Byron’s attack on Lord Elgin in _Childe Harold_ had been animated by a love for Greece and a pity for her forlorn state among the nations, as well as by resentment of England’s cold-blooded attitude in allowing such depredations. In the passage Byron had covered Elgin with abuse:-- “Cold as the crags upon his native coast, His mind as barren and his head as hard, Is he whose head conceived, whose hand prepared, Aught to displace Athena’s poor remains.”[149] These lines were published in March, 1812. In 1813, James and Horace Smith, famous through their _Rejected Addresses_, appeared again as authors in _Horace in London_, a series of imitations of the first two books of the _Odes_ of Horace. In this volume, Ode XV, _The Parthenon_, modelled fairly closely in plot on Horace’s _Prophecy of Nereus_, treats of the controversy concerning Elgin. A clear reference to Byron in the poem makes it certain that the Smiths had read _Childe Harold_ and that they concurred with his expressed disapproval of Elgin’s conduct. _The Parthenon_, owing perhaps to mere coincidence, perhaps to the possibility that the Smiths may have had access to _The Curse of Minerva_ in manuscript, is in its outlines and especially in the general features of Minerva’s curse, singularly like Byron’s satire. The Smiths, following Horace, describe Elgin’s ship as hastening homeward, laden with the “guilty prize.” Suddenly Minerva rises, like Nereus, from the sea and, with the language of a prophet, pronounces a curse on the destroyer, predicting that Elgin will suffer misfortunes and go down through the ages remembered for his shamelessness. The poem, like Byron’s, closes with Minerva speaking. Certain lines in _The Parthenon_:-- “Goth, Vandal, Moslem, had their flags unfurl’d Around my still unviolated fane, Two thousand summers had with dews impearl’d Its marble heights nor left a mouldering stain; ’T was thine to ruin all that all had spared in vain,”[150] epitomize a longer passage in _The Curse of Minerva_.[151] In _Childe Harold_ Byron had made no mention of the fact that Elgin’s marriage had been dissolved by act of Parliament in 1818, but in _The Curse of Minerva_ he made the goddess allude to the domestic scandal. A similar passage is introduced into Minerva’s prophecy in _The Parthenon_. These resemblances in structure and sometimes in phrasing may, of course, have occurred independently, or may have arisen from the chance that Byron, as well as the Smiths, was thinking of Horace’s _Ode_. On the other hand, there is a possibility that the Smiths, already familiar with the lines on Elgin in _Childe Harold_, may have read _The Curse of Minerva_ in manuscript and have unconsciously reproduced some of its features in their poem. By a natural transition Minerva, in Byron’s satire, leaves Elgin and turns to England in the words, “Hers were the deeds that taught her lawless son To do what oft Britannia’s self had done.”