oetry, he thinks,
in the "Essay on Man" than in the "Excursion"; and if you want passion,
where is to be found stronger than in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard"?
To the sneer that Pope is only the "poet of reason" Byron replies that he
will undertake to find more lines teeming with _imagination_ in Pope than
in any two living poets. "In the mean time," he asks, "what have we got
instead? . . . The Lake school," and "a deluge of flimsy and
unintelligible romances imitated from Scott and myself." He prophesies
that all except the classical poets, Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, will
survive their reputation, acknowledges that his own practice as a poet is
not in harmony with his principles, and says; "I told Moore not very long
ago, 'We are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell.'" In the
first of his two letters to Murray, Byron had taken himself to task in
much the same way. He compared the romanticists to barbarians who had
"raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest
architecture"; and who were "not contented with their own grotesque
edifice unless they destroy the prior and purely beautiful fabric which
preceded, and which shames them and theirs for ever and ever. I shall be
told that amongst those I _have_ been (or it may be still _am_)
conspicuous--true, and I am ashamed of it. I _have_ been amongst the
builders of this Babel . . . but never among the envious destroyers of
the classic temple of our predecessor." "Neither time nor distance nor
grief nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great
moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all
stages of existence. The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood,
perhaps he may be the consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book of
Life." [16]

Strange language this from the author of "Childe Harold" and "The
Corsair"! But the very extravagance of Byron's claims for Pope makes it
plain that he was pleading a lost cause. When Warton issued the first
volume of his "Essay on Pope," it was easy for leaders of literary
opinion, like Johnson and Goldsmith, to pooh-pooh the critical canons of
the new school. But when Byron wrote, the aesthetic revolution was
already accomplished. The future belonged not to Campbell and Gifford
and Rogers and Crabbe, but to Wordsworth and Scott and Coleridge and
Shelley and Keats; to Byron himself, the romantic poet, but not to Byron
the _laudator temporis acti_.