certainly have no title to give any verdict on the case. What made Lord Byron undertake the patronage of Pope? It was, as usually happened with _him_, a motive of hostility to some contemporaries. He wished to write up Pope by way of writing down others. But, whatever were the motive, we may judge of the style in which he carried out his intentions by the following well-known _mot_. Having mentioned the poets, he compares them with the moralists--'the moralists,' these are his words, 'the moralists, their betters.' How, or in what sense that would satisfy even a lampooner, are moralists as a class the 'betters' in a collation with poets as a class? It is pretty clear at starting that, _in order_ to be a moralist of the first rank, that is, to carry a great moral truth with heart-shaking force into the mind, a moralist must begin by becoming a poet. For instance, 'to justify the ways of God to man.' _That_ is a grand moral doctrine; but to utter the doctrine authentically a man must write a 'Paradise Lost.' The order of precedency, therefore, between poets and moralists, as laid down by Lord Byron, is very soon inverted by a slight effort of reflection. But without exacting from a man so self-willed as Lord Byron (and at that moment in a great passion) any philosophic vigor, it may be worth while, so far as the case concerns Pope, to ponder for one moment upon this invidious comparison, and to expose the fallacy which it conceals. By the term _moralist_ we indicate two kinds of thinkers, differing as much in quality as a chestnut horse from horse chestnut, and in rank as a Roman proconsul from the nautical consul's first clerk at a seaport. A clerical moralist in a pulpit, reading a sermon, is a moralist in the sense of one who applies the rules of a known ethical system, viz., that system which is contained in the New Testament, to the ordinary cases of human action. Such a man pretends to no originality--it would be criminal in him to do so; or, if he seeks for novelty in any shape or degree, it is exclusively in the quality of his illustrations. But there is another use of the word _moralist_, which indicates an intellectual architect of the first class. A Grecian moralist was one who published a new _theory_ of morals--that is, he assumed some new central principle, from which he endeavored, with more or less success, to derive all the virtues and vices, and thus introduced new relations amongst the keys or elementary gamut of our moral nature. [Footnote 6] For example, the Peripatetic system of morality, that of Aristotle, had for its fundamental principle, that all vices formed one or other of two polar extremes, one pole being in excess, the other in defect; and that the corresponding virtue lay on an equatorial line between these two poles. Here, because the new principle became a law of coercion for the entire system, since it must be carried out harmoniously with regard to every element that