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and his third, half way in censure, in the fifth, I leave topography to rapid Gell. Of such materials are literary judgments made! The success of Byron's satire was due to the fact of its being the only good thing of its kind since Churchill, for in the Baviad and Maeviad only butterflies were broken upon the wheel and to its being the first promise of a now power.
The affectation of the period, such as we have described it, received a blow no less effectual than that which Ben Jonson, by his satire called "Cynthia's Revels," inflicted on the kindred folly of euphuism, or as the author of "The Baviad and Mæviad" dealt to similar affectations of our own day.
The first editor of the Quarterly was William Gifford, a satirist, who wrote the Baviad and Mæviad ridicule of literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 by John Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Walter Scott, and the author of an excellent Life of Scott.
Gifford's version of the Roman satirist is the baldest, and, in parts, the most offensive of all others. We do not know why he attempted it, unless he had got it in his head that he should thus follow in the steps of Dryden, as he had already done in those of Pope in the Baviad and Maeviad. As an editor of old authors, Mr.
Especially was this so in satiric and didactic poetry. Not only Dr. Johnson's adaptations from Juvenal, London, 1738, and the Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, but Gifford's Baviad, 1791, and Maeviad, 1795, and Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 1809, were in the verse and the manner of Pope. In Johnson's Lives of the Poets, 1781, Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets.
Becoming known to Lord Grosvenor, he was patronised by him, and in course of time produced his first poem, The Baviad , a satire directed against the Delia Cruscans, a clique of very small and sentimental poets, which at once quenched their little tapers. This was followed by another satire, The Mæviad, against some minor dramatists. He also brought out ed. of Massinger, Ben Jonson, and Ford.
But, when I just remember what Gifford has done; when I call to mind the perfect and triumphant success of everything he has undertaken; the Anti-Jacobin, the Baviad and Maeviad, the Quarterly; all palpable hits, on the very jugular; I hesitate before I speak of William Gifford in any other terms, or in any other spirit, than those of admiration and of gratitude. "And to think.
The eminent professors in this grovelling department are at first merely out of sorts with themselves, and vent their spleen in little interjections and contortions of phrase cry Pish at a lucky hit, and Hem at a fault, are smart on personal defects, and sneer at 'Beauty out of favour and on crutches' are thrown into an ague-fit by hearing the name of a rival, start back with horror at any approach to their morbid pretensions, like Justice Woodcock with his gouty limbs rifle the flowers of the Della Cruscan school, and give you in their stead, as models of a pleasing pastoral style, Verses upon Anna which you may see in the notes to the Baviad and Maeviad.
This custom was not thought to detract from the writer's independence, inasmuch as each had his own domain, and borrowed only where he would be equally ready to give. It was otherwise with those thriftless bards so roughly dealt with by Horace in his nineteenth Epistle "O imitatores, servum pecus! ut mihi saepe Bilem, saepe iocum movistis." the Baviad and Maeviad of the Roman poet-world.
It is a good thing to secure as much exercise. I observed in the papers my old friend Gifford's funeral. He was a man of rare attainments and many excellent qualities. The translation of Juvenal is one of the best versions ever made of a classical author, and his satire of the Baviad and Maeviad squabashed at one blow a set of coxcombs who might have humbugged the world long enough.
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