The rise in prices due to the long-continued war had fattened the purses of the farmers and land-holders in England, and led them to wish secretly for the continuance of the struggle. Byron attacks severely their grudging assent to proposals of peace, and, in a succession of rhymes on the word “rent,” points out the selfishness of their position. The diatribe contains some of Byron’s most passionate lines:
“See these inglorious Cincinnati swarm,
Farmers of war, dictators of the farm;
Their ploughshare was the sword in hireling hands,
Their fields manured by gore of other lands;
Safe in their barns, these Sabine tillers sent
Their brethren out to battle—why? for rent!”
Although an occasional touch of mockery reminds us of Don Juan, The Age of Bronze, in method, shows a reversion to the invective manner of English Bards. It can hardly be said, however, that this later satire is any advance over the earlier poem. Its allusions are now unfamiliar to the average reader, and the names once so pregnant with meaning have faded into dim memories. Although The Age of Bronze has sagacity and practicality, it lacks unity and concentration. Without the vehement sweep of English Bards, it is also too rhetorical and declamatory. Most readers, despite the flash of spirit which now and then lights its pages, have found the satire dull.
The Blues, so little deserving of attention in most respects, is unique among Byron’s satires for two reasons: it is written in the form of a play, and it employs the anapestic couplet metre, used by Anstey and later by Moore. Byron’s first reference to it occurs in a letter to Murray from Ravenna, August 7, 1821: “I send you a thing which I scratched off lately, a mere buffoonery, to quiz the Blues, in two literary eclogues. If published, it must be anonymously—don’t let my name out for the present, or I shall have all the old women in London about my ears, since it sneers at the solace of their ancient Spinsterstry.”[379] On September 20, 1821, he calls it a “mere buffoonery, never meant for publication.”[380] Murray, following his usual custom with literature which was likely to get him into trouble, cautiously delayed publication, and the poem was turned over to John Hunt and printed in The Liberal, No. III (pages 1–24), for April 26, 1823. It was not attributed to Byron by contemporary critics, most of them giving Leigh Hunt credit for the authorship.
There is nothing in Byron’s letters to explain the immediate motive which led the poet to scribble a work so unworthy of his genius. In his journal kept during his society life in London there are several references to the “blues,” and later he made some uncomplimentary allusions to them in Beppo and Don Juan. In a sense his efforts to ridicule them seem to parallel the attacks of Gifford on a coterie equally harmless and inoffensive.