show that Byron’s rage at that critic was still smouldering. Repeating the bombastic challenge uttered in the postscript to the second edition of _English Bards_, the satirist taunts Jeffrey with disinclination or inability to reply to the assault made upon him. It is probable that the Scotchman never saw this passage in _Hints from Horace_; at any rate he did not deign to answer Byron’s abuse, and maintained a discreet silence during the period of the latter’s anger. The lines on Southey reiterate in a commonplace fashion what Byron had said before on the same subject, a long prose note dwelling on the heaviness of Southey’s epics, particularly of _The Curse of Kehama_ (1810), which had recently appeared. Another elaborate note is aimed at the “cobbler-laureates,” Bloomfield and Blackett, whom Byron still mentions with contempt. Scott and Bowles receive some passing uncomplimentary remarks; Fitzgerald is referred to once as “Fitz-scribble”; Wordsworth is barely alluded to, and Coleridge is not spoken of at all. The review of the drama is uninteresting and dull. Byron persists in his condemnation of the Opera on the ground of its immorality, although, somewhat inconsistently, he defends plays against the prudish censure of “Methodistic men.” An occasional line suggests a similar passage from other English satirists. Thus Byron’s couplet, “Satiric rhyme first sprang from selfish spleen. You doubt--see Dryden, Pope, St. Patrick’s Dean,” recalls the words of Cowper, “But (I might instance in St. Patrick’s Dean) Too often rails to gratify his spleen.”[139] The reference to Pitt’s skill in coining words may have been remembered from many jests on the subject in the _Rolliad_ and the Works of Peter Pindar. The scorn of “French flippancy and German sentiment” re-echoes the violent opposition of the _Anti-Jacobin_ to the spread of foreign ideas. A note on “the millennium of the black letter”[140] calls to mind the hatred of Mathias for antiquaries and searchers for old manuscripts[141] and another note[142] reinforces Gifford in abusing T. Vaughan, Esq., the “last of the Cruscanti.” The single striking feature of _Hints from Horace_ is its summary of “Life’s little tale,” based upon a corresponding passage in the _Ars Poetica_, in which Byron describes graphically the career of a young nobleman under the Georges, from his “simple childhood’s dawning days” to the time when “Age palsies every limb,” and he sinks into his grave “crazed, querulous, forsaken, half-forgot.” Despite some obvious exaggerations and some traces of affected pessimism, the poet was undoubtedly drawing largely upon his own experience. The tone of the lines is bitter, unrelieved by sympathy or humor, paralleled in Byron’s work only in the _Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog_.