Under the false impression that Jeffrey was responsible for the scornful review of Hours of Idleness, Byron singled him out for violent abuse, though he did not neglect his colleagues, “the allied usurpers on the throne of taste.” For his attack on critics as a class Byron could have found much encouragement in previous English satire. Dryden had expressed a common enough feeling of authors, in the lines:
“They who write ill, and they who ne’er durst write,
Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.”[75]
Pope had condemned the “bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,” who knows no method in his calling but censure.[76] Young had carried out rather tamely in his third satire his boastful intention of falling upon critics:
“Like the bold bird upon the banks of Nile,
That picks the teeth of the vile crocodile.”
Aside from these more or less incidental aspersions, at least two entire satires had been written upon critics. Cuthbert Shaw, enraged by what he thought an unfair account of his Race (1762) in the Critical Review, prefixed to the second edition of that poem an Address to the Critics, in which he heaped vituperation on all the reviewers of his time. Only a few months before this, Churchill in his Apology Addressed to the Critical Reviewers (1761) had constructed a satire very similar in motive and plan to Byron’s English Bards. A fairly close parallel may, in fact, be evolved between the two poems. Both are replies to the severe comments of critics on an earlier work[77]; both assail Scotch editors, the victim being, in the one case, Smollett, in the other, Jeffrey; both digress from the main theme, the one to renew the controversy with actors begun in the Rosciad, the other to satirise a new movement in poetry.
It is characteristic of both Churchill and Byron that, instead of attempting to defend their verses, they devote all their attention to reviling their reviewers. Byron’s retaliation is less vigorous than Churchill’s; indeed it may be said that English Bards is weakest in the place where it should have been most effective—in the passage directed at Jeffrey. Byron compares his antagonist to the hangman Jeffries, and describes in burlesque fashion the duel between him and Moore; but he fastens on him no epithet worth remembering and abuses him in lines which are neither incisive nor witty.
Churchill had made an especial point of the anonymous character of the articles in the Critical Review, and had said of the editors:
“Wrapt in mysterious secrecy they rise,