That tasteless shame be his, and ours the grief
To gaze on Beauty’s band without its chief.”
In satire of this sort there is nothing sportive or delicate; it is sheer invective of the kind which Byron had used on Clarke and was to employ against Castlereagh.
Byron never became reconciled to the Regent, not even when, as George IV, the latter ascended the throne. Indeed what is probably the poet’s most bitter estimate of his sovereign was sent in a letter to Moore on September 17, 1821—the lines now entitled The Irish Avatar. Queen Caroline had died on August 7, 1821, shortly after the failure of her husband to secure a divorce, and not over a week later, the king was feasted with regal pomp at Dublin by the servile Irish office-holders. The combination of circumstances was fit material for satire, and Byron spoke out in stanzas that ring with rage and contempt:—
“Shout, drink, feast, and flatter! Oh! Erin, how low
Wert thou sunk by misfortune and tyranny, till
Thy welcome of tyrants had plunged thee below
The depth of thy deep in a deeper gulf still.”
The satire in this poem is as spontaneous and sincere as any Byron ever wrote; it is passionate, convincing, laden with noble scorn. The two methods of irony and invective are admirably mingled, without a trace of humor.
We have already noticed some early poems in which Byron had evinced a liking for uncommon rhymes. In the humorous Farewell to Malta, written May 26, 1811, and printed in 1816, he employed octosyllabics, with such rhymes as: yawn sirs—dancers, fault’s in—waltzing, prate is—gratis. The Devil’s Drive, an irregular and amorphous fragment, broken off on December 9, 1813, also contains some extraordinary rhymes; but it deserves attention especially because it anticipates, to some extent, the thought and manner of Don Juan. It is styled a sequel to The Devil’s Walk, a fanciful ballad composed by Southey and Coleridge in 1799, but attributed by Byron to Porson, the great Cambridge scholar. Byron’s poem, a rambling and discursive satire, is crammed with allusions to current events, prophetic of the views which he was to advocate during the remainder of his career. It describes a night visit of the Devil to his favorites on earth, in the course of which he pauses to survey the battle-field of Leipzig, and then, passing on to England, investigates a Methodist chapel, the Houses of Parliament, a royal ball, and other supposed resorts of his disciples. Byron’s portrayal of the horrors of war is probably his first satiric expression of what was to become a frequent theme in his later work, and especially in Don Juan. As the Devil gazes down with glee at the bloody plain of Leipzig, the satirist remarks: