d the severity of
his criticism.

"He said once, when we were alone,--'I like to astonish Englishmen; they
come abroad full of Shakspeare, and contempt for the dramatic literature
of other nations. They think it blasphemy to find a fault in his
writings, which are full of them. People talk of my writings, and yet
read the sonnets to Master Hughes.'

"And yet," continues Finlay, "he continually had the most melodious
lines of Shakspeare in his mouth, as examples of blank verse."

The jealousy of Shakspeare attributed to Byron is, however, nothing when
compared to the ridiculous assertion, that he was jealous of Keats,
simply because he had repeated in joke what the papers and Shelley
himself, a friend of Keats, had said, namely, "that the young poet had
been killed by a criticism of the 'Quarterly.'"

But since a French critic, M. Philarete Chasles, has made the same
accusation, we must pause and consider it.

At the time when Byron was more than ever penetrated with the perfection
of Pope, and opposed to the romantic school,--at the time when he
himself wrote his dramas according to all classical rules,--he received
at Ravenna the poems of a young disciple of the Lakists, who united in
himself all their exaggerated faults. This young man had the
audacity--(which was almost unpardonable in the eyes of Byron)--to
despise Pope, and to constitute himself at nineteen a lawgiver of
poetical rules in England.

Such ridiculous pride, added to the contempt shown to his idol, incensed
Byron and prevented his showing Keats the same indulgence he had shown
Maturin and Blackett. He spoke severely of Keats in his famous reply to
"Blackwood's Magazine," and to his Cambridge friends--followers of the
good old traditions. He quoted some lines of Keats, and remarked that
"they were taken from the book of a young man who was learning how to
write in verse, but who began by teaching others the art of poetry."
Then, after a long quotation, he adds--"What precedes will show the
ideas and principles professed by the regenerators of the English lyre
in regard to the man who most of any contributed to its harmony, and the
progress visible in their innovation."

Let us not forget to add that he styled Keats "the tadpole of the
Lakists."

But the following year, when he heard that Keats had died at Rome, the
victim of his inordinate self-love, and unable to be consoled for the
criticism directed against his poetry, he wrote the followin