“Oh, factious viper! whose envenomed tooth,
Would mangle still the dead, perverting truth,”
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,
“Let keener bards delight in Satire’s sting,
My fancy soars not on Detraction’s wing,”
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.”