ENGLISH BARDS, AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS.
355
The puny schoolboy and his early lay
Men pardon, if his follies pass away;
But who forgives the Senior's ceaseless verse,
Whose hairs grow hoary as his rhymes grow worse?730
What heterogeneous honours deck the Peer!
Lord, rhymester, petit-maître, pamphleteer![1]
So dull in youth, so drivelling in his age,
His scenes alone had damned our sinking stage;
But Managers for once cried, "Hold, enough!"
Nor drugged their audience with the tragic stuff.
Yet at their judgment let his Lordship laugh,[2]
And case his volumes in congenial calf;
- ↑ The Earl of Carlisle has lately published an eighteen-penny pamphlet on the state of the Stage, and offers his plan for building a new theatre. It is to be hoped his Lordship will be permitted to bring forward anything for the Stage—except his own tragedies. [This pamphlet was entitled Thoughts upon the present condition of the stage, and upon the construction of a new Theatre, anon. 1808.] [Line 732. None of the earlier editions, including the fifth and Murray, 1831, insert "and" between "petit-maître" and "pamphleteer." No doubt Byron sounded the final syllable of "maître," anglicé "maiter."]
- ↑
Yet at their fiat ——
Yet at their nausea ——.—[MS. Addition to British Bards.]
had. I must naturally be the last person to be pointed on defects or maladies."
In 1814 he consulted Rogers on the chance of conciliating Carlisle, and in Childe Harold, iii. 29, he laments the loss of the "young and gallant Howard" (Carlisle's youngest son) at Waterloo, and admits that "he did his sire some wrong." But, according to Medwin (Conversations, 1824, p. 362), who prints an excellent parody on Carlisle's lines addressed to Lady Holland in 1822, in which he urges her to decline the legacy of Napoleon's snuff-box, Byron made fun of his "noble relative" to the end of the chapter (vide post, p. 370, note 2).]
