In my days, some of the pieces of the modern poets have gained this
common popularity, which must be distinguished from fame as it may
only live for a season.

Wordsworth's beautiful, simple ballad of "We are seven" I have seen
hawked about for a penny, and Tannahill's song of "Jessy" has met
with more popularity among the common people than all other songs,
English and Scottish, put together. Lord Byron's hasty fame may be
deemed a contradiction to the above opinion that popularity is not
true fame, though at its greatest extent it is but an exception, and
scarcely that, for his great and hurried popularity, that almost
trampled on its own heels in its haste, must drop into a less
bustling degree, and become cool and quiet, like the preaching of
Irving. Shakespeare was hardly noticed in his lifetime by popularity,
but he is known now, and Byron is hardly the tenth part of a
Shakespeare. Every storm must have its calm, and Byron took fame by
storm. By a desperate daring he over-swept petty control like a
rebellious flood, or a tempest worked up into madness by the quarrel
of the elements, and he seemed to value that daring as the attainment
of true fame. He looked upon Horace's "Art of Poetry" no doubt with
esteem as a reader, but he cared no more for it in the profession of
a poet than the weather does for an almanack. He looked upon critics
as the countryman does on a magistrate. He beheld them as a race of
petty tyrants that stood in the way of genius. They were in his eyes
more of stumbling-blocks than guides, and he treated them
accordingly. He let them know there was another road to Parnassus
without taking theirs, and being obliged to do them homage. Not
stooping to the impediments of their authorities, like the paths of a
besieged city encumbered with sentinels, he made a road for himself,
and, like Napoleon crossing the Alps, he let the world see that even