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But all this time his brain was active, and another book of poetry had been printed, entitled “Hours of Idleness.” This book was gotten out, at his own expense, by the same country printer as the first.

Surely the verse must have had merit, or why should Lord Brougham, in the great “Edinburgh Review,” go after it with a slashing, crashing, damning criticism?

When Byron read the review, a bystander has told us he turned red, then livid green. He straightway ordered and drank two bottles of claret, said nothing, but looked like a man who had sent a challenge.

A challenge! that was exactly what Byron proposed. He would fight Jeffrey first, and then take up in turn every man who had ever contributed to the magazine–he would kill them all. And to that end he called for his pistols and went out to practise firing at ten paces. Wiser counsel prevailed, and he decided to attack the enemy in their own citadel, and with their own weapons. He ordered ink, and began “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.”

It took time to get this enormous siege-gun into position and find the range. Finally, it was loaded with more kinds of missiles, in the way of what Augustine Birrell has called literary stinkpots, than were ever before rammed home in a single charge.

It was an audacious move–to reverse the initiative and go after a whole race of critics, scribblers and reviewers, who had been badgering honest folks, and blow ’em into kingdom come.

But at the last moment Byron’s heart failed him, his wrath gave way to caution, and “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” appeared anonymously.

The edition was soon exhausted–the shot had at least raised a mighty dust.

The author got his nerve back, fathered the book, made corrections; and this edition, too, sold with a rush. Byron returned to Newstead, invited a score of his Cambridge cronies, who came down, entering the mansion between the bear and the wolf, and were received with salvos of pistol-shots. Here they played games over the spacious grounds, wrestled, boxed, swam, and at night feasted and drank deep damnation out of a skull to all Scotch reviewers.

Probably the acme of this depravity was reached when the young gentlemen began shooting the pendants off the chandelier; then the servants hastily decamped and left the rogues to do their own cooking.

This brought them to their senses, sanity came back, and the company disbanded. Then the servants, who had watched the orgies from afar, returned and found a week’s pile of dishes unwashed and a horse stabled in the library.

* * * * *

Then Byron had reached the mature age of twenty-one, he was formally admitted to the House of Lords as a Peer of the realm. His titles and pedigree were so closely scanned on this occasion that he grew quite out of conceit with the noble company, and was seriously thinking of launching a dunciad in their direction. His good nature was especially ruffled by Lord Carlisle, his guardian, who refused to stand as his legal sponsor. The chief cause of the old Lord’s prejudice against the young one lay in the fact that the young ‘un had ridiculed the old ‘un’s literary pretensions.

They were rivals in letters, with a very beautiful, natural and mutual disdain for each other.

Lord Byron was not welcomed into the House of Lords: he simply pushed in the door because he had a right to. He thirsted for approbation, for distinction, for notoriety. His sensitive soul hung upon newspaper clippings with feverish expectations; and about all the attention he received was in the line of being damned by faint praise, or smothered with silence. Patriotism, as far as England was concerned, was not a part of Byron’s composition.

When all Great Britain was execrating Napoleon, picturing him as a devil with horns and hoofs, Byron looked upon him as the world’s hero.