many men of high poetical talent, but none, I think, of that ever-gushing and perennial fountain of natural water."[285] The likenesses between Byron's poetical manner and Scott's own must have made it easy for the elder poet to recognize the power of the younger, since Scott was innocent of all repining or envy over the fact which he so freely acknowledged in later years, that Byron "beat" him out of the field.[286] From the time of the appearance of the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_ he acknowledged the author's "extraordinary power,"[287] and even before that he had tried to soften Jeffrey's harsh treatment of _Hours of Idleness_.[288] In 1814 he was ready to say, "Byron hits the mark where I don't even pretend to fledge my arrow."[289] It was Byron, rather than Scott, who realized the debt of the new popular favorite to the old; and their personal relations were of the pleasantest, though they were never intimate as Scott was with Southey and Wordsworth.

As poets, Scott and Byron seem to have understood each other thoroughly.[290] None of the other great poets of the period did justice to Scott, nor did he succeed so well in defining the power of any of the others.

His first review of _Childe Harold_ is the most important of all his articles on the poetry of his time; and his remarks written at the death of Lord Byron, though brief, are not less full of good judgment.

Originality, spontaneity, and the ability and inclination to write rapidly were traits Scott admired most in Byron, and in the vigor and beauty of the poems he found the fine flower of all these qualities.

"We cannot but repeat our conviction," he says, "that poetry, being, in its higher classes, an art which has for its elements sublimity and unaffected beauty, is more liable than any other to suffer from the labour of polishing....