We remarked that we had been occasionally struck with an omission, or a silence. It seems to us a characteristic circumstance that we hear no mention made of Lord Byron. Wordsworth and Southey, Coleridge and Shelley, get some space allotted to them, larger or smaller; but he who occupied so conspicuous a position among these very contemporaries has none whatever. It is not because he still holds a very high rank amongst our poets--though by no means the same eminence that was once assigned to him--that we notice this omission; but because his writings had so strong and peculiar an influence on most minds open to the influence of poetry, that we naturally expect to meet with his name in the literary recollections of one who, we way venture to say without any ungallant reference to chronology, must have lived in that period when Lord Byron was in the ascendant. There are few persons who, in acknowledging the happy influence of Wordsworth's poetry, would not have to commence their confession by some account of the very opposite influence of Lord Byron's. We should have said that the Byronic fever was a malady which hardly any of our contemporaries, who are liable to catch a fever of any kind from books, had entirely escaped. Miss Mitford, however, hints at no such calamity. Her excellent constitution seems to have preserved her from it. She bore a charm against all such plagues, in her clear sense and cheerful temper. She was thereby preserved from some very absurd misery--very absurd, but most indisputable misery; and she also lost some experience of a not unprofitable nature--certain lessons of wisdom which, being _burnt into one_, are never afterwards to be obliterated from the mind. If the subject were but one shade more attractive, or less repulsive than it is, we would, for the benefit of such exempted persons as Miss Mitford, describe the course and the symptoms of this Byronic fever. We would describe how, some luckless day, the youth who ought to be busy with his Greek or his Euclid plays truant over the poetry of _Childe Harold_ and _Manfred_; how it makes him brimful of unaccountable misery; how, as is most natural, he reads on the faster--reads on insatiate and insensate.