ll
his whims or dislikes taken for gospel, and who cannot be at the pains to
do more than signify his contempt or displeasure. If a great man meets
with a rebuff which he does not like, he turns on his heel, and this
passes for a repartee. The Noble Author says of a celebrated barrister and
critic, that he was "born in a garret sixteen stories high." The
insinuation is not true; or if it were, it is low. The allusion degrades
the person who makes it, not him to whom it is applied. This is also the
satire of a person of birth and quality, who measures all merit by
external rank, that is, by his own standard. So his Lordship, in a "Letter
to the Editor of my Grandmother's Review," addresses him fifty times as
"_my dear Robarts_;" nor is there any other wit in the article. This is
surely a mere assumption of superiority from his Lordship's rank, and is
the sort of _quizzing_ he might use to a person who came to hire himself
as a valet to him at _Long's_--the waiters might laugh, the public will
not. In like manner, in the controversy about Pope, he claps Mr. Bowles on
the back with a coarse facetious familiarity, as if he were his chaplain
whom he had invited to dine with him, or was about to present to a
benefice. The reverend divine might submit to the obligation, but he has
no occasion to subscribe to the jest. If it is a jest that Mr. Bowles
should be a parson, and Lord Byron a peer, the world knew this before;
there was no need to write a pamphlet to prove it.

The _Don Juan_ indeed has great power; but its power is owing to the force
of the serious writing, and to the oddity of the contrast between that and
the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the sublime to the
ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are surprised that any one
should turn round and _travestie_ himself: the drollery is in the utter
discontinuity of ideas and feelings. He makes virtue serve as a foil to
vice; _dandyism_ is (for want of any other) a variety of genius. A
classical intoxication is followed by the splashing of soda-water, by
frothy effusions of ordinary bile. After the lightning and the hurricane,
we are introduced to the interior of the cabin and the contents of the
wash-hand basins. The solemn hero of tragedy plays _Scrub_ in the farce.
This is "very tolerable and not to be endured." The Noble Lord is almost
the only writer who has prostituted his talents in this way. He hallows in
order to desecrate; takes a pl