he chooses to bivouack apart from his mate; but he read a copy of the
Ravenna diary without altering his view that his lordship was his own
worst maligner. Scott, says Lockhart, considered Byron the only poet of
transcendent talents we had had since Dryden. There is preserved a curious
record of his meeting with a greater poet than Dryden, but one whose
greatness neither he nor Scott suspected. Mr. Crabb Robinson reports
Wordsworth to have said, in Charles Lamb's chambers, about the year 1808,
"These reviewers put me out of patience. Here is a young man who has
written a volume of poetry; and these fellows, just because he is a lord,
set upon him. The young man will do something, if he goes on as he has
begun. But these reviewers seem to think that nobody may write poetry
unless he lives in a garret." Years after, Lady Byron, on being told this,
exclaimed, "Ah, if Byron had known that, he would never have attacked
Wordsworth. He went one day to meet him at dinner, and I said, 'Well, how
did the young poet get on with the old one?' 'Why, to tell the truth,'
said he, 'I had but one feeling from the beginning of the visit to the
end, and that was _reverence_.'" Similarly, he began by being on good
terms with Southey, and after a meeting at Holland House, wrote
enthusiastically of his prepossessing appearance.

Byron and the leaders of the so-called Lake School were, at starting,
common heirs of the revolutionary spirit; they were, either in their
social views or personal feelings, to a large extent influenced by the
most morbid, though in some respects the most magnetic, genius of modern
France, J.J. Rousseau; but their temperaments were in many respects
fundamentally diverse; and the pre-established discord between them ere
long began to make itself manifest in their following out widely divergent
paths. Wordsworth's return to nature had been preluded by Cowper; that of
Byron by Burns. The revival of the one ripened into a restoration of
simpler manners and old beliefs; the other was the spirit of the storm.