His whole story is told incidentally in a note to 'The Noctes,' in which it is stated, that in an article in 'Blackwood,' January 1825, on Scotch poets, the palm was given to Hogg over Campbell; 'one ground being, that he could drink "eight and twenty tumblers of punch, while Campbell is hazy upon seven."' There is evidence in 'The Noctes,' that in due time Campbell was reconciled to Moore, and was always suitably ashamed of having tried to be any more generous or just than the men of his generation.
And so it was settled as a law to Jacob, and an ordinance in Israel, that the Byron worship should proceed, and that all the earth should keep silence before him.

'Don Juan,' that, years before, had been printed by stealth, without Murray's name on the title-page, that had been denounced as a book which no woman should read, and had been given up as a desperate enterprise, now came forth in triumph, with banners flying and drums beating.

Every great periodical in England that had fired moral volleys of artillery against it in its early days, now humbly marched in the glorious procession of admirers to salute this edifying work of genius.
'Blackwood,' which in the beginning had been the most indignantly virtuous of the whole, now grovelled and ate dust as the serpent in the very abjectness of submission.

Odoherty (Maginn) declares that he would rather have written a page of 'Don Juan' than a ton of 'Childe Harold.' {95a} Timothy Tickler informs Christopher North that he means to tender Murray, as Emperor of the North, an interleaved copy {95b} of 'Don Juan,' with illustrations, as the only work of Byron's he cares much about; and Christopher North, professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh, smiles approval! We are not, after this, surprised to see the assertion, by a recent much-aggrieved writer in 'The London Era,' that 'Lord Byron has been, more than any other man of the age, the teacher of the youth of England;' and that he has 'seen his works on the bookshelves of bishops' palaces, no less than on the tables of university undergraduates.' A note to 'The Noctes' of July 1822 informs us of another instance of Lord Byron's triumph over English morals:-- 'The mention of this' (Byron's going to Greece) 'reminds me, by the by, of what the Guiccioli said in her visit to London, where she was so lionised as having been the lady-love of Byron.

She was rather fond of speaking on the subject, designating herself by some Venetian pet phrase, which she interpreted as meaning "Love-Wife."' What was Lady Byron to do in such a world?
She retired to the deepest privacy, and devoted herself to works of charity, and the education of her only child, that brilliant daughter, to whose eager, opening mind the whole course of current literature must bring so many trying questions in regard to the position of her father and mother,--questions that the mother might not answer.