The originality of the satire was questioned as far back as 1822 in _Blakwood’s Magazine_, which, in a _Letter to Paddy_, said: “_English Bards_ is, even to the most wretched point of its rhyme, most grossly and manifestly borrowed.”[60] That this is inexcusable exaggeration hardly needs asserting; yet it is not detrimental to Byron to state that he had been anticipated in many of his criticisms to such an extent that his views could have offered little of novelty to his readers, and that some of his lines are reminiscent of the work of previous English satirists. He was no direct plagiarist, but he had a tenacious memory, and he had read omnivorously in Pope, Churchill, Gifford, and the minor satirists of his own time. It is not strange that he occasionally repeats phrases which had become, by inheritance, the common property of all English satirists. Continuing a practice which, as we have seen, was instituted by Oldham and adopted by Pope and Gifford, Byron evidently intended to follow the general plan of the first satire of Juvenal. Pope, in the _Satires and Epistles Imitated_, had printed the Latin poems of Horace in parallel columns with his own verses.[61] Gifford, in the _Baviad_, had placed sections of the text of Persius in notes at the bottom of the page, and had adhered rather closely to the structure of his Latin model. Byron, however, soon perceived the restrictions which such procedure would entail, and after indicating three examples of imitation in the first hundred lines, neglected Juvenal in order to pursue an independent course.[62] Aside from these acknowledged imitations, it is interesting to notice that one couplet from _English Bards_, “I, too, can scrawl, and once upon a time I poured along the town a flood of rhyme,”[63] have some resemblance to two lines of Gifford’s translation of Juvenal’s first satire, “I, too, can write--and at a pedant’s frown, Once poured my fustian rhetoric on the town.” These few instances excepted, there is no evidence in the poem of borrowing from the Latin satirists, nor is any one of them mentioned or quoted in _English Bards_. It is curious that Byron, instead of striking out for himself in an original way, should have repeated complacently many of the time-honored ideas which had become almost fixed conventions in satire. It is customary, of course, for the satirist to complain of contemporary conditions and to sigh for the good old days; indeed, it would be possible to collate passages from satirists in an unbroken line from Juvenal to William Watson, each making it clear that the age in which the writer lives is decadent. As far back as 1523 we find in the verse preface to _Rede Me and be nott wrothe_, a couplet full of this lament: “This worlde is worsse than evyr it was, Never so depe in miserable decaye.”