Scott's letter, in which a generous recognition of the pleasure he had derived from tho work of the English poet, was followed by a manly remonstrance on the subject of the attack in the Bards and Reviewers, drew from Byron in the following month (July 1812) an answer in the same strain, descanting on the Prince's praises of the Lay and Marmion, and candidly apologizing for the "evil works of his nonage." "The satire," he remarks, "was written when I was very young and very angry, and fully bent on displaying my wrath and my wit; and now I am haunted by the ghosts of my wholesale assertions." This, in turn, called forth another letter to Byron eager for more of his verses, with a cordial invitation to Abbotsford on the ground of Scotland's maternal claim on him, and asking for information about Pegasus and Parnassus. After this the correspondence continues with greater freedom, and the same display on either side of mutual respect. When Scott says "the Giaour is praised among our mountains," and Byron returns "Waverley is the best novel I have read," there is no suspicion of flattery—it is the interchange of compliments between men,
Et cantare pares et respondere parati.
They talk in just the same manner to third parties. "I gave over writing romances," says the elder, in the spirit of a great-hearted gentleman," because Byron beat me. He hits the mark, where I don't even pretend to fledge my arrow. He has access to a stream of sentiment unknown to me." The younger, on the other hand, deprecates the comparisons that were being invidiously drawn between them. He presents his copy of the Giaour to Scott, with the phrase "To the monarch of Parnassus," and compares the feeling of those who cavilled at his fame to that of the Athenians towards Aristides. From those sentiments, he never swerves, recognizing to the last the breadth of character of the most generous of his critics, and referring to him, during his later years in Italy, as the Wizard and the Ariosto of the North. A meeting was at length arranged between them. Scott looked forward to it with anxious interest, humorously remarking that Byron should say,—
Art thou the man whom men famed Grissell call?
And he reply—
Art thou the still more famed Tom Thumb the small?
They met in London during the spring of 1815. The following sentences are from Sir Walter's account of it:—"Report had prepared me to meet a man of peculiar habits and quick temper, and I had some doubts whether we were likely to suit each other in society. I was most agreeably disappointed in this respect. I found Lord Byron in the highest degree courteous, and even kind. We met for an hour or two almost daily in Mr. Murray's drawing-room, and found a great deal to say to each other. Our sentiments agreed a good deal, except upon the subjects of religion and politics, upon neither of which I was inclined to believe that Lord Byron entertained very fixed opinions. On politics he used sometimes to express a high strain of what is now called Liberalism; but it appeared to me that the pleasure it afforded him as a vehicle of displaying his wit and satire against individuals in office was at the bottom of this habit of thinking. At heart, I would have termed Byron a patrician on principle. His reading did not seem to me to have been very extensive. I remember repeating to him the fine poem of Hardyknute, and some one asked me what I could possibly have been telling Byron by which he was so much agitated. I saw him for the last time in (September) 1815, after I returned from France; he dined or lunched with me at Long's in Bond Street. I never saw him so full of gaiety and good humour. The day of this interview was the most interesting I ever spent. Several letters passed between us—one perhaps every half year. Like the old heroes in Homer we exchanged gifts; I gave Byron a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the redoubted Elfi Bey. But I was to play the part of Diomed in the Iliad, for Byron sent me, some time after, a large sepulchral vase of silver, full of dead men's bones, found within the land walls of Athens. He was often melancholy, almost gloomy. When I observed him in this humour I used either to wait till it went off of its own accord, or till some natural and easy mode occurred of leading him into conversation, when the shadows almost always left his countenance, like the mist arising from a landscape. I think I also remarked in his temper starts of suspicion, when he seemed to pause and consider whether there had not been a secret and perhaps offensive meaning in something that was said to him. In this case I also judged it best to let his mind, like a troubled spring, work itself clear, which it did in a minute or two. A downright steadiness of manner was the way to his good opinion. Will Rose, looking by accident at his feet, saw him scowling furiously; but on his showing no consciousness, his lordship resumed his easy manner. What I liked about him, besides his boundless genius, was his generosity of spirit as well as of purse, and his utter contempt of all the affectations of literature. He liked Moore and me because, with all our other differences, we were both good-natured fellows, not caring to maintain our dignity, enjoying the mot-pour-rire. He wrote from impulse never from effort, and therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetic geniuses of my time, and of half a century before me. We have many men of high poetic talents, but none of that ever-gushing and perennial fountain of natural waters."
Scott, like all hale men of sound sense, regretted the almost fatal incontinence which, in the year of his greatest private troubles, led his friend to make a parade of them before the public. He speaks more than once of his unhappy tendency to exhibit himself as the dying gladiator, and even compares him to his peacock, screeching before his window because he chooses to bivouack apart from his mate; but he read a copy of the Ravenna diary without altering his view that his lordship was his own worst maligner. Scott, says Lockhart, considered Byron the only poet of transcendent talents we had had since Dryden. There is preserved a curious record of his meeting with a greater poet than Dryden, but one whose greatness neither he nor Scott suspected. Mr. Crabb Robinson reports Wordsworth to have said, in Charles Lamb's chambers, about the year 1808, "These reviewers put me out of patience. Here is a young man who has written a volume of poetry; and these fellows, just because he is a lord, set upon him. The young man will do something, if he goes on as he has begun. But these reviewers seem to think that nobody may write poetry unless he lives in a garret." Years after, Lady Byron, on being told this, exclaimed, "Ah, if Byron had known that, he would never have attacked Wordsworth. He went one day to meet him at dinner, and I said, 'Well, how did the young poet get on with the old one?' 'Why, to tell the truth,' said he, 'I had but one feeling from the beginning of the visit to the end, and that was reverence.'" Similarly, he began by being on good terms with Southey, and after a meeting at Holland House, wrote enthusiastically of his prepossessing appearance.
Byron and the leaders of the so-called Lake School were, at starting, common heirs of the revolutionary spirit; they were, either in their social views or personal feelings, to a large extent influenced by the most morbid, though in some respects the most magnetic, genius of modern France, J.J. Rousseau; but their temperaments were in many respects fundamentally diverse; and the pre-established discord between them ere long began to make itself manifest in their following out widely divergent paths. Wordsworth's return to nature had been preluded by Cowper; that of Byron by Burns. The revival of the one ripened into a restoration of simpler manners and old beliefs; the other was the spirit of the storm. When they had both become recognized powers, neither appreciated the work of the other. A few years after this date Byron wrote of Wordsworth, to a common admirer of both: "I take leave to differ from you as freely as I once agreed with you. His performances, since the Lyrical Ballads, are miserably inadequate to the ability that lurks within him. There is, undoubtedly, much natural talent spilt over the Excursion; but it is rain upon rocks, where it stands and stagnates; or rain upon sand, where it falls without fertilizing." This criticism with others in like strain, was addressed to Mr. Leigh Hunt, to whom, in 1812, when enduring for radicalism's sake a very comfortable incarceration, Byron had, in company with Moore, paid a courteous visit.
Of the correspondence of this period—flippant, trenchant, or sparkling—few portions are more calculated to excite a smile than the record of his frequent resolutions made, reasseverated, and broken, to have done with literature; even going the length on some occasions of threatening to suppress his works, and, if possible, recall the existing copies. He affected being a man of the world unmercifully, and had a real delight in clever companions who assumed the same rôle. Frequent allusion is made to his intercourse with Erskine and Sheridan: the latter he is never tired of praising, as "the author of the best modern comedy (School for Scandal), the best farce (The Critic), and the best oration (the famous Begum speech) ever heard in this country." They spent many an evening together, and probably cracked many a bottle. It is Byron who tells the story of Sheridan being found in a gutter in a sadly incapable state; and, on some one asking "Who is this?" stammering out "Wilberforce." On one occasion he speaks of coming out of a tavern with the dramatist, when they both found the staircase in a very cork-screw condition: and elsewhere, of encountering a Mr. C——, who "had no notion of meeting with a bon-vivant in a scribbler," and summed the poet's eulogy with the phrase, "he drinks like a man." Hunt, the tattler, who observed his lordship's habits in Italy, with the microscope of malice ensconced within the same walls, makes it a charge against his host that he would not drink like a man. Once for all it may be noted, that although there was no kind of excess in which Byron, whether from bravado or inclination, failed occasionally to indulge, he was never for any stretch of time given over, like Burns, to what is technically termed intemperance. His head does not seem to have been strong, and under the influence of stimulants he may have been led to talk a great deal of his dangerous nonsense. But though he could not say, with Wordsworth, that only once, at Cambridge, had his brain been "excited by the fumes of wine," his prevailing sins were in other directions.