Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 1.djvu/336

294 March, 1809, the Satire was published anonymously. Byron was at no pains to conceal the authorship of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, and, before starting on his Pilgrimage, he had prepared a second and enlarged edition, which came out in October, 1809, with his name prefixed. Two more editions were called for in his absence, and on his return he revised and printed a fifth, when he suddenly resolved to suppress the work. On his homeward voyage he expressed in a letter to Dallas, June 28, 1811, his regret at having written the Satire. A year later he became intimate, among others, with Lord and Lady Holland, whom he had assailed on the supposition that they were the instigators of the article in the Edinburgh Review, and on being told by Rogers that they wished the Satire to be withdrawn, he gave orders to his publisher, Cawthorn, to burn the whole impression. A few copies escaped the flames. One of two copies retained by Dallas, which afterwards belonged to Murray, and is now in his grandson's possession, was the foundation of the text of 1831, and of all subsequent issues. Another copy which belonged to Dallas is retained in the British Museum.

Towards the close of the last century there had been an outburst of satirical poems, written in the style of the Dunciad and its offspring the Rosciad. Of these, Gifford's Baviad and Mœviad (1794-5), and T. J. Mathias' Pursuits of Literature (1794-7), were the direct progenitors of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. The Rolliad (1784), the Children of Apollo (circ. 1794), Canning's New Morality (1798), and Wolcot's coarse but virile lampoons, must also be reckoned among Byron's earlier models. The ministry of "All the Talents" gave rise to a fresh batch of political jeux d'ésprit, and in 1807, when Byron was still at Cambridge, the air was full of these ephemera. To name only a few, All the Talents, by Polypus (Eaton Stannard Barrett), was answered by All the Blocks, an antidote to All the Talents, by Flagellum (W. H. Ireland); Elijah's Mantle, a tribute to the memory of the R. H. William Pitt, by James Sayer, the caricaturist, provoked Melville's Mantle, being a Parody on ... Elijah's Mantle. The Simpliciad, A Satirico-Didactic Poem, and Lady Anne Hamilton's Epics