The complete works of Lord Byron Volume 2

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1852 Excerpt: ...would fall From lips that now may seem imbued with gall;"' Nor fools nor follies tempt me to despise The meanest thing that crawl'd beneath my eyes; But now, so callous grown, so changed since youth, I 've learn'd to think, and sternly speak the truth; Learn'd to deride the critic's starch decree, And break him on the wheel he meant for me; To spurn the rod a scribbler bids me kiss, Nor care if courts and crowds applaud or hiss: Nay more, though all my rival rhymesters frown, I too can hunt a poetaster down; And arm'd in proof, the gauntlet cast at once To Scotch marauder, and to southern dunce. Thus much I 've dared; if my incondite lay Hath wrong'd these righteous times, let others say; This, let the world, which knows not how to spare, Yet rarely blames unjustly, now declare." POSTSCRIPT. I have been mformed, since the present edition went to the press, that my trusty and well-beloved cousins, the Edinburgh Reviewers, are preparing a most vehement critique on my poor, gentle, unresisting Muse, whom they have already so bedeviled with their ungodly ribaldry: "Tantsene animis cceleslibus iraa!" 1 suppose I must say of Jeffrey as Sir Andrew Agueqhcek saith, "an I had known he was so cunning of fence, I had seen him damned ere I had fought him." What a pity it is that I shall be beyond the Bosphorus before the next number has passed the Tweed. But yet 1 hope to light my pipe with it in Persia. My northern friends have accused me, with justice, of personality towards their great literary Anthropophagus, Jeffrey: but what else was to be done with him and his dirty pack, who feed "by lying and slandering," and slake their thirst by "evil speaking?" 1 have adduced facts already well known, and of Jeffrev's mind I...