t in the first edition, before he saw the
Troad,--

I leave topography to classic Gell;

and his third, half way in censure, in the fifth,--

I leave topography to rapid Gell.

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is written "unjust," a concession not much sooner made than withdrawn,--is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