Byron having, with or without design, arraigned some of the Thirty-Nine Articles of his countrymen, proceeded in the following month (October 1821) to commit an outrage, yet more keenly resented, on the memory of their sainted king, the pattern of private virtue and public vice, George III.  The perpetration of this occurred in the course of the last of his numerous literary duels, of which it was the close.  That Mr. Southey was a well-meaning and independent man of letters, there can be no doubt.  It does not require the conclusive testimony of the esteem of Savage Landor to compel our respect for the author of the Life of Nelson, and the open-handed friend of Coleridge; nor is it any disparagement that, with the last-named and with Wordsworth, he in middle life changed his political and other opinions.  But in his dealings with Lord Byron, Southey had “eaten of the insane root.”  He attacked a man of incomparably superior powers, for whom his utter want of humour—­save in its comparatively childish forms—­made him a ludicrously unequal match, and paid the penalty in being gibbeted in satires that will endure with the language.  The strife, which seems to have begun on Byron’s leaving England, rose to its height when his lordship, in the humorous observations and serious defence of his character against “the Remarks” in Blackwood, 1819 (August), accused the Laureate of apostasy, treason, and slander.

In 1821, when the latter published his Vision of Judgment—­the most quaintly preposterous panegyric ever penned—­he prefixed to it a long explanatory note, in the course of which he characterizes Don Juan as a “monstrous combination of horror and mockery, lewdness and impiety,” regrets that it has not been brought under the lash of the law, salutes the writer as chief of the Satanic school, inspired by the spirits of Moloch and Belial, and refers to the remorse that will overtake him on his death-bed.  To which Byron, inter alia:  “Mr. Southey, with a cowardly ferocity, exults over the anticipated death-bed repentance of the objects of his dislike, and indulges himself in a pleasant ‘Vision of Judgment,’ in prose, as well as verse, full of impious impudence.  What Mr. Southey’s sensations or ours may be in the awful moment of leaving this state of existence, neither he nor we can pretend to decide.  In common, I presume, with most men of any reflection, I have not waited for a death-bed to repent of many of my actions, notwithstanding the ‘diabolical pride’ which this pitiful renegade in his rancour would impute to those who scorn him.”  This dignified, though trenchant, rejoinder would have been unanswerable; but the writer goes on to charge the Laureate with spreading calumnies.  To this charge Southey, in January, 1822, replies with “a direct and positive denial,” and then proceeds to talk at large of the “whip and branding iron,” “slaves of sensuality,” “stones from slings,” “Goliahs,” “public panders,” and what not, in the manner of the brave days of old.