(Canto I. st. vi.), Byron had written,
"For an eloquent passage in the latest work of the first female writer of this, perhaps of any, age, on the analogy (and the immediate comparison excited by that analogy) between 'painting and music,' see vol. iii. cap. 10, De l'Allemagne."
The passage is as follows (Part III. chap, x.):
"Sans cesse nous comparons la peinture à la musique, et la musique à la peinture, parceque les émotions que nous eprouvons nous révèlent des analogies où l'observation froide ne verroit que des différences," etc., etc.
The following is Madame de Staël's "very pretty billet:"
"Argyll St., No. 31.
"Je ne saurais vous exprímer, my lord, à quel point je me trouve honorée d'être dans une note de votre poëme, et de quel poëme! il me semble que pour la première fois je me crois certaine d'un nom d'avenir et que vous avez disposé pour moi de cet empire de reputation qui vous sera tous les jours plus soumis. Je voudrais vous parler de ce poëme que tout le monde admire, mais j'avouerai que je suis trop suspecte en le louant, et je ne cache pas qu' une louage de vous m'a fait épreuver un sentiment de fierté et de réconaissance qui me rendrait incapable de vous juger; mais heureusement vous êtes au dessus du jugement.
"Donnez moi quelquefois le plaisir de vous voir; il-y-a un proverbe français qui dit qu'un bonheur ne va jamais sans d'autre.
"de Staël."
"Byron," writes Sir Walter Scott, in a hitherto unpublished note, "occasionally said what are called good things, but never studied for them. They came naturally and easily, and mixed with the comic or serious, as it happened. A professed wit is of all earthly companions the most intolerable. He is like a schoolboy with his pockets stuffed with crackers.
"No first-rate author was ever what is understood by a great conversational wit. Swift's wit in common society was either the strong sense of a wonderful man unconsciously exerting his powers, or that of the same being wilfully unbending, wilfully, in fact, degrading himself. Who ever heard of any fame for conversational wit lingering over the memory of a Shakespeare, a Milton, even of a Dryden or a Pope?
Johnson is, perhaps, a solitary exception. More shame to him. He was the most indolent great man that ever lived, and threw away in his talk more than he ever took pains to embalm in his writings.
It is true that Boswell has in great measure counteracted all this. But here is no defence. Few great men can expect to have a Boswell, and none ought to wish to have one, far less to trust to having one. A man should not keep fine clothes locked up in his chest only that his valet may occasionally show off in them; no, nor yet strut about in them in his chamber, only that his valet may puff him and his finery abroad.
What might not he have done, who wrote Rasselas in the evenings of eight days to get money enough for his mother's funeral expenses? As it is, what has Johnson done? Is it nothing to be the first intellect of an age? and who seriously talks even of Burke as having been more than a clever boy in the presence of old Samuel?"