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,
“I, too, can scrawl, and once upon a time
I poured along the town a flood of rhyme,”[63]
have some resemblance to two lines of Gifford’s translation of Juvenal’s first satire,
“I, too, can write—and at a pedant’s frown,