Famous it is, and famous it deserved to become, though not because of its wit and humour, for it has neither the one nor the other--nor yet because of its effectiveness, for it is satire which for the most part hacks and hews blindly, here, there, and everywhere--but because of the power, the self-consciousness, the unexampled audacity, which underlie and which found expression in the whole. The attacks of the reviewers had produced in Byron for the first time the feeling which was soon to become constant and dominant in his breast, the feeling which first made him completely conscious of himself, and which may be expressed in the words: "Alone against you all!" To him, as to the other great combative characters of history, this feeling was the elixir of life. "Jeer at _me_ with impunity! Crush _me_, who am stronger than all of them together!" was the refrain that rang in his ears whilst he wrote. The Edinburgh Reviewers were accustomed, when they crushed a trumpery little poet and flung him on the ground like a fly, or by mischance shot a poor little song-bird, to no resistance on the part of the victim. He either rebelled against the verdict in silence, or humbly laid the blame on his own want of ability. In either case what followed was profound silence. But now they had lighted upon the man whose prodigious strength and weakness lay exactly in the peculiarity that he never blamed himself for a misfortune, but furiously turned upon others as its authors. In this case, too, a silence of a year and a half followed upon the review. But then happened what we read of in Victor Hugo's poem (_Les Châtiments_. "La Caravane"): "Tout à coup, au milieu de ce silence morne Qui monte et qui s'accroît de moment en moment, S'élève un formidable et long rugissement! C'est le lion."