except a personal quarrel with a bear, kept by me at Cambridge to sit for a fellowship, and whom the jealousy of his Trinity contemporaries prevented from success, has been abusing me, and, what is worse, the defenceless innocent above mentioned, in " The Satirist" for one year and some months. I am utterly unconscious of having given him any provocation; indeed, I am guiltless of having heard his name, till coupled with "The Satirist." He has therefore no reason to complain, and I dare say that, like Sir Fretful Plagiary, he is rather pleased than otherwise. I have now

mentioned all who have done me the honour to notice me and mine, that is, my bear and my book, except the editor of " The Satirist," who, it seems, is a gentleman-God wot! I wish he could impart a little of his gentility to his subordinate scribblers. I hear that Mr. Jerningham is about to take up the cudgels for his Mæcenas, Lord Carlisle. I hope not: he was one of the few, who, in the very short intercourse I had with him, treated me with kindness when a boy; and whatever he may say or do," pour on, I will endure." I have nothing further to add, save a general note of thanksgiving to readers, purchasers, and publishers, and, in the words of Scott, I wish

"To all and each a fair good night,
And rosy dreams and slumbers light."

HINTS FROM HORACE:

BEING AN ALLUSION IN ENGLISH VERSE TO THE EPISTLE "AD PISONES, DE ARTE POETICA," AND INTENDED AS A SEQUEL TO "ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS."

44

"Ergo fungar vice cotis, acutum

Reddere quæ ferrum valet, exsors ipsa secandi."

HOR. De Arte Poet,

FIELDING'S Amelia.

Rhymes are difficult things-they are stubborn things, sir."

[Authors are apt, it is said, to estimate their performances more according to the trouble they have cost themselves, than the pleasure they afford to the public; and it is only in this way that we can pretend to account for the extraordinary value which Lord Byron attached, even many long years after they were written, to these "Hints from Horace." The business of translating Horace has hitherto been a hopeless one; - and notwithstanding the brilliant cleverness of some passages, in both Pope's and Swift's Imitations of him, there had been, on the whole, very little to encourage any one to meddle seriously even with that less difficult department. It is, comparatively, an easy affair to transfer the effect, or something like the effect, of the majestic declamations of Juvenal; but the Horatian satire is cast in a mould of such exquisite delicacy uniting perfect ease with perfect elegance throughout as has hitherto defied all the skill of the moderns. Lord Byron, however, having composed this piece at Athens, in 1811, and brought it home in the same desk with the two first cantos of "Childe Harold," appears to have, on his arrival in London, contemplated its publication as far more likely to increase his reputation than that of his original poem. Perhaps Milton's preference of the "Paradise Regained" over the " Paradise Lost" is not a more decisive example of the extent to which a great author may mistake the source of his greatness. Lord Byron was prevented from publishing these lines, by a feeling whích, considering his high notion of their merit, does him honour. By accident, or nearly so, the "Harold" came out before the "Hints; "- and the reception of the former was so flattering to Lord Byron, that it could scarcely fail to take off, for the time, the edge of his appetite for literary bitterness. In short, he found himself mixing constantly in society with persons who had-from good sense, or goodnature, or from both overlooked the petulancies of his " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," and felt, as he said, that he should be "heaping coals of fire on his head" if he were to persist in bringing forth a continuation of his juvenile lampoon. Nine years had passed ere he is found writing thus to Mr. Murray:-"Get from Mr. Hobhouse, and send me a proof of my Hints from Horace it has now the nonum prematur in annum complete for its production. I have a notion that, with some omissiohs of names and passages, it will do; and I could put my late observations for Pope amongst the notes. As far as versification goes, it is good; and, in looking back at what I wrote about that period, I am astonished to see how little I have trained on. I wrote better then than now; but that comes of my having fallen into the atrocious bad taste of the times." On hearing, however, that, in Mr. Hobhouse's opinion, the iambics would require "a good deal of slashing" to suit the times, the notion of printing them was once more abandoned. They were first published, therefore, in 1831, seven years after the poet's death.]