Of such materials are literary judgments made!
The success of Byron's satire was due to the fact of its being the only good thing of its kind since Churchill,—for in the Baviad and Maeviad only butterflies were broken upon the wheel—and to its being the first promise of a now power. The Bards and Reviewers also enlisted sympathy, from its vigorous attack upon the critics who had hitherto assumed the prerogative of attack. Jeffrey and Brougham were seethed in their own milk; and outsiders, whose credentials were still being examined, as Moore and Campbell, came in for their share of vigorous vituperation. The Lakers fared worst of all. It was the beginning of the author's life-long war, only once relaxed, with Southey. Wordsworth—though against this passage is written "unjust," a concession not much sooner made than withdrawn,—is dubbed an idiot, who—
Both by precept and example shows,
That prose is verse and verse is only prose;
and Coleridge, a baby,—
To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear.
The lines ridiculing the encounter between Jeffrey and Moore, are a fair specimen of the accuracy with which the author had caught the ring of Pope's antithesis:—
The surly Tolbooth scarcely kept her place.
The Tolbooth felt—for marble sometimes can,
On such occasions, feel as much as man—
The Tolbooth felt defrauded of her charms,
If Jeffrey died, except within her arms.
Meanwhile Byron had again retired to Newstead, where he invited some choice spirits to hold a few weeks of farewell revel. Matthews, one of these, gives an account of the place, and the time they spent there—entering the mansion between a bear and a wolf, amid a salvo of pistol-shots; sitting up to all hours, talking politics, philosophy, poetry; hearing stories of the dead lords, and the ghost of the Black Brother; drinking their wine out of the skull cup which the owner had made out of the cranium of some old monk dug up in the garden; breakfasting at two, then reading, fencing, riding, cricketing, sailing on the lake, and playing with the bear or teasing the wolf. The party broke up without having made themselves responsible for any of the orgies of which Childe Harold raves, and which Dallas in good earnest accepts as veracious, when the poet and his friend Hobhouse started for Falmouth, on their way "outre mer."