fondness for Ossian, his intense passion, his morbid gloom, his
exaltation in wild and solitary places, his love of night and storm, of
the desert and the ocean, in the careless and irregular outpour of his
verse, in his subjectivity, the continual presence of the man in the
work--in all these particulars Byron was romantic and would seem to have
had little in common with Pope. But there was another side to Byron--and
William Rossetti thinks his most characteristic side--viz., his wit and
understanding; and this side sympathised heartily with Pope. It is well
known that when Byron came back from the East he had in his trunk besides
the manuscript of "Childe Harold," which he thought little of, certain
"Hints from Horace" which the world thinks less of, but which he was
eager to have published, while Dallas was urging him to print "Childe
Harold." "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is a thoroughly Popeian
satire, and "The Vision of Judgment," though not in couplets but in
_ottava rima_, is one of the best personal satires in English. It has
all of Pope's malicious wit, with a sweep and glow, which belonged to
Byron as a poet rather than as a satirist, and which Pope never had.
Lowell thinks, too, that what Byron admired in Pope was "that patience in
careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of his
contemporaries."

With all this there probably mingled something of perversity and
exaggeration in Byron's praises of Pope. He hated the Lakers, and he
delighted to use Pope against them as a foil and a rod. He at least was
everything that they were not. Doubtless in the Pope controversy, his
"object was mainly mischief," as Lowell says. Byron loved a fight; he
thought the Rev. W. L. Bowles an ass, and he determined to have some fun
with him. Besides the two letters to Murray in 1821, an open letter of
Byron's to Isaac Disraeli, dated March 15, 1820, and entitled "Some
Observations upon an article in _Blackwood's Magazine_," [15] contains a