English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, Byron’s first long poem, is, like the Dunciad and the Baviad, a satire principally on literary people. It was not, however, in its inception, planned to be either so pretentious or so comprehensive as it afterwards came to be. In a letter to Elizabeth Pigot, October 26, 1807, when Byron was still an undergraduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he referred casually to “one poem of 380 lines, to be published (without my name) in a few weeks, with notes,” and added, “The poem to be published is a satire.”55 The manuscript draft of the work as thus conceived contained 360 lines.

The actual stimulus for the enlargement of the poem came, however, from an external source. Injured vanity, the occasion of the earlier Soliloquy of a Bard in the Country, was also responsible for the completion of the half-formed satire of which Byron had written to Miss Pigot. On February 26, 1808, he wrote Becher: “A most violent attack is preparing for me in the next number of the Edinburgh Review.”56 The attack alluded to, a criticism of Hours of Idleness, unsigned but probably contributed by Brougham, appeared in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1807; but that number, in accordance with a practice not then uncommon, was delayed for over a month in going through the press, and was not actually on sale until March. The article itself, which has since become notorious for its bad taste, began with the scathing sentence: “The poetry of this young lord belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit.” Its attitude was certainly not calculated to encourage or soothe the youthful poet, and with his usual impetuosity, he at once sought a means of redress. Adding an introduction and a conclusion to his embryonic poem, and inserting an attack on Jeffrey, whom he supposed to be his critic, he had the whole privately printed, as British Bards, in the autumn of 1808. This work, revised and enlarged, but with some excisions,57 making a poem of 696 lines, was published anonymously in March, 1809, under the title English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. A letter of January 25, 1809, to Dallas proves that the poet had intended to conceal his authorship by inserting a slighting reference to “minor Byron,”58 but this ruse was not retained in the published volume.

The satire, as Byron told Medwin, made a prodigious impression. A second edition in October, 1809, was amplified by several interpolated passages so that it comprised 1050 lines. A third and a fourth edition were demanded while Byron was on his travels, and the fifth, including the 1070 lines of the poem as it is ordinarily printed to-day, was suppressed by him in 1811. In the second and succeeding editions his name was on the title-page.

His friend, Dallas, who had been favored with the perusal of the poem in manuscript, had suggested as a title, The Parish Poor of Parnassus, but Byron, with some wisdom, rejected this as too humorous,59 and chose English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. The present title indicates clearly the double object of the satire; for though it is, in one sense, an attempt at retaliation upon the editors of the Edinburgh Review, it is, in another, an eager and deliberate defence of the Popean tradition in poetry. It combines the motives of Churchill’s Apology and Gifford’s Baviad in that it aims, like the first, to castigate hostile critics, and like the second, to ridicule contemporary poets. Personal spite urged him to assail the “Scotch marauders,” Jeffrey, Horner, and their coterie; but he had no individual grudge to pay in satirising the “Southern dunces,” Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, and others. His attack upon them was actuated by the same sort of narrow spirit which he had condemned in his critics. The spectacle of Byron posing as an overthrower of intolerant reviewers, and in the same poem outdoing them in unjust and prejudiced criticism is not likely to leave the reader with an exalted opinion of the author’s consistency.

Presumably influenced by the example of Gifford, Byron deluded himself into believing that it was his mission to protest against the excesses of romanticism in poetry, and to engage “the swarm of idiots” who were infecting literature. He was to be “self-constituted judge of poesy”; and in pursuance of his design, the satire became a gallery of many figures, some sketched graphically, others merely limned in a line or a phrase. It is to Byron’s credit that his chosen victims were not, like those of Pope and Gifford, all poetasters. Doubtless there was a certain amount of chance in the causes that led him to be the opponent of men who have since been recognized as representative poets of their age; but in spite of the fact that Wordsworth and Coleridge, Southey and Moore, may not have been fully appreciated in 1809, they were, nevertheless, authors of reputation whom it was not altogether discreet to attack. As for Scott, he was the favorite writer of the period and no mean antagonist. Herford points out the daring character of the satire in saying: “It is a kind of inverted Dunciad; the novice falls upon the masters of his day, as the Augustan Master upon the nonentities of his.”

The originality of the satire was questioned as far back as 1822 in Blakwood’s Magazine, which, in a Letter to Paddy, said: “English Bards is, even to the most wretched point of its rhyme, most grossly and manifestly borrowed.”60 That this is inexcusable exaggeration hardly needs asserting; yet it is not detrimental to Byron to state that he had been anticipated in many of his criticisms to such an extent that his views could have offered little of novelty to his readers, and that some of his lines are reminiscent of the work of previous English satirists. He was no direct plagiarist, but he had a tenacious memory, and he had read omnivorously in Pope, Churchill, Gifford, and the minor satirists of his own time. It is not strange that he occasionally repeats phrases which had become, by inheritance, the common property of all English satirists.

Continuing a practice which, as we have seen, was instituted by Oldham and adopted by Pope and Gifford, Byron evidently intended to follow the general plan of the first satire of Juvenal. Pope, in the Satires and Epistles Imitated, had printed the Latin poems of Horace in parallel columns with his own verses.61 Gifford, in the Baviad, had placed sections of the text of Persius in notes at the bottom of the page, and had adhered rather closely to the structure of his Latin model. Byron, however, soon perceived the restrictions which such procedure would entail, and after indicating three examples of imitation in the first hundred lines, neglected Juvenal in order to pursue an independent course.62 Aside from these acknowledged imitations, it is interesting to notice that one couplet from English Bards,

have some resemblance to two lines of Gifford’s translation of Juvenal’s first satire,

These few instances excepted, there is no evidence in the poem of borrowing from the Latin satirists, nor is any one of them mentioned or quoted in English Bards.

It is curious that Byron, instead of striking out for himself in an original way, should have repeated complacently many of the time-honored ideas which had become almost fixed conventions in satire. It is customary, of course, for the satirist to complain of contemporary conditions and to sigh for the good old days; indeed, it would be possible to collate passages from satirists in an unbroken line from Juvenal to William Watson, each making it clear that the age in which the writer lives is decadent. As far back as 1523 we find in the verse preface to Rede Me and be nott wrothe, a couplet full of this lament:

Marvell, in An Historical Poem, wishes for the glorious period of the Tudors; Dryden, in the Epistle to Henry Higden, Esq., cries out against “our degenerate times”; and Pope, in the Dunciad, has a familiar reference to “these degen’rate days.” The same strain is repeated in Young,64 in Johnson,65 in Cowper,66 in Gifford,67 and even in Barrett.68 The tone of Byron’s jeremiad differs very little from that of those which have been cited:

It is not inappropriate to point out that this ideal era to which Byron refers had been termed by Pope, who lived in it, “a Saturnian Age of lead.”70 It required a maturer Byron to satirise this very satiric convention as he did in the first line of The Age of Bronze:

“The ‘good old times’—all times when old are good.”

Another generally accepted custom for the satirist was the apologetic formality of calling upon some supposedly more powerful censor to revive and scourge folly. Thus Young had asked,

Whitehead’s State Dunces had opened with a similar invocation to Pope. At the end of the eighteenth century it was Gifford who seemed to have sunk into a torpor. Thus we find Canning in New Morality attempting to rouse him:

Hodgson, Byron’s friend, in his Gentle Alterative had also appealed to Gifford. In the preface to the second edition of English Bards, Byron had, in his turn, regretted the listlessness of Gifford, and had modestly professed himself a mere country practitioner officiating in default of the regular physician; while in the satire itself he again sounded the familiar note, repeating the interrogation of Canning:

The emphatic language which he used elsewhere in admitting his indebtedness and even his inferiority to Gifford is, however, proof of the sincerity of this outburst.

A third convention, established if not originated in English by Pope, is the obligation felt by the satirist to pose as a defender of public morals and to insist upon his ethical purpose. Byron, partly affected by this tradition, partly believing himself to be, like Gifford, a champion of law and order in literature, tries to persuade his public that he is instigated entirely by lofty motives in giving vent to his anger:

It will not do, however, to take this assertion too seriously, especially since incitements of a far different sort seem to have occasioned several sections of the poem.

Besides conforming to the conventional practice of his predecessors in these three important respects, Byron linked himself with them by so many other ties that even in matters of minor detail English Bards resembles the classical satires of Pope and Gifford. As a satire it may justly be compared with the Dunciad and the Baviad, and may be judged by the standards which are applied to them.

An analysis of English Bards is rendered difficult by the lack of any coherent plan in the poem, and its consequent failure to follow any logical order in treating its material. The author wanders from his avowed theme to satirise the depravity of the Argyle Institution and to ridicule the antiquarian folly of Aberdeen and Elgin, slipping, moreover, easily from critics to bards and from bards to critics, as a train of observations occurs to him. The same excuse may be pleaded for him that Mathias advanced in his own behalf: that an informing personality lends a kind of unity to the poem. It may be said, too, that the classical satire, not aiming as a rule to be compact and close in structure, is very likely to become a panorama in which figures pass in long review. This impression is conveyed in English Bards by the use of stock phrases which serve to introduce each new character as if he were appearing in a parade of celebrities.74

Under the false impression that Jeffrey was responsible for the scornful review of Hours of Idleness, Byron singled him out for violent abuse, though he did not neglect his colleagues, “the allied usurpers on the throne of taste.” For his attack on critics as a class Byron could have found much encouragement in previous English satire. Dryden had expressed a common enough feeling of authors, in the lines:

Pope had condemned the “bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,” who knows no method in his calling but censure.76 Young had carried out rather tamely in his third satire his boastful intention of falling upon critics:

Aside from these more or less incidental aspersions, at least two entire satires had been written upon critics. Cuthbert Shaw, enraged by what he thought an unfair account of his Race (1762) in the Critical Review, prefixed to the second edition of that poem an Address to the Critics, in which he heaped vituperation on all the reviewers of his time. Only a few months before this, Churchill in his Apology Addressed to the Critical Reviewers (1761) had constructed a satire very similar in motive and plan to Byron’s English Bards. A fairly close parallel may, in fact, be evolved between the two poems. Both are replies to the severe comments of critics on an earlier work77; both assail Scotch editors, the victim being, in the one case, Smollett, in the other, Jeffrey; both digress from the main theme, the one to renew the controversy with actors begun in the Rosciad, the other to satirise a new movement in poetry.

It is characteristic of both Churchill and Byron that, instead of attempting to defend their verses, they devote all their attention to reviling their reviewers. Byron’s retaliation is less vigorous than Churchill’s; indeed it may be said that English Bards is weakest in the place where it should have been most effective—in the passage directed at Jeffrey. Byron compares his antagonist to the hangman Jeffries, and describes in burlesque fashion the duel between him and Moore; but he fastens on him no epithet worth remembering and abuses him in lines which are neither incisive nor witty.

Churchill had made an especial point of the anonymous character of the articles in the Critical Review, and had said of the editors:

Hodgson, in his Gentle Alterative (1809), had referred to a similar custom of the Edinburgh Review, by attacking,

The allusion in English Bards to “Northern Wolves, that still in darkness prowl”79 may be explained by Byron’s objection to this practice, though he chooses to dwell on it very little.

The Apology had accused the critics of dissimulation and had alleged that their pages were full of misstatements—

“Ne’er was lie made that was not welcome there.”80

Byron made the same charge in advising contributors to the Edinburgh Review not to stick to the truth,

“Fear not to lie, ’twill seem a sharper hit.”81

It is quite apparent that the “self-elected monarchs” whom Churchill treated so cavalierly in 1761 had no more popularity among sensitive authors than did the body of critics whom Hodgson styled “self-raised arbiters of sense and wit”82 whom Gifford spoke of as “mope-eyed dolts placed by thoughtless fashion on the throne of taste”83 and whom Byron, in much the same phraseology, scorned as,

Churchill, rash though he was, was cautious enough not to print his opponents’ names, and they are to be discovered only through definite allusions. Byron, on the other hand, brought his satire into the open, and ridiculed “smug Sydney,” “classic Hallam,” “paltry Pillans,” “blundering Brougham,” and other contributors to the Edinburgh, never hesitating to give a name in full. Even Lord and Lady Holland, later Byron’s close friends, were included among the victims, as patrons of the Whig Review.

These resemblances between English Bards and some earlier satires of a like nature do not prove Byron a mere imitator. Enough has been shown, perhaps, to make it clear that his work belongs to a definite school of poetry, and that his verses show no marked originality. At the same time he never stoops to direct plagiarism, and whatever similarities exist with other poems are largely those of style and spirit, not of phraseology.

But there is much more in English Bards than the outburst against critics; dexterously Byron proceeded himself to don the garb of judge and to pass sentence on men older and better known than he. He had early adopted a conservative attitude towards the versification and subject-matter of poetry, a position which he preserved in theory throughout his life.84 Having learned to use glibly the catchwords of the Augustans, he ventured to praise Crabbe, Campbell, Rogers, and Gifford for adhering tenaciously to the principles of Sense, Wit, Taste, and Correctness established by Pope. Acting on this basis, he was justified in condemning his own age for its disregard of what he considered to be the standard models of poetic expression.85 Under the tutelage of Gifford, he had acquired a distaste for novelty which led him to look upon the romanticists as Gifford looked upon the Della Cruscans, and which induced him to carry his defence of custom and tradition almost to the verge of bigotry.

Something must be allowed, too, for the operation of contemporary ideas upon Byron. The leaders of the so-called Romantic Movement, partly because many of them had associated themselves with the Jacobin party in England, partly because their poetry seemed strange, were met from the first with opposition in many quarters.86 Language of a tenor hostile to their work may be met with in Mathias, the Anti-Jacobin, Epics of the Ton, the Simpliciad, and Hodgson’s Gentle Alterative. The suggestions for many of the anti-romantic views since attributed to Byron alone came doubtless from other satirists, whose accusations Byron fitted into telling phrases.

An excellent illustration of this is to be found in Byron’s unprovoked attack upon Scott, in which the younger poet, seizing upon the well-known fact that Scott had received money for his verses, terms him “hireling bard” and “Apollo’s venal son.” Perhaps Byron may have shared with Young the snobbish notions about money expressed in the latter’s couplet:

It is more probable, however, that he had in mind a passage from Epics of the Ton, in which Scott’s “well-paid lays” had been mentioned in a contemptuous manner.88 Even in his charge that the plot of the Lay of the Last Minstrel was “incongruous and absurd,” Byron had been anticipated in a note to All the Talents.89 The whole tirade against Scott in English Bards was particularly unfortunate because, as was revealed later, that author had remonstrated with Jeffrey on the “offensive criticism” of Hours of Idleness.

Byron’s antagonism to the so-called Lake School of poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, began early and continued long. In 1809 it is improbable that he had any acquaintance with any one of the three; yet he placed them in a conspicuous and unenviable position in English Bards. His primary motives in attacking them have already been indicated. Considering them as faddists who were lowering the dignity of the author’s calling and degrading poetic style, he followed the Simpliciad in condemning them for the contemptible nature of their subject-matter, for their simple diction, for their fondness for the wild and unnatural, and for their studied avoidance of conventionality.

Southey’s first verse had appeared in 1794; while Wordsworth and Coleridge had been really introduced to the public through Lyrical Ballads. Opposition to them and their theories had begun to be shown almost immediately, allusions to Southey, in particular, being fairly common in satiric literature before 1809. Mathias had said ironically with reference to Southey’s first poem:

In the Anti-Jacobin Southey’s poetry had been ludicrously parodied, and the members of the Lake School had been branded as revolutionists. Epics of the Ton had ridiculed Southey and Wordsworth,91 and the Simpliciad had accused all three of “childish prattle.”92 Byron, then, was no pioneer in his satire on the romanticists, nor did he contribute anything original to the controversy. The frequency and rapidity with which Southey had published long epics had impressed others before Byron cried in English Bards:

In this early satire Byron showed no personal animosity towards Southey; he introduced him merely as a too prolific and too eccentric scribbler, to be jeered at rather than hated. The fierce feud between the two men was of a later growth.

Picking Southey as the leader of the romanticists, Byron treats Wordsworth as merely a “dull disciple,” silly in his choice of subjects and prosaic in his poetry, “the meanest object of the lowly group.” Perhaps the most striking defect in the satire levelled at this poet is the lack of any recognition of his ability, an omission all the more noticeable because Byron, in the last two cantos of Childe Harold, was influenced so strongly by Wordsworth’s conception of the relation between man and nature. Coleridge receives even less consideration. He is “the gentle Coleridge—to turgid ode and tumid stanza dear,” and is ridiculed mainly because of his Lines to a Young Ass, a poem which had previously excited the mirth of the Simpliciad.94 The slashing manner in which the boy satirist disposes of his great contemporaries is almost unparalleled.95

Byron’s satire on the Rev. Samuel Bowles (1762–1850) illustrates one phase of his veneration for Pope, and connects him with another Pope enthusiast, Gifford. In the Baviad Gifford had gone out of his way to confront and refute Weston, who, in an article in the Gentleman’s Magazine, had adduced evidence to prove that Pope’s moral character was not above reproach. Gifford, unable to dispute the validity of the facts, had contented himself with describing the critic as “canker’d Weston,” and terming him in a note “this nightman of literature.”96 Bowles, whose early sonnets (1789) had attracted the admiration of Coleridge, published in 1807 an edition of Pope’s Works in ten volumes, in which he followed Weston in not sparing the infirmities and mendacities of the great Augustan. The effect of this work on Byron was like that of Weston’s on Gifford, and the result was that Bowles was pilloried in English Bards as “the wretch who did for hate what Mallet did for hire.” Nor did the quarrel end here. It grew eventually into a heated controversy between Bowles and Byron, carried on while the latter was in Italy, in the course of which Byron was provoked into calling Pope “the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence.”97 So strongly did he feel on the matter that he wrote, even as late as 1821, concerning English Bards: “The part which I regret the least is that which regards Mr. Bowles, with reference to Pope.”98 Byron’s exaltation of Pope was made a positive issue in the unreserved commendation which he gave to Campbell, Rogers, and Crabbe, all three of whom were, in most respects, firm in their allegiance to that master’s principles of poetry.

An odd freak of fancy led Byron to pose in English Bards as a watchful guardian of morality in literature, though even at that date he was the author of verses which are not altogether blameless. That he should upbraid Monk Lewis, Moore, and Strangford as “melodious advocates of lust” may well seem extraordinary to the reader who recalls the poem which Byron sent to Pigot, August 10, 1806, asking that it be printed separately as “improper for the perusal of ladies.”99 The truth is that Byron was again treading in the steps of others. The virtuous but somewhat prurient Mathias, excited by Lewis’s novel Ambrosio, or the Monk (1795), which has given the writer notoriety and a nickname, had assailed the author in Pursuits of Literature,100 and the supposed voluptuousness of the story had not escaped the notice of the Anti-Jacobin and Epics of the Ton. Byron had thus more than one precedent for his ironic reference to Lewis’s “chaste descriptions.” Moore’s Epistles, Odes, and other Poems (1806) had been censured by the Edinburgh Review in an article which described Moore as “the most licentious of modern versifiers.” All the Talents had questioned Moore’s morality, and Epics of the Ton had mentioned a writer who,

Byron had been a delighted reader of the Irish poet and had been influenced by him in the more sentimental verses of Hours of Idleness; nevertheless he repeated the imputations of the other satirists in referring to him as

To Viscount Strangford (1780–1855), of whose translation of Camoëns he had formerly been very fond, Byron offered advice:

“Be warm, but pure; be amorous, but be chaste.”

In the same vein as this grave admonition are the remarks which the poet makes upon the Argyle Institution, founded by Colonel Greville as a resort for gambling and dancing. Digressing for a while without any logical reason, Byron proceeds to condemn social follies, especially those fostered by “blest retreats of infamy and ease.” The passage includes some lines on round dancing, which anticipate Byron’s attack on that amusement in his later satire, The Waltz.

Gifford’s Mæviad, after making some final thrusts at the Della Cruscans, had shifted its attack to contemporary actors and dramatists. That satire upon them was justified may be gathered from Gifford’s remark in his Preface: “I know not if the stage has been so low since the days of Gammer Gurton as at this hour.”101 During the fifteen years following the date of this statement it cannot be averred that circumstances made it any the less applicable to the theatrical situation in England, and Byron, in 1809, in ridiculing the “motley sight” which met his eyes on the stage of his time, had perhaps even more justification than Gifford had had in 1794.102

Of the dramatists whom Gifford had mentioned with disfavor, only two, Frederick Reynolds (1784–1841) and Miles Andrews (died 1814), were selected for notice by Byron. What the Mæviad had called “Reynolds’ flippant trash” was still enjoying some vogue, and English Bards took occasion to speak of the author as “venting his ‘dammes!’ ‘poohs!’ and ‘zounds!’”103 Miles Andrews, whose “Wonder-working poetry” had been laughed at in the Baviad, was barely mentioned by Byron as a writer who “may live in prologues, though his dramas die.” In general the satire on the stage in English Bards consists of uninteresting remarks on some mediocre dramatists, among them Theodore Hook (1788–1841), Andrew Cherry (1762–1812), James Kenney (1780–1849), Thomas Sheridan (1775–1817), Lumley Skeffington (1762–1850), and T. J. Dibdin (1771–1841). It is a fair contention that this digression is the dreariest portion of the poem. The interpolated lines on the Italian Opera, sent to Dallas, February 22, 1809, after an evening spent at a performance, attack that amusement on the ground of its indecency. They are akin in spirit to similar passages in Young,104 Pope,105 Churchill,106 and Bramston.107

The satire on less-known poets is indiscriminate and not always discerning. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), who, in his Botanic Garden (1789–92), was a decadent imitator of Pope, is contemptuously dismissed as “a mighty master of unmeaning rhyme.” Another once popular bard, William Hayley (1745–1820), still remembered as the friend and biographer of Cowper, is branded with a stinging couplet:

The Delia Cruscans are passed over as already crushed by Gifford, and “sepulchral Grahame,” “hoarse Fitzgerald,” the Cottles from Bristol, Maurice, and the cobbler poets, Blackett and Bloomfield, get only a fleeting sneer. H. J. Pye, the laureate, once a butt of Mathias, is mentioned only once.

Two characterizations, however, are distinguished above the others by their singular virulence. The first was a vicious onslaught on Lord Carlisle, the friend of Fox, Byron’s relative and guardian, who had been included among the sentimental rhymsters in Tickell’s Wreath of Fashion. To him his ward had dedicated Poems Original and Translated; but the peer’s carelessness about introducing Byron into the House of Lords had irritated the young poet, and he changed what had previously been a flattering notice in English Bards into a ferocious assault:

The sharpest satire in the poem was inserted merely to satisfy a personal grudge. Hewson Clarke (1787–1832), editor of The Satirist, a monthly magazine, had made sport of Hours of Idleness in an issue for October, 1807, and had harshly reviewed Poems Original and Translated in August, 1808. Byron replied in a passage full of violent invective, describing Clarke as

These lines Byron never repudiated; he appended to them in 1816 the note: “Right enough: this was well deserved and well laid on.”109

English Bards closes with a defiance and a challenge. The poet, then only twenty-one, repeating that his only motive has been “to sternly speak the truth,” dares his opponents to meet him in the open and declares his willingness to engage them. There is something amusing in the pompous way in which Byron, throwing down the gauntlet, boasts of his own indifference and callousness to criticism. He had, however, achieved at least one of his two objects: he had answered hostile reviewers in a manner which made it plain that he would not submit unresistingly to supercilious comment on his work. Assuredly he had turned the weapons of his critics against themselves.

Nothing was more natural than that Byron, his wrath for the most part evaporated, should regret his bitterness in cases where his hasty judgment had carried him too far. On his way home from Greece he wrote Dallas: “At this period when I can think and act coolly, I regret that I have written it.”110 The story of the events leading to the suppression of the fifth and last edition may be given in the words of Byron to Leigh Hunt, October 22, 1815: “I was correcting the fifth edition of E. B. for the press, when Rogers represented to me that he knew Lord and Lady Holland would not be sorry if I suppressed any further publication of that poem; and I immediately acquiesced, and with great pleasure, for I had attacked them upon a fancied and false provocation, with many others; and neither was, nor am, sorry to have done what I could to stifle that furious rhapsody.”111 The result was that the whole impression of this edition was burned, only a few copies being rescued, and when, in 1816, Byron left England forever, he signed a Power of Attorney forbidding republication in any form.112 His mature opinion of the work is expressed in a comment written at Diodati in 1816: “The greater part of this Satire I most sincerely wish had never been written—not only on account of the injustice of some of the critical and some of the personal part of it—but the tone and temper are such as I cannot approve.”

It now remains to compare English Bards with other examples of English classical satire, if one may apply that title to poems which use the heroic couplet and follow the methods employed by Pope. Byron’s versification in his early satires shows the effect of a careful study of Pope. It is singularly free from double rhymes, there being but five instances of them in English Bards.113 Byron was somewhat more sparing than Pope in his use of the run-on line. Adopting as a basis of judgment the conclusion of Mr. Gosse that “with occasional exceptions, the presence or want of a mark of punctuation may be made the determining element,” we find that, of the 1070 lines in English Bards, approximately 101 are of the run-on variety, that is, about ten out of every hundred. In Mr. Gosse’s collation of typical passages from other poets, he estimates that Dryden has 11, Pope 4, and Keats 40 run-on lines out of every hundred. In the whole length of Byron’s poem there is but one run-on couplet; in a hundred consecutive lines selected by Mr. Gosse, Dryden has one such example and Pope none. Twice Byron employs the triplet,114 and he has two alexandrines.115 The medial cæsura after the 4th, 5th, or 6th foot of the line occurs with great regularity as it does in Pope’s work. There are a few minor peculiarities in rhyming,116 but in general the rhymes are pure. In summarizing, it is safe to say that Byron adhered closely to the metrical principles established by Pope. Not until Hunt, Keats, and Shelley introduced the looser and less monotonous system of versification used in Rimini, Endymion, and Epipsychidion, was the heroic couplet freed from the shackles with which Pope had bound it.

Byron’s candid acknowledgment that, in English Bards, he was venturing “o’er the path which Pope and Gifford trod before” suggests at once a comparison of his work with that of the two earlier authors. Although the Dunciad and English Bards are alike in that they are in the same metre and actuated by much the same motive, there are many differences in execution between the poems. The Dunciad is, as the Preface of “Martinus Scriblerus” states, a true mock-heroic, with a fable “one and entire” dealing with the Empire and the Goddess of Dulness, with machinery setting forth a “continued chain of allegories,” and with a succession of incidents and episodes imitated from epic writers. English Bards, beginning as a paraphrase of Juvenal, has no real action and is composed of a series of descriptions and characterizations, joined by some necessary connective material. Pope’s method of satire is frequently indirect: he involves his victims in the plot, making them ridiculous through the situations in which he places them. Instead of inveighing against Blackmore, Pope pictures him as victor in a braying contest. Byron, on the other hand, uses this method only once in English Bards—in burlesquing the duel between Jeffrey and Moore. Instinctively he prefers taking up his adversaries one by one and covering each with abuse. The Dunciad, with rare exceptions, assails only personal enemies of the satirist, and these, for the most part, men already despised and defenceless; Byron attacks many prominent writers of whom he knows nothing except their work, and against whom he has no grievance of a private nature. Thus in plan and operation the two satires present some striking divergences.

So far as matters of detail are concerned, English Bards is not always in the manner of the Dunciad and the other satires of Pope. It has been observed of Dryden, and occasionally of Pope, that at its best their satire, however much it may be aimed at particular persons, tends to become universal in its application, just as had been the case with the finest work of the Latin satirists. Horace’s Bore, for instance, was doubtless once a definite Roman citizen; Dryden’s Buckingham has a place in history: but the satire on them is pointed and effective when applied to their counterparts in the twentieth century. The same is true of Pope’s Atticus, who is described in language which is both specific and general, fitted both to Addison and to a definite type of humanity. The faculty of thus creating types was not part of Byron’s art. For one thing, he seldom, except in some of his earliest satires, employs type names, and he carefully prints in full, without asterisks or blank spaces, the names of those whom he attacks. His accusations are too precise to admit of transference to others, and his epithets, even when they are unsatisfactory, cannot be dissevered from the one to whom they apply. The satire on Wordsworth, illustrated as it is by quotations and by references to that author’s poetry, is appropriate to him alone, and would have soon been forgotten had it not been for the eminence of the victim. It is otherwise with Pope’s description of Sporus, which is often applied to others, even when it is forgotten that the original Sporus was Lord Hervey.

In many respects Byron had more in common with Gifford than with Pope. It is Gifford to whom, in English Bards, he refers so often as a master; it is he whom he mentions in 1811 as his “Magnus Apollo”117; and it was of the Baviad and the Mæviad that he was thinking when he conceived his plan of hunting down the “clamorous brood of Folly.”

Pope, preserving in his satire a calm deliberation which enabled him both to conceal and to concentrate his inward wrath, was capable, even when most in a rage, of a sustained analysis of those whom he hated, and seldom let his temper sweep him off his feet. Gifford and Byron prefer a more slashing and a less reserved method. Dallas once said of Byron: “His feelings rather than his judgment guided his pen.”118 The same idea was also expressed by the poet himself:—“Almost all I have written has been mere passion.”119 These two statements, confirming each other, explain the lack of poise and the want of a sense of proportion which are apparent in English Bards, as they were apparent in the Baviad. Unlike Dryden, neither Gifford nor Pope allows his victims any merit; each paints entirely in sombre colors, without ever perfecting a finished sketch or alleviating the black picture with the admission of a single virtue. Their conclusions, naturally, are unpleasantly dogmatic, founded as they are on prejudice and seldom subjected to reason. Most satire is, of course, biassed and unjust, but the careful craftsman takes good care that his charges shall have a semblance of plausibility and shall not defeat their purpose by arousing in reaction a sympathy for the defendant.120 Satire written in a rage is likely to be mere invective, and invective, even when embodied in artistic form, is usually less effective than deliberate irony. Byron in his later satire learned better than to portray an enemy as all fool or all knave.

Gifford was, as he sedulously protested, fighting for a principle, aiming at the extermination of certain forms of affectation and false taste in poetry. There is no ground for suspecting his sincerity, any more than there is for questioning Byron’s motive in his effort to defend the classical standards against the encroachments of romanticism. It so happened that Gifford was performing a genuine service to letters, while Byron engaged himself in a struggle at once unnecessary and hopeless. In their zeal and enthusiasm, however, both satirists lost a feeling for values. Gifford delivered sledge-hammer blows at butterflies; Byron classed together, without discernment, the work of mediocrity and genius, and heaped abuse indiscriminately upon poetaster and poet.

Gifford’s method, like Byron’s, was descriptive and direct, and his satires have little action. The Baviad, with its dialogue framework, is not unlike some of Pope’s Epistles, while the Mæviad is more akin to English Bards. Byron, following Mathias and Gifford, employed prose notes to reinforce his verse, but he never, like Gifford, padded them with quotations from the men whom he was attacking. In both the Mæviad and English Bards names are printed in full. Gifford used no type names, nor did he succeed in creating a type. In style and diction Byron is Gifford’s superior. The latter was often vulgar and inelegant, and his ear for rhythm and melody was poor. Byron’s instinctive good taste kept him from blotting his pages with the language of the streets. His study of Pope, moreover, had enabled him to acquire something of the smoothness as well as of the vigor of that master.

It may be said in general of English Bards that it owes most in versification to Pope, and most in manner and structure to Gifford. There are, however, other satirists to whom Byron may have been slightly indebted. At the time when he was preparing British Bards, Francis Hodgson (1781–1852), his close friend, irritated by some severe criticism in the Edinburgh Review on his translation of Juvenal (1807), was planning his Gentle Alterative prepared for the Reviewers, which appeared in Lady Jane Grey; and other Poems (1809). The fact that the provocation was the same as for English Bards and that the two authors were acquaintances offers a curious case of parallelism in literature. It is certain, however, that Byron’s satire, which is much longer than the Gentle Alterative, is indebted to it only in minor respects, if at all. Both satires mention the ludicrous mistake of an Edinburgh Review article in attributing to Payne Knight some Greek passages really quoted from Pindar; but this error had been discussed in a long note to All the Talents, and was a favorite literary joke of the period. Both poets, too, call upon the master, Gifford, to do his part in castigating the age. Beyond these superficial similarities, it may safely be asserted that Byron borrowed nothing from Hodgson.

It is curious that the striking simile of the eagle shot by an arrow winged with a feather from his own plume used by Moore in Corruption121 should have been employed by Byron122 in speaking of the tragic death of Henry Kirke White (1785–1805), the religious poet and protégé of Southey. The simile, which has been traced to Fragment 123 of Æschylus, occurs also in Waller’s To a Lady Singing a Song of His Own Composing. It is somewhat remarkable that two poets in two successive years should have happened upon the same figure, each working it out so elaborately. Aside from this one parallelism, Moore’s early satires, almost entirely political, would seem to have had no definite influence upon English Bards.

It has been shown, then, that Byron’s ideas in his satire were not always entirely his own, and that he reflected, in many cases, the views and sometimes the phraseology of other satirists, notably Pope, Churchill, and Gifford. English Bards belongs to the school of English classical satire, and, as such, has the peculiarities and the established features common to the different types of that genre. In the preface to the second edition of his poem, Byron said: “I can safely say that I have attacked none personally, who did not commence on the offensive.”123 To accept this literally would be to misinterpret Byron’s whole theory of satire. Whether he admitted it or not he was a great personal satirist—in English Bards, primarily a personal satirist. Looking back at the time when his wrath was fiercest, he said: “Like Ishmael, my hand was against all men, and all men’s against me.”124 Even when satirising a principle or a movement, he was invariably led to attack the individuals who represented it. Swift’s satiric code: