Scott was almost the last of the dramatic poets of England, using the word dramatic in its large sense. His plays never amounted to much; but his stories in verse and in prose are essentially dramatic. In neither does he reveal himself. In all his poetry you scarcely find a reference to his personal feelings. In the L'Envoi to the "Lady of the Lake" there is a brief allusion of this sort, touching because so unusual, and almost the only one I now recall. Addressing the "Harp of the North" he says:-- "Much have I owed thy strains through life's long way, Through secret woes the world has never known, When on the weary night dawned wearier day, And bitterer was the grief devoured alone; That I o'erlive such woes, Enchantress! is thine own." Scott, like Chaucer, brings before us a long succession of characters, from many classes, countries, and times. Scotch barons and freebooters, English kings, soldiers, gentlemen, crusaders, Alpine peasants, mediæval counts, serfs, Jews, Saxons,--brave, cruel, generous,--all sweep past us, in a long succession of pictures; but of Scott himself nothing appears except the nobleness and purity of the tone which pervades all. He is therefore eminently a dramatic or objective writer. But Byron is the exact opposite. The mighty exuberance of his genius, which captivated his age, and the echoes of which thrill down to ours, in all its vast overflow of passion, imagination, wit,--ever sounded but one strain,--himself. His own woes, his own wrongs are the ever-recurring theme. Though he wrote many dramas, he was more undramatic than Milton. Every character in every play is merely a thinly disguised Byron. It was impossible for him to get away from himself. If Tennyson's lovely line tells the truth when he says,-- "Love took up the harp of life and smote on all its chords with might; Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight:" then Byron never really loved; for in his poetry the chord of self never passes out of sight. In his plays the principal characters are Byron undiluted--as Manfred, Sardanapalus, Cain, Werner, Arnold. All the secondary characters are Byron more or less diluted,--Byron and water, may we say? Never, since the world began, has there been a poet so steeped in egotism, so sick of self-love as he; and the magnificence of his genius appears in the unfailing interest which he can give to this monotonous theme.