ABSTRACT
Byron, Bride of Abydos (1813); review by John Hodgson, Monthly Review, 2nd Series, LXXIII (Jan. 1814), 55–63. John Hodgson (?1786–1849), a cousin of Francis Hodgson, was a London lawyer who practiced as a conveyancer. An interesting feature of this review (by a critic who was not a university graduate) is the misreading of Byron’s obviously intentional embodiment of the famous sentence from Tacitus as an “unconscious plagiarism” (p. 61). This muted accusation shows the gap between the tradition of classical imitation that was perfectly understood by the Augustan poets and their readers and the new, basically bourgeois, emphasis on “originality” and “sincerity.”
