The probable results of the publication of a work of such a sensational character had been foreseen by both Murray and Longman. When the first number of _The Liberal_ appeared containing not only _The Vision of Judgment_ but also three epigrams of Byron’s on the death of Castlereagh, it was received by a torrent of hostile criticism from the Tory press. The _Literary Gazette_ for October 19, 1822, called Byron’s work “heartless and beastly ribaldry,” and added on November 2, that Byron had contributed to the _Liberal_ “impiety, vulgarity, inhumanity, and heartlessness.” The _Courier_ for October 26 termed him “an unsexed Circe, who gems the poisoned cup he offers us.” On the Whig side, in contrast, Hunt’s _Examiner_ for September 29 spoke of it as “a Satire upon the Laureate, which contains also a true and fearless character of a grossly adulated monarch.” Byron himself described it to Murray as “one of my best things.”[376] Later critical opinion has also tended to rank it very high. Goethe called the verses on George III “the sublime of hatred.” Swinburne, himself a revolutionist but no partisan of Byron’s, exhausts superlatives in commenting on it: “This poem--stands alone, not in Byron’s work only, but in the work of the world. Satire in earlier times had changed her rags for robes; Juvenal had clothed with fire, and Dryden with majesty, that wandering and bastard muse. Byron gave her wings to fly with, above the reach even of these. Others have had as much of passion and as much of humor; Dryden had perhaps as much of both combined. But here, and not elsewhere, a third quality is apparent--the sense of a high and clear imagination.--Above all, the balance of thought and passion is admirable; human indignation and divine irony are alike understood and expressed; the pure and fiery anger of men at the sight of wrong-doing, the tacit inscrutable derision of heaven.” Nichol, in his life of Byron, says:--“Nowhere in so much space, save in some of the prose of Swift, is there in English so much scathing satire.” Two figures in Byron’s poem have been made the basis of a shrewd comparison by Henley. He says: “Byron and Wordsworth are like the Lucifer and Michael of _The Vision of Judgment_. Byron’s was the genius of revolt, as Wordsworth’s was the genius of dignified and useful submission; Byron preached the doctrine of private revolution, Wordsworth the dogma of private apotheosis--Byron was the passionate and dauntless ‘soldier of a forlorn hope,’ Wordsworth a kind of inspired clergyman.” Byron’s sympathies in the _Vision_, as in _Cain_, were undoubtedly with Lucifer, the rebel and exile, and his poem will live as a satiric declaration of the duty of active resistance to despotism and oppression. CHAPTER X “THE AGE OF BRONZE” AND “THE BLUES”