It is not inappropriate to point out that this ideal era to which Byron refers had been termed by Pope, who lived in it, “a Saturnian Age of lead.”[70] It required a maturer Byron to satirise this very satiric convention as he did in the first line of The Age of Bronze:
“The ‘good old times’—all times when old are good.”
Another generally accepted custom for the satirist was the apologetic formality of calling upon some supposedly more powerful censor to revive and scourge folly. Thus Young had asked,
“Why slumbers Pope, who leads the tuneful train,
Nor hears the virtue which he loves complain.”[71]
Whitehead’s State Dunces had opened with a similar invocation to Pope. At the end of the eighteenth century it was Gifford who seemed to have sunk into a torpor. Thus we find Canning in New Morality attempting to rouse him:
“Oh, where is now that promise? why so long
Sleep the keen shafts of satire and of song?”
Hodgson, Byron’s friend, in his Gentle Alterative had also appealed to Gifford. In the preface to the second edition of English Bards, Byron had, in his turn, regretted the listlessness of Gifford, and had modestly professed himself a mere country practitioner officiating in default of the regular physician; while in the satire itself he again sounded the familiar note, repeating the interrogation of Canning:
“‘Why slumbers Gifford?’ once was asked in vain;