comes to rule. Now the principle of satire is reason, reason commenting mockingly upon absurd or base realities. Its natural medium is prose; but it invests itself, by right, in verse instead, whenever the gaiety of the mocker sings itself into a tune, and demands the cymbals, or when the wrath of the moralist demands a louder blast for accompaniment. Byron, as we know, used both prose and verse. When he was young, they thought that he would be an orator; and he says himself that as a schoolboy “my qualities were much more oratorical than poetical”; and oratory, we know, is own brother to satire and invective. There is wit, I think, even in Byron’s young speeches in the House of Lords; when, for instance, he pleads for the removal of oppression from the Irish Catholics, and, pointing out that even the negroes had been set free, exclaims, “I pity the Catholic peasantry for not having had the good fortune to be born black.” I do not dwell on the English Bards, of which he was afterwards ashamed, the satire having fallen wildly on many innocent heads. It is Pope, or Crabbe, blunted and coarsened. But it is worth noting that Childe Harold itself, but for the timid dissuasion of friends, might have been something of a medley of jest and earnest, like Don Juan later. The suppressed stanzas have been saved; and there is the satire on the mock inquiry into the conduct of the generals after the Convention of Cintra:
Thus unto Heav’n appeal’d the people; Heaven,
Which loves the lieges of our gracious king,
Decreed, that ere our Generals were forgiven,
Inquiry should be held about the thing.
But Mercy cloak’d the babes beneath her wing;
And as they spar’d our foes, so spar’d we them;
(Where was the pity of our sires for Byng?)
Yet knaves, not idiots, should the law condemn;
Then live, ye gallant knights! and bless your judges’ phlegm.
More of this ingredient would have lightened the tension of Childe Harold; but when Byron got to Venice, and had purged his bosom of his hectic tales and of some of his confessions, he found his real vein and his real form, or mould, and he commenced humorist. The true accompaniment to Don Juan and Beppo are Byron’s letters of the period. It seems to be admitted that his prose, which is chiefly found in his letters, will live; and it will live by its rich, rough, rapid, spontaneous humour, as well as by its manliness. He is perfectly natural and untrammelled in his pictures of his various Venetian establishments, and afterwards in the tale of his dealings
