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ENGLISH BARDS, AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS.
Then should you ask me,[1] why I venture o'er
The path which Pope and Gifford[2] trod before;
If not yet sickened, you can still proceed;
Go on; my rhyme will tell you as you read.
"But hold!" exclaims a friend,—"here's some neglect:
- ↑ Imitation.
"Cur tamen hoc potius libeat decurrere campo,
Per quem magnus equos Auruncæ flexit alumnus,
Si vacat, et placidi rationem admittitis, edam."Juvenal, Sat. I. ll. 19-21. - ↑ [William Gifford (1756-1826), a self-taught scholar, first a ploughboy, then boy on board a Brixham coaster, afterwards shoemaker's apprentice, was sent by friends to Exeter College, Oxford (1779-81). In the Baviad (1794) and the Mœviad (1795) he attacked many of the smaller writers of the day, who were either silly, like the Della Cruscan School, or discreditable, like Williams, who wrote as "Anthony Pasquin." In his Epistle to Peter Pindar (1800) he laboured to expose the true character of John Wolcot. As editor of the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner (November, 1797, to July, 1798), he supported the political views of Canning and his friends. As editor of the Quarterly Review, from its foundation (February, 1809) to his resignation in September, 1824, he soon rose to literary eminence by his sound sense and adherence to the best models, though his judgments were sometimes narrow-minded and warped by political prejudice. His editions of Massinger (1805), which superseded that of Monck Mason and Davies (1765), of Ben Jonson (1816), of Ford (1827), are valuable. To his translation of Juvenal (1802) is prefixed his autobiography. His translation of Persius appeared in 1821. To Gifford, Byron usually paid the utmost deference. "Any suggestion of yours, even if it were conveyed," he writes to him, in 1813, "in the less tender text of the Baviad, or a Monck Mason note to Massinger, would be obeyed." See also his letter (September 20, 1821, Life, p. 531): "I know no praise which would compensate me in my own mind for his censure." Byron was attracted to Gifford, partly by his devotion to the classical models of literature, partly by the outspoken frankness of his literary criticism, partly also, perhaps, by his physical deformity.]
