It was a bitter pill for Lord Byron when his juvenile poems, called "Hours of Idleness," were so severely attacked by the Edinburgh Review. They might have escaped the searching eyes of the critics had the author not been a lord. At that time the great Reviews had just been started; and it was the especial object of the Edinburgh Review to handle authors roughly,--to condemn and not to praise. Criticism was not then a science, as it became fifty years later, in the hands of Sainte-Beuve, who endeavored to review every production fairly and justly. There was nothing like justice entering into the head of Jeffrey or Sydney Smith or Brougham, or later on of Macaulay, whose articles were often written for political party effect. Critics, from the time of Swift down to the middle of the century, aimed to demolish enemies, and to make party capital; hence, as a general thing, their articles were not criticisms at all, but attacks. And as even an Achilles was vulnerable in his heel, so most intellectual giants have some weak point for the shafts of malice to penetrate. Yet it is the weaknesses of great men that people like to quote. If Byron was humiliated, enraged, and embittered by the severity of the Edinburgh Review, he was not crushed. He rallied, collected his unsuspected strength, and shattered his opponents by one of the wittiest, most brilliant, and most unscrupulous satires in our literature, which he called "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." At the height of his fame he regretted and suppressed this youthful production of malice and bitterness. Yet it was the beginning of his great career, both as to a consciousness of his own powers and in attracting the public attention. It was doubtless unwise, since he attacked many who were afterwards his friends, and since he sowed the seeds of hatred among those who might otherwise have been his admirers or apologists. He had to learn the truth that "with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again." The creators of public opinion in reference to Byron have not been women of fashion, or men of the world, but literary lions themselves,--like Thackeray, who detested him, and the whole school of pharisaic ecclesiastical dignitaries, who abhorred in him sentiments which they condoned in Fielding, in Burns, in Rousseau, and in Voltaire.