146 PRÆTERITA-I

169. Now, observe, that passage is noble, primarily because it contains the utmost number that will come together into the space, of absolutely just, wise, and kind thoughts. But it is more than noble, it is perfect, because the quantity it holds is not artificially or intricately concentrated, but with the serene swiftness of a smith’s hammer-strokes on hot iron; and with choice of terms which, each in its place, will convey far more than they mean in the dictionary. Thus, “however” is used instead of “yet,” because it stands for “howsoever,” or, in full, for “yet whatever they did.” “Thick” of society, because it means, not merely the crowd, but the fog of it; “ten hundred thousand” instead of “a million,” or “a thousand thousand,” to take the sublimity out of the number, and make us feel that it is a number of nobodies. Then the sentence in parenthesis, “which might be false,” etc., is indeed obscure, because it was impossible to clarify it without a regular pause, and much loss of time; and the reader’s sense is therefore left to expand it for himself into “it was, perhaps, falsely said of him at first, that he had no character,” etc. Finally, the dawn “unshadows”-lessens the shadow on-the Rialto, but does not gleam on that, as on the broad water.

170. Next, take the two sentences on poetry, in his letters to Murray of September 15th, 1817, and April 12th, 1818; (for the collected force of these compare the deliberate published statement in the answer to Blackwood in 1820.)¹

(1817.) “With regard to poetry in general, I am convinced, the more I think of it, that he (Moore), and all of us-Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, I,-are all in the wrong, one as much as another; that we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system, or systems, not worth a damn in itself, and from which none but Rogers and Crabbe are free: and that the present and next generations will finally be of this opinion.

¹ [See vol. iv. p. 169 for the letter of September 15. In the MS. copy of it, “there is the following note in the handwriting of Mr. Gifford: ‘There is more good sense, and feeling and judgment in this passage, than in any other I ever read, or Lord Byron wrote.’” For the letter of April 12, see ibid., p. 224. The “Reply to Blackwood’s Magazine” is in the same volume, pp. 474-495. For the words on Pope quoted (not quite textually) in § 171, see ibid., p. 489.]

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