Believe me, yours very sincerely,
BYRON.
P. S.--My last question is in the true style of Grub Street; but, like
_Jeremy Diddler_ [3], I only "ask for information."--Send me Adair on
_Diet and Regimen_, just republished by Ridgway [4].
[Footnote 1: 'Rokeby', completed December 31, 1812, was published in the
following year, with a dedication to John Morritt, to whom Rokeby
belonged. It was, as Scott admits in the Preface to the edition of 1830,
comparatively a failure. In the popularity of Byron he finds the chief
cause of the small success which his poem obtained.
"To have kept his ground at the crisis when 'Rokeby' appeared," he
writes, "its author ought to have put forth his utmost strength, and
to have possessed all his original advantages, for a mighty and
unexpected rival was advancing on the stage--a rival not in poetical
powers only, but in that art of attracting popularity, in which the
present writer had hitherto preceded better men than himself. The
reader will easily see that Byron is here meant, who, after a little
velitation of no great promise, now appeared as a serious candidate,
in the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold'."
On this rivalry Byron wrote the passage in his Diary for November 17,
1813. A further cause for the cold reception of 'Rokeby' was its
inferiority both to the 'Lay' and to 'Marmion'. In Letter vii. of the
'Twopenny Post-bag', Moore writes thus of 'Rokeby'
"Should you feel any touch of 'poetical' glow,
We've a Scheme to suggest--Mr.
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