You doubt—see Dryden, Pope, St. Patrick’s Dean,”
recalls the words of Cowper,
“But (I might instance in St. Patrick’s Dean)
Too often rails to gratify his spleen.”[139]
The reference to Pitt’s skill in coining words may have been remembered from many jests on the subject in the Rolliad and the Works of Peter Pindar. The scorn of “French flippancy and German sentiment” re-echoes the violent opposition of the Anti-Jacobin to the spread of foreign ideas. A note on “the millennium of the black letter”[140] calls to mind the hatred of Mathias for antiquaries and searchers for old manuscripts[141] and another note[142] reinforces Gifford in abusing T. Vaughan, Esq., the “last of the Cruscanti.”
The single striking feature of Hints from Horace is its summary of “Life’s little tale,” based upon a corresponding passage in the Ars Poetica, in which Byron describes graphically the career of a young nobleman under the Georges, from his “simple childhood’s dawning days” to the time when “Age palsies every limb,” and he sinks into his grave “crazed, querulous, forsaken, half-forgot.” Despite some obvious exaggerations and some traces of affected pessimism, the poet was undoubtedly drawing largely upon his own experience. The tone of the lines is bitter, unrelieved by sympathy or humor, paralleled in Byron’s work only in the Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog.
The Curse of Minerva, composed at approximately the same time as Hints from Horace,—it is dated from the Capuchin Convent at Athens, March 17, 1811—was actually printed in 1812, but not for public circulation. The first edition, probably unauthorized, was brought out in Philadelphia in 1815. Meanwhile the 54 introductory lines, beginning:—
“Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,
Along Morea’s hills the setting sun,”
had appeared in Canto III of the Corsair (1814). A fragmentary version of 111 lines, entitled The Malediction of Minerva, or the Athenian Marble-Market, signed “Steropes” and published in the New Monthly Magazine for April, 1815, was disowned by Byron as a “miserable and villanous copy.”[143] The stanzas on Lord Elgin in Childe Harold[144] had already expressed Byron’s condemnation of the conduct of that nobleman, and the poet doubtless believed that nothing was to be gained by again airing his indignation. Possibly, too, as Moore suggests,[145] a remonstrance from Lord Elgin or some of his relatives may have been an inducement to sacrifice a work which could add little to his reputation.