ott 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 everything 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