[BYRON (George Gordon Noel, Lord)]. English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. A Satire. London: James Cawthorn, n.d. [1809].
FIRST EDITION. Leather-bound; hardcover; duodecimo (18 x 10.5 x 1 cm); pp. vi, 54. English text. Handsomely bound in contemporary full calf gilt; smooth spine with black morocco lettering-piece; speckled page edges; lacking half-title but with Preface leaf; paper watermarked "E & P 1805" and with p.5 line 7 reading "Dispatch" and "wizard's". Condition: VERY GOOD. Binding tight and secure, the covers very well-preserved. Interior with some light toning. Armorial bookplate to front pastedown. Small newspaper clipping tipped in at front. An excellent copy.
Notes: Written following the poor review of his first work Hours of Idleness which was published in 1807 and reviewed anonymously in the Edinburgh Review by Henry Brougham. In this work he praises the Neoclassical poets Dryden and Pope and attacks the Romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the editor of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffery, to whom he attributed the review.
"Wise's contention that the copies without the prefactory leaf constitute an issue is incorrect--the two variants differ in the printing of 'dispatch,' and, as noted above, a volume lacking the prefactory leaf is only incomplete." The misprint on p.5 is the distinguishing point between the two issues, but due to the complicated printing history of the book, Randolph and Wise are inconclusive as to their priority. Randolph, p.15; Wise Byron I, pp.20-21.
