sh Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is a thoroughly Popeian
satire, and "The Vision of Judgment," though not in couplets but in
_ottava rima_, is one of the best personal satires in English. It has
all of Pope's malicious wit, with a sweep and glow, which belonged to
Byron as a poet rather than as a satirist, and which Pope never had.
Lowell thinks, too, that what Byron admired in Pope was "that patience in
careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of his
contemporaries."

With all this there probably mingled something of perversity and
exaggeration in Byron's praises of Pope. He hated the Lakers, and he
delighted to use Pope against them as a foil and a rod. He at least was
everything that they were not. Doubtless in the Pope controversy, his
"object was mainly mischief," as Lowell says. Byron loved a fight; he
thought the Rev. W. L. Bowles an ass, and he determined to have some fun
with him. Besides the two letters to Murray in 1821, an open letter of
Byron's to Isaac Disraeli, dated March 15, 1820, and entitled "Some
Observations upon an article in _Blackwood's Magazine_," [15] contains a
long passage in vindication of Pope and in denunciation of contemporary
poetry--a passage which is important not only as showing Byron's
opinions, but as testifying to the very general change in taste which had
taken place since 1756, when Joseph Warton was so discouraged by the
public hostility to his "Essay on Pope" that he withheld the second
volume for twenty-six years. "The great cause of the present deplorable
state of English poetry," writes Byron, "is to be attributed to that
absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope in which, for the last few
years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most
opposite opinions have united upon this topic." He then goes on to
praise Pope and abuse his own contemporaries, especially the Lake poets,
both in the most extravagant terms. Pope he pronounces the most perfect
and harmonious of poets. "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," he says,
"had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope . . . but they have
been joined in it by . . . the whole heterogeneous mass of living English
poets excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by
precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have
shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's
poetry with my whole soul." There is ten times more p