somewhere, and could not have been directed against any person whom it could possibly molest or injure less. The viper, however venomous in purpose, is harmless in effect, while it is biting at the file. It is seldom, indeed, that I waste a word, or a thought, upon those who are perpetually assailing me. But abhorring, as I do, the personalities which disgrace our current literature, and averse from controversy as I am, both by principle and inclination, I make no profession of nonresistance. When the offence and the offender are such as to call for the whip and the branding-iron, it has been both seen and felt that I can inflict them.

"Lord Byron's present exacerbation is evidently produced by an infliction of this kind—not by hearsay reports of my conversation, four years ago, transmitted him from England. The cause may be found in certain remarks upon the Satanic school of poetry, contained in my preface to the 'Vision of Judgment.' Well would it be for Lord Byron if he could look back upon any of his writings with as much satisfaction as I shall always do upon what is there said of that flagitious school. Many persons, and parents especially, have expressed their gratitude to me for having applied the branding-iron where it was so richly deserved. The Edinburgh Reviewer, indeed, with that honourable feeling, by which his criticisms are so peculiarly distinguished, suppressing the remarks themselves, has imputed them wholly to envy on my part. I give him, in this instance, full credit for sincerity; I believe he was equally incapable of comprehending a worthier motive, or of inventing a worse; and, as I have never condescended to expose, in any instance, his pitiful malevolence, I thank him for having, in this, stripped it bare himself and exhibited it in its bald, naked, and undisguised deformity.

"Lord Byron, like his encomiast, has not ventured to bring the matter of those animadversions into view. He conceals the fact, that they are directed against the authors of blasphemous and lascivious books; against men who, not content with indulging their own vices, labour to make others the slaves of sensuality, like themselves; against public panders, who, mingling impiety with lewdness, seek at once to destroy the cement of social order, and to carry profanation and pollution into private families, and into the hearts of individuals.

"His Lordship has thought it not unbecoming for him to call me a scribbler of all work. Let the word scribbler pass; it is an appellation that will not stick, like that of the Satanic School. But, if a scribbler, how am I one of all work? I will tell Lord Byron what I have not scribbled-what kind of work I have not done. I have never published libels upon my friends and acquaintance, expressed my sorrow for those libels, and called them in during a mood of better mind-and then reissued them, when the evil spirit, which for a time had been cast out, had returned and taken possession, with seven others more wicked than himself. I have never abused the power, of which every author is in some degree possessed, to wound the character of a man, or the heart of a woman. I have never sent into the world a book to which I did not dare to affix my name; or which I feared to claim in a court of justice, if it were pirated by a knavish bookseller. I have never manufactured furniture for the brothel. None of these things have I done; none of the foul work by which literature is perverted to the injury of mankind. My hands are clean; there is no 'damned spot' upon them-no taint, which all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten.'

"Of the work which I have done, it becomes me not here to speak, save only as relates to the Satanic School, and its Coryphæus, the author of 'Don Juan.' I have held up that school to public detestation as enemies to the religion, the institutions, and the domestic morals of the country. I have given them a designation to which their founder and leader answers. I have sent a stone from my sling which has smitten their Goliath in the forehead. I have fastened his

VOL. II.

P

name upon the gibbet, for reproach and ignominy as long as it shall endure.— Take it down who can !

"One word of advice to Lord Byron before I conclude.-When he attacks me again, let it be in rhyme. For one who has so little command of himself, it will be a great advantage that his temper should be obliged to keep tune. And while he may still indulge in the same rankness and virulence of insult, the metre will, in some degree, seem to lessen its vulgarity."

Without waiting for Mr. Southey's closing hint, Lord Byron had already "attacked" him "in rhyme." On October 1, 1821, he informed Mr. Moore that he had completed sixty stanzas of "The Vision of Judgment." “In this,” he added, "it is my intention to put the said George's Apotheosis in a Whig point of view, not forgetting the Poet Laureate for his preface and his other demerits." When, however, Mr. Southey's letter fell into his hands, he could no longer wait for revenge in inkshed, and despatched a cartel of mortal defiance to the Laureate, through the medium of Mr. Kinnaird, to whom he thus writes, February 6, 1822 :—

"I have got Southey's pretended reply: what remains to be done is to call him out. The question is, would he come? for, if he would not, the whole thing would appear ridiculous, if I were to take a long and expensive journey to no purpose. You must be my second, and, as such, I wish to consult you. I apply to you as one well versed in the duello, or monomachie. Of course I shall come to England as privately as possible, and leave it (supposing that I was the survivor) in the same manner; having no other object which could bring me to that country except to settle quarrels accumulated during my absence."

Mr. Kinnaird, wisely trusting to the soothing effects of the delay which distance imposed, never forwarded the challenge which accompanied the letter, and the pen was left to avenge its own provocations.

INTRODUCTION TO THE VISION OF JUDGMENT.

دو

AMONG the English bards whom Lord Byron ridiculed in his early satire, Mr. Southey had a prominent place. When the quarrel ended in a general shaking of hands, Southey shared in the pacification. The two poets met occasionally at London dinners in 1813, and Lord Byron, struck with the "epic appearance " of his brother bard, said that "to have his head and shoulders he would almost have written his Sapphics." In this there was more of sarcasm than compliment, but in a journal of the same year he declared "Southey's talents to be of the first order." His prose he pronounced "perfect," and though rating his verse lower, he afterwards called "Don Roderick" "the first poem of our time.' Yet whatever panegyrics he might utter in a soft and benevolent hour, his friends were aware that he had at bottom an indifferent opinion of Southey's powers, and a worse of his politics. These feelings gained a complete ascendancy when a false report reached Lord Byron in Italy, that the Laureate had propagated scandalous tales of him. But above all he imagined that the class of people who attacked his character had taken Southey for their champion, and to vex the disciples he made a butt of the master. He assailed him in the early cantos of "Don Juan" with the happiest admixture of gaiety and pungency, of playfulness and contempt. This compound of sportive and scornful derision was a species of satire thoroughly original, and as thoroughly galling. The Laureate contented himself at the time with boasting in private that if he gave Lord Byron “a passing touch, it should be one that would leave a scar," and on publishing the "Vision of Judgment," in 1821, he seized the opportunity "to pay off," as he said, "a part of his obligations." The poem of Southey shocked the pious, and was laughed at by the profane. Robert Hall correctly termed it a travestie of the final judgment. With incredible presumption the Laureate distributed the rewards and punishments of eternity according to his political and literary predilections, and far from redeeming the arrogance of the plan by the grandeur of the execution, the irreverence was increased by the meanness of the thoughts, the puerility of the language, and the grotesqueness of the metre. With such an opening for mischievous waggery, the temptation would probably have been irresistible to Lord Byron, even although the preface to the "Vision of Judgment" had not contained the virulent attack upon himself. "I'll work the Laureate," he wrote to Walter Scott, "before I have done with him, as soon as I can muster Billingsgate therefor." He began, as we have seen, with prose, and next determined upon a metrical satire on the heavy hexametrical burlesque of Southey. Hence the opposition "Vision of Judgment," which, after ineffectual negotiations with various publishers, was inserted in "The Liberal" in 1822. Some of the Laureate's friends called it a dull comment upon a stupid original, while Leigh Hunt describes it "as the most masterly satire since the time of Pope.”

Each might have quoted specimens to justify their opinion, for many passages are undoubtedly feeble, and there is nothing even in Pope to equal the caustic humour of others. The ninety-sixth, and two following stanzas, in which Lord Byron sketches the career of his antagonist, are, for instance, superlative of their kind. The mocking treatment of an awful theme is the blot upon the piece, and met with the condemnation it deserved. In personal disputes the public are spectators who seek to be amused, and not judges anxious to do justice between the parties. As Lord Byron had the wit, he had also the laughers upon his side, and he who has the laughers wins. Nor was the superiority of power his only advantage. The vaunts and egotism of Southey damaged his case, and many were glad that the advocate should be mortified who wished well to his cause. It is among the curiosities of literary conflicts that he nevertheless fancied he had gained the victory, and spoke of the result in terms of exultation, which would only have been correct if he had substituted the name of Byron for his own.

THE VISION OF JUDGMENT.

I.

SAINT PETER sat by the celestial gate:

His keys were rusty, and the lock was dull, So little trouble had been given of late;

Not that the place by any means was full,
But since the Gallic era "eighty-eight"

The devils had ta'en a longer, stronger pull,
And "a pull altogether," as they say
At sea-which drew most souls another way.

II.

The angels all were singing out of tune,

And hoarse with having little else to do, Excepting to wind up the sun and moon,

Or curb a runaway young star or two,
Or wild colt of a comet, which too soon

Broke out of bounds o'er th' ethereal blue,
Splitting some planet with its playful tail,
As boats are sometimes by a wanton whale.

III.

The guardian seraphs had retired on high,
Finding their charges past all care below;
Terrestrial business fill'd nought in the sky

Save the recording angel's black bureau;
Who found, indeed, the facts to multiply
With such rapidity of vice and wo,
That he had stripp'd off both his wings in quills,
And yet was in arrear of human ills.