Tra.

but come

let us shake hands.

You knew,

And you know, my dear fellow, how heartily I,
Whatever you publish, am ready to buy.

[for sale,

Ink. That's my bookseller's business; I care not
Indeed the best poems at first rather fail.

There were Renegade's epics, and Botherby's plays, 1
And my own grand romance
Tra.

Had its full share of praise.

I myself saw it puff'd in the "Old Girl's Review. "2
[Trevoux ; "3
Ink. What Review?
"Tis the English "Journal de
Tra.
A clerical work of our jesuits at home.

Have you never yet seen it?

Ink.

That pleasure's to come.

Tra. Make haste then.

Ink.

Why so?

Tra.

I have heard people say

That it threaten'd to give up the ghost t'other day.

soon

Ink. Well, that is a sign of some spirit. No doubt. Tra. Shall you be at the Countess of Fiddlecome's rout? Ink. I've a card, and shall go: but at present, as [the moon As friend Scamp shall be pleased to step down from (Where he seems to be soaring in search of his wits), And an interval grants from his lecturing fits, I'm engaged to the Lady Bluebottle's collation, To partake of a luncheon and learn'd conversation: 'Tis a sort of re-union for Scamp, on the days Of his lecture, to treat him with cold tongue and praise.

And I own, for my own part, that 't is not unpleasant.
Will you go? There's Miss Lilac will also be present.
Tra. That "metal's attractive."
Ink.

No doubt to the pocket.
Tra. You should rather encourage my passion than
shock it.

But let us proceed; for I think, by the hum

Ink. Very true; let us go, then, before they can
come,

Or else we 'll be kept here an hour at their levy,
On the rack of cross questions, by all the blue bevy.
Hark! Zounds, they'll be on us; I know by the drone
Of old Botherby's spouting ex-cathedrà tone.
Ay! there he is at it.

1 [Messrs. Southey and Sotheby.]

[ My Grandmother's Review, the British." This heavy journal has since been gathered to its grandmothers.]

3 [The " Journal de Trevoux" (in fifty-six volumes) is one of the most curious collections of literary gossip in the world, and the Poet paid the British Review an extravagant compliment, when he made this comparison.]

4 [Sotheby is a good man-rhymes well (if not wisely); - (something but is a bore. He seizes you by the button. One night of a rout at Mrs. Hope's, he had fastened upon me— A gamemnon, or Orestes, or some of his plays) notabout

That's clear.
Ink.
But for God's sake let's go, or the Bore will be here.
[Exit INKEL.
Come, come: nay, I'm off.
You are right, and I'll follow;
Tra.
'Tis high time for a " Sic me servavit Apollo."4
And yet we shall have the whole crew on our kibes,
Blues, dandies, and dowagers, and second-hand scribes,
All flocking to moisten their exquisite throttles
With a glass of Madeira at Lady Bluebottle's.

ECLOGUE SECOND.

[Exit TRACY.

An Apartment in the House of LADY BLUEBOTTLE
- A Table prepared.

SIR RICHARD BLUEBOTTLE solus.

Was there ever a man who was married so sorry?
Like a fool, I must needs do the thing in a hurry.
My life is reversed, and my quiet destroy'd;
My days, which once pass'd in so gentle a void,
Must now, every hour of the twelve, be employ'd:
of the whole twenty-four,
The twelve, do I say? -
Is there one which I dare call my own any more?
What with driving and visiting, dancing and dining,
What with learning, and teaching, and scribbling,
and shining

In science and art, I'll be cursed if I know
Myself from my wife; for although we are two,
Yet she somehow contrives that all things shall be done
In a style which proclaims us eternally one.
But the thing of all things which distresses me more
Than the bills of the week (though they trouble me
sore),

Of scribblers, wits, lecturers, white, black, and blue,
Is the numerous, humourous, backbiting crew
Who are brought to my house as an inn, to my cost-
For the bill here, it seems, is defray'd by the host-
No pleasure! no leisure! no thought for my pains,
But to hear a vile jargon which addles my brains:
A smatter and chatter, glean'd out of reviews,
By the rag, tag, and bobtail, of those they call "BLUES;"
A rabble who know not-But soft, here they come !
Would to God I were deaf! as I'm not, I'll be dumb.

Enter LADY BLUEBOTTLE, MISS LILAC, LADY BLUE-
MOUNT, MR. BOTHERBY, INKEL, TRACY, MISS
MAZARINE, and others, with SCAMP the Lecturer,
&c. &c.

Lady Blueb. Ah! Sir Richard, good morning;
I've brought you some friends.
Sir Rich. (bows, and afterwards aside.) If friends,
they're the first.

in love, and just nicked a minute when neither mothers, nor
husbands, nor rivals, nor gossips were near my then idol,
who was beautiful as the statues of the gallery where we
stood at the time. Sotheby, I say, had seized upon me by
the button and the heart-strings, and spared neither. Wil-
liam Spencer, who likes fun, and don't dislike mischief, saw
my case, and coming up to us both, took me by the hand, and
sic me ser-
pathetically bade me farewell; for,' said he, I see it is all
Sotheby then went his way:
over with you.'
vavit Apollo.'"- Byron Diary, 1821.]

The Vision of Judgment,

BY QUEVEDO REDIVIVUS. 1

SUGGESTED BY THE COMPOSITION SO ENTITLED BY THE AUTHOR OF "WAT TYLER."

"A Daniel come to judgment! yea, a Daniel!

I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word."

PREFACE.

Ir hath been wisely said, that "One fool makes
many;" and it hath been poetically observed,
"That fools rush in where angels fear to tread."-Pope.
If Mr. Southey had not rushed in where he had
no business, and where he never was before, and
never will be again, the following poem would not

1 [In 1821, Mr. Southey published a piece, in English hexameters, entitled "A Vision of Judgment;" and which Lord Byron, in criticising it, laughs at as "the Apotheosis of George the Third." In the preface to this poem, after some observations on the peculiar style of its versification, Mr. Southey introduced the following remarks:

"I am well aware that the public are peculiarly intolerant of such innovations; not less so than the populace are of any foreign fashion, whether of foppery or convenience. Would that this literary intolerance were under the influence of a saner judgment, and regarded the morals more than the manner of a composition; the spirit rather than the form! Would that it were directed against those monstrous combinations of horrors and mockery, lewdness and impiety, with which English poetry has, in our days, first been polluted! For more than half a century English literature had been distinguished by its moral purity, the effect, and, in its turn, the cause, of an improvement in national manners. A father might, without apprehension of evil, have put into the hands of his children any book which issued from the press, if it did not bear, either in its title-page or frontis. piece, manifest signs that it was intended as furniture for the brothel. There was no danger in any work which bore the name of a respectable publisher, or was to be procured at any respectable bookseller's. This was particularly the case with regard to our poetry. It is now no longer so: and woe to those by whom the offence cometh! The greater the talents of the offender, the greater is his guilt, and the more enduring will be his shame. Whether it be that the laws are in themselves unable to abate an evil of this magnitude, or whether it be that they are remissly administered, and with such injustice that the celebrity of an offender serves as a privilege whereby he obtains impunity, individuals are bound to consider that such pernicious works would neither be published nor written, if they were discouraged as they might, and ought to be, by public feeling: every person, therefore, who purchases such books, or admits them into his house, promotes the mischief, and thereby, as far as in him lies, becomes an aider and abettor of the crime.

"The publication of a lascivious book is one of the worst offences which can be committed against the well-being of society. It is a sin, to the consequences of which no limits can be assigned, and those consequences no after-repentance in the writer can counteract. Whatever remorse of conscience he may feel when his hour comes (and come it must!) will be of no avail. The poignancy of a death-bed repentance cannot cancel one copy of the thousands which are sent abroad; and as long as it continues to be read, so long is he the pander of posterity, and so long is he heaping up guilt upon his soul in perpetual accumulation.

These remarks are not more severe than the offence deserves, even when applied to those immoral writers who have not been conscious of any evil intention in their writings, who would acknowledge a little levity, a little warmth of colouring, and so forth, in that sort of language with which men gloss over their favourite vices, and deceive themselves. What then should be said of those for whom the thoughtlessness and inebriety of wanton youth can no longer be pleaded, but who have written in sober manhood and with deliberate purpose? - Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus

Si

*["Summi poetre in omni poetarum sæculo viri fuerunt probi: in nostris id vidimus et videmus; neque alius est error a veritate longiùs quàm magna ingenia magnis necessario corrumpi vitiis. Secundo plerique posthabent primum, hi malignitate, illi ignorantia; et quum aliquem inveniunt styli morumque vitiis notatum, nec inficetum tamen nec in libris edendis parcum, eum stipant, prædicant, occupant, amplectuntur. mores aliquantulum vellet corrigere, si stylum curare paululum, si fervido ingenio temperare, si moræ tantillum interponere, tum ingens nescio quid et verè epicum, quadraginta annos natus, procuderat. Ignorant verò febriculis non indicari vires, impatientiam ab imbecillitate non differre; ignorant a levi homine et inconstante multa fortasse scribi posse plusquam mediocria, nihil compositum, arduum, eternum."- Savagius Landor, De Cultu atque Usu Latini Sermonis." This essay, which is full of fine critical remarks and striking thoughts felicitously expressed, reached me from Pisa, while the proof of the present sheet was before me. author (the author of Gebir and Count Julian) I will only say in this place, that, to have obtained his approbation as a poet, and possessed his friendship as a man, will be remembered among the honours of my life, when the petty enmities of this generation will be forgotten, and its ephemeral reputations shall have passed away."-Mr. Southey's note.]

Of its

have been written. It is not impossible that it may be as good as his own, seeing that it cannot, by any species of stupidity, natural or acquired, be worse. The gross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegado intolerance and impious cant, of the poem by the author of "Wat Tyler," are something so stupendous as to form the sublime of himself-containing the quintessence of his own attributes.

that eats into the soul! The school which they have set up may prope be called the Satanic school; for though their productions breathe spirit of Belial in their lascivious parts, and the spirit of Malach in ther loathsome images of atrocities and horrors which they delight to repreet, they are more especially characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride audacious impiety, which still betrays the wretched feeling of hopeles wherewith it is allied.

"This evil is political as well as moral, for indeed moral and politent evils are inseparably connected. Truly has it been affirmed by one of our ablest and clearest reasoners, that the destruction of governments may be proved and deduced from the general corruption of the subjects' su ners, as a direct and natural cause thereof, by a demonstration as certain any in the mathematics. There is no maxim more frequently enforced by Machiavelli, than that where the manners of a people are generally car rupted, there the government cannot long subsist, a truth which all h tory exemplifies; and there is no means whereby that corruption can be sa surely and rapidly diffused, as by poisoning the waters of literature.

"Let rulers of the state look to this, in time! But, to use the world Southey, if our physicians think the best way of caring & disease is to pamper it, the Lord in mercy prepare the kingdom to suffer, what He by miracle only can prevent!'

"No apology is offered for these remarks. The subject led to them; the occasion of introducing them was willingly taken, because it is the duty of every one, whose opinion may have any influence, to expose the drift and aim of those writers who are labouring to subvert the founda of human virtue and of human happiness."

Lord Byron rejoined as follows:

"Mr. Southey, in his pious preface to a poem whose blasphem harmless as the sedition of Wat Tyler, because it is equally abwera that sincere production, calls upon the legislature to look to it." toleration of such writings led to the French Revolution: of such wor ings as Wat Tyler, but as those of the 'Satanic School. This is not oral and Mr. Southey knows it to be not true. Every French writer of ag freedom was persecuted; Voltaire and Rousseau were exiles, Marama and Diderot were sent to the Bastile, and a perpetual war was waged with the whole class by the existing despotism. In the next place, the Fremt Revolution was not occasioned by any writings whatsoever, but must home occurred had no such writers ever existed. It is the fashion to attaphon every thing to the French Revolution, and the French Revolution to e thing but its real cause. That cause is obvious the government exactl too much, and the people could neither give nor bear more. Withest tha the Encyclopedists might have written their fingers off without the wom rence of a single alteration. And the English revolution- the firm. I mean)-what was it occasioned by? The Puritans were surely as pos and moral as Wesley or his biographer? Acts-acts on the part of or ment, and not writings against them, have caused the past can and are tending to the future.

"I look upon such as inevitable, though no revolutionist: I wish the English constitution restored, and not destroyed. Born an and naturally one by temper, with the greater part of my present prop in the funds, what have I to gain by a revolution? Perhaps I have to lose in every way than Mr. Southey, with all his places anal p panegyrics and abuse into the bargain. But that a revolution is ter 1 repeat. The government may exult over the repression of perry these are but the receding waves repulsed and broken for a mem shore, while the great tide is still rolling on and gaining ground with breaker. Mr. Southey accuses us of attacking the religion of the and is he abetting it by writing lives of Wesley? One made of war is merely destroyed by another. There never was, ner ever wil country without a religion. We shall be told of France again but at wo only Paris and a frantic party, which for a moment upheld their da nonsense of theo-philanthropy. The church of England, if overshoes will be swept away by the sectarians and not by the sceptics. People too wise, too well informed, too certain of their own immerse ingrass in the realms of space, ever to submit to the impiety of doubt. There be a few such diffident speculators, like water in the pale be human reason, but they are very few; and their options, withour e thusiasm or appeal to the passions, can never gah proselytoindeed, they are persecuted-that, to be sure, will increase any taling "Mr. Southey, with a cowardly ferocity, exults over the c 'death-bed repentance' of the objects of his dislike; and idalgo in a pleasantVision of Judgment' in prose as well as verse, fell of pious impudence. What Mr. Southey's sensations or ours may be se awful moment of leaving this state of existence, neither be nor we tend to decide. In common, I presume, with most men of any roleta I have not waited for a death-bed' to repent of many of my SCHOO withstanding the 'diabolical pride' which this pitiful renegado ha cour would impute to those who scorn him. Whether upon the

THE VISION OF JUDGMENT.

-a word on his preface. So much for his poem. In this preface it has pleased the magnanimous Laureate to draw the picture of a supposed "Satanic School," the which he doth recommend to the notice of the legislature; thereby adding to his other laurels the ambition of those of an informer. If there

exists any where, excepting in his imagination, such
The truth is, that there
a School, is he not sufficiently armed against it by
imagines, like
his own intense vanity?
are certain writers whom Mr. S.
Scrub, to have "talked of him; for they laughed
consumedly."

non-resistance. 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 inflic-
tion 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 Re-
viewer, 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 wor-
thier 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 un-
disguised 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 in him to call me a scribbler of all work. Let the word scribbler pass; it is an appellation which 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 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."

Lord Byron, without waiting for the closing hint of the foregoing letter, had already" attacked" Mr. Southey "in rhyme." On October 1. 1821, he says to Mr. Moore,

"I have written about sixty stanzas of a poem, in octave stanzas (in the Pulci style, which the fools in England think was invented by Whistlecraft -it is as old as the hills, in Italy), called The Vision of Judgment,' by Quevedo Redivivus. In this 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."

Lord Byron had proceeded some length in the performance thus announced, before Mr. Southey's letter to the "Courier" fell into his hands. On seeing it, his Lordship's feelings were so excited, that he could not wait for revenge in inkshed, but on the instant despatched a cartel of mortal defiance to the Poet Laureate, through the medium of Mr. Douglas 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 into that country except to settle quarrels accumulated during my absence."

Mr. Kinnaird, justly appreciating the momentary exacerbation under which Lord Byron had written the challenge which this letter enclosed, and fully aware how absurd the whole business would seem to his distant friend after the lapse of such a period as must intervene before the return of post from Keswick to Ravenna, put Lord Byron's warlike missive aside; and it never was heard of by Mr. Southey until after the death of its author. Meantime Lord Byron had continued his " attack in rhyme "-and his " Vision of Judgment," after ineffectual negotiations with various publishers in London, at length saw the light in 1822, in the pages of the unfortunate "Liberal."]