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Lord Byron and his Times: http://lordbyron.org
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We said a little while since, that if the creature yclept
“Such, Sir,”
observes
Oh, how true is this! “But you are a nuisance,” continues
The Quarterly
ReviewRound TableCharacters of Shakespeare’s
PlaysLectures on the English Poets
“Your employers,
Mr. Gifford , do not pay their hirelings for nothing. They want your invincible pertness, your mercenary malice, your impenetrable dullness, your barefaced impudence, your pragmatical self-sufficiency, your hypocritical zeal, your pious frauds to stand in the gap of their prejudices and pretensions, to fly-blow and taint public opinion, to defeat independent efforts, to apply not the sting of the scorpion but the touch of the torpedo to youthful hopes, to crawl and leave the slimy track of sophistry and lies over every work that does not “dedicate it’s sweet leaves” to some luminary of the Treasury Bench, or is not fostered in the hot-bed of corruption.—This is your office; “this is what is looked for at your hands, and this you do not baulk.”—You are, by appointment, literary toad-eater to greatness, and taster to the Court.”—P. 41.
“Your reasoning is ill put together; it wants sincerity, it wants ingenuity.”—“You ask, “are we gratified by the cruelties of
Nero andDomitian ?” No, not we—they weretoo petty and cowardly to strike the imagination at a distance; but the Roman Senate tolerated them, addressed their perpetrators, exalted them into gods, the Fathers of their people; they had pimps and scribblers of all sorts in their pay, their Senecas , &c. till a turbulent rabble thinking that there were no injuries to society greater than the endurance of unlimited and wanton oppression, put an end to the farce, and abated the nuisance as well as they could. Had you and I lived in those times, we should have been what we are now, I “a sour mal-content;” and you “a sweet courtier.”—P. 49.
The following prose epigram contains half the secret of all
“You say that it is impossible to remember what I write after reading it:—One remembers to have read what you write—
before!”—P. 35.
But we must reserve another extract or two for next week. Blackguard’s Edinburgh Magazine