is slightly more literal.
Horace’s treatise, technically an epistle, suffers from a want of coherence. In plan it is merely a group of maxims, with illustrations and amplifications. Hints from Horace is even more muddled and formless. It is like a collection of detached thoughts in verse, with each single observation jotted down almost at haphazard without regard to what comes before or after. It is no exaggeration to say that whole sections of the satire might be lifted bodily from one page to another without perceptibly affecting the continuity of thought. This defect, obscured in Horace and Pope by the epigrammatic brilliancy of separate phrases and the lift of “winged words,” has, in Byron’s poem, few counterbalancing virtues. Hints from Horace lacks the finished perfection of style which distinguishes the Ars Poetica and the Epistle to Augustus. Its versification is, except in isolated lines, feeble and careless, far inferior to that of English Bards, and even sinking at times, as in the passage on Hudibras,[137] into bare prosing. One finds in the poem confirmation of Byron’s confession to Lord Holland in 1812:—“Latterly, I can weave a nine-line stanza faster than a couplet, for which measure I have not the cunning.”[138] If the dates furnished by the poet are correct, 722 lines, at least, of the satire must have been composed in two weeks, a speed which may explain some of the defects in execution. Certainly, even with due allowance for Byron’s strange fondness, it must be considered one of his poorest works in structure, diction, and versification.
Nor can it, viewed merely as a medium for satire, claim a high rank. It is too obviously didactic in its purpose and too general in its attacks. It does not even possess the special interest which attaches to English Bards because of the references to contemporary and famous writers in the latter work. Only a few lines are devoted to personal satire, and these seldom do more than repeat or amplify the criticism embodied in the earlier poem. The result is that Hints from Horace, taken as a satire only, is open to a charge of futility, in that its motive is not definite and its satire is too scattered. It cannot go straight to the mark, because it is aiming at no particular target.
As in English Bards, a large proportion of the satire is placed in prose notes. The longest passage of satire in verse is that directed at Jeffrey. The lines:—
“On shores of Euxine or Ægean sea,
My hate, untraveiled, fondly turned to thee,”
show that Byron’s rage at that critic was still smouldering. Repeating the bombastic challenge uttered in the postscript to the second edition of English Bards, the satirist taunts Jeffrey with disinclination or inability to reply to the assault made upon him. It is probable that the Scotchman never saw this passage in Hints from Horace; at any rate he did not deign to answer Byron’s abuse, and maintained a discreet silence during the period of the latter’s anger.
The lines on Southey reiterate in a commonplace fashion what Byron had said before on the same subject, a long prose note dwelling on the heaviness of Southey’s epics, particularly of The Curse of Kehama (1810), which had recently appeared. Another elaborate note is aimed at the “cobbler-laureates,” Bloomfield and Blackett, whom Byron still mentions with contempt. Scott and Bowles receive some passing uncomplimentary remarks; Fitzgerald is referred to once as “Fitz-scribble”; Wordsworth is barely alluded to, and Coleridge is not spoken of at all. The review of the drama is uninteresting and dull. Byron persists in his condemnation of the Opera on the ground of its immorality, although, somewhat inconsistently, he defends plays against the prudish censure of “Methodistic men.”
An occasional line suggests a similar passage from other English satirists. Thus Byron’s couplet,
“Satiric rhyme first sprang from selfish spleen.