which are necessarily and
unavoidably personal, and sure I am if he attends to it, which is
unlikely, he will find advantage from doing so. I wish Mr. Gifford and
you would consider every word carefully. If you think the general tenor
is likely to make any impression on him, if you think it likely to hurt
him either in his feelings or with the public, in God's name fling the
sheets in the fire and let them be as _not written_. But if it appears,
I should wish him to get an early copy, and that you would at the same
time say I am the author, at your opportunity. No one can honour Lord
Byron a genius more than I do, and no one had so great a wish to love
him personally, though personally we had not the means of becoming very
intimate. In his family distress (deeply to be deprecated, and in which
probably he can yet be excused) I still looked to some moment of
reflection when bad advisers (and, except you were one, I have heard of
few whom I should call good) were distant from the side of one who is so
much the child of feeling and emotion. An opportunity was once afforded
me of interfering, but things appeared to me to have gone too far; yet,
even after all, I wish I had tried it, for Lord Byron always seemed to
give me credit for wishing him sincerely well, and knew me to be
superior to what Commodore Trunnion would call "the trash of literary
envy and petty rivalry."

Lord Byron's opinion of the article forms so necessary a complement to
Walter Scott's sympathetic criticism of the man and the poet, that we
make no excuse for reproducing it, as conveyed in a letter to Mr. Murray
(March 3, 1817).

"In acknowledging the arrival of the article from the _Quarterly_, which
I received two days ago, I cannot express myself better than in the
words of my sister Augusta, who (speaking of it) says, that it is
written in a spirit 'of the most feeling and kind nature.'

"It is, however, something more. It seems to me (as far as the subject
of it may be permitted to judge) to be very well written as a
composition, and I think will do the journal no discredit, because even
those who condemn its partiality, must praise its generosity. The
temptations to take another and a less favourable view of the question
have been so great and numerous, that, what with public opinion,
politics, etc., he must be a gallant as well as a good man who has
ventured in that place, and at this time, to write such an article, even
anonymously. Such thing