t for Dante his
admiration was altogether unimpassioned,[280] but the review, after all,
is on the whole very laudatory.[281] In it Scott awards to Southey the
palm for a surpassing share of imagination, which he elsewhere gave to
Coleridge. Possibly Scott was the less inclined to be severe over the
absurdities of _Kehama_ because Southey agreed with his own theory as to
the evil of fastidious corrections.[282] At any rate he seems to have
been quite sincere in saying to Southey, in connection with the
poet-laureateship which, according to Scott's suggestion, was offered to
him in 1813, "I am not such an ass as not to know that you are my better
in poetry, though I have had, probably but for a time, the tide of
popularity in my favour."[283]

Much as Scott admired Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, he considered
Byron the great poetical genius of the period. He once spoke of Byron as
the only poet of transcendent talents that England had had since
Dryden.[284] At another time his comment was: "He wrote from impulse,
never from effort; and therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron
the most genuine poetical geniuses of my time, and half a century before
me. We have ... 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 artic