If Byron was humiliated, enraged, and embittered by the severity of the Edinburgh Review, he was not crushed.  He rallied, collected his unsuspected strength, and shattered his opponents by one of the wittiest, most brilliant, and most unscrupulous satires in our literature, which he called “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.”  At the height of his fame he regretted and suppressed this youthful production of malice and bitterness.  Yet it was the beginning of his great career, both as to a consciousness of his own powers and in attracting the public attention.  It was doubtless unwise, since he attacked many who were afterwards his friends, and since he sowed the seeds of hatred among those who might otherwise have been his admirers or apologists.  He had to learn the truth that “with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again.”  The creators of public opinion in reference to Byron have not been women of fashion, or men of the world, but literary lions themselves,—­like Thackeray, who detested him, and the whole school of pharisaic ecclesiastical dignitaries, who abhorred in him sentiments which they condoned in Fielding, in Burns, in Rousseau, and in Voltaire.

Before his bitter satire was published, however, Byron took his seat in the House of Lords, not knowing any peer sufficiently to be introduced by him.  His guardian, Lord Carlisle, treated him very shabbily, refusing to furnish to the Lord Chancellor some important information, of a technical kind, which refusal delayed the ceremony for several weeks, until the necessary papers could be procured from Cornwall relating to the marriage of one of his ancestors.  Unfriended and alone, Byron sat on the scarlet benches of the House of Lords until he was formally admitted as a peer.  But when the Lord Chancellor left the woolsack to congratulate him, and with a smiling face extended his hand, the embittered young peer bowed coldly and stiffly, and simply held out two or three of his fingers,—­an act of impudence for which there was no excuse.

It is difficult to understand why Lord Byron should have had so few friends or even acquaintances at that time among people of his rank.  At twenty-one, he was a lonely and solitary man, mortified by the attack of the Edinburgh Review, exasperated by injustice, morose even to misanthropy, and decidedly sceptical in his religious opinions.  Newstead Abbey was a burden to him, since he could not keep it up.  He owed L10,000.  He had no domestic ties, except to a mother with whom he could not live.  His poetry had not brought him fame, for which of all things he most ardently thirsted.  His love affairs were unfortunate, and tinged his soul with sadness and melancholy.  Nor had fashion as yet marked him for her own.  He craved excitement, and society to him was dull and conventional.