(7)  Byroniana No. 4 (The Courier, February 17, 1814).

Much Ado about Nothing.

We have already seen how scurvily Lord Byron has treated three of the four persons to whom he has successively dedicated his Poems; but for the fourth he reserved a species of contumely, which we are confident our readers will think more degrading than all the rest.

He has uniformly praised him! and him alone!!!

—The exalted rank, the gentle manners, the polished taste of his guardian and relation, Lord Carlisle; the considerations due to Lord Holland, from his family, his personal character, and his love of letters; the amiability of Mr. Moore's society, the sweetness of his versification, and the vivacity of his imagination;—all these could not save their possessors from the brutality of Lord Byron's personal satire.

It was, then, for a person only, who should have none of these titles to his envy that his Lordship could be expected to reserve the fullness and steadiness of his friendship; and if we had any respect or regard for that small poet and very disagreeable person, Mr. Sam Rogers, we should heartily pity him for being " damned " to such " fame" as Lord Byron's uninterrupted praise can give.

But Mr. Sam Rogers has another cause of complaint against Lord Byron, and which he is of a taste to resent more. His Lordship has not deigned to call him "the firmest of patriots," though we have heard that his claims to that title are not much inferior to Mr. Moore's. Mr. Sam Rogers is reported to have clubb'd with the Irish Anacreon in that scurrilous collection of verses, which we have before mentioned, and which were published under the title of the Twopenny Post-bag, and the assumed name of "Thomas Brown." The rumour may be unfounded; if it be, Messrs. Rogers and Moore will easily forgive us for saying that, much as we are astonished at the effrontery with which Lord Byron has acknowledged his lampoon, we infinitely prefer it to the cowardly prudence of the author or authors of the Twopenny Post-bag lurking behind a fictitious name, and "devising impossible slanders," which he or they have not the spirit to avow.

But, to return to the more immediate subject of our lucubrations: It seems almost like a fatality, that Lord Byron has hardly ever praised any thing that he has not at some other period censured, or censured any thing that he has not, by and bye, praised or practised.

It does not often happen that booksellers are assailed for their too great liberality to authors; yet, in Lord Byron's satire, while Mr. Scott is abused, his publisher, Mr. Murray, is sneered at, in the following lines:

Now, is it not almost incredible that this very Murray (the only remaining one of the booksellers whom his Lordship had attacked; Miller has left the trade)—is it not, we say, almost incredible that this very Murray should have been soon after selected, by this very Lord Byron, to be his own publisher? But what will our readers say, when we assure them, that not only was Murray so selected, but that this magnanimous young Lord has actually sold

his works to this same Murray? and, what is a yet more singular circumstance, has received and pocketted, for one of his own "stale romances," a sum amounting, not to "half-a-crown," but to a whole crown, a line!!!

This fact, monstrous as it seems in the author of the foregoing lines, is, we have the fullest reason to believe, accurately true. And the "faded laurel," "the brains rac'd for lucre," "the merited contempt," "the scorn," and the "meanness," which this impudent young man dared to attribute to Mr. Scott, appear to have been a mere anticipation of his own future proceedings; and thus,

How he now likes the taste of it we do not know; about as much, we suspect, as the "incestuous, murderous, damned Dane" did, when Hamlet obliged him to "drink off the potion" which he had treacherously drugged for the destruction of others.