be little doubt, would have been certain and
signal;--his former assailants would have resumed their advantage over
him, and either, in the bitterness of his mortification, he would have
flung Childe Harold into the fire; or, had he summoned up sufficient
confidence to publish that poem, its reception, even if sufficient to
retrieve him in the eyes of the public and his own, could never have, at
all, resembled that explosion of success,--that instantaneous and
universal acclaim of admiration into which, coming, as it were, fresh
from the land of song, he now surprised the world, and in the midst of
which he was borne, buoyant and self-assured, along, through a
succession of new triumphs, each more splendid than the last.

Happily, the better judgment of his friends averted such a risk; and he
at length consented to the immediate publication of Childe
Harold,--still, however, to the last, expressing his doubts of its
merits, and his alarm at the sort of reception it might meet with in the
world.

"I did all I could," says his adviser, "to raise his opinion of this
composition, and I succeeded; but he varied much in his feelings about
it, nor was he, as will appear, at his ease until the world decided on
its merit. He said again and again that I was going to get him into a
scrape with his old enemies, and that none of them would rejoice more
than the Edinburgh Reviewers at an opportunity to humble him. He said I
must not put his name to it. I entreated him to leave it to me, and
that I would answer for this poem silencing all his enemies."

The publication being now determined upon, there arose some doubts and
difficulty as to a publisher. Though Lord Byron had intrusted Cawthorn
with what he considered to be his surer card, the "Hints from Horace,"
he did not, it seems, think him of sufficient station in the trade to
give a sanction or fashion to his more hazardous experiment. The former
refusal of the Messrs. Longman[14] to publish his "English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers" was not forgotten; and he expressly stipulated with
Mr. Dallas that the manuscript should not be offered to that house. An
application was, at first, made to Mr. Miller, of Albemarle Street; but,
in consequence of the severity with which Lord Elgin was treated in the
poem, Mr. Miller (already the publisher and bookseller of this latter
nobleman) declined the work. Even this circumstance,--so apprehensive
was the poet for his fame,--began to re-awake