’No muse will cheer with renovating smile,
      The paralytic puling of Carlisle.’

In a note Byron adds:—­’The Earl of Carlisle has lately published an eighteen-penny pamphlet on the state of the stage, and offers his plan for building a new theatre.  It is to be hoped his lordship will be permitted to bring forward anything for the stage—­except his own tragedies.’  In the third canto of Childe Harold Byron makes amends.  In writing of the death of Lord Carlisle’s youngest son at Waterloo, he says:—­

     ’Their praise is hymn’d by loftier harps than mine;
      Yet one I would select from that proud throng,
      Partly because they blend me with his line,
      And partly that I did his Sire some wrong.’

For his lordship’s tragedy see post, under Nov. 19, 1783.

[369] Men of rank and fortune, however, should be pretty well assured of having a real claim to the approbation of the publick, as writers, before they venture to stand forth.  Dryden, in his preface to All for Love, thus expresses himself:—­

’Men of pleasant conversation (at least esteemed so) and endued with a trifling kind of fancy, perhaps helped out by [with] a smattering of Latin, are ambitious to distinguish themselves from the herd of gentlemen, by their poetry: 

"Rarus enim ferme sensus communis in ilia
Fortuna,”——­[Juvenal, viii. 73.]

And is not this a wretched affectation, not to be contented with what fortune has done for them, and sit down quietly with their estates, but they must call their wits in question, and needlessly expose their nakedness to publick view?  Not considering that they are not to expect the same approbation from sober men, which they have found from their flatterers after the third bottle:  If a little glittering in discourse has passed them on us for witty men, where was the necessity of undeceiving the world?  Would a man who has an ill title to an estate, but yet is in possession of it, would he bring it of his own accord to be tried at Westminster?  We who write, if we want the talents [talent], yet have the excuse that we do it for a poor subsistence; but what can be urged in their defence, who, not having the vocation of poverty to scribble, out of mere wantonness take pains to make themselves ridiculous?  Horace was certainly in the right where he said, “That no man is satisfied with his own condition.”  A poet is not pleased, because he is not rich; and the rich are discontented because the poets will not admit them of their number.’  BOSWELL.  Boswell, it should seem, had followed Swift’s advice:—­

     ’Read all the prefaces of Dryden,
      For these our critics much confide in;
      Though merely writ at first for filling,
      To raise the volume’s price a shilling.’

Swift’s Works, ed. 1803, xi. 293.

[370] See ante, i. 402.

[371] Wordsworth, it should seem, held with Johnson in this.  When he read the article in the Edinburgh Review on Lord Byron’s early poems, he remarked that ’though Byron’s verses were probably poor enough, yet such an attack was abominable,—­that a young nobleman, who took to poetry, deserved to be encouraged, not ridiculed.’  Rogers’s Table-Talk, p. 234, note.