In February Byron, having seen this assault in the _Courier_, writes off in needless heat, "I have got Southey's pretended reply; what remains to be done is to call him out,"--and despatches a cartel of mortal defiance. Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, through whom this was sent, judiciously suppressed it, and the author's thirst for literary blood was destined to remain unquenched. Meanwhile he had written his own _Vision of Judgment_. This extraordinary work, having been refused by both Murray and Longman, appeared in 1822 in the pages of the _Liberal_. It passed the bounds of British endurance; and the publisher, Mr. John Hunt, was prosecuted and fined for the publication.
Readers of our day will generally admit that the "gouty hexameters" of the original poem, which celebrates the apotheosis of King George in heaven, are much more blasphemous than the _ottava rima_ of the travesty, which professes to narrate the difficulties of his getting there. Byron's _Vision of Judgment_ is as unmistakably the first of parodies as the _Iliad_ is the first of epics, or the _Pilgrim's Progress_ the first of allegories. In execution it is almost perfect. _Don Juan_ is in scope and magnitude a far wider work; but no considerable series of stanzas in _Don Juan_ are so free from serious artistic flaw. From first to last, every epithet hits the white; every line that does not convulse with laughter stings or lashes. It rises to greatness by the fact that, underneath all its lambent buffoonery, it is aflame with righteous wrath. Nowhere in such space, save in some of the prose of Swift, is there in English so much scathing satire.