Fugitive Pieces, Byron’s first volume of verse, actually printed in November, 1806, was almost immediately suppressed at the instance of his elder friend and self-appointed mentor, Rev. J. T. Becher, who somewhat prudishly expostulated with him on the sensuous tone of certain passages. Of the thirty-eight separate poems which the collection contains, eight, at least, may be classed as legitimate satires. The arrangement of the different items is, however, unsystematic and inconsistent. The lines On a Change of Masters at a Great Public School, comprising a prejudiced and impulsive diatribe, are followed by the Epitaph on a Beloved Friend, a sincere and heartfelt elegy; while the conventionally sentimental Lines to Mary, On Receiving Her Picture are preceded and followed by satiric poems. These unexpected juxtapositions, inexplicable even on the theory of an adherence to chronology, suggest at once the curious way in which Byron’s versatile and complex nature tended to show itself at various times in moods apparently antithetical, permitting them often to follow each other closely or even to exist at practically the same moment. In his early book two characteristic moods, if not more, may be recognized: the romantic, whether melancholy, sentimental, or mysterious; and the satiric, whether savage or mocking. It is, of course, only with the manifestations of the latter mood that we have here to do.

The motives which urged Byron, at this early age, towards satire arose chiefly from personal dislike, the wish to retaliate when some one, by word or deed, had offended his vanity or his partialities. His animosities, notoriously violent, were often, though not always, hasty, irrational, and unjustified. His satire was occasioned by his emotions, not by his reason, a fact which partly accounts for his fondness for exaggeration and his incapacity for weighing evidence. As to his choice of methods, it must be remembered that careful reading, of a scope and diverseness remarkable for one of his years, had given him a comprehensive acquaintance with the English poets, and notably with Pope, for whom his preference began early and continued long. From Pope, and from Pope’s literary descendant, Gifford, Byron derived the models for much of his preliminary work in satire. He also knew Canning and Mathias, Lady Hamilton, Mant, and E. S. Barrett, and, in a different field, he was familiar with the lighter verse of Swift, Prior, Anstey, the Rolliad, and the Anti-Jacobin. It was natural, indeed almost inevitable, that these first exercises in satire should reflect something of the style and manner of poems with which Byron had an acquaintance and of which he had made a study.

The first printed satire of his composition was the poem entitled On a Change of Masters at a Great Public School, dated from Harrow, July, 1805, when his period of residence there had almost closed. Dr. Drury, Headmaster of Harrow, having resigned, Dr. Butler had been chosen to fill the vacancy. Against Dr. Butler, Byron had no personal grievance; but resenting an appointment which, passing over Dr. Drury’s son, Mark Drury, had selected an utter stranger, the boy launched an invective at a teacher whom he scarcely knew, and predicted the downfall of the school under his administration. Characteristically enough he was soon ready to avow his regret for his rash outburst. Referring to Dr. Butler, he said in his Diary: “I treated him rebelliously, and have been sorry ever since.” In the details of Byron’s conduct at this time are exemplified several of his traits as a satirist: impetuous judgment, energetic attack, and eventual repentance.

The use of the Latin type names, Probus and Pomposus, applied to Dr. Drury and Dr. Butler, as well as a certain technical skill in the management of the heroic couplet, indicates that Byron had perused Pope to his own advantage. Already he had caught something of the tricks of antithesis and repetition of which the elder poet had been so fond, and he had derived from him the power of condensing acrimony into a single pointed couplet. Such lines as:

have a hint of the vigor and vehemence of Pope himself, while they display, at the same time, the unfairness and exaggerated bitterness, so rarely mitigated by good humor, which were to distinguish the longer English Bards.

This poem, after all, was a mere scholastic experiment to be read only by those in close touch with events at Harrow. Fugitive Pieces contained also Byron’s earliest effort at political satire. An Impromptu, unsigned, and derogatory to Fox, had appeared in the Morning Post for September 26, 1806, only a few months after the death of the great Whig statesman, and the schoolboy, even then headed toward liberalism, came to the Minister’s defence in a reply published in the Morning Chronicle in October of the same year. The opening couplet:

proved that he possessed, with Gifford, the singular faculty of working himself, with very little cause, into a furious rage. When once he had let his wrath master him, he was uncontrollable, and he found satisfaction in nothing so much as in affixing scurrilous epithets to those who had aroused him. Until he had studied the Italian satirists, he was almost incapable of cool dissection of an enemy’s faults or shortcomings, and even then he never acquired the virtue of self-control.

This essay at political satire was not followed by other excursions into politics, probably because of the poet’s temporary indifference to the situation in England at the time. On January 15, 1809, in writing his solicitor, Hanson, concerning his entrance into the House of Lords, he said: “I cannot say that my opinion is strongly in favor of either party.”53 Not until after his return to England from his travels in 1811 and the beginning of his friendship with Moore, Hunt, and other active Whigs, did his interest in politics revive and his pen become a party weapon.

The last of the three classical satires in couplets to be found in Fugitive Pieces is Thoughts Suggested by a College Examination (1806), composed at Cambridge. It opens with a burlesque sketch of Magnus, a college tutor, but soon broadens into a general indictment of pedantry and scholastic sycophancy. Byron himself had desired to go to Oxford, and he never felt himself in sympathy with either the instructors or the educational system of his Alma Mater. This particular poem, however, is merely an outburst of boyish spleen, remarkable for nothing except a kind of sauciness not unknown in the university freshman.

Fugitive Pieces had been privately printed, with the addition of twelve poems, and with two poems omitted, as Poems on Various Occasions in January, 1807, and in the summer of the same year a new collection, consisting partly of selections from the two previous volumes and partly of hitherto unprinted work, was published under the title Hours of Idleness. A final edition, called Poems Original and Translated, appeared in 1808, comprising thirty-eight separate poems, five of them new. Among the poems in these volumes, and other verses of the same period, drawn from various sources and since gathered together in Mr. Coleridge’s authoritative edition of Byron’s poetry, there are several satires, many of them interesting in themselves and nearly all illuminating in their relation to the author’s later production.

Childish Recollections (1806),54 a sentimental reverie, is satiric in part, though it is devoted mostly to eulogies of Byron’s companions at Harrow. In the couplet,

he disavows any satiric intent, but this does not prevent him from indulging in some additional criticism of Dr. Butler. Regret for this passage induced Byron to omit the entire poem from Poems Original and Translated, and in ordering the excision he wrote Ridge: “As I am now reconciled to Dr. Butler I cannot allow my satire to appear against him.”

Damoetas, a short fragment of truculent characterization, may be a morbid bit of self-portraiture, but is more probably a cynical sketch of some acquaintance. The description is excessively bitter:—

The poems so far mentioned as composed by Byron before 1809 have been formal exercises in the manner of Pope, tentative efforts in the genre of which English Bards was to be Byron’s best example. Even in this early period, however, another phase of his satiric spirit appears, which hints of the future Don Juan; it trifles in a lighter vein, with less of invective and more of banter, and the style is lent a humorous touch by the use of odd and uncommon rhymes. The half-genial playfulness of these poems is decidedly different from the earnestness and intensity of Damoetas, and makes them akin to the familiar verse of Prior, Cowper, and Praed. One of the cleverer specimens is the poem with the elaborate title Lines to a Lady Who Presented to the Author a Lock of Her Hair Braided with His Own, and Appointed a Night in December to Meet Him in the Garden, in which thirteen rhymes out of twenty-two are double. These verses, printed first in Fugitive Pieces, are possibly the earliest in which evidence may be found of a sportive mood in Byron’s work. Their tone is both ironic and comic, and possible romance is turned into something ridiculous by a satiric use of realism. The poem is also one of the few examples of Byron’s employment of octosyllabic couplets for satiric purposes.

To Eliza (October 9, 1806), written to Elizabeth Pigot, Byron’s early correspondent and confidante, contains some cynical observations on marriage, with at least one line that might have fitted into Don Juan:

“Though women are angels, yet wedlock’s the devil.”

It is composed in stanzas made up of four anapestic lines. Granta, a Medley, written October 28, 1806, in one of the bursts of rhyming not uncommon with him at that period, treats, in a jocular fashion, of college life at Cambridge. Its chief interest lies in some of its peculiar rhymes, such as triangle-wrangle, historic use-hypothenuse, before him-tore ’em, crude enough in themselves, but prophetic of better skill to come, and in the fact that it uses the common quatrain of four-stressed lines, with alternate rhymes, a measure seldom found in Byron’s satire. To the Sighing Strephon, in a six-line stanza, while occasionally serious, is actually the reflection of a frivolous mood, and contains light satire. The trivial nature of these poems as contrasted with the vehemence of some other of his early satires, indicates that Byron’s satiric spirit even at that time was fickle and changeable, dependent often on his environment and varying constantly in response to alterations in his own temper. It is noticeable too that he was experimenting with several metrical forms, and trying his hand at extraordinary rhymes.

Byron’s path as an aspiring author was not always a smooth one, even before his name became generally known. Fugitive Pieces had been harshly criticised by several of his acquaintances, and, as we have seen, the objections of the hypercritical Becher had led to the destruction of the entire edition. But the proud young lord was not always tamely submissive to correction. In December, 1806, he wrote in Hudibrastic couplets the verses To a Knot of Ungenerous Critics, which express the same sort of injured pride and resentment that he afterwards showed toward Jeffrey and the Edinburgh reviewers:

Byron’s anger in these lines was directed apparently at certain ladies of Southwell, the little town where most of his Harrow vacations were spent; but though he mentioned one “portly female,” he had not yet reached the point where he ventured to call his enemies by name. This reserve, however, did not prevent him from breaking out in some caustic personal satire, in the course of which he did not spare the characters of the ladies in question. The same provocation led him to compose the Soliloquy of a Bard in the Country (1806), in heroic couplets, in which he seems to pick three persons—“physician, parson, dame”—as responsible for the adverse comment on Fugitive Pieces. In these satires the occasional sharpness of single phrases does not conceal a boyish timidity, which is evidence that Byron had not yet been stung enough to make him realize or display his full power. Neither of the poems was published during his lifetime, and they probably served only to gratify his revenge in private among his friends.

Possibly the last, and certainly the most cynical, of these early satires is the well-known Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog, dated by Byron from Newstead Abbey, October 30, 1808, though the animal did not die until November 18th. The twenty-six lines of the poem are now carved on a monument at Newstead, with an elaborate prose epitaph. Their misanthropy and savagery recall the contempt which Swift expressed for humanity in such poems as The Beasts’ Confession and the Lines on the Day of Judgment. An appropriate text for Byron’s verses might have been taken from Swift’s letter to Pope, September 29, 1725: “I heartily hate and detest that animal called man.” Doubtless Byron’s mood is due in part to an affectation of cynicism which reappeared frequently throughout his life; his hatred of mankind, if not actually assumed, was by no means the deep-seated emotion that agitated Swift.

A retrospective survey of the material so far considered again fastens our attention on the singular complexity of Byron’s satiric spirit. In a body of work comparatively meagre in content, he had used both invective and mockery, severity and humor. He had tried various metrical forms, some dignified and some colloquial. There is less to be said, however, for the intrinsic merit of the satires. No one of them is brilliant, nor does any one suggest marked intellectual power. The invective is too often mere indiscriminate ranting; the wit is, for the most part, sophomoric; and the assumption of superiority in one so young is, at times, exceedingly offensive. Here and there in single lines and passages, there are indications of latent genius; but many other young poets have shown as much.

These exercises, however, imitative and crude though they were, were training him in style and giving him confidence. When his anger was fully roused by the Edinburgh Review, he found himself prepared with an instrument for his purposes. English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, with all its faults, is not the product of an amateur in satire, but of a writer who, after much study of the methods of Pope and Gifford, has learned how to express his wrath in virulent couplets.