guess how painfully he must have writhed under the sneers of the highest.  A friend, who found him in the first moments of excitement after reading the article, enquired anxiously whether he had just received a challenge?—­not knowing how else to account for the fierce defiance of his looks.  It would, indeed, be difficult for sculptor or painter to imagine a subject of more fearful beauty than the fine countenance of the young poet must have exhibited in the collected energy of that crisis.  His pride had been wounded to the quick, and his ambition humbled;—­but this feeling of humiliation lasted but for a moment.  The very re-action of his spirit against aggression roused him to a full consciousness of his own powers;[90] and the pain and the shame of the injury were forgotten in the proud certainty of revenge.

Among the less sentimental effects of this review upon his mind, he used to mention that, on the day he read it, he drank three bottles of claret to his own share after dinner;—­that nothing, however, relieved him till he had given vent to his indignation in rhyme, and that “after the first twenty lines, he felt himself considerably better.”  His chief care, indeed, afterwards, was amiably devoted,—­as we have seen it was, in like manner, before the criticism,—­to allaying, as far as he could, the sensitiveness of his mother; who, not having the same motive or power to summon up a spirit of resistance, was, of course, more helplessly alive to this attack upon his fame, and felt it far more than, after the first burst of indignation, he did himself.  But the state of his mind upon the subject will be best understood from the following letter.

LETTER 25.

TO MR. BECKER.

“Dorant’s, March 28. 1808.

“I have lately received a copy of the new edition from Ridge, and it is high time for me to return my best thanks to you for the trouble you have taken in the superintendence.  This I do most sincerely, and only regret that Ridge has not seconded you as I could wish,—­at least, in the bindings, paper, &c., of the copy he sent to me.  Perhaps those for the public may be more respectable in such articles.

You have seen the Edinburgh Review, of course.  I regret that Mrs. Byron is so much annoyed.  For my own part, these ’paper bullets of the brain’ have only taught me to stand fire; and, as I have been lucky enough upon the whole, my repose and appetite are not discomposed.  Pratt, the gleaner, author, poet, &c. &c., addressed a long rhyming epistle to me on the subject, by way of consolation; but it was not well done, so I do not send it, though the name of the man might make it go down.  The E. R^s. have not performed their task well; at least the literati tell me this; and I think I could write a more sarcastic critique on myself than any yet published.  For instance, instead of the remark,—­ill-natured enough, but not keen,—­about Macpherson, I (quoad reviewers) could have said, ’Alas, this imitation only proves the assertion of Dr. Johnson, that many men, women, and children, could write such poetry as Ossian’s.’