ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the extracts from English Bards. The opening ten lines deliberately echo Alexander Pope’s mock-epic masterpiece, The Dunciad. The revised 1812 version makes the analogy with Pope yet more explicit. Byron is referring to Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a border ballad that bought Scott’s name to a much wider audience than the one to which he had hitherto been used. Despite his admiration for Scott Byron believed that he was wasting his talent on imitations of border ballads. Byron qualified these remarks somewhat in his preface to The Corsair. It is ‘Scott alone, of the present generation, who has hitherto completely triumphed over the fatal facility of the octo-syllabic verse’. Upon the phenomenal sales that were generated by the publication of The Corsair, The Anti-Jacobin drew attention to the disparaging remarks by Byron of Scott prostituting his art.
