of gold which the owner knows not of." But Lord Byron had made the
discovery of the vein, without, as it would seem, being aware of its
value. I have already had occasion to observe that, even while occupied
with the composition of Childe Harold, it is questionable whether he
himself was yet fully conscious of the new powers, both of thought and
feeling, that had been awakened in him; and the strange estimate we now
find him forming of his own production appears to warrant the remark. It
would seem, indeed, as if, while the imaginative powers of his mind had
received such an impulse forward, the faculty of judgment, slower in its
developement, was still immature, and that of _self_-judgment, the most
difficult of all, still unattained.

On the other hand, from the deference which, particularly at this period
of his life, he was inclined to pay to the opinions of those with whom
he associated, it would be fairer, perhaps, to conclude that this
erroneous valuation arose rather from a diffidence in his own judgment
than from any deficiency of it. To his college companions, almost all of
whom were his superiors in scholarship, and some of them even, at this
time, his competitors in poetry, he looked up with a degree of fond and
admiring deference, for which his ignorance of his own intellectual
strength alone could account; and the example, as well as tastes, of
these young writers being mostly on the side of established models,
their authority, as long as it influenced him, would, to a certain
degree, interfere with his striking confidently into any new or original
path. That some remains of this bias, with a little leaning, perhaps,
towards school recollections[6], may have had a share in prompting his
preference of the Horatian Paraphrase, is by no means improbable;--at
least, that it was enough to lead him, untried as he had yet been in the
new path, to content himself, for the present, with following up his
success in the old. We have seen, indeed, that the manuscript of the two