"Hours of Idleness" had appeared while he was at Cambridge. The interest of that volume, nowadays, is far more biographical than poetical. When one has inferred from it that Byron did not pass through the University with a heart bowed down by the loss of Mary Chaworth, but flirted with a long series of the belles of Southwell, one has said nearly all that there is to say. The poems themselves, as the quotations given amply demonstrate, are no better than the general run of undergraduate verse composition. They are purely imitative; no new note rings in them. One is not surprised that Lord Carlisle, on receiving a presentation copy, was in a greater hurry to acknowledge than to read it, and merely remarked, in his acknowledgment that young men were better occupied in writing poetry than in devoting their valuable time to women and horses. "Tolerably handsome," was Byron's first verdict on that letter; but he seems to have felt snubbed when he read it over a second time. Lord Carlisle's opinions, he wrote to Miss Pigot, were nothing to him, but his guardian must not be "insolent." If he were insolent, he should be gibbeted, just as Butler of Harrow had been gibbeted. In fact, and to sum up: "Perhaps the Earl '_bears no brother near the throne_'--_if so_, I will make his _sceptre_ totter _in his hands_." Which shows that Byron's back was up, and that he was already in a fighting mood when the famous review in the _Edinburgh_ introduced a jarring note into the chorus of approbation. The author of the attack was not Jeffrey, as Byron thought, but Brougham. He had the excuse, for what it may be worth, that the poems had indubitably been over-praised because they had appeared under the signature of a nobleman. He, therefore, set out on the war path with the truculent air of a man whose conscience requires him to bludgeon a butterfly. The punishment, we cannot doubt, was very painful to the poet whom Cambridge undergraduates and Southwell belles had flattered; and the instant question for him was: Would he take his punishment lying down, or would he take it fighting? That question, however, was not long in doubt. The Byrons were a fighting race; and the poet had inherited their love of fighting. Just as he had fought Lord Calthorpe at Harrow for calling him an atheist, so now he would fight the _Edinburgh_ critic for calling him a fool. And he would fight him with his own weapons. Let him have three bottles of claret to prime him, and then he would strip for the fray, and would "take on," not the reviewer only, but every one whom the reviewer had praised, and every one whom he himself disliked, or thought he might dislike if he knew him better. So he emptied his three bottles, and set to work on "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," and having written twenty lines of it, "felt better."