ABSTRACT
Byron, Heaven and Earth (1823), and Moore, Loves of the Angels (1823); review by? Francis Jeffrey and William Hazlitt, Edinburgh Review, XXXVIII (Feb. 1823), 27–48. Though the authorship of this review has not been positively established, it has many of the marks of Jeffrey’s work, including plot summaries. In the first paragraph, indeed, there seems to be a note of embarrassed apology for an earlier moralizing review — perhaps Jeffrey’s review of the Sardanapalus volume, with its digression on Don Juan. The reference to Wordsworth on page 30 also sounds like Jeffrey. But the question remains open (for me, at least) because the long critical paragraph on page 40, with its quotation from Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, its comparison of Byron’s work with Poussin’s painting, and its flippant allusion to Byron’s claims to originality, almost cries out: “William Hazlitt wrote me!” P.P. Howe reprints this paragraph and a few early paragraphs as probable contributions by Hazlitt to a review heavily reworked by Jeffrey.
