And, as they are unknown, are safe and wise.”[78]
Hodgson, in his Gentle Alterative (1809), had referred to a similar custom of the Edinburgh Review, by attacking,
“Chiefly those anonymously wise,
Who skulk in darkness from Detection’s eyes.”
The allusion in English Bards to “Northern Wolves, that still in darkness prowl”[79] may be explained by Byron’s objection to this practice, though he chooses to dwell on it very little.
The Apology had accused the critics of dissimulation and had alleged that their pages were full of misstatements—
“Ne’er was lie made that was not welcome there.”[80]
Byron made the same charge in advising contributors to the Edinburgh Review not to stick to the truth,
“Fear not to lie, ’twill seem a sharper hit.”[81]
It is quite apparent that the “self-elected monarchs” whom Churchill treated so cavalierly in 1761 had no more popularity among sensitive authors than did the body of critics whom Hodgson styled “self-raised arbiters of sense and wit”[82] whom Gifford spoke of as “mope-eyed dolts placed by thoughtless fashion on the throne of taste”[83] and whom Byron, in much the same phraseology, scorned as,