[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.