(vol. ii. p. 313), the following passage is quoted from the actor's journal:
"Read English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, by Lord Byron. It is well written. His Lordship is rather severe, perhaps justly so, on Walter Scott, and most assuredly justly severe upon Monk Lewis."
In Byron's
Detached Thoughts
(1821) occurs this passage:
"In general I do not draw well with literary men. Not that I dislike them, but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication. There are several exceptions, to be sure; but then they have always been men of the world, such as Scott and Moore, etc., or visionaries out of it, such as Shelley, etc. But your literary every-day man and I never went well in company, especially your foreigner, whom I never could abide,—except Giordani, and—and—and (I really can't name any other); I do not remember a man amongst them whom I ever wished to see twice, except, perhaps, Mezzophanti, who is a Monster of Languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking Polyglott, and more—who ought to have existed at the time of the Tower of Babel as universal Interpreter. He is, indeed, a Marvel,—unassuming also. I tried him in all the tongues of which I have a single oath (or adjuration to the Gods against Postboys, Savages, Tartars, boatmen, sailors, pilots, Gondoliers, Muleteers, Cameldrivers, Vetturini, Postmasters, post-horses, post-houses, post-everything) and Egad! he astounded me even to my English."
On this passage Sir Walter Scott makes the following note:
"I suspect Lord Byron of some self-deceit as to this matter. It appears that he liked extremely the only first-rate men of letters into whose society he happened to be thrown in England. They happened to be men of the world, it is true; but how few men of very great eminence in literature, how few intellectually Lord B.'s peers, have not been men of the world? Does any one doubt that the topics he had most pleasure in discussing with Scott or Moore were literary ones, or had at least some relation to literature?
"As for the foreign literati, pray what literati anything like his own rank did he encounter abroad? I have no doubt he would have been as much at home with an Alfieri, a Schiller, or a Goethe, or a Voltaire, as he was with Scott or Moore, and yet two of these were very little of men of the world in the sense in which he uses that phrase.
"As to 'every-day men of letters,' pray who does like their company? Would a clever man like a prosing 'captain, or colonel, or knight-in-arms' the better for happening to be himself the Duke of Wellington?"