SIR WALTER SCOTT AND LORD BYRON.

 A correspondent, under the signature of " Childe Harold," calls our attention to the fact of a monument being about to be erected, at the expense of the country, to the memory of the veriest lickspittle that ever lived, Sir Walter Scott; and he very naturally asks whether a similar mark of respect to the manes of Lord Byron is not in existance in some part of England. We answer, to the disgrace of the clergy, no! There is a beautifully executed monument now lying at the Custom-house, by Thorwolden, but the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey have refused it admission into that noble building, because Lord Byron was a lover of liberty, a hater of cant, and a deist. Sir Walter was a mean panderer to the worst vices and the worst practices of the aristocracy. Search his volumes from end to end, there is not a sentence to be found in favour of freedom—in favour of human liberty—in them. His writings are a libel on divine revelation regarding the origin of our race. By him the mass of mankind are treated as having minds which fitted them only to act as serfs under the lords of the soil. Barbarous feudal Lords, and their enslaved, degraded, retainers, are the characters throughout all his works in which he delighted to revel. Sir Walter Scott imagined himself the tenth cousin to some of the ancient plundering Barons; and in every line he wrote, he made it his study to treat as a separate cast, incapable of rising out of the sphere they were born in, all who could not count connection with some of these lawless reavers, who only escaped the gallows by being born in uncivilized times. As he pandered to the tastes, to the pride, and the follies of the aristocracy, so Sir Walter Scot attempted to imitate their vices. If he could enjoy himself he cared not at whose cost. Freedom in every form was to him a hated name. He could feel for a dog; it was servile by nature, but for the poor bondsman in chains; the negroes stolen in thousands; the millions suffering under the domineering sway of a despot; or the still more unfortunate thousands, who in their endeavours to free themselves from a tyrant's, yoke, subjected themselves to a tyrant's displeasure, and had to submit to a tyrant's punishment—Sir Walter Scott never felt, never sympathized with these; his tales describe the ages, and the scenes in which these deeds were constantly enacted; but he is mute to everything except the foibles of my Lord, and the sycophantic fawning of my Lord's footman. What a contrast in the characters of Byron and of Scott! They both lived in the same age; both were poets; both had an opportunity of displaying the real nobility of their souls, when Greece and Poland rose for freedom. Byron devoted his person, his fortune, and latterly his life, to rescue from oppression the descendants of that people who were the fathers of the arts and of literature. Byron was a poet, who could not refrain from sharing every danger, when the countrymen of Homer were nobly struggling to free themselves from the despot's sway. Scott was a poet; put he contented himself at that very time with the issue of volume after volume regardless of ail that was going on; his all-absorbing thought only, how he could add another pinnacle to Abbotsford turrets, or an acre to the estate, either by the announcement of a new novel, or the discounting of a wind bill. Mr. Fox Maule has on too many occasions already called forth the disapprobation of the most discriminating portion of his countrymen, by his silly proposals in the House of Commons, and his trafficking for party purposes out of doors; and now he has run in the same carriage with such a politician as Sir William Rae, in setting the example of passing an Act of Parliament, about a monument to such a thorough-paced, self-aggrandising, mean, place-hunting Tory as Sir Walter Scott.— Weekly Dispatch

Hobart Town Advertiser (Tas. : 1839 - 1861), Friday 20 August 1841, page 4