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Lord Byron and his Times: http://lordbyron.org
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In the course of your practice as a critical sportsman, you have
already had the merit of discovering, winging, and bagging some new kinds of game. Upon one of
these, your additions to
You do not, I perceive, know what a paltry creature this is, otherwise you would
either have said more or less about him than you have done. I am a very brief man, and can
neither write sounding letters like Idoloclastes, nor doleful ones like Presbyter Anglicanus,
nor jeering ones like
He is a mere quack, Mr Editor, and a mere bookmaker; one of the sort that lounge in third-rate bookshops, and write third-rate books. It were well if he were honest in his humble trade. I beg, through your Miscellany, to put the following queries to him, which I hope he will answer by return of post.
Query I.
II. Is it, or is it not, true that you owe all your ideas about poetry or criticism to gross misconceptions of the meaning of his conversation; and that you once owed your personal safety, perhaps existence, to the humane and firm interference of that virtuous man, who rescued you from the hands of an indignant peasantry whose ideas of purity you, a cockney visitor, had dared to outrage?
III. Is it, or is it not true, that you did some time ago, in your occupation of scribbler, play off upon one of your task-masters or employers, the two following tricks? 1. Sending him a translation verbatim from a common French book, and demanding pay for it as your own original composition. 2. Quoting a book upon tobacco-pipes as a book upon tides; and thereby exposing you, him, and the work itself, to the eternal derision of all who understood either the subject on which you were writing, or the German tongue, or the rules of common honesty?
IV. Being expelled, as you deserv-
1. For example, in an essay of yours on the “
2. Do you not, in that essay, pass off for original communication, a quantity of trash already printed by you in another publication?
3. Do not you call most contemptible character of the day?
4. Do not you, who cannot repeat the Greek alphabet, nay, who know not of how
many letters it is formed, pretend to give an opinion of the literary character of
5. Do not you assert, that Greek
style
6. Do you know the difference between
8. Did not you say what you knew to be false, when you said, that in his preface
” (there is no
preface), had “hardly a sentence of common English?
”
9. Do you know any thing whatever about the late
10. Do you know what is English, or what is not English, any more
11. Do not you pretend to claim acquaintance with Bishop
12. Do you not, you impudent charlatan, quizz the poor
Editors of the one of the most masculine
of English intellects;
” mirabile dictu!
13. Is it possible to be guilty of a more mean trick than thus deluding into
derision, under the mask, and claiming the recompense of good will, two men, who, hard-hearted
Cockney! “did thee no wrong?
”
14. Do you not, on every occasion, describe the Editors of this said Scottish Magazine as perfect ninnies, and their work as a millstone? and do you not despise yourself, for mixing, for the sake of a few paltry pounds, your madness with their idiocy? and do not you say so at all times and in all places?
V. Did not you publish an
VI. Did you not insinuate, in an essay on
VII. Did you not wantonly, and grossly, and indecently, insult a retracting lie, in order to escape a caning?
VIII. Do you know the Latin for a goose?
As soon as