respect from other men of high endowment, but in the single
circumstance of the objects to which their taste is attracted. The
most vigorous poets, those who have influenced longest and are most
quoted, have indeed been all men of great shrewdness of remark, and
anything but your chin-on-hand contemplators. To adduce many
instances is unnecessary. Are there any symptoms of the gelatinous
character of the effusions of the Lakers in the compositions of
Homer? The London Gazette does not tell us things more like facts
than the narratives of Homer, and it often states facts that are much
more like fictions than his most poetical inventions. So much is
this the case with the works of all the higher poets, that as they
recede from that worldly standard which is found in the Epics of
Homer, they sink in the scale of poets. In what does the inferiority
of Virgil, for example, consist, but in his having hatched fancies in
his contemplations which the calm mind rejects as absurdities. Then
Tasso, with his enchanted forests and his other improbabilities; are
they more than childish tales? tales, too, not in fancy to be
compared with those of that venerable dry-nurse, Mother Bunch.
Compare the poets that babble of green fields with those who deal in
the actions and passions of men, such as Shakspeare, and it must be
confessed that it is not those who have looked at external nature who
are the true poets, but those who have seen and considered most about
the business and bosom of man. It may be an advantage that a poet
should have the benefit of landscapes and storms, as children are the
better for country air and cow's milk; but the true scene of their
manly work and business is in the populous city. Inasmuch as Byron
was a lover of solitude, he was deficient as an observer of men.

The barrenest portion, as to materials for biography, in the life of
this interesting man, is the period he spent at the University of