and to Dr. Johnson, who have jeered at the Scotch and Scotland. Byron’s antipathy for his early home evidently developed from his quarrel with the Scotch reviewers. _English Bards_ had contained scattered references to “Northern wolves” and to the “oat-fed phalanx” of the critic clan, and had alluded scornfully to the children of Dun-edin who “write for food--and feed because they write.” In _The Curse of Minerva_, a new occasion for dislike having arisen, the attack on the Scotch is more vicious and intolerant. Many passages have their counterparts in portions of Churchill’s _Prophecy of Famine_ (1763), a pastoral in the form of a dialogue, with the motto, “Nos patriam fugimus,” ingeniously applied to the Scotch in the translation, “We all get out of our country as fast as we can.” Churchill, who, it will be remembered, hated the Scotch critic, Smollett, as ferociously as Byron hated Jeffrey, had been aroused also by the growing influence of Bute and other Scotchmen at the court of George III, and his poem, accordingly, became a severe political invective, interspersed with vilification of the Scotch climate and the Scotch people. It is interesting to compare Churchill’s description of the barrenness and dampness of Scotland with Byron’s picture of that country as “a land of meanness, sophistry, and mist.” The former poet calls Scotchmen “Nature’s bastards”; Byron refers to Scotland as “that bastard land.” Both writers have caustic lines on the shrewdness, importunity, and avarice of the Scotch people, wherever they settle. Although the similarities between the satires warrant no deduction, there is a possibility that Byron, who undoubtedly had read the _Prophecy of Famine_, may have recollected certain passages in a poem the spirit of which is very like his own.[147] Basing his argument chiefly on the fact that a couplet of Pope[148] is parodied in Byron’s lines, “‘Blest paper-credit!’ who shall dare to sing? It clogs like lead Corruption’s weary wing,” Weiser has endeavored to prove that Byron borrowed something from Pope’s _Epistle to Lord Bathurst_. A verbal comparison of the two passages in question fails to bring out any striking resemblance. Pope continues with a comment on the ease with which paper money may be used in bribery; Byron, after quoting Pope, does not touch on this point, and his lines seem to be merely a passing quotation, not closely connected with what comes before or after. In no other place in _The Curse of Minerva_ are there phrases which have even a remote likeness to the language of Pope’s _Epistle_. On such grounds as Weiser advances it might be shown that Byron, in _Beppo_, is imitating Cowper, because he quotes a line from that poet.