ABSTRACT
Scott was grieved by the scandal of Byron's separation from his wife, and disturbed as well as impressed by his poetry of the summer of 1816. ‘The last part of Childe Harold,’ he wrote to Joanna Baillie on 26 November, ‘intimates a terrible state of mind and with all the power and genius which characterized his former productions the present seems to indicate a more serious and desperate degree of misanthropy…. On my word of honour I should expect it to end either in actual insanity or something equally frightful.’ (The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, IV, 300.) In this review he aimed at paying full tribute to Byron's genius, while rebuking his political aberrations, and giving sound counsel, personal and moral, if this could be done without offence. (See his letters of 10 January 1817, to John Murray and Croker— Letters, IV, 363–5, 366.) Byron was delighted by the review: ‘You will agree,’ he wrote to Thomas Moore on 10 March 1817, ‘that such an article is still more honourable to him than to myself’; while to Scott himself he expressed, much later, his gratitude for ‘the extraordinary good-heartedness of the whole proceeding’. (LJ, IV, 72; VI, 2.)
