Upon this he took flight to London and Hydra followed, repentant and lacrimose.  A truce was patched up; they agreed to disagree, and coldly shaking hands withdrew in opposite directions.

After this, when the poet wrote he addressed his mother as “Dear Madam,” and confined himself to business matters.  Only rarely was there any flash in his letters, as when he said, “Dear Mother—­you know you are a vixen, but save me some champagne.”  If Byron’s mother had been of the stuff of which most mothers are made, we would have found these two safely settled at Newstead, making the best of their battered fortune, with the son in time marrying some neighbor lass, and slipping into the place of a respectable English gentleman, a worthy member of the House of Lords.

But the boy, now grown twenty, had no home, and either was supplied too much money or else too little.  He wasted his substance in London, economized in Southwell, sponged on friends, and borrowed of Scrope Davis at Cambridge.  When a remittance again came, he explored the greenrooms, took lessons from Professor Johnson, the pugilist (referred to as “my corporeal pastor"), drank whole companies under the table, bought a tame bear and a wolf to guard the entrance of Newstead, and roamed the country as a gipsy, in company with a girl dressed in boy’s clothes, thus supplying Richard Le Gallienne an interesting chapter in his “Quest of the Golden Girl.”

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.