have a hint of the vigor and vehemence of Pope himself, while they display, at the same time, the unfairness and exaggerated bitterness, so rarely mitigated by good humor, which were to distinguish the longer _English Bards_. This poem, after all, was a mere scholastic experiment to be read only by those in close touch with events at Harrow. _Fugitive Pieces_ contained also Byron’s earliest effort at political satire. An _Impromptu_, unsigned, and derogatory to Fox, had appeared in the _Morning Post_ for September 26, 1806, only a few months after the death of the great Whig statesman, and the schoolboy, even then headed toward liberalism, came to the Minister’s defence in a reply published in the _Morning Chronicle_ in October of the same year. The opening couplet: “Oh, factious viper! whose envenomed tooth, Would mangle still the dead, perverting truth,” proved that he possessed, with Gifford, the singular faculty of working himself, with very little cause, into a furious rage. When once he had let his wrath master him, he was uncontrollable, and he found satisfaction in nothing so much as in affixing scurrilous epithets to those who had aroused him. Until he had studied the Italian satirists, he was almost incapable of cool dissection of an enemy’s faults or shortcomings, and even then he never acquired the virtue of self-control. This essay at political satire was not followed by other excursions into politics, probably because of the poet’s temporary indifference to the situation in England at the time. On January 15, 1809, in writing his solicitor, Hanson, concerning his entrance into the House of Lords, he said: “I cannot say that my opinion is strongly in favor of either party.”[53] Not until after his return to England from his travels in 1811 and the beginning of his friendship with Moore, Hunt, and other active Whigs, did his interest in politics revive and his pen become a party weapon. The last of the three classical satires in couplets to be found in _Fugitive Pieces_ is _Thoughts Suggested by a College Examination_ (1806), composed at Cambridge. It opens with a burlesque sketch of Magnus, a college tutor, but soon broadens into a general indictment of pedantry and scholastic sycophancy. Byron himself had desired to go to Oxford, and he never felt himself in sympathy with either the instructors or the educational system of his Alma Mater. This particular poem, however, is merely an outburst of boyish spleen, remarkable for nothing except a kind of sauciness not unknown in the university freshman.