When,
on his joining me, I expressed what I had felt, he said 'If I had shaken
hands heartily, he would have set me down for one of his party; but I will
have nothing to do with them on either side. I have taken my seat, and now
I will go abroad.'"
A few days later the _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ appeared before
the public. The first anonymous edition was exhausted in a month; a
second, to which the author gave his name, quickly followed. He was wont
at a later date to disparage this production, and frequently recanted many
of his verdicts in marginal notes. Several, indeed, seem to have been
dictated by feelings so transitory, that in the course of the correction
of proof blame was turned into praise, and praise into blame; i.e. he
wrote in MS. before he met the agreeable author,--
I leave topography to coxcomb Gell;
we have his second thought 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.
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