"could direct you to any book in any part of the world, with the precision with which the metropolitan policeman directs you to St. Paul's or Piccadilly. It is of him that the stories are told of answers to inquiries after books, in these terms: 'There is but one copy of that book in the world. It is in the Grand Seignior's library at Constantinople, and is the seventh book in the second shelf on the right hand as you go in.'"
Byron himself was "likened to Burns," and Sir Walter Scott, commenting on the comparison in a manuscript note, says,
"Burns, in depth of poetical feeling, in strong shrewd sense to balance and regulate this, in the tact to make his poetry tell by connecting it with the stream of public thought and the sentiment of the age, in commanded wildness of fancy and profligacy or recklessness as to moral and occasionally as to religious matters, was much more like Lord Byron than any other person to whom Lord B. says he had been compared.
"A gross blunder of the English public has been talking of Burns as if the character of his poetry ought to be estimated with an eternal recollection that he was a peasant. It would be just as proper to say that Lord Byron ought always to be thought of as a Peer. Rank in life was nothing to either in his true moments. Then, they were both great Poets. Some silly and sickly affectations connected with the accidents of birth and breeding may be observed in both, when they are not under the influence of 'the happier star.' Witness Burns's prate about independence, when he was an exciseman, and Byron's ridiculous pretence of Republicanism, when he never wrote sincerely about the Multitude without expressing or insinuating the very soul of scorn."
[cross-reference: return to Footnote 10 of Journal entry for February 18th, 1814]
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