blunder himself: he either accepted the facts from report, or else took satirical licence. And why not? If you want to laugh at a person, and he will not give occasion, whose fault is it that you are obliged to make it? Hallam did criticise some of Payne Knight's Greek; but with the caution of his character, he remarked that possibly some of these queer phrases might be 'critic-traps' justified by some one use of some one author. I remember well having a Latin essay to write at Cambridge, in which I took care to insert a few monstrous and unusual idioms from Cicero: a person with a Nizolius, and without scruples may get scores of them. So when my tutor raised his voice against these oddities, I was up to him, for I came down upon him with Cicero, chapter and verse, and got round him. And so my own sclecisms, many of them, passed unchallenged.
Byron had more good in his nature than he was fond of letting out: whether he was a soured misanthrope, or whether his vein lay that way in poetry, and he felt it necessary to fit his demeanour to it, are matters far beyond me. Mr. Crabb Robinson told me the following story more than once. He was at Charles Lamb's chambers in the Temple when Wordsworth came in, with the new Edinburgh Review in his hand, and fume on his countenance. 'These reviewers,' said he, 'put me out of patience! Here is a young man—they say he is a lord—who has written a volume of poetry; and these fellows, just because he is a lord, set upon him, laugh at him, and sneer at his writing. The young man will do something, if he goes on as he has begun. But these reviewers seem to think that nobody may write poetry, unless he lives in a garret.' Crabb Robinson told this long after to Lady Byron, who said, 'Ah! if Byron had known that, he would never have attacked Wordsworth. He went one day to meet Wordsworth at dinner; when he came home I said, "Well, how did the young poet get on with the old one?" "Why, to tell you the truth," said he, "I had but one feeling from the beginning of the visit to the end, and that was—reverence!"' Lady Byron told my wife that her husband had a very great respect for Wordsworth. I suppose he would have said—as the Archangel said to his Satan—' Our difference is po[li=e]tical.'
I suspect that Fielding would, if all were known, be ranked among unlucky railers at supposed paradox. In his 'Miscellanies' (1742, 8vo.) he wrote a satire on the Chrysippus or Guinea, an animal which multiplies itself by division, like the polypus. This he supposes to have been drawn up by Petrus Gualterus, meaning the famous usurer, Peter Walter. He calls it a paper 'proper to
