_The Curse of Minerva_ was brought back from his early travels, along with the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_; _The Waltz_ is almost synchronous with the _Giaour_; and _The Vision of Judgment_ was being planned while he was composing _Cain_. Even in the period between the _Waltz_ (1813) and _Beppo_ (1818), during which no long verse-satire of his was published, he wrote _The Devil’s Drive_ (1813), _Windsor Poetics_ (1814), and _A Sketch_ (1816), besides other shorter epigrams. Thus Byron’s satiric spirit was persistent and conspicuous from the date of _Fugitive Pieces_ (1806) until his death eighteen years later. The position which Byron occupies in the history of English satire is especially important because he is, in many respects, the last of the powerful satirists in verse. _English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers_, published in March, 1809, is perhaps the last of the great English satires in the heroic couplet measure. It is a final vigorous outburst in the _genre_ which, originating possibly with Wyatt, and improved by Donne and Hall, culminated in the satires of Dryden, and then passing successively through the hands of Pope, Churchill, and Gifford, underwent many modifications, and seemed, down to the end of the eighteenth century, to be losing gradually in universality and permanent value. The revival in which Byron took part, but which, as we shall see, was not altogether occasioned by him, was spasmodic and temporary; and in the hundred years since the appearance of _English Bards_, our literature has produced no single satire in the same manner worthy of being placed by the side of the _Dunciad_, the _Rosciad_, or even the _Baviad_. Byron himself, though he continued to write this sort of satire up to the time of _The Age of Bronze_, never equalled his early success. Eventually he turned from his standard models, Pope and Gifford, and under the inspiration of Italy and Italian authors, made his chief original contribution to satire in _Beppo_, _Don Juan_, and _The Vision of Judgment_. He thus, in a significant way, closes and sums up the work of an old and passing school, at the same time bringing into English satire the infusion of a new spirit and method.