The personification of “Waltz,” carried out for a time in such phrases as “Nimble Nymph,” “Imperial Waltz,” “Endearing Waltz,” and “Voluptuous Waltz,” is, however, often disregarded or forgotten. She is described as a lovely stranger, “borne on the breath of Hyperborean gales,” from Hamburg to England, and welcomed there by the “daughters of the land.” At this point the mock-heroic element ceases to be noticeable, and the rest of the poem is devoted to an exposure of the iniquity which the new dance had brought into English high society.
It is in The Waltz that Byron for the first time manifests the ability to deal with political questions in a lighter vein, in a manner something like that of Moore. He alludes, for instance, to the Regent’s well-known preference for ladies of a mature age:
“And thou, my Prince! whose sovereign taste and will
It is to love the lovely beldames still.”
This topic Moore touched upon frequently, particularly in Intercepted Letters, II, from Major M’Mahon, the Regent’s parasite and pander, and in The Fudge Family in Paris, Letter X, in which Biddy Fudge says,
“The Regent loves none but old women you know.”
A note to line 162 of The Waltz has a joking reference to the Regent’s whiskers, an adornment which had excited Moore’s merriment, especially in his “rejected drama,” The Book, appended to Letter VII of Intercepted Letters. The fact that the dance is an importation from Germany allows Byron to sum up ironically what England owes to that country:
“A dozen dukes, some kings, a Queen—and Waltz.”
The body of the satire is occupied with a description of the dance itself, given in lines which are too often more prurient and suggestive than the waltz could possibly have been. Byron is here surely not at his best, and his coarseness is not extenuated by his alleged moral purpose. Weiser’s judgment that The Waltz is the ripest of Byron’s youthful poems will, to most critics, seem unwarranted. There is barely a line of the satire which is either witty or epigrammatic; the style is low and the language is cheap in tone; the versification is lifeless and dull. The one thing for which it is to be noted is the spirit of mockery sometimes displayed, and the tendency to jest rather than to inveigh.
The competition for a suitable dedicatory address for the reopening of Drury Lane Theatre in 1812,[167] memorable as the occasion for the skilful parodies contained in the Rejected Addresses[168] of James and Horace Smith, led Byron also to compose a rather extraordinary satire. The genuine address of Dr. Busby (1755–1838) had been rejected, along with those of the other competitors; but on October 14th, two or three evenings after the formal opening of the theatre, Busby’s son endeavored to recite his father’s poem from one of the boxes, and nearly started a riot. Byron thereupon wrote a Parenthetical Address, by Dr. Plagiary, which was printed in the Morning Chronicle for October 23, 1812. This satire, which Byron called “a parody of a peculiar kind,” is noteworthy only in that it selects lines and phrases from Busby’s address, and connecting them by satiric comments, manages to make the original seem ridiculous.