m and not
from him.

To praise was almost a besetting sin in Lord Byron. So amiable a fault
was not only committed in favor of his rivals, but also by way of
encouragement to young authors. What did he not do to promote the
success of M.N. N----, the author of Bertram's dramas, whom Walter Scott
had recommended to him?

After reading a tragedy which a young man had submitted to him, Byron
wrote in his memoranda:----

"This young man has talent; he has, no doubt, stolen his ideas from
another, but I shall not betray him. His critics will be but too prone
to proclaim it. I hate to discourage a beginner."

Indulgent to mediocrity, compassionate with the weakness and defects of
all, incapable of causing the slightest pain to those who were destitute
of talent, even when art required that he should condemn them, his
goodness was such, that he almost felt remorse whenever he had been led
to criticise a work too severely. He deplored his having dealt too
harshly with poor Blackett, as soon as the latter's position became
known to him; and also with Keats, whose talent, though great, was raw
in many respects, and who had become a follower of the Lakist school,
which Byron abhorred.

To praise the humble, however, in order to humble the great, was an
action incompatible with his noble character. Great minds constituted
his great attractions, and on these he bestowed such praise as could not
be deemed too partial or unjust.

Happy in the unqualified praise of Pope, of the classical poets, of the
great German and Italian poets, he sometimes made exceptions, and
Shakspeare was one. This is not to be wondered at. Lord Byron's mind was
as well regulated as it was powerful. His admiration of Pope proves it.

"As to Pope," he writes to Moore from Ravenna, in 1821, "I have always
regarded him as the greatest name in our Poetry. Depend upon it, the
rest are barbarians. He is a Greek temple, with a Gothic cathedral on
one hand, and a Turkish mosque and all sorts of fantastic pagodas and
conventicles about him. You may call Shakspeare and Milton pyramids, if
you please; but I prefer the Temple of Theseus, or the Parthenon, to a
mountain of burnt brick-work."[33]

Order and proportion were necessities of his nature, so much so that he
condemned his writings whenever they departed from his ideal of the
beautiful, the essential constituents of which were order and power.

His admiration, therefore, was entirely centred in classical