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“I hold in utter abhorrence any contact with the travelling English. I was persecuted by these tourists even to my riding-ground at Lido, and reduced to the most disagreeable circuits to avoid them. I repeatedly refused to be introduced to them. Of a thousand such presentations, I accepted two. Hundreds who bored me with letters, or visits, I refused to have any communication with.” —Appendix to the Doge of Venice.

“The Indian sung in a style altogether extravagant; related stories, at which he laughed immoderately, &c.” See in “Vathek” the description of the Giaour, or short and squab Indian, who, when he rolled down the palace steps, drew all Samarah after him.

This is a feeble attempt to imitate the great poetical “Luminary of the Age,” who never fails to discover the bright traits in the characters of his friends, excelling all writers in the first qualification of a Satirist—personality. The organ of this instinct in the great poet will doubtless be pointed out, if Messrs. Gall and Spurzheim, or their disciples, should ever have an opportunity of examining the skull of Lara; and who knows but it may one day become a vendible commodity in the hands of some Venetian, or other foreign merchant?

Simon the Faultless is a personification of that Monthly Review, which alone, of all human works, is infallible.

The Cabal here alluded to, is that of the “great poet,” and “his set.” Is it to be believed, that about half a dozen individuals, in the nineteenth century, imagine they can depreciate Shakspeare and Milton, by praising Pope—and themselves?

See the Byron and Bowles controversy.

A comparison, by which Dennis would be insulted, would offend beyond forgiveness some moderns of his now-worse-than-useless profession—our great trading critics.

“If pigs in a high wind” see it, they may see farther than we are aware of, and anticipate for the great poet, or rather with him, “the award of Gods, and men, and columns.”

This is an imitation of the following magnanimous lines of the Childe:—

Sketch from Private Life.

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

The Apollo, once called of the Belvedere, in the Vatican.

Milton has given to his Satan an exterior of god-like grandeur and beauty.

—Lord Byron's Letter to the Rev. W. L. Bowles.

Dedication to the Vision of Dante.

This attempt to put the “great Poet's” precepts into practice is a lamentable failure; for terms of seamanship, that might be very poetical in the mouth of Childe Noah, or other great voyagers, are quite otherwise, when used by a person who has only crossed the sea occasionally, like Scott, Moore, and Southey.

“In what,” asks Lord Byron, “does the infinite superiority of ‘Falconer's Shipwreck’ over all other shipwrecks consist? In the admirable application of the terms of his art. These very terms, by his application, make the strength and reality of his poem.”

The genius of the poet-sailor, and his fate, make the poetry of his poem; and the application of the terms of his art constitutes its great blemish.

On the publication of the “Task,” Simon Faultless, and Co. declared that Cowper had some merit. But since the Giaour volunteered his services, the “creatures are at their dirty work again.” “Why yet he doth deny his prisoners.” Thus the assassins of Kirk White stab his very ashes.

—Lord Byron's Letter to the Rev. W. L. Bowles.

Born to the inheritance of a splendid fortune, Lord Byron may have vast ideas of the difference between the giver and the receiver; but for this cold-blooded insult on the buried “almoner of Mrs. Throgmorton,” he deserves to experience what poverty and dependance are.

“Pope and Cowper,” says his Lordship, “come into comparison in one great work.” Now, “these two writers” do not come into comparison “in the translation of Homer;” for it is as absurd to compare a poem in rhyme with a poem in blank verse, as it would be to compare the “tool-work” of Lord Byron with the inspiration of Shakspeare.

“I have tried,” it is Lord Byron that speaks, “to read Cowper's version (of Homer), and found it impossible. Has any human reader ever succeeded?”

Whether Cowper is, or is not a poet, he does not make Achilles perjure himself, and Homer did not.

Cowper's Homer, Book I.

Here is a turn worthy of Shakspeare. Let us see how the Parodist of the Lutrin has managed it—

Pope's Homer, Book I.

One would think the circumstances under which Cowper wrote his translation might have disarmed the malice of a fiend. Written, as it was, in the intervals of madness, to amuse the torturing leisure of the mind's decrepitude, to soothe the aching nerves and throbbing heart of a wretched invalid, where is the wonder, if Cowper's translation be inferior to Pope's, which was composed in the strength and maturity of the author's genius? Yet the work of Pope is not distinguishable from that of his assistants, Broome and Fenton.

If this Censor do not pause in his ethics, what will become of the parsons? They will have nothing in the world left to do, but to pray that the devil may fly away with Gifford.

“He would stand in the turning of a street; and calling to those who passed by, would cry to one, ‘Worthy sir, do me the honour of a good slap in the chaps;’ to another, ‘Honest friend, pray favour me with a handsome kick on the ------. Madam, shall I entreat a small box on the ear from your ladyship's fair hand? Noble captain, lend a reasonable thwack for the love of God, with that cane of yours, over these poor shoulders.” —Tale of a Tub.

Lord Byron never loses an opportunity of expressing his contempt of lubbers. Indeed, his merit as a “Voyager” could hardly have been greater, had he actually served an apprenticeship on board a Grimsby Packet.

“I have swam,” says Lord Byron, “more miles than all the rest of them ever sailed! and have lived for months and months on shipboard!! and during the whole period of my life abroad have scarcely ever passed a month out of sight of the ocean!!! besides being brought up from two years till ten on the brink of it!!!!” Why, this is a greater personage than Sindbad himself!!!!!

He has celebrated his “perilous feat” in prefaces and in notes, in prose and in verse, in pamphlets, poems, and plays.

See the Works of the “Colossus,” Dr. Samuel Surface, inventor of the Bow-Wow prose couplets, at once inimitable by human genius, and the vehicle of every modern scribbler's thoughts. “If,” observes Lord Byron, “the opinions cited, of the Doctor against Pope, are to be taken as decisive authority, what becomes of the poetical character of Milton, and of English Poetry in general? Still,” he sagely continues, “the Doctor's is the finest critical work extant.” Bravo, Ethics! this is profundity.

But, “in these days, the grand ‘primum mobile’ of England is cant; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, (cant Byronian?) and cant critical; but always cant.” —Lord Byron's Letter to the Rev. W. L. Bowles.

For a Treatise on the Art of “Booing to a Big Mon,” apply to Sir Pertinax Mac Sycophant.

The imputation cast on modern Poetry is true of modern Criticism, which might, indeed, with the strictest propriety, be called “echoism.” No author, who is not a Lord or a Baronet, need expect to be noticed by our leading Reviews, unless he have established a reputation which renders their notice at once useless and ridiculous. But every Sir Sycophant Mac Syllable comes forward with his cowardly praise, when he can only tell the world what the world knows.

See in Lord Byron's Letter to Mr. Bowles, his allusion to the common-place description of a game at cards in the “Rape of the Lock.”

See Hazlitt's Lecture on the Lakists.

Cannot this arrogant, un-English tourist, spend his money abroad, and quit his country in her misfortunes, without insulting her?

For a noble attack on the Author of the “Farmer's Boy,” see “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.”

When Pope was allowed to be the most vain of human beings, the modest claims of Byron had not been urged:—“a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind!” but “the poet of all civilization” had another quality in common with the “Prince of modern Bards,” namely, that warmth of heart, which cannot prudently be called cold-bloodedness—if truth is a libel. That his supreme delight was to insult poverty, that he boasted perpetually of his wealth, and that he attacked the defenceless, without provocation, and because they were defenceless, are facts that will become every day more obvious and acknowledged, whatever may be the fate of the “trashy jingle” which has given to his successor a “paltry renown,” so called by himself, with at least as much truth as sincerity. No personification of vulgarity, no pampered footman, no successful scavenger, no purse-proud commercial upstart, ever assumed such airs of “imitated state;” and when squatted, like a toad, in the parlour of Bolinbrook, he, too, no doubt found himself tolerably “aristocratical in temper.”

See “Gambado's Horsemanship,” for a picture of the “Bridle way to Horse-lie-Down.”

“It is the business of a great Poet,” says Lord Byron, “to give the lie to the proverb, and sometimes to “make a silken purse out of a sow's ear.”

Let modern poets forswear “imagination, and addict themselves unto ethics,” and the “Corsair” will keep the sea awhile. The “Luminary of the Age” has little to fear from the emulation of mere rhyming verbalists—he can afford to praise them; and his praises are echoed and re-echoed at humble distance, in almost every Number of the poor mechanical “Monthly.” This iteration is become the greatest bore in the universe, except the nauseous and eternal adulation of the “Great Bard” himself, by the Knight “who plays the devil with the stars,” to the amusement of more than Bridge-street. “Poetry,” according to ‘the Prince of modern Poets,’ “is the most mechanical of the arts; and he is the greatest artist, who executes best, in whatever department!” in other words, an excellent sonnet-maker may be as great a poet as Shakspeare, or greater. Is there really no difference, in point of merit, between a Watt, or an Arkwright, and the artisan (at least equally mechanical) who executes faultlessly the sixteenth part of a pin? What says the most canting Lord Byron?