“‘Blest paper-credit!’ who shall dare to sing?
It clogs like lead Corruption’s weary wing,”
Weiser has endeavored to prove that Byron borrowed something from Pope’s Epistle to Lord Bathurst. A verbal comparison of the two passages in question fails to bring out any striking resemblance. Pope continues with a comment on the ease with which paper money may be used in bribery; Byron, after quoting Pope, does not touch on this point, and his lines seem to be merely a passing quotation, not closely connected with what comes before or after. In no other place in The Curse of Minerva are there phrases which have even a remote likeness to the language of Pope’s Epistle. On such grounds as Weiser advances it might be shown that Byron, in Beppo, is imitating Cowper, because he quotes a line from that poet.
Byron’s attack on Lord Elgin in Childe Harold had been animated by a love for Greece and a pity for her forlorn state among the nations, as well as by resentment of England’s cold-blooded attitude in allowing such depredations. In the passage Byron had covered Elgin with abuse:—
“Cold as the crags upon his native coast,
His mind as barren and his head as hard,
Is he whose head conceived, whose hand prepared,
Aught to displace Athena’s poor remains.”[149]
These lines were published in March, 1812. In 1813, James and Horace Smith, famous through their Rejected Addresses, appeared again as authors in Horace in London, a series of imitations of the first two books of the Odes of Horace. In this volume, Ode XV, The Parthenon, modelled fairly closely in plot on Horace’s Prophecy of Nereus, treats of the controversy concerning Elgin. A clear reference to Byron in the poem makes it certain that the Smiths had read Childe Harold and that they concurred with his expressed disapproval of Elgin’s conduct.
The Parthenon, owing perhaps to mere coincidence, perhaps to the possibility that the Smiths may have had access to The Curse of Minerva in manuscript, is in its outlines and especially in the general features of Minerva’s curse, singularly like Byron’s satire. The Smiths, following Horace, describe Elgin’s ship as hastening homeward, laden with the “guilty prize.” Suddenly Minerva rises, like Nereus, from the sea and, with the language of a prophet, pronounces a curse on the destroyer, predicting that Elgin will suffer misfortunes and go down through the ages remembered for his shamelessness. The poem, like Byron’s, closes with Minerva speaking. Certain lines in The Parthenon:—