Gifford’s Mæviad, after making some final thrusts at the Della Cruscans, had shifted its attack to contemporary actors and dramatists. That satire upon them was justified may be gathered from Gifford’s remark in his Preface: “I know not if the stage has been so low since the days of Gammer Gurton as at this hour.”[101] During the fifteen years following the date of this statement it cannot be averred that circumstances made it any the less applicable to the theatrical situation in England, and Byron, in 1809, in ridiculing the “motley sight” which met his eyes on the stage of his time, had perhaps even more justification than Gifford had had in 1794.[102]
Of the dramatists whom Gifford had mentioned with disfavor, only two, Frederick Reynolds (1784–1841) and Miles Andrews (died 1814), were selected for notice by Byron. What the Mæviad had called “Reynolds’ flippant trash” was still enjoying some vogue, and English Bards took occasion to speak of the author as “venting his ‘dammes!’ ‘poohs!’ and ‘zounds!’”[103] Miles Andrews, whose “Wonder-working poetry” had been laughed at in the Baviad, was barely mentioned by Byron as a writer who “may live in prologues, though his dramas die.” In general the satire on the stage in English Bards consists of uninteresting remarks on some mediocre dramatists, among them Theodore Hook (1788–1841), Andrew Cherry (1762–1812), James Kenney (1780–1849), Thomas Sheridan (1775–1817), Lumley Skeffington (1762–1850), and T. J. Dibdin (1771–1841). It is a fair contention that this digression is the dreariest portion of the poem. The interpolated lines on the Italian Opera, sent to Dallas, February 22, 1809, after an evening spent at a performance, attack that amusement on the ground of its indecency. They are akin in spirit to similar passages in Young,[104] Pope,[105] Churchill,[106] and Bramston.[107]
The satire on less-known poets is indiscriminate and not always discerning. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), who, in his Botanic Garden (1789–92), was a decadent imitator of Pope, is contemptuously dismissed as “a mighty master of unmeaning rhyme.” Another once popular bard, William Hayley (1745–1820), still remembered as the friend and biographer of Cowper, is branded with a stinging couplet:
“His style in youth or age is still the same,
Forever feeble and forever tame.”
The Delia Cruscans are passed over as already crushed by Gifford, and “sepulchral Grahame,” “hoarse Fitzgerald,” the Cottles from Bristol, Maurice, and the cobbler poets, Blackett and Bloomfield, get only a fleeting sneer. H. J. Pye, the laureate, once a butt of Mathias, is mentioned only once.
Two characterizations, however, are distinguished above the others by their singular virulence. The first was a vicious onslaught on Lord Carlisle, the friend of Fox, Byron’s relative and guardian, who had been included among the sentimental rhymsters in Tickell’s Wreath of Fashion. To him his ward had dedicated Poems Original and Translated; but the peer’s carelessness about introducing Byron into the House of Lords had irritated the young poet, and he changed what had previously been a flattering notice in English Bards into a ferocious assault:
“The puny schoolboy and his early lay
Men pardon, if his follies pass away;
But who forgives the Senior’s ceaseless verse,