ted thus in Scott's _Journal_: "This poem
goes to the tune of _Don Juan_, but it is the champagne after it has
stood two days with the cork drawn."[294] He called Byron "as various in
composition as Shakspeare himself"; and added, "this will be admitted by
all who are acquainted with his _Don Juan_.... Neither _Childe Harold_,
nor any of the most beautiful of Byron's earlier tales, contain more
exquisite morsels of poetry than are to be found scattered through the
cantos of _Don Juan_."[295] The defence of _Cain_ which Scott wrote in
accepting the dedication of that poem to himself is well known.[296] He
calls it a "very grand and tremendous drama," and continues, "Byron has
certainly matched Milton on his own ground. Some part of the language is
bold, and may shock one class of readers, whose tone will be adopted by
others out of affectation or envy. But then they must condemn the
_Paradise Lost_, if they have a mind to be consistent."

Scott's comments on Byron are closely paralleled by those of Goethe, who
considered that Byron had the greatest talent of any man of his
century.[297] The opinions of continental critics in general were
similar. Among English critics Matthew Arnold aroused many protests when
he ranked Byron as one of the two greatest English poets of the
nineteenth century, but his views seem perfectly rational now; and
though he remarked upon the extravagance of Scott's phrases his own
verdict was not very unlike that we have been considering.

Scott's enthusiasm about the literature of his own time seems natural
enough when we consider that the list of his notable contemporaries is
far from exhausted after Burns, the Lake Poets, and Byron have been
named. Campbell was a poet of whose powers he thought very highly, but
who, he believed had given only a sample of the great things he might do
if he would cease to "fear the shadow of his own reputation." Before he
wrote about Byron Scott had given in his review of _Gertrude of Wyoming_
an exposition of his opinion as to the dangers of extreme care in
revision. "The truth is," he says, "that an author cannot work upon a
beautiful poem beyond a certain point without doing it real and
irreparable injury in more respects than one."[298] He felt that
Campbell had worked, in many cases, beyond the "certain point." For the
"impetuous lyric sally," like the _Mariners of England_ and the _Battle
of the Baltic_, Scott rightly thought that Campbell excelled all his