“Young tyrants, by themselves misplaced,
Combined usurpers on the Throne of Taste.”
Churchill, rash though he was, was cautious enough not to print his opponents’ names, and they are to be discovered only through definite allusions. Byron, on the other hand, brought his satire into the open, and ridiculed “smug Sydney,” “classic Hallam,” “paltry Pillans,” “blundering Brougham,” and other contributors to the Edinburgh, never hesitating to give a name in full. Even Lord and Lady Holland, later Byron’s close friends, were included among the victims, as patrons of the Whig Review.
These resemblances between English Bards and some earlier satires of a like nature do not prove Byron a mere imitator. Enough has been shown, perhaps, to make it clear that his work belongs to a definite school of poetry, and that his verses show no marked originality. At the same time he never stoops to direct plagiarism, and whatever similarities exist with other poems are largely those of style and spirit, not of phraseology.
But there is much more in English Bards than the outburst against critics; dexterously Byron proceeded himself to don the garb of judge and to pass sentence on men older and better known than he. He had early adopted a conservative attitude towards the versification and subject-matter of poetry, a position which he preserved in theory throughout his life.[84] Having learned to use glibly the catchwords of the Augustans, he ventured to praise Crabbe, Campbell, Rogers, and Gifford for adhering tenaciously to the principles of Sense, Wit, Taste, and Correctness established by Pope. Acting on this basis, he was justified in condemning his own age for its disregard of what he considered to be the standard models of poetic expression.[85] Under the tutelage of Gifford, he had acquired a distaste for novelty which led him to look upon the romanticists as Gifford looked upon the Della Cruscans, and which induced him to carry his defence of custom and tradition almost to the verge of bigotry.
Something must be allowed, too, for the operation of contemporary ideas upon Byron. The leaders of the so-called Romantic Movement, partly because many of them had associated themselves with the Jacobin party in England, partly because their poetry seemed strange, were met from the first with opposition in many quarters.[86] Language of a tenor hostile to their work may be met with in Mathias, the Anti-Jacobin, Epics of the Ton, the Simpliciad, and Hodgson’s Gentle Alterative. The suggestions for many of the anti-romantic views since attributed to Byron alone came doubtless from other satirists, whose accusations Byron fitted into telling phrases.
An excellent illustration of this is to be found in Byron’s unprovoked attack upon Scott, in which the younger poet, seizing upon the well-known fact that Scott had received money for his verses, terms him “hireling bard” and “Apollo’s venal son.” Perhaps Byron may have shared with Young the snobbish notions about money expressed in the latter’s couplet:
“His [Apollo’s] sacred influence never should be sold;
’Tis arrant simony to sing for gold.”[87]
It is more probable, however, that he had in mind a passage from Epics of the Ton, in which Scott’s “well-paid lays” had been mentioned in a contemptuous manner.[88] Even in his charge that the plot of the Lay of the Last Minstrel was “incongruous and absurd,” Byron had been anticipated in a note to All the Talents.[89] The whole tirade against Scott in English Bards was particularly unfortunate because, as was revealed later, that author had remonstrated with Jeffrey on the “offensive criticism” of Hours of Idleness.