al questions, yet in works of
genius we prefer him who bows to the authority of nature, who appeals to
actual objects, to mouldering superstitions, to history, observation, and
tradition, before him who only consults the pragmatical and restless
workings of his own breast, and gives them out as oracles to the world. We
like a writer (whether poet or prose-writer) who takes in (or is willing
to take in) the range of half the universe in feeling, character,
description, much better than we do one who obstinately and invariably
shuts himself up in the Bastile of his own ruling passions. In short, we
had rather be Sir Walter Scott (meaning thereby the Author of Waverley)
than Lord Byron, a hundred times over. And for the reason just given,
namely, that he casts his descriptions in the mould of nature,
ever-varying, never tiresome, always interesting and always instructive,
instead of casting them constantly in the mould of his own individual
impressions. He gives us man as he is, or as he was, in almost every
variety of situation, action, and feeling. Lord Byron makes man after his
own image, woman after his own heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the
other a yielding slave; he gives us the misanthrope and the voluptuary by
turns; and with these two characters, burning or melting in their own
fires, he makes out everlasting centos of himself. He hangs the cloud, the
film of his existence over all outward things--sits in the centre of his
thoughts, and enjoys dark night, bright day, the glitter and the gloom "in
cell monastic"--we see the mournful pall, the crucifix, the death's-heads,
the faded chaplet of flowers, the gleaming tapers, the agonized brow of
genius, the wasted form of beauty--but we are still imprisoned in a
dungeon, a curtain intercepts our view, we do not breathe freely the air
of nature or of our own thoughts--the other admired author draws aside the
curtain, and the veil of egotism is rent, and he shows us the crowd of
living men and women, the endless groups, the landscape back-ground, the
cloud and the rainbow, and enriches our imaginations and relieves one
passion by another, and expands and lightens reflection, and takes away
that tightness at the breast which arises from thinking or wishing to
think that there is nothing in the world out of a man's self!--In this
point of view, the Author of Waverley is one of the greatest teachers of
morality that ever lived, by emancipating the mind from petty, narr