In his family distress (deeply to be deprecated, and in which probably he can yet be excused) I still looked to some moment of reflection when bad advisers (and, except you were one, I have heard of few whom I should call good) were distant from the side of one who is so much the child of feeling and emotion.

An opportunity was once afforded me of interfering, but things appeared to me to have gone too far; yet, even after all, I wish I had tried it, for Lord Byron always seemed to give me credit for wishing him sincerely well, and knew me to be superior to what Commodore Trunnion would call "the trash of literary envy and petty rivalry." Lord Byron's opinion of the article forms so necessary a complement to Walter Scott's sympathetic criticism of the man and the poet, that we make no excuse for reproducing it, as conveyed in a letter to Mr.Murray (March 3, 1817).
"In acknowledging the arrival of the article from the _Quarterly_, which I received two days ago, I cannot express myself better than in the words of my sister Augusta, who (speaking of it) says, that it is written in a spirit 'of the most feeling and kind nature.' "It is, however, something more.

It seems to me (as far as the subject of it may be permitted to judge) to be very well written as a composition, and I think will do the journal no discredit, because even those who condemn its partiality, must praise its generosity.

The temptations to take another and a less favourable view of the question have been so great and numerous, that, what with public opinion, politics, etc., he must be a gallant as well as a good man who has ventured in that place, and at this time, to write such an article, even anonymously.

Such things, however, are their own reward; and I even flatter myself that the writer, whoever he may be (and I have no guess), will not regret that the perusal of this has given me as much gratification as any composition of that nature could give, and more than any has given--and I have had a good many in my time of one kind or the other.