Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
Lord Byron to John Murray, 19 October 1812
“Many thanks, but I must pay the damage, and will thank you to tell me the amount for the
engraving. I think the ‘Rejected
Addresses’ by far the best thing of the kind since the Rolliad, and wish you had published them. Tell
the author ‘I forgive him, were he twenty
times over a satirist;’ and think his imitations not at all inferior to the famous
ones of Hawkins Browne. He must be a man of very
lively wit, and less scurrilous than wits often are: altogether, I very much admire the
performance, and wish it all success. The Satirist has taken a new tone, as you will see: we have
now, I think, finished with Childe
Harold’s critics. I have in hand a Satire on Waltzing,
which you must publish anonymously; it is not long, not quite two hundred lines, but
will make a very small boarded pamphlet. In a few days you shall have it.
“P.S. The editor
of the Satirist ought
to be thanked for his revocation; it is done handsomely, after five years’
warfare.”
Isaac Hawkins Browne (1706-1760)
English poet, author of a popular collection of burlesque poems,
A Pipe
of Tobacco (1736).
Hewson Clarke (1787-1845 fl.)
The Cambridge-educated son of a barber, the editor of
The Scourge
(1811-12) and contributor to
The Satirist (1807-14) was an early
mocker of Lord Byron; later in life he published a continuation of Hume's
History of England, 2 vols (1832).
John Murray II (1778-1843)
The second John Murray began the
Quarterly Review in 1809 and
published works by Scott, Byron, Austen, Crabbe, and other literary notables.
Horace Smith (1779-1849)
English poet and novelist; with his brother James he wrote
Rejected
Addresses (1812) and
Horace in London (1813). Among his
novels was
Brambletye House (1826).
The Satirist, or, Monthly Meteor. (1807-1814). Originally issued with colored plates, the Tory-inspired
Satirist
was edited by George Manners (1778–1853) from October 1807 to June 1812, and William Jerdan
(1782–1869) from July 1812 to August 1814; it was continued as
Tripod,
or, New Satirist (July-Aug. 1814). The humor was coarse, and Byron the target in a
series of pieces by Hewson Clarke (1787-1845 fl.).
Criticisms on the Rolliad. (London: James Ridgway, 1785). A very successful collection of political parodies with notes variorum; the addresses,
composed in the manner of the popular poets of the day, are put into the mouths of the
popular politicians of the day.
