The actual stimulus for the enlargement of the poem came, however, from an external source. Injured vanity, the occasion of the earlier _Soliloquy of a Bard in the Country_, was also responsible for the completion of the half-formed satire of which Byron had written to Miss Pigot. On February 26, 1808, he wrote Becher: “A most violent attack is preparing for me in the next number of the _Edinburgh Review_.”[56] The attack alluded to, a criticism of _Hours of Idleness_, unsigned but probably contributed by Brougham, appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_ for January, 1807; but that number, in accordance with a practice not then uncommon, was delayed for over a month in going through the press, and was not actually on sale until March. The article itself, which has since become notorious for its bad taste, began with the scathing sentence: “The poetry of this young lord belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit.” Its attitude was certainly not calculated to encourage or soothe the youthful poet, and with his usual impetuosity, he at once sought a means of redress. Adding an introduction and a conclusion to his embryonic poem, and inserting an attack on Jeffrey, whom he supposed to be his critic, he had the whole privately printed, as _British Bards_, in the autumn of 1808. This work, revised and enlarged, but with some excisions,[57] making a poem of 696 lines, was published anonymously in March, 1809, under the title _English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers_. A letter of January 25, 1809, to Dallas proves that the poet had intended to conceal his authorship by inserting a slighting reference to “minor Byron,”[58] but this ruse was not retained in the published volume. The satire, as Byron told Medwin, made a prodigious impression. A second edition in October, 1809, was amplified by several interpolated passages so that it comprised 1050 lines. A third and a fourth edition were demanded while Byron was on his travels, and the fifth, including the 1070 lines of the poem as it is ordinarily printed to-day, was suppressed by him in 1811. In the second and succeeding editions his name was on the title-page.