of art:  in reading the other, you look through a noble window at the clear and varied landscape without.  Or to sum up the distinction in one word, Sir Walter Scott is the most dramatic writer now living; and Lord Byron is the least so.  It would be difficult to imagine that the Author of Waverley is in the smallest degree a pedant; as it would be hard to persuade ourselves that the author of Childe Harold and Don Juan is not a coxcomb, though a provoking and sublime one.  In this decided preference given to Sir Walter Scott over Lord Byron, we distinctly include the prose-works of the former; for we do not think his poetry alone by any means entitles him to that precedence.  Sir Walter in his poetry, though pleasing and natural, is a comparative trifler:  it is in his anonymous productions that he has shewn himself for what he is!—­

Intensity is the great and prominent distinction of Lord Byron’s writings.  He seldom gets beyond force of style, nor has he produced any regular work or masterly whole.  He does not prepare any plan beforehand, nor revise and retouch what he has written with polished accuracy.  His only object seems to be to stimulate himself and his readers for the moment—­to keep both alive, to drive away ennui, to substitute a feverish and irritable state of excitement for listless indolence or even calm enjoyment.  For this purpose he pitches on any subject at random without much thought or delicacy—­he is only impatient to begin—­and takes care to adorn and enrich it as he proceeds with “thoughts that breathe and words that burn.”  He composes (as he himself has said) whether he is in the bath, in his study, or on horseback—­he writes as habitually as others talk or think—­and whether we have the inspiration of the Muse or not, we always find the spirit of the man of genius breathing from his verse.  He grapples with his subject, and moves, penetrates, and animates it by the electric force of his own feelings.  He is often monotonous, extravagant, offensive; but he is never dull, or tedious, but when he writes prose.  Lord Byron does not exhibit a new view of nature, or raise insignificant objects into importance by the romantic associations with which he surrounds them; but generally (at least) takes common-place thoughts and events, and endeavours to express them in stronger and statelier language than others.  His poetry stands like a Martello tower by the side of his subject.  He does not, like Mr. Wordsworth, lift poetry from the ground, or create a sentiment out of nothing.  He does not describe a daisy or a periwinkle, but the cedar or the cypress:  not “poor men’s cottages, but princes’ palaces.”  His Childe Harold contains a lofty and impassioned review of the great events of history, of the mighty objects left as wrecks of time, but he dwells chiefly on what is familiar to the mind of every school-boy; has brought out few new traits of feeling or thought; and has done no more than justice to the reader’s preconceptions