Microsoft Word Byron and Scott 1809-1824

 
Scott’s review of Childe Harold III and The Prisoner of Chillon. 
(Source: text from Quarterly Review XVI, October 1816, issued February 1817, pp.172-208) 
Anonymous. 
 
ART.IX—1. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III. 8vo. 2. The Prisoner of Chillon, a Dream; and 
other Poems.
By Lord Byron. 8vo. John Murray: London. 
 
We have felt ourselves very much affected by the perusal of these poems, nor can we suppose that we 
are singular in our feelings. Other poets have given us their literary productions as the subject of 
criticism, impersonally as it were, and generally speaking, abstracted from their ordinary habits and 
feelings; and all, or almost all, might apply to their poetical effusions, though in somewhat a different 
sense, the l’envoy of Ovid. 
Sine me, Liber, ibis in urbem.
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The work of the poet is indeed before the public, but the character, the habits of the author, the 
events of his life and the motives of his writing, are known but to the small circle of literary gossips, 
for whose curiosity no food is too insipid. From such, indeed, [p.173] those supposed to be in intimacy 
with the individual have sometimes undergone an examination which reminds us of the extravagances 
of Arabella in the Female Quixote,
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who expected from every lady she met in society a full and 
interesting history of her life and adventures, and which could only be answered in the words of the 
‘Weary Knife-grinder,’—‘Story! God bless you, I have none to tell, Ma’am!’
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—The time therefore 
appeared to be passed when the mere sin of having been dipped in rhyme was supposed to exclude the 
poet from the usual business and habits of life, and to single him out from the herd as a marked deer 
expected to make sport by his solitary exertions for escape. Whether this has arisen from the 
diminished irritability of the rhyming generation, or from the peculiar habits of those who have been 
distinguished in our time, or from their mental efforts having been early directed to modify and to 
restrain the excess of their enthusiasm, we do not pretend to conjecture; but it is certain, that for many 
years past, though the number of our successful poets may be as great as at any period of our literary 
history, we have heard little comparatively of their eccentricities, their adventures, or their distresses. 
The wretched Dermody
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is not worth mentioning as an exception, and the misfortunes of Burns arose 
from circumstances not much connected with his powerful poetical genius. 
It has been, however, reserved for our own time to produce one distinguished example of the Muse 
having descended upon a bard of a wounded spirit, and lent her lyre to tell, and we trust to soothe, 
afflictions of no ordinary description, afflictions originating probably in that singular combination of 
feeling which has been called the poetical temperament, and which has so often saddened the days of 
those on whom it has been conferred. If ever a man could lay claim to that character in all its strength 
and all its weakness, with its unbounded range of enjoyment, and its exquisite sensibility of pleasure 
and of pain, it must certainly be granted to Lord Byron. Nor does it require much time or a deep 
acquaintance with human nature to discover why these extraordinary powers should in many cases 
have contributed more to the wretchedness than to the happiness of their possessor. 
The ‘imagination all compact,’
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which the greatest poet who ever lived has assigned as the 
distinguishing badge of his brethren, is in every case a dangerous gift. It exaggerates, indeed, our 
expectations, and can often bid its possessor hope, where hope is lost to reason: but the delusive 
pleasure arising from these visions of imagination, resembles that of a child whose notice is attracted 
by a fragment of glass to which a sun-beam has given momentary splendour. He hastens to the spot