Rokeby
, completed December 31, 1812, was published in the following year, with a dedication to John Morritt, to whom Rokeby belonged. It was, as Scott admits in the Preface to the edition of 1830, comparatively a failure. In the popularity of Byron he finds the chief cause of the small success which his poem obtained.
"To have kept his ground at the crisis when Rokeby appeared," he writes, "its author ought to have put forth his utmost strength, and to have possessed all his original advantages, for a mighty and unexpected rival was advancing on the stage—a rival not in poetical powers only, but in that art of attracting popularity, in which the present writer had hitherto preceded better men than himself. The reader will easily see that Byron is here meant, who, after a little velitation of no great promise, now appeared as a serious candidate, in the first two cantos of Childe Harold."
On this rivalry Byron wrote the passage in his Diary for November 17, 1813. A further cause for the cold reception of
Rokeby
was its inferiority both to the
Lay
and to
Marmion