Notwithstanding this just praise, and the secret echo it must have found
in a heart so awake to the slightest whisper of fame, it was some time
before Lord Byron's obstinate repugnance to the idea of publishing
Childe Harold could be removed.

"Attentive," says Mr. Dallas, "as he had hitherto been to my opinions
and suggestions, and natural as it was that he should be swayed by such
decided praise, I was surprised to find that I could not at first obtain
credit with him for my judgment on Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 'It was
any thing but poetry--it had been condemned by a good critic--had I not
myself seen the sentences on the margins of the manuscripts?' He dwelt
upon the Paraphrase of the Art of Poetry with pleasure, and the
manuscript of that was given to Cawthorn, the publisher of the Satire,
to be brought forth without delay. I did not, however, leave him so:
before I quitted him I returned to the charge, and told him that I was
so convinced of the merit of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, that, as he had
given it to me, I should certainly publish it, if he would have the
kindness to attend to some corrections and alterations."

Among the many instances, recorded in literary history, of the false
judgments of authors respecting their own productions, the preference
given by Lord Byron to a work so little worthy of his genius, over a
poem of such rare and original beauty as the first Cantos of Childe
Harold, may be accounted, perhaps, one of the most extraordinary and
inexplicable.[5]

"It is in men as in soils," says Swift, "where sometimes there is a vein
of gold which the owner knows not of." But Lord Byron had made the
discovery of the vein, without, as it would seem, being aware of its
value. I have already had occasion to observe that, even while occupied
with the composition of Childe Harold, it is questionable whether he
himself was yet fully conscious of the new powers, both of thought and
feeling, that had been awakened in him; and the strange estimate we now
find him forming of his own production appears to warrant the remark. It
would seem, indeed, as if, while the imaginative powers of his mind had
received such an impulse forward, the faculty of judgment, slower in its
developement, was still immature, and that of _self_-judgment, the most
difficult of all, still unattained.

On the other hand, from the deference which, particularly at this period
of his life, he was inclined to pay to the opinions of