| Summary: | <p>Between March and June 1811, as he travelled in Greece and Malta, Byron wrote a fragmentary imitation in heroic couplets of the first lines of Horace’s Satire 1.4. The imitation was never completed, but survives in holograph fair copy on a single leaf bound up with the second corrected manuscript of Hints from Horace, which Byron was working on in May and June of the same year. Reproduced in full, the poem runs to eighteen lines:</p> <br/> <p>Dryden and Buckingham in Charles’s reign,</p> <p>And Foote in George’s – took men’s names in vain.</p> <p>All evil doers doomed to be described,</p> <p>Were lashed along, however high they bribed,</p> <p>And every Indian thief and English rogue,</p> <p>Or other follower of the Vice in vogue,</p> <p>Adulteress or duellist – felt the rowell,</p> <p>No matter which, – two Pagets or one Powell! –</p> <p>Whate’er was done – the Cat escaped the bag –</p> <p>And Peers found small protection in Scan. Mag.! –</p> <p>These and their followers laughed at great and small</p> <p>Till desperate Churchill’sMuse outthundered all,</p> <p>Whose verse by turns half angry, half facete,</p> <p>Moves or must run on most unpolished feet.</p> <p>But all this roughness of his rhyming prose</p> <p>We pardon (like a Poodle) for his nose,</p> <p>Than which there never was Satiric snout</p> <p>So sharp at smelling mortal foibles out.</p> <br/> <p>Frederick Beaty is unusual in noting the interest of this poem as an early statement of Byron’s concept of the English satiric tradition, and suggests in particular that it ‘raises a tantalising question about Byron’s relationship to Charles Churchill’. He identifies what is still an overlooked facet of Byron’s identity as a satirist: just what role did Churchill play in the early years of Byron’s development?</p>
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