A retrospective survey of the material so far considered again fastens our attention on the singular complexity of Byron’s satiric spirit. In a body of work comparatively meagre in content, he had used both invective and mockery, severity and humor. He had tried various metrical forms, some dignified and some colloquial. There is less to be said, however, for the intrinsic merit of the satires. No one of them is brilliant, nor does any one suggest marked intellectual power. The invective is too often mere indiscriminate ranting; the wit is, for the most part, sophomoric; and the assumption of superiority in one so young is, at times, exceedingly offensive. Here and there in single lines and passages, there are indications of latent genius; but many other young poets have shown as much. These exercises, however, imitative and crude though they were, were training him in style and giving him confidence. When his anger was fully roused by the _Edinburgh Review_, he found himself prepared with an instrument for his purposes. _English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers_, with all its faults, is not the product of an amateur in satire, but of a writer who, after much study of the methods of Pope and Gifford, has learned how to express his wrath in virulent couplets. CHAPTER IV “ENGLISH BARDS, AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS” _English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers_, Byron’s first long poem, is, like the _Dunciad_ and the _Baviad_, a satire principally on literary people. It was not, however, in its inception, planned to be either so pretentious or so comprehensive as it afterwards came to be. In a letter to Elizabeth Pigot, October 26, 1807, when Byron was still an undergraduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he referred casually to “one poem of 380 lines, to be published (without my name) in a few weeks, with notes,” and added, “The poem to be published is a satire.”[55] The manuscript draft of the work as thus conceived contained 360 lines.