But in his dealings with Lord Byron, Southey
had "eaten of the insane root." He attacked a man of incomparably superior
powers, for whom his utter want of humour--save in its comparatively
childish forms--made him a ludicrously unequal match, and paid the penalty
in being gibbeted in satires that will endure with the language. The
strife, which seems to have begun on Byron's leaving England, rose to its
height when his lordship, in the humorous observations and serious defence
of his character against "the Remarks" in Blackwood, 1819 (August),
accused the Laureate of apostasy, treason, and slander.
In 1821, when the latter published his _Vision of Judgment_--the most
quaintly preposterous panegyric ever penned--he prefixed to it a long
explanatory note, in the course of which he characterizes _Don Juan_ as a
"monstrous combination of horror and mockery, lewdness and impiety,"
regrets that it has not been brought under the lash of the law, salutes
the writer as chief of the Satanic school, inspired by the spirits of
Moloch and Belial, and refers to the remorse that will overtake him on his
death-bed.
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