Goethe said of him, that he was inspired with the _genius of Pain_. The joyous, cheerful spirit that pervades the works of men who, like Scott and Southey, were educated under auspicious influences, and by a healthy process grew up to manhood with an habitual regard to the sacred sanctions annexed to their physical and moral being, contrasts strongly with the morbid, gloomy, and often bitter and sarcastic temper of that poetry, which seems to flow as if from some poisoned fountain of Helicon. Sometimes, indeed, he forgets his fancied wrongs and real woes, as when walking amid the ruins of imperial Rome, and kindred contiguities, he throws himself back into the very bosom of classic antiquity, and pours out the purest strains of eloquence, enriched with the glowing sunlight of poetry. For a time the shadow of the evil spirit appears to depart from him, and the true glory of his genius shines forth without a cloud, while the sentiments that rise in his soul ascend to a pitch of moral sublimity beyond which the ambition of the human imagination could not desire to go. In the fourth canto of Childe Harold his power of conception and expression culminated, and the publication of that poem called forth a judgment of the Lord Chief Justice of the Bench of Literature, Francis Jeffrey, which almost deserves a coequal immortality with the poem itself, and it is impossible to account for this splendid piece of criticism being left out of the recent collection of the elegant Critic and Essayist, except on the supposition that the most accomplished judges of other men’s works are some times incompetent to fix the right estimate of their own. Genius does not always accurately weigh its own productions, since Milton preferred his Paradise Regained to his Paradise Lost, and Byron himself was inveterately attached to a poem, or rather a translation, to restrain him from publishing which cost the strongest efforts of his most influential friends.