We must say we think little of our author’s turn for satire.  His “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” is dogmatical and insolent, but without refinement or point.  He calls people names, and tries to transfix a character with an epithet, which does not stick, because it has no other foundation than his own petulance and spite; or he endeavours to degrade by alluding to some circumstance of external situation.  He says of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry, that “it is his aversion.”  That may be:  but whose fault is it?  This is the satire of a lord, who is accustomed to have all his whims or dislikes taken for gospel, and who cannot be at the pains to do more than signify his contempt or displeasure.  If a great man meets with a rebuff which he does not like, he turns on his heel, and this passes for a repartee.  The Noble Author says of a celebrated barrister and critic, that he was “born in a garret sixteen stories high.”  The insinuation is not true; or if it were, it is low.  The allusion degrades the person who makes, not him to whom it is applied.  This is also the satire of a person of birth and quality, who measures all merit by external rank, that is, by his own standard.  So his Lordship, in a “Letter to the Editor of My Grandmother’s Review,” addresses him fifty times as “my dear Robarts;” nor is there any other wit in the article.  This is surely a mere assumption of superiority from his Lordship’s rank, and is the sort of quizzing he might use to a person who came to hire himself as a valet to him at Long’s—­the waiters might laugh, the public will not.  In like manner, in the controversy about Pope, he claps Mr. Bowles on the back with a coarse facetious familiarity, as if he were his chaplain whom he had invited to dine with him, or was about to present to a benefice.  The reverend divine might submit to the obligation, but he has no occasion to subscribe to the jest.  If it is a jest that Mr. Bowles should be a parson, and Lord Byron a peer, the world knew this before; there was no need to write a pamphlet to prove it.

The Don Juan indeed has great power; but its power is owing to the force of the serious writing, and to the oddity of the contrast between that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded.  From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step.  You laugh and are surprised that any one should turn round and travestie himself:  the drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and feelings.  He makes virtue serve as a foil to vice; dandyism is (for want of any other) a variety of genius.  A classical intoxication is followed by the splashing of soda-water, by frothy effusions of ordinary bile.  After the lightning and the hurricane, we are introduced to the interior of the cabin and the contents of wash-hand basins.  The solemn hero of tragedy plays Scrub in the farce.  This is “very tolerable and not to be endured.”  The Noble Lord is almost the only writer who has prostituted his talents in this