Since authors sometimes seek the field of Mars.
Can none remember that eventful day,
That ever glorious, almost fatal fray,
When Little’s leadless pistol met his eye,
And Bow Street myrmidons stood laughing by?”
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
When Moore read these lines he was so incensed that he addressed a challenge to Lord Byron, but by cautiously confiding it to a discreet friend it somehow never reached its destination. Moore afterwards became very intimate with Byron, but he still had his revenge, for he wrote Byron’s Life.
[95] George Birkbeck, M.D., president of the London Mechanics’ Institute, and founder of the Birkbeck Institution in Southampton Buildings, was a physician by profession, and an ardent advocate for the education of the people. He died in 1841.
[96] Lord Mayor Waithman, four times elected M.P. for London, a strenuous advocate for popular rights. He died in 1833, and an obelisk was erected to his memory, in Ludgate Circus.
[97] Jeremy Bentham, political economist, and father of the Utilitarian School of writers, died in 1832.