Selected Poems (7 page)

The double principle that has guided our selection – works of
interest to Byron’s contemporaries and his nineteenth-century readers as well as works of interest to readers today – has also shaped our Notes, which collate citations from contemporary reviews with concise pointers to modern criticism of each poem. (The list of Works Cited in the Notes has complete references for all items mentioned therein.) These Notes also give information about the circumstances of composition and publication of each work and gloss the salient literary, biographical and historical references. Readers wanting extensive scholarly commentaries on the compositional histories, manuscript states and stages, textual variants and disputed readings, as well as more detailed annotations of historical circumstances, references, allusions, etc., may refer to Jerome J. McGann’s major seven-volume edition of
Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works
(1980–93).

The Introduction is supplemented by a Table of Dates that situates a detailed chronology of Byron’s life and career in relation to prominent events in England and abroad, and indicates some of the other works of literature being published alongside his. The chronology extends past Bryon’s death to note the most important of the posthumous presentations of his life and works that preceded the publication of Murray’s landmark edition.

November 1995

ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS

A Satire

‘I had rather be a kitten, and cry mew!

Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers.’

SHAKSPEARE
.

‘Such shameless bards we have; and yet ’tis true,

There are as mad, abandon’d critics too.’

POPE.

PREFACE
¹

All my friends, learned and unlearned, have urged me not to publish this Satire with my name. If I were to be ‘turned from the career of my humour by quibbles quick, and paper bullets of the brain,’ I should have complied with their counsel. But I am not to be terrified by abuse, or bullied by reviewers, with or without arms. I can safely say that I have attacked none personally, who did not commence on the offensive. An author’s works are public property: he who purchases may judge, and publish his opinion if he pleases; and the authors I have endeavoured to commemorate may do by me as I have done by them. I dare say they will succeed better in condemning my scribblings, than in mending their own. But my object is not to prove that I can write well, but, if possible, to make others write better.

As the poem has met with far more success than I expected, I have endeavoured in this edition to make some additions and alterations, to render it more worthy of public perusal.

In the first edition of this satire, published anonymously, fourteen lines on the subject of Bowles’s Pope were written by, and inserted at the request of, an ingenious friend of
mine,
¹
who has now in the press a volume of poetry. In the present edition they are erased, and some of my own substituted in their stead; my only reason for this being that which I conceive would operate with any other person in the same manner, – a determination not to publish with my name any production, which was not entirely and exclusively my own composition.

With regard to the real talents of many of the poetical persons whose performances are mentioned or alluded to in the following pages, it is presumed by the author that there can be little difference of opinion in the public at large; though, like other sectaries, each has his separate tabernacle of proselytes, by whom his abilities are over-rated, his faults overlooked, and his metrical canons received without scruple and without consideration. But the unquestionable possession of considerable genius by several of the writers here censured renders their mental prostitution more to be regretted. Imbecility may be pitied, or, at worst, laughed at and forgotten; perverted powers demand the most decided reprehension. No one can wish more than the author that some known and able writer had undertaken their exposure; but Mr Gifford has devoted himself to Massinger, and, in the absence of the regular physician, a country practitioner may, in cases of absolute necessity, be allowed to prescribe his nostrum to prevent the extension of so deplorable an epidemic, provided there be no quackery in his treatment of the malady. A caustic is here offered; as it is to be feared nothing short of actual cautery can recover the numerous patients afflicted with the present prevalent and distressing
rabies
for rhyming. – As to the Edinburgh Reviewers, it would indeed require an Hercules to crush the Hydra; but if the author succeeds in merely ‘bruising one of the heads of the serpent,’ though his own hand should suffer in the encounter, he will be amply satisfied.