The sharpest satire in the poem was inserted merely to satisfy a personal grudge. Hewson Clarke (1787–1832), editor of _The Satirist_, a monthly magazine, had made sport of _Hours of Idleness_ in an issue for October, 1807, and had harshly reviewed _Poems Original and Translated_ in August, 1808. Byron replied in a passage full of violent invective, describing Clarke as “A would-be satirist, a hired Buffoon, A monthly scribbler of some low Lampoon.”[108] These lines Byron never repudiated; he appended to them in 1816 the note: “Right enough: this was well deserved and well laid on.”[109] _English Bards_ closes with a defiance and a challenge. The poet, then only twenty-one, repeating that his only motive has been “to sternly speak the truth,” dares his opponents to meet him in the open and declares his willingness to engage them. There is something amusing in the pompous way in which Byron, throwing down the gauntlet, boasts of his own indifference and callousness to criticism. He had, however, achieved at least one of his two objects: he had answered hostile reviewers in a manner which made it plain that he would not submit unresistingly to supercilious comment on his work. Assuredly he had turned the weapons of his critics against themselves. Nothing was more natural than that Byron, his wrath for the most part evaporated, should regret his bitterness in cases where his hasty judgment had carried him too far. On his way home from Greece he wrote Dallas: “At this period when I can think and act coolly, I regret that I have written it.”[110] The story of the events leading to the suppression of the fifth and last edition may be given in the words of Byron to Leigh Hunt, October 22, 1815: “I was correcting the fifth edition of E. B. for the press, when Rogers represented to me that he knew Lord and Lady Holland would not be sorry if I suppressed any further publication of that poem; and I immediately acquiesced, and with great pleasure, for I had attacked them upon a fancied and false provocation, with many others; and neither was, nor am, sorry to have done what I could to stifle that furious rhapsody.”[111] The result was that the whole impression of this edition was burned, only a few copies being rescued, and when, in 1816, Byron left England forever, he signed a Power of Attorney forbidding republication in any form.[112] His mature opinion of the work is expressed in a comment written at Diodati in 1816: “The greater part of this Satire I most sincerely wish had never been written--not only on account of the injustice of some of the critical and some of the personal part of it--but the tone and temper are such as I cannot approve.”