’Liquid lines’: Byron Among the Amatory Poets

Abstract

An 1809 pen and ink caricature sketch by Scrope Berdmore Davies depicts ‘Ld B. as an Amatory Writer’. It is one of a group of four head-and-shoulders sketches, in profile, that includes their mutual Cambridge friends John Cam Hobhouse and Charles Skinner Matthews, depicted as ‘Two Authors of the Satirical Miscellany’, and a fourth figure, ‘The Satirist’ – possibly Davies himself, but more likely Hewson Clarke, a Cambridge enemy who had criticized Byron’s first published volume Hours of Idleness (1807) in The Satirist.2 But the ‘Satirist’ could also be Byron, for the poetic identity of ‘satirist’ had replaced that of ‘amatory writer’ with the publication of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers ..