But with us it appeared as if a literary Guy Fawkes had been detected in the act of blowing up half the cathedrals and all the chapels of the country.  The rage of insular orthodoxy was in proportion to its impotence.  Every scribbler with a cassock denounced the book and its author, though few attempted to answer him.  The hubbub was such that Byron wrote to Murray, authorizing him to disclaim all responsibility, and offering to refund the payment he had received.  “Say that both you and Mr. Gilford remonstrated.  I will come to England to stand trial.  ‘Me, me, adsum qui feci,’”—­and much to the same effect.  The book was pirated; and on the publisher’s application to have an injunction, Lord Eldon refused to grant it.  The majority of the minor reviewers became hysterical, and Dr. Watkins, amid much almost inarticulate raving, said that Sir Walter Scott, who had gratefully accepted the dedication, would go down to posterity with the brand of Cain upon his brow.  Several even of the higher critics took fright.  Jeffrey, while protesting his appreciation of the literary merits of the work, lamented its tendency to unsettle faith.  Mr. Campbell talked of its “frightful audacity.”  Bishop Heber wrote at great length to prove that its spirit was more dangerous than that of Paradise Lost—­and succeeded.  The Quarterly began to cool towards the author.  Moore wrote to him, that Cain was “wonderful, terrible, never to be forgotten,” but “dreaded and deprecated” the influence of Shelley.  Byron showed the letter to Shelley, who wrote to a common friend to assure Mr. Moore that he had not the smallest influence over his lordship in matters of religion, and only wished he had, as he would “employ it to eradicate from his great mind the delusions of Christianity, which seem perpetually to recur, and to lie in ambush for the hours of sickness and distress.”  Shelley elsewhere writes:  “What think you of Lord B.’s last volume?  In my opinion it contains finer poetry than has appeared in England since Paradise Lost.  Cain is apocalyptic; it is a revelation not before communicated to man.”  In the same strain, Scott says of the author of the “grand and tremendous drama:”  “He has certainly matched Milton on his own ground.”  The worst effect of those attacks appears in the shifts to which Byron resorted to explain himself,—­to be imputed, however, not to cowardice, but to his wavering habit of mind.  Great writers in our country have frequently stirred difficult questions in religion and life, and then seemed to be half scared, like Rouget de Lisle, by the reverberation of their own voices.  Shelley almost alone was always ready to declare, “I meant what I said, and stand to it.”