Note 101 — LIFE OF LORD BYRON. (continued 4)
Reading edition
In the fifth edition of the Satire (suppressed by him in 1812) he again changed his mind respecting this gentleman, and altered the line to
"I leave topography to rapid Gell;"
explaining his reasons for the change in the following note:—"'Rapid,' indeed;—he topographised and typographised King Priam's dominions in three days. I called him 'classic' before I saw the Troad, but since have learned better than to tack to his name what don't belong to it."
He is not, however, the only satirist who has been thus capricious and changeable in his judgments. The variations of this nature in Pope's Dunciad are well known; and the Abbé Cotin, it is said, owed the "painful pre-eminence" of his station in Boileau's Satires to the unlucky convenience of his name as a rhyme. Of the generous change from censure to praise, the poet Dante had already set an example; having, in his "Convito," lauded some of those persons whom, in his Commedia, he had most severely lashed.