The binding of this volume is considerably too valuable for the Contents.

Gift of William Richards Castle, 1923 – *EC8.B9968E.1814

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Lord Byron (1788-1824). English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, 4th ed. (London, 1811 [ i.e., 1814]).

In July 1816 Byron borrowed a copy of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers from a Mrs. Plowden Slaney at the salon of Madame de Staël at Coppet, Switzerland. In its margins he expressed remorse, with some few exceptions, over “this miserable record of misplaced anger and indiscriminate acrimony”; elsewhere he writes, “The binding of this volume is considerably too valuable for the Contents.”  T. J. Hunt, an acquaintance of the lady, transcribed the poet's annotations into this copy in 1827. Hunt’s version of the incident (as recounted on the front flyleaves) may be apocryphal, but we know that Byron at this same time annotated a copy of the satire that may have been in the possession of either R. C. Dallas or Percy B. Shelley and that subsequently came into the possession of John Murray II and his heirs. A facsimile of the Murray copy was published by the Roxburghe Club in 1936.