprehensiveness of view for history, and vented his
littleness, pique, resentment, bigotry, and intolerance on his
contemporaries--who took the wrong side, and defended it by unfair
means--who, the moment his own interest or the prejudices of others
interfered, seemed to forget all that was due to the pride of intellect,
to the sense of manhood--who, praised, admired by men of all parties
alike, repaid the public liberality by striking a secret and envenomed
blow at the reputation of every one who was not the ready tool of
power--who strewed the slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn
over the bud and promise of genius, because it was not fostered in the
hot-bed of corruption, or warped by the trammels of servility--who
supported the worst abuses of authority in the worst spirit--who joined
a gang of desperadoes to spread calumny, contempt, infamy, wherever they
were merited by honesty or talent on a different side--who officiously
undertook to decide public questions by private insinuations, to prop
the throne by nicknames, and the altar by lies--who being (by common
consent) the finest, the most humane and accomplished writer of his age,
associated himself with and encouraged the lowest panders of a venal
press; deluging, nauseating the public mind with the offal and garbage
of Billingsgate abuse and vulgar _slang_; shewing no remorse, no
relenting or compassion towards the victims of this nefarious and
organized system of party-proscription, carried on under the mask of
literary criticism and fair discussion, insulting the misfortunes of
some, and trampling on the early grave of others--

"Who would not grieve if such a man there be?
Who would not weep if Atticus were he? "

But we believe there is no other age or country of the world (but ours),
in which such genius could have been so degraded!


[Footnote A: No! For we met with a young lady who kept a circulating
library and a milliner's-shop, in a watering-place in the country, who,
when we inquired for the _Scotch Novels_, spoke indifferently about
them, said they were "so dry she could hardly get through them," and
recommended us to read _Agnes_. We never thought of it before; but we
would venture to lay a wager that there are many other young ladies in
the same situation, and who think "Old Mortality" "dry. "]

[Footnote B: Just as Cobbett is a _matter-of-fact reasoner_. ]

[Footnote C: St. Ronan's Well. ]

[Footnote D: Perhaps the finest scene in all these novels, is that where
the Dominie meets his pupil, Miss Lucy, the morning after her brother's
arrival. ]

[Footnote E: "And here we cannot but think it necessary to offer some
better proof than the incidents of an idle tale, to vindicate the
melancholy representation of manners which has been just laid before
the reader. It is grievous to think that those valiant Barons, to whose
stand against the crown the liberties of England were indebted for their
existence, should themselves have been such dreadful oppressors, and
capable of excesses, contrary not only to the laws of England, but to
those of nature and humanity. But alas! we have only to extract from the
industrious Henry one of those numerous passages which he has collected
from contemporary historians, to prove that fiction itself can hardly
reach the dark reality of the horrors of the period.

"The description given by the author of the Saxon Chronicle of the
cruelties exercised in the reign of King Stephen by the great barons and
lords of castles, who were all Normans, affords a strong proof of the
excesses of which they were capable when their passions were inflamed.
'They grievously oppressed the poor people by building castles; and when
they were built, they filled them with wicked men or rather devils, who
seized both men and women who they imagined had any money, threw them
into prison, and put them to more cruel tortures than the martyrs ever
endured. They suffocated some in mud, and suspended others by the feet,
or the head, or the thumbs, kindling fires below them. They squeezed the
heads of some with knotted cords till they pierced their brains, while
they threw others into dungeons swarming with serpents, snakes, and
toads. ' But it would be cruel to put the reader to the pain of perusing
the remainder of the description. "--_Henry's Hist_. edit. 1805, vol.
vii. p. 346. ]





* * * * *





LORD BYRON.



Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott are among writers now living[A] the two,
who would carry away a majority of suffrages as the greatest geniuses of
the age. The former would, perhaps, obtain the preference with the fine
gentlemen and ladies (squeamishness apart)--the latter with the critics
and the vulgar. We shall treat of them in the same connection, partly
on account of their distinguished pre-eminence, and partly because they
afford a complete contrast to each other. In their poetry, in their
prose, in their politics, and in their tempers no two men can be more
unlike. If Sir Walter Scott may be thought by some to have been

"Born universal heir to all humanity,"

it is plain Lord Byron can set up no such pretension. He is, in a
striking degree, the creature of his own will. He holds no communion
with his kind; but stands alone, without mate or fellow--

"As if a man were author of himself,
And owned no other kin. "

He is like a solitary peak, all access to which is cut off not more by
elevation than distance. He is seated on a lofty eminence, "cloud-capt,"
or reflecting the last rays of setting suns; and in his poetical moods,
reminds us of the fabled Titans, retired to a ridgy steep, playing on
their Pan's-pipes, and taking up ordinary men and things in their hands
with haughty indifference. He raises his subject to himself, or tramples
on it: he neither stoops to, nor loses himself in it. He exists not by
sympathy, but by antipathy. He scorns all things, even himself. Nature
must come to him to sit for her picture--he does not go to her. She must
consult his time, his convenience, and his humour; and wear a _sombre_
or a fantastic garb, or his Lordship turns his back upon her. There is
no ease, no unaffected simplicity of manner, no "golden mean. " All is
strained, or petulant in the extreme. His thoughts are sphered and
crystalline; his style "prouder than when blue Iris bends;" his spirit
fiery, impatient, wayward, indefatigable. Instead of taking his
impressions from without, in entire and almost unimpaired masses, he
moulds them according to his own temperament, and heats the materials
of his imagination in the furnace of his passions. --Lord Byron's verse
glows like a flame, consuming every thing in its way; Sir Walter Scott's
glides like a river, clear, gentle, harmless. The poetry of the first
scorches, that of the last scarcely warms. The light of the one proceeds
from an internal source, ensanguined, sullen, fixed; the other reflects
the hues of Heaven, or the face of nature, glancing vivid and various.
The productions of the Northern Bard have the rust and the freshness
of antiquity about them; those of the Noble Poet cease to startle
from their extreme ambition of novelty, both in style and matter. Sir
Walter's rhymes are "silly sooth"--

"And dally with the innocence of thought,
Like the old age"--

his Lordship's Muse spurns _the olden time_, and affects all the
supercilious airs of a modern fine lady and an upstart. The object of
the one writer is to restore us to truth and nature: the other chiefly
thinks how he shall display his own power, or vent his spleen, or
astonish the reader either by starting new subjects and trains of
speculation, or by expressing old ones in a more striking and emphatic
manner than they have been expressed before. He cares little what it is
he says, so that he can say it differently from others. This may account
for the charges of plagiarism which have been repeatedly brought against
the Noble Poet--if he can borrow an image or sentiment from another, and
heighten it by an epithet or an allusion of greater force and beauty
than is to be found in the original passage, he thinks he shews his
superiority of execution in this in a more marked manner than if
the first suggestion had been his own. It is not the value of the
observation itself he is solicitous about; but he wishes to shine by
contrast--even nature only serves as a foil to set off his style. He
therefore takes the thoughts of others (whether contemporaries or not)
out of their mouths, and is content to make them his own, to set his
stamp upon them, by imparting to them a more meretricious gloss, a
higher relief, a greater loftiness of tone, and a characteristic
inveteracy of purpose. Even in those collateral ornaments of modern
style, slovenliness, abruptness, and eccentricity (as well as in
terseness and significance), Lord Byron, when he pleases, defies
competition and surpasses all his contemporaries. Whatever he does, he
must do in a more decided and daring manner than any one else--he lounges
with extravagance, and yawns so as to alarm the reader! Self-will,
passion, the love of singularity, a disdain of himself and of others
(with a conscious sense that this is among the ways and means of
procuring admiration) are the proper categories of his mind: he is a
lordly writer, is above his own reputation, and condescends to the Muses
with a scornful grace!

Lord Byron, who in his politics is a _liberal_, in his genius is haughty
and aristocratic: Walter Scott, who is an aristocrat in principle, is
popular in his writings, and is (as it were) equally _servile_ to nature
and to opinion. The genius of Sir Walter is essentially imitative, or
"denotes a foregone conclusion:" that of Lord Byron is self-dependent;
or at least requires no aid, is governed by no law, but the impulses of
its own will. We confess, however much we may admire independence of
feeling and erectness of spirit in general or practical questions, yet
in works of genius we prefer him who bows to the authority of nature,
who appeals to actual objects, to mouldering superstitions, to history,
observation, and tradition, before him who only consults the pragmatical
and restless workings of his own breast, and gives them out as oracles
to the world. We like a writer (whether poet or prose-writer) who takes
in (or is willing to take in) the range of half the universe in feeling,
character, description, much better than we do one who obstinately and
invariably shuts himself up in the Bastile of his own ruling passions.
In short, we had rather be Sir Walter Scott (meaning thereby the Author
of Waverley) than Lord Byron, a hundred times over. And for the reason
just given, namely, that he casts his descriptions in the mould of
nature, ever-varying, never tiresome, always interesting and always
instructive, instead of casting them constantly in the mould of his
own individual impressions. He gives us man as he is, or as he was, in
almost every variety of situation, action, and feeling. Lord Byron
makes man after his own image, woman after his own heart; the one is
a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave; he gives us the
misanthrope and the voluptuary by turns; and with these two characters,
burning or melting in their own fires, he makes out everlasting centos
of himself. He hangs the cloud, the film of his existence over all
outward things--sits in the centre of his thoughts, and enjoys dark
night, bright day, the glitter and the gloom "in cell monastic"--we see
the mournful pall, the crucifix, the death's heads, the faded chaplet of
flowers, the gleaming tapers, the agonized brow of genius, the wasted
form of beauty--but we are still imprisoned in a dungeon, a curtain
intercepts our view, we do not breathe freely the air of nature or of
our own thoughts--the other admired author draws aside the curtain, and
the veil of egotism is rent, and he shews us the crowd of living men and
women, the endless groups, the landscape back-ground, the cloud and
the rainbow, and enriches our imaginations and relieves one passion
by another, and expands and lightens reflection, and takes away that
tightness at the breast which arises from thinking or wishing to think
that there is nothing in the world out of a man's self! --In this point
of view, the Author of Waverley is one of the greatest teachers of
morality that ever lived, by emancipating the mind from petty, narrow,
and bigotted prejudices: Lord Byron is the greatest pamperer of those
prejudices, by seeming to think there is nothing else worth encouraging
but the seeds or the full luxuriant growth of dogmatism and
self-conceit. In reading the _Scotch Novels_, we never think about
the author, except from a feeling of curiosity respecting our unknown
benefactor: in reading Lord Byron's works, he himself is never absent
from our minds. The colouring of Lord Byron's style, however rich and
dipped in Tyrian dyes, is nevertheless opaque, is in itself an object
of delight and wonder: Sir Walter Scott's is perfectly transparent. In
studying the one, you seem to gaze at the figures cut in stained glass,
which exclude the view beyond, and where the pure light of Heaven is
only a means of setting off the gorgeousness of art: in reading the
other, you look through a noble window at the clear and varied landscape
without. Or to sum up the distinction in one word, Sir Walter Scott is
the most _dramatic_ writer now living; and Lord Byron is the least so.
It would be difficult to imagine that the Author of Waverley is in the
smallest degree a pedant; as it would be hard to persuade ourselves that
the author of Childe Harold and Don Juan is not a coxcomb, though a
provoking and sublime one. In this decided preference given to Sir
Walter Scott over Lord Byron, we distinctly include the prose-works of
the former; for we do not think his poetry alone by any means entitles
him to that precedence. Sir Walter in his poetry, though pleasing and
natural, is a comparative trifler: it is in his anonymous productions
that he has shewn himself for what he is! --

_Intensity_ is the great and prominent distinction of Lord Byron's
writings. He seldom gets beyond force of style, nor has he produced any
regular work or masterly whole. He does not prepare any plan beforehand,
nor revise and retouch what he has written with polished accuracy. His
only object seems to be to stimulate himself and his readers for the
moment--to keep both alive, to drive away _ennui_, to substitute a
feverish and irritable state of excitement for listless indolence or
even calm enjoyment. For this purpose he pitches on any subject at
random without much thought or delicacy--he is only impatient to
begin--and takes care to adorn and enrich it as he proceeds with
"thoughts that breathe and words that burn. " He composes (as he himself
has said) whether he is in the bath, in his study, or on horseback--he
writes as habitually as others talk or think--and whether we have the
inspiration of the Muse or not, we always find the spirit of the man
of genius breathing from his verse. He grapples with his subject, and
moves, penetrates, and animates it by the electric force of his own
feelings. He is often monotonous, extravagant, offensive; but he is
never dull, or tedious, but when he writes prose. Lord Byron does not
exhibit a new view of nature, or raise insignificant objects into
importance by the romantic associations with which he surrounds them;
but generally (at least) takes common-place thoughts and events, and
endeavours to express them in stronger and statelier language than
others. His poetry stands like a Martello tower by the side of his
subject. He does not, like Mr. Wordsworth, lift poetry from the ground,
or create a sentiment out of nothing. He does not describe a daisy or a
periwinkle, but the cedar or the cypress: not "poor men's cottages, but
princes' palaces. " His Childe Harold contains a lofty and impassioned
review of the great events of history, of the mighty objects left as
wrecks of time, but he dwells chiefly on what is familiar to the mind of
every school-boy; has brought out few new traits of feeling or thought;
and has done no more than justice to the reader's preconceptions by the
sustained force and brilliancy of his style and imagery. Lord Byron's
earlier productions, _Lara_, the _Corsair_, &c. were wild and gloomy
romances, put into rapid and shining verse.