Once poured my fustian rhetoric on the town.”
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:
“This worlde is worsse than evyr it was,
Never so depe in miserable decaye.”
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:
“Time was, ere yet in these degenerate days
Ignoble themes obtained mistaken praise,
When Sense and Wit with Poesy allied,
No fabled Graces, flourished side by side.”[69]