“He had been in his youth an enthusiast for liberty, and had hailed the dawn of the French Revolution as the promise of a day that was to banish war and slavery, and every form of vice and misery, from the face of the earth. Because all this was not done, he deduced that nothing was done, and from this deduction, according to his system of logic, he drew a conclusion that worse than nothing was done, * * *” etc. And thus he describes his opinion of current literature:[255] “This rage for novelty is the bane of literature. Except my works and those of my particular friends, nothing is good that is not as old as Jeremy Taylor; and, _entre nous_, the best parts of my friends’ books were either written or suggested by myself.” In the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, Coleridge gets a contemporary thrust for his conceit and dogmatism, with the conclusion,-- “The author o’ _Christabel_, and _The Auncient Mariner_, had better just continue to see visions, and to dream dreams--for he’s no fit for the wakin’ world.” The most direct attack on Southey is in the comment on Mr. Feathernest:[256] “* * * to whom the Marquis had recently given a place in exchange for his conscience. The poet had, in consequence, burned his old ‘Odes to Truth and Liberty,’ and published a volume of Panegyrical Addresses ‘to all the crowned heads in Europe,’ with the motto, ‘Whatever is at court, is right.’” In Disraeli’s _Ixion_, Enceladus has been identified as Wellington, Hyperion as Sir Robert Peel, Jupiter as George the Third, and Apollo as Byron. Byronism indeed is one of the shining marks loved by the nineteenth century, a fact that not only labels the British temper, but illustrates the irony of time’s revenges. The last great satirist of the old school himself becomes the prime object of satire for the new, partly through mutual lack of understanding, and partly because Byron, like some other brilliant wits, lacked a real sense of humor. Both these reasons enabled Lytton to flatter himself that his _Pelham_ had “contributed to put an end to the Satanic Mania--to turn the thoughts and ambitions of young gentlemen without neckcloths, and young clerks who were sallow, from playing the Corsair and boasting that they were villains.”[257] Nearly a half century after _Pelham_, we have a reference which strikes indirectly the keynote of satire, made by a genius great enough to admire judiciously (as he elsewhere testifies) another genius.[258] “Beauchampism, as one confronting him calls it, may be said to stand for nearly everything which is the obverse of Byronism, and rarely woos your sympathy, shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind of posturing.” It was Lytton, in turn, who was attacked by Thackeray. He heads the list of _Novels by Eminent Hands_, and is brought up again in the _Yellowplush Papers_ and _Epistles to the Literati_.