Percy Bysshe Shelley on Byron’s Childe Harold

Nothing can be less sublime than the true source of these expressions of contempt and desperation. The fact is... the Italian women with whom he associates are perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon — the most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; countesses smell so strongly of garlic that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them.

Letter to Thomas Love Peacock, December 22, 1818, in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed M Shelley (1845)

Charles Lamb on Shelley

Shelley I saw once. His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with.

Letter to Bernard Barton, October 9, 1822, in The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb (1897)

George Meredith on Dickens

Not much of Dickens will live, because it has so little correspondence to life. He was the incarnation of cockneydom, a caricaturist who aped the moralist; he should have kept to short stories.

In Edward Clodd, Memories (1916)

GK Chesterton on Tennyson

He really did hold a great many of the same views as Queen Victoria, though he was gifted with a more fortunate literary style... He had a great deal to say; but he had much more power of expression than was wanted for anything he had to express.

The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)

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