AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS: A Satire: BY LORD BYRON. K I had rather be a kitten and cry, mew! Shakespeare. Such shameless Bards we have; and yet 'tis true, A NEW EDITION, Pope. WITH A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR: TO WHICH IS ADDED FARE THEE WELL, AND OTHER POEMS. HALIFAX: PRINTED FOR W. MILNER, BY HARTLEY AND WALKER, CHEAPSIDE. - 1834. LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. GEORGE GORDON, Lord Byron, had not only his own talents, but the pride of illustrious ancestry to boast; for even so early as the conquest, his family was distinguished, not merely for their extensive manors in Lancashire and other parts, but for their prowess in arms. The last Lord Byron but one, had only one son, who held a commission in the army, and was killed in Corsica several years before the death of his father, which accelerated the succession of his present Lordship, as the infant grandson of the cele. brated Admiral Byron, who was the eldest brother of the late Lord. This nobleman died on the 19th of May, 1791, by which means our hero became entitled to the title and estates of his illustrious ancestry. His Lordship's father married first the Baroness Conyers, daughter of Lord Holderness, by whom he had a daughter; and after her demise Miss Gordon of Gight, the mother of the noble Lord. A2 His Lordship spent a considerable portion of his early life in Scotland, where the wild and mountainous scenes which surrounded him, contributed not a little to strengthen the mighty energies of his nind, and to imprint on his vivid imagination those powerful and beautiful images of natural grandeur and wildness which characterise all his writings. At times, his Lordship would exclude himself from his ordinary companions, and wander alone amid the majestic and sublime scenery of the Highlands, until his soul seemed tinged with those elements of real sublimity, and drank a species of inspiration from the mists of the mountains, the wild waves of the ocean, and the black adamant of its terrific boundaries. The celebrated school at Harrow, and the University at Cambridge, had the honour of adding the polish of education to the innate powers of his. mind, and several of his academic companions can relate not a few instances of his precocious talents and strange eccentricities. At this early period of his life he made many voluntary excursions to the Aonian Hill, and drank largely of the Castalian stream, which, the work he published under the title of Hours of Idleness, a Series of Poems, original and translated, sufficiently proves; yet, premature as these poetic attempts might be considered, and notwithstanding the severity with which the Editor of the Edinburgh Review handled them, there are numerous original beauties in many of the pieces, which proved the harbingers of the splendid galaxy that succeeded them. These poems were published at Newark in 1805, when his lordship was nineteen years of age; and from the dates prefixed, it appears that the majority were written between his sixteenth and eighteenth year. This critique elicited from his Lordship one of the bitterest and most powerful satires ever published Lord Byron declares towards the termination of the poein, that it was his intention to close, from that period, his connexion with the Muses, and that should he return in safety from the "Mina rets" of Constantinople, the "Maidens of Georgia,' and the "sublime snows" of Mount Caucasus, no thing on earth should tempt him to resume the pen. Happily for the republic of letters this resolution was not preserved; and the noble Bard, with that generosity which usually accompanies true genius has not only forgiven the Editor of the Edinburgh Review, but flatteringly alludes to him in one of his poems. In more than one instance, Lord Byron exhibits his attachment to Scotland. His remembrances of the scenes of his childhood are recorded in an early poem on Loch na Gar, a mountain which he describes as "one of the most sublime and pictu. resque amongst our Caledonian Alps." Though the verses were among his earliest poetical effor |