“Goth, Vandal, Moslem, had their flags unfurl’d
Around my still unviolated fane,
Two thousand summers had with dews impearl’d
Its marble heights nor left a mouldering stain;
’T was thine to ruin all that all had spared in vain,”[150]
epitomize a longer passage in The Curse of Minerva.[151] In Childe Harold Byron had made no mention of the fact that Elgin’s marriage had been dissolved by act of Parliament in 1818, but in The Curse of Minerva he made the goddess allude to the domestic scandal. A similar passage is introduced into Minerva’s prophecy in The Parthenon. These resemblances in structure and sometimes in phrasing may, of course, have occurred independently, or may have arisen from the chance that Byron, as well as the Smiths, was thinking of Horace’s Ode. On the other hand, there is a possibility that the Smiths, already familiar with the lines on Elgin in Childe Harold, may have read The Curse of Minerva in manuscript and have unconsciously reproduced some of its features in their poem.
By a natural transition Minerva, in Byron’s satire, leaves Elgin and turns to England in the words,
“Hers were the deeds that taught her lawless son
To do what oft Britannia’s self had done.”
This introduces a survey of England’s foreign affairs, designed to expose that country’s despotic policy towards her weaker rivals and dependents. The goddess treats briefly of England’s treachery to Denmark in the battle of Copenhagen, of the recent uprisings of the natives in India, and of the misfortunes of the Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal, and finally, touching upon domestic matters, uncovers the distress and misery of the laboring classes in England and the inefficiency of the government in dealing with internal problems. She ends with a picture of the Furies waving their kindled brands above the distracted realm, while ascending fires shake their “red shadow o’er the startled Thames.” Such a fate, says Minerva, and Byron with her, is deserved by a nation which had lit pyres “from Tagus to the Rhine.”