ABSTRACT
Byron, Childe Harold, IV (1818); review by John Wilson, Edinburgh Review, XXX (June 1818), 87–12. This, Wilson’s only article for the Edinburgh Review, provoked Hazlitt’s charge that Wilson was cribbing from his Round Table articles. But Elsie Swann shows in her biography, Christopher North (John Wilson) (1934), that Wilson followed a suggestion in a letter from his friend Alexander Blair. Nevertheless, Wilson spins out the Byron-Rousseau comparison and develops his subject in a most un-Jeffrey-like way. Especially cogent are his remarks (pp. 117–118) on the political implications of Byron’s imagination and his essential sympathy for Napoleon.
