FOOTNOTES
1 That satire is primarily destructive criticism was asserted by Heinsius in a familiar passage quoted approvingly by Dryden in his Essay on Satire:—“Satire is a kind of poetry—in which human vices, ignorance, and errors, and all things besides, which are produced from them in every man, are severely reprehended.” The same theory is expressed by De Gubernatis in his Storia della Satira:—“La satira è, sovra ogni cosa, una negazione.”
2 See Poetry, VII, 1.
3 In the Preface to Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden is inclined to take pride in his fairness:—“I have but laughed at some men’s follies, when I could have declaimed against their vices; and other men’s virtues I have commended, as freely as I have taxed their crimes.”
4 Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II., 212–217.
5 See Chesterton’s Pope and the Art of Satire.
6 Both methods are illustrated in a line of the Dunciad:—
7 In the Dramatis Personæ of Absalom and Achitophel only two women appear, and they are spoken of in the poem in a complimentary way.
8 Byron particularly emphasizes the correctness and moral tone of Pope: he is “the most perfect of our poets and the purest of our moralists” (Letters, v., 559); “his moral is as pure as his poetry is glorious” (Letters, v., 555); “he is the only poet that never shocks” (Letters, v., 560).
9 Gay’s Alexander Pope, his safe Return from Troy (1720) is interesting as being one of the rare examples of the use of the English octave stanza between Lycidas and Beppo.
10 Letters, v., 252.
11 In speaking of the art of rhyming to Trelawney, Byron said:—“If you are curious in these matters, look in Swift. I will send you a volume; he beats us all hollow, his rhymes are wonderful.”
12 Cf. Swift’s The Puppet Show with Byron’s Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog.
13 For a contemporary characterization of the unscrupulous satirists of the period see Cowper’s Charity, 501–532, in the passage beginning,
“Most satirists are indeed a public scourge.”
14 Examples are The Thimble (1743) by William Hawkins (1722–1801) and the Scribleriad (1752) by Richard Owen Cambridge (1717–1802).
15 State Dunces (1733) and The Gymnasiad (1738) by Paul Whitehead (1710–1744); The Toast (1736) by William King (1685–1763); and a succession of anonymous poems, The Battle of the Briefs (1752), Patriotism (1765), The Battle of the Wigs (1763), The Triumph of Dulness (1781), The Rape of the Faro-Bank (1797), and The Battle of the Bards (1799).
16 The most important is Churchill’s Rosciad (1761), with the numerous replies which it elicited: the Churchilliad (1761), the Smithfield Rosciad (1761), the Anti-Rosciad (1761), by Thomas Morell (1703–1784), and The Rosciad of Covent Garden (1761) by H. J. Pye (1745–1813). Among other satires of the same class may be mentioned the Smartiad (1752) by Dr. John Hill (1710–1775), with its answer, the severe and effective Hilliad (1752) by Christopher Smart (1722–1771); the Meretriciad (1764) by Arthur Murphy (1727–1806); the Consuliad (1770), a fragment by Chatterton; the Diaboliad (1777), with its sequel, the Diabolady (1777) by William Combe (1741–1823); and finally the Criticisms on the Rolliad, Gifford’s Baviad and Mæviad, the Simpliciad, and the Alexandriad (1805).
17 The Scandalizade (1750); The Pasquinade (1752) by William Kenrick (1725–1779); The Quackade (1752); The Booksellers (1766); The Art of Rising in the Church (1763) by James Scott (1733–1814); The Senators (1772); and The Tribunal (1787).
18 A few typical controversial satires of this decade are: The Race (1762) by Cuthbert Shaw (1739–1771); The Tower (1763); The Demagogue (1764) by William Falconer (1732–1769); The Scourge (1765); and The Politician (1766) by E. B. Greene (1727–1788).
19 Some characteristic examples are the Epistle to Cornbury (1745) by Earl Nugent (1702–1788); the Epistle to William Chambers (1773) and the Epistle to Dr. Shebbeare (1777) by William Mason (1724–1797); and the Epistle to Dr. Randolph (1796), as well as numerous other epistles, by T. J. Mathias.
20 See Macaulay’s Essay on Horace Walpole, page 35.
21 An Essay on the Different Styles of Poetry (1713) by Thomas Parnell (1679–1718); The Danger of Writing Verse (1741) by William Whitehead (1715–1785); A Prospect of Poetry (1733); The Perils of Poetry (1766); and The Wreath of Fashion (1780) by Richard Tickell (1751–1793).
22 The anonymous Manners of the Age (1733); Manners (1738) by Paul Whitehead; The Man of Taste (1733) by James Bramston (1694–1744); the Modern Fine Gentleman (1746) and the Modern Fine Lady (1750) by Soame Jenyns (1703–1787); Fashion (1748) by Joseph Warton (1722–1800); and Newmarket (1751) by Thomas Warton (1728–1790).
23 Examples are the Essay on Reason (1733) by Walter Harte (1709–1774); the Vanity of Human Enjoyments (1749) by James Cawthorn (1718–1761), the most slavish of all Pope’s imitators; Honour (1737) by John Brown; Advice and Reproof (1747) by Smollett; Of Retired and Active Life (1735) by William Helmoth (1710–1799); Ridicule (1743) by William Whitehead; Taste (1753) by John Armstrong (1709–1779); An Essay on Conversation (1748) by Benjamin Stillingfleet (1702–1771).
24 Letters, v., 162.
25 Letters, iv., 485.
26 See An Apology, 376–387.
27 In his Letters, Byron refers once to Churchill’s Times (Letters, ii., 148). His Churchill’s Grave (1816), a parody of Wordsworth’s style, contains a reference to Churchill as “him who blazed the comet of a season.” Otherwise Churchill’s actual influence on Byron was not great.
28 Byron praised Crabbe in English Bards as “Nature’s sternest painter, but her best.” In a letter to Moore, February 2, 1818, he termed Crabbe and Rogers “the fathers of present Poesy,” and in his Reply to Blackwood’s (1819) he said publicly: “We are all wrong except Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell.” Crabbe, whom Horace Smith called “Pope in worsted stockings,” seemed, to Byron, to represent devotion to Pope.
29 Byron said of Gifford in 1824: “I have always considered him as my literary father, and myself as his ‘prodigal son’” (Letters, vi., 329).
30 The movement represented by this clique, Gli Oziosi, originated in Florence with a coterie of dilettanti, among whom were Robert Merry (1755–1799), Mrs. Piozzi (1741–1831), Bertie Greathead (1759–1826), and William Parsons (fl. 1785–1807). They published two small volumes, The Arno Miscellany (1784) and The Florence Miscellany (1785), both marred by affectation, obscurity, tawdry ornamentation, and frantic efforts at sublimity. The printing of Merry’s Adieu and Recall to Love started a new series of sentimental verses, in the writing of which other scribblers took part: Hannah Cowley (1743–1809), Perdita Robinson (1752–1800), and Thomas Vaughan (fl. 1772–1820). Their combined contributions were gathered in Bell’s British Album (1789).
31 Merry had written a Wreath of Liberty (1790) in praise of revolutionary principles.
32 Scott said of Gifford: “He squashed at one blow a set of humbugs who might have humbugged the world long enough.” New Morality has a reference to “the hand which brushed a swarm of fools away.” Byron inserted a similar passage in English Bards, 741–744.
33 Letters, iv., 485.
34 English Bards, 701.
35 Moore speaks sarcastically of this custom in the Preface to Corruption and Intolerance (1808): “The practice which has been lately introduced into literature, of writing very long notes upon very indifferent verses, appears to me a very happy invention, as it supplies us with a mode of turning dull poetry to account.”
36 Byron said of the Pursuits of Literature: “It is notoriously, as far as the poetry goes, the worst written of its kind; the World has long been of but one opinion, viz., that it’s [sic] sole merit lies in the notes, which are indisputably excellent” (Letters, ii., 4).
37 Examples are the Fables of Æsop (1692) of Roger L’Estrange (1616–1704); Æsop at Court, or Select Fables (1702) by Thomas Yalden (1671–1736); Æsop’s Fables (1722) by Samuel Croxall (1680–1752); Fables (1744) by Edward Moore (1711–1757); and collections by Nathaniel Cotton (1707–1788) and William Wilkie (1721–1772).
38 See the Spleen (1737) by Matthew Green (1696–1737); Variety, a Tale for Married People (1732); and the poems of Isaac Hawkins Browne (1705–1760), James Bramston (1694–1744), George Colman, the elder (1732–1794), John Dalton (1709–1763), David Garrick (1717–1779). John Duncombe (1729–1763), and many other poetasters.
39 Probationary Odes also anticipate the more famous Rejected Addresses (1812), and the Poetic Mirror (1816) of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.
40 For less reserved praise of the Rolliad, see Trevelyan’s Early History of Charles James Fox, page 285.
41 In A Postscript he speaks of “the unmeaning and noisy lines of two things called Baviad and Mæviad”; while in a note to Out at Last, or the Fallen Minister, he presents a sketch of Gifford’s life, accusing him of heinous crimes, and speaking of the “awkward and obscure inversions and verbose pomposity” of the Baviad. Gifford replied in the Epistle to Peter Pindar (1800). Mathias and Canning invariably treated Pindar with contempt.
42 Vision of Judgment, 92.
43 See A Dream (1786), a bitterly satirical address to George III, and the Lines Written at Stirling, attacking the Hanoverians.
44 Byron knew the New Bath Guide well, and admired it. In one of his youthful poems, an Answer to Some Elegant Verses sent by a Friend to the Author he uses four lines of Anstey’s poem as a motto. He also quotes from it not infrequently in his letters.
45 See Letters from Simpson the Second to his Dear Brother in Wales (1788) and Groans of the Talents (1807), both of which deliberately appropriate Anstey’s scheme. Both are anonymous.
46 See the Epistle to my Sisters (1734) by Thomas Lisle; The ’Piscopade, a Panegyri-Satiri-Serio-Comical Poem (1748) by “Porcupinus Pelagius”; and Goldsmith’s three graceful satires, Retaliation (1774), The Haunch of Venison (1776), and the Letter to Mrs. Bunbury (1777).
47 The attitude of the Anti-Jacobin was almost precisely that already adopted by Gifford and Mathias; that is, it represented extreme Tory feeling, and therefore was resolutely opposed to any movement in literature which seemed new or strange.
48 The Anti-Jacobin was deserted by its original editors, largely because it was becoming too dangerous a weapon for aspiring statesmen to handle. A new journal, under the same name, was less successful.
49 It was the era described by Wordsworth in his sonnets Written in London, 1802, and London, 1802, the last beginning,
50 See the Nation, volume xciv., No. 2436, March 7, 1912.
51 Examples are Elijah’s Mantle (1807) by James Sayer (1748–1823), with its answer, the anonymous Elijah’s Mantle Parodied (1807); the Uti Possidetis and Status Quo (1807), The Devil and the Patriot (1807), and Canning’s famous ballad The Pilot that Weathered the Storm.
52 Poetry, i., 17.
53 Letters, i., 209.
54 It is probable that Byron’s verses are modelled somewhat on the Epistle on His Schoolfellows at Eton (1766) by his relative and guardian, Lord Carlisle (1748–1825).
55 Letters, i., 47.
56 Letters, i., 183.
57 Letters, i., 167.
58 Letters, i., 211.
59 Letters, i., 212.
60 Blackwood’s, ix., 461.
61 This practice was ridiculed by his enemy, Lady Montagu, in the lines:
62 The opening couplet of English Bards is a paraphrase of the first two lines of Juvenal, I. Other imitations occur in lines 87–88 (Juvenal, I., 17–18) and lines 93–94 (Juvenal, I., 19–21).
63 English Bards, 47–48.
64 Satires, iii., 15–18.
65 London, 35–36.
66 Table Talk, 571–572.
67 Baviad, 215 ff.
68 All the Talents, ii., 46–47.
69 English Bards, 103–106.
70 Dunciad, i., 28.
71 Satires, i., 35–36.
72 English Bards, 819–820.
73 English Bards, 991–994.
74 See English Bards, 144–145, 165–166, 202, 235, etc.
75 Prologue to the second part of the Conquest of Granada, 1–2.
76 Essay on Criticism, 610–630.
77 The Apology was written in response to a scathing article on the Rosciad, printed in the Critical Review for March, 1761. This periodical, ultra-Tory in its principles, made a point of decrying, any work which was by a Whig author, or expressed any sympathy with liberal ideas. Though the editor, Tobias Smollett, was able to exculpate himself from the charge, Churchill deemed him accountable for the uncomplimentary review and, without naming him, described him in his satire as “alien from God, and foe to all mankind.”
78 The Apology, 110–111.
79 English Bards, 429.
80 The Apology, 44.
81 English Bards, 71.
82 Gentle Alterative.
83 Baviad, 200–201.
84 It is curious that Byron’s views on poetry were not very different from those held by Jeffrey. Both men believed in maintaining the common-sense traditions of the eighteenth century.
85 “There can be no worse sign for the taste of the times than the depreciation of Pope” (Letters, v, 559).
86 W. Tooke, in his edition of Churchill’s Works (1804), expresses one phase of contemporary opinion in speaking of “the simplicity of a later school of poetry, the spawn of the lakes, consisting of a mawkish combination of the nonsense verse of the nursery with the rhodomontade of German Mysticism and Transcendentalism” (i., 189).
87 Epistles to Pope, ii., 165.
88 To this utterly unjust stricture Scott made a calm reply in his Preface to Marmion (1830): “I never could conceive how an arrangement between an author and his publishers, if satisfactory to the persons concerned, could afford matter of censure to any third party.” Certainly Byron came to be a gross offender in this respect himself, and when, in 1819, he was haggling with Murray over the price of Don Juan, these boyish censures, if they met his eye, must have roused a smile.
89 “The plot is absurd, and the antique costume of the language is disgusting, because it is unnatural” (All the Talents, page 68).
90 Pursuits of Literature, iv., 397–398.
92 After some praise of the three poets, the dedication of the Simpliciad closes with the words: “I lament the degradation of your genius, and deprecate the propagation of your perverted taste.”
93 Pope, in the Dunciad, had bantered Sir Richard Blackmore, author of epics, in the lines:—
The possibility that Byron may have had this passage in mind is increased by his note to his lines in English Bards: “Must he [Southey] be content to rival Sir Richard Blackmore in the quantity as well as the quality of his verse?”
94 Simpliciad, 212–213.
95 It must be remembered, however, that practically every charge that Byron brings against the “Lakists” has a counterpart in Mant’s Simpliciad, printed only a year before Byron’s poem.
96 Baviad, 248–261.
97 Letters, v., 590.
98 Letters, v., 539.
99 Letters, i., 104.
100 Mathias had asserted that Moore “had neither scrupled nor blushed to depict, and to publish to the world, the arts of systematic seduction, and to thrust upon the nation the most open and unqualified blasphemy against the very code and volume of our religion” (Pursuits of Literature, Preface to Dialogue IV.).
101 Preface to Mæviad, page 59, Note.
102 See the account of this period in Thorndike’s Tragedy, chapter x.
103 Byron may have taken a suggestion from some lines of Children of Apollo:
104 Satires, iii., 197.
105 Dunciad, iv., 45–70.
106 Rosciad, 723–728.
107 The Man of Taste.
108 One line of Byron’s attack,
“Himself a living libel on mankind,”
recalls Murphy’s address to Churchill,
“Thy look’s a libel on the human race.”
109 In the Scourge, a new venture of Clarke’s begun in 1810, that editor published another scurrilous attack on Byron, involving also the poet’s mother. An action for libel which Byron intended to bring was for some reason abandoned, though not without some caustic words from him about “the cowardly calumniator of an absent man and a defenceless woman” (Letters, i., 324).
110 Letters, i., 314. See also Letters, ii., 312; iii., 192.
111 Letters, ii., 326.
112 Letters, v., 539.
113 English Bards, 209–210; 231–232; 239–240; 253–254; 909–910.
114 Ibid., 415–417; 684–686.
115 Ibid., 417, 1022.
116 Ibid., 608–609; 624–625; 656–657.
117 Letters, ii., 27.
118 Recollections of Lord Byron, page 31.
119 Letters, iv., 488.
120 See Pope and the Art of Satire, by G. K. Chesterton.
121 Corruption, 93–98.
122 English Bards, 841–848.
123 Poetry, i., 291.
124 Letters, ii., 330.
125 Letters, ii., 24.
126 Letters, iv., 425.
127 Letters, v., 221.
128 Letters, v., 245.
129 Letters, v., 255.
130 Letters, v., 77.
131 There have been many actual translations of the Ars Poetica into English. T. Drant published, in 1567, the first complete version. Queen Elizabeth left a fragmentary version of 194 lines in her Englishings (1598). Ben Jonson’s excellent Horace, of the Art of Poetry was printed after his death. Of other translations, from that of Roscommon (1680) in blank verse, to that of Howes (1809) in heroic couplets, it is unnecessary to speak, except to say that they mount into the hundreds. In such works as The Art of Preaching by Christopher Pitt (1699–1748) and The Art of Politicks (1731) by James Bramston (1694–1744) the title and method of Horace had been transferred to other fields. Harlequin-Horace; or the Art of Modern Poetry by James Miller (1706–1744) is an ironical parody of the Ars Poetica.