t, as the extent and the limitations of the attack reveal,
occasion was taken by political adversaries to inflict punishment for an
outrage on popular sentiment.

The _Champion_ had been the first to give tongue, and the other
journals, on the plea that the mischief was out, one after the other
took up the cry. On Monday, April 15, the _Sun_ printed _Fare Thee
Well_, and on Tuesday, April 16, followed with _A Sketch_. On the same
day the _Morning Chronicle_, protesting that "the poems were not written
for the public eye, but as having been inserted in a Sunday paper,"
printed both sets of verses; the _Morning Post_, with an ugly hint that
"the noble Lord gives us verses, when he dare not give us
circumstances," restricted itself to _Fare Thee Well_; while the
_Times_, in a leading paragraph, feigned to regard "the two
extraordinary copies of verses ... the whining stanzas of _Fare Thee
Well_, and the low malignity and miserable doggerel of the companion
_Sketch_," as "an injurious fabrication." On Thursday, the 18th, the
_Courier_, though declining to insert _A Sketch_, deals temperately and
sympathetically with the _Fare Thee Well_, and quotes the testimony of a
"fair correspondent" (? Madame de Stael), that if "her husband had bade
her such a farewell she could not have avoided running into his arms,
and being reconciled immediately--'Je n'aurois pu m'y tenir un
instant';" and on the same day the _Times_, having learnt to its
"extreme astonishment and regret," that both poems were indeed Lord
Byron's, maintained that the noble author had "degraded literature, and
abused the privileges of rank, by converting them into weapons of
vengeance against an inferior and a female." On Friday, the 19th, the
_Star_ printed both poems, and the _Morning Post_ inserted a criticism,
which had already appeared in the _Courier_ of the preceding day. On
Saturday, the 20th, the _Courier_ found itself compelled, in the
interests of its readers, to print both poems. On Sunday, the 21st, the
octave of the original issue, the _Examiner_ devoted a long article to
an apology for Byron, and a fierce rejoinder to the _Champion_; and on
the same day the _Independent Whig_ and the _Sunday News_, which
favoured the "opposition," printed both poems, with prefatory notices
more or less favourable to the writer; whereas the Tory _Antigallican
Monitor_, which also printed both poems, added the significant remark
that "if everything said of Lord Byron b