In tracing the fortunes of men, it is not a little curious to observe, how often the course of a whole life has depended on one single step.  Had Lord Byron now persisted in his original purpose of giving this poem to the press, instead of Childe Harold, it is more than probable that he would have been lost, as a great poet, to the world.[13] Inferior as the Paraphrase is, in every respect, to his former Satire, and, in some places, even descending below the level of under-graduate versifiers, its failure, there can be little doubt, would have been certain and signal;—­his former assailants would have resumed their advantage over him, and either, in the bitterness of his mortification, he would have flung Childe Harold into the fire; or, had he summoned up sufficient confidence to publish that poem, its reception, even if sufficient to retrieve him in the eyes of the public and his own, could never have, at all, resembled that explosion of success,—­that instantaneous and universal acclaim of admiration into which, coming, as it were, fresh from the land of song, he now surprised the world, and in the midst of which he was borne, buoyant and self-assured, along, through a succession of new triumphs, each more splendid than the last.

Happily, the better judgment of his friends averted such a risk; and he at length consented to the immediate publication of Childe Harold,—­still, however, to the last, expressing his doubts of its merits, and his alarm at the sort of reception it might meet with in the world.

“I did all I could,” says his adviser, “to raise his opinion of this composition, and I succeeded; but he varied much in his feelings about it, nor was he, as will appear, at his ease until the world decided on its merit.  He said again and again that I was going to get him into a scrape with his old enemies, and that none of them would rejoice more than the Edinburgh Reviewers at an opportunity to humble him.  He said I must not put his name to it.  I entreated him to leave it to me, and that I would answer for this poem silencing all his enemies.”

The publication being now determined upon, there arose some doubts and difficulty as to a publisher.  Though Lord Byron had intrusted Cawthorn with what he considered to be his surer card, the “Hints from Horace,” he did not, it seems, think him of sufficient station in the trade to give a sanction or fashion to his more hazardous experiment.  The former refusal of the Messrs. Longman[14] to publish his “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” was not forgotten; and he expressly stipulated with Mr. Dallas that the manuscript should not be offered to that house.  An application was, at first, made to Mr. Miller, of Albemarle Street; but, in consequence of the severity with which Lord Elgin was treated in the poem, Mr. Miller (already the publisher and bookseller of this latter nobleman) declined the work.  Even this circumstance,—­so apprehensive was the poet for his fame,—­began to re-awaken