ABSTRACT
Byron, Childe Harold, I-II (3rd edition, 1812); Town Talk, III (Aug. 1812), 217–222; (Sept. 1812), 302–305; (Oct. 1812), 372–377. George Grenville Temple, Baron Nugent (p. 218), was not the George Grenville, Baron Lansdowne, discussed by Dr. Johnson, but the author of Portugal, a poem (1812). The reviewer writes clearly and demonstrates a better literary background and range than do many of his colleagues, but his taste is strictly comformable to eighteenth-century standards, to the age of Gray, Johnson, and Cowper. (Note, on page 305, how he classes Byron with Wordsworth.) The quotation on page 303 is from Waller’s “To a Lady Singing a Song of His Composing.” The quotations from Cowper on page 220 are from The Task (III, 708–709, III, 352, II, 161ff., and II, 388–390); those on page 221 are from Conversation (lines 145–162) and Hope (lines 598–601). The tenant of Strawberry Hill was Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, who wrote a Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors of England (1758). On page 373 we find the literary reviewer (and editor) has turned military strategist and pontificates on how to defeat Napoleon.
