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Lord Byron and his Times: http://lordbyron.org
So, we have at last got the second volume of “
Repeatedly have we had occasion to place upon record our opinion of the general
character and conduct of
As to the affair of the en passantno instance,
excepting perhaps in that of his first boyish flame—not even in his attachment to the
silent, and enduring—that lasts until death—that looks
forward, in the vividness of immortal hope, to a blessed and beatific elevation in a world
beyond the grave. No! no! of the earth,
earthly.
” Excitement, animal as well as mental, was the soul of his existence. It
is evident, from the whole tenor of his proceedings, that his passion for the
But every body must read this book; not for what only
mirror of his mind—the only source from which any true view of his mind
and character can be obtained. In reading these memoirs, every person will form an estimate of
his own respecting the genius, the talents, the principles of
The letters, in the entire work, extend to the number of 561: in the second
volume, the greater, and the more interesting part of his Lordship’s epistolary
correspondence is addressed to Romance, in prose,
founded upon the story of the Marriage of
”
A little further on, shall venture so far to depart from the plan hitherto pursued, as to give, with
but little suppression, the noble poet’s letters relative to his Italian
adventures.
” Let the public, and the friends of
Let us get rid of this painful feeling. As You talk of marriage; ever since my own funeral, the word
makes me giddy;—pray don’t repeat it.
”
Here is an opinion of his Lordship’s well deserving the attention of our
romance writers and playwrights. Alluding to the tragedy of I hate things
” all fiction; and therefore the Merchant [of
Venice] and OthelloPierre
I know
nothing of painting; and I detest it, unless it reminds me of something I have seen, or
think it possible to see, for which reason I spit upon and abhor all the Saints and
subjects of one half the impostures I see in the churches and palaces; and when in
Flanders, I never was so disgusted in my life, as with
” Now all this parade of
words amounts to no more than that nature is superior to art; a position, the truth of which
was never yet contested by any man in his senses.
In the opinion of his own art—the art of which he was a master, surpassing most of his greatest
predecessors—we are not prepared to say that he is quite so much at fault. There is more good sense,
and feeling, and judgment in this passage, than in any other I ever read, or
” Here is the passage referred
to:—
“With regard to poetry in general, I am convinced, the more I think of
it, that he and all of us—Pope
With all this admiration of are all in the
wrong
” as to the essentials—as to the higher attributes of poetry, we must take leave
utterly to deny. Theirs is the verse—the magic strain—that touches every
tender and every bolder string—that opens every sluice of feeling—that breaks up the
flood-gates of the heart. Not even
Here is a sugar-plum for What cruel work
you make with
” And somewhere else he speaks
of her That it is as
good for her as a dose of hartshorn.
’
Once for all we protest against the biographer’s silly mystification of substituting asterisks for proper names, in cases where, notwithstanding the affected disguise, the names themselves are so obvious that not even a child could mistake in tracing them; in cases, too, where, without the shadow of a reason, one way or the other, the name that is starred in one page is given at length in the next.
When the poem of The cool shrewdness of age, with the
vivacity and glowing temperament of youth—the wit of a
”
Here is a picture; and—mark the allusion at its close:—
“I wish you good night, with a Venetian benediction,
‘
” earth which you will make’—is it not pretty? You would think it still prettier if you had heard it,
as I did two hours ago, from the lips of a Venetian girl, with large black eyes, a face
like
With what bitterness, too, does he speak of another lawyer—a hireling—one
of the men who impudently and remorselessly stigmatise honourable men,
who, by honourable means, dare to advocate an honourable cause, through the medium of the press; and that says much. We forgive
that class.
“But there will come a day of reckoning, even if I should not live to
see it. I have at last seen
” my
feelings must have been, when wife, and child, and sister, and name, and fame, and country,
were to be my sacrifice on his legal altar—and this at a moment when my health was
declining, my fortune embarrassed, and my mind had been shaken by many kinds of
disappointment—while I was yet
There is nothing like contrast—
“My dearest
others will not understand
them,—which is the reason I have not scrawled them in Italian. But you will recognize the
hand-writing of him who passionately loved you, and you will divine that, over a book which
was your’s, he could only think of love. In that word, beautiful in all languages,
but most so in your’s—Amor miowhat purpose you will decide; my destiny rests with
you, and you are a woman, eighteen years of age, and two out of a convent. I wish that you
had staid there, with all my heart,—or, at least, that I had never met you in your married
state.
“But all this is too late. I love you, and you love me,—at least, you
say so, and act as if you did so, which last is a great consolation in all events. But I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you.
“Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and the ocean divide us—but
they never will, unless you
” wish it.
Did she ever wish it? No; but he did; and they were divided.
Their
moral is not your moral; their life is not your life; you would not understand it; it is
not English, nor French, nor German, which you would all understand.
”—“I
know not how to make you comprehend a people who are at once temperate and profligate,
serious in their
”—“sudden and durable (which you find in no other nation), and who actually have no society
(what we would call so), as you may see by their comedies.Their
conversazioni are not society at all. They go to the theatre to talk, and into company to
hold their tongues. The
”—The women “women sit in a circle, and the men gather
into groups, or they play at dreary faro, or ‘lotto reale,’ for small
sums.”—“Their best things are their carnival balls and masquerades, when every
one runs mad for six weeks. After their dinners and suppers they make extempore verses, and
buffoon one another; but it is in a humour which you would not enter into, ye of the
north.are extremely tenacious, and jealous as furies, not
permitting their lovers even to marry if they can help it, and keeping them always close to
them in public as in private, whenever they can.
”
Here is a tickler for
“dunque, ’tis built a church to
’ it was
‘God, and then blasphemed his name:Voltaireto gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
’
&c.; for lily he puts rose, and bedevils in
more words than one the whole quotation.
“Now,
” injustice (to ignorance,
and the third a blunder. Tell him all this, and let him take it in
good part; for I might have rammed it into a review and rowed him—instead of which, I act
like a Christian.
Of another poet—too much of the cockney, certainly—No more
”—The My indignation at
” In another letter to Instead of bursting
a blood-vessel, I drank three bottles of claret, and begun an answer, finding that there
was nothing in the article for which I could lawfully knock
”
It has been said that the immortality of the soul is a ‘grand
” He asks—“grand one.
Every body clings to it—the stupidest, and dullest, and wickedest of human bipeds is still
persuaded that he is immortal.What is poetry? The feeling of
a Former world and Future.
” Again:—
“Why, at the very height of desire and human pleasure—worldly, social,
amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious—does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and
sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a
*” Hope is; and what Hope
is there without a deep leaven of Fear? and what sensation is so delightful as Hope? and,
if it were not for Hope, where would the Future be?—in hell. It is useless to say where the
Present is, for most of us know; and as for the Past, what predominates in memory?—Hope baffled. Ergo, in all human affairs, it is Hope—Hope—Hope. I
allow sixteen minutes, though I never counted them, to any given or supposed possession.
From whatever place we commence, we know where it all must end. And yet, what good is there
in knowing it? It does not make men better or wiser. During the greatest horrors of the
greatest plagues (Athens and Florence, for example—see
How delightful how noble, and how just is Byron’s defence of
“He says also that
” but Hell?
Is there any in
The account of “ * Thus marked, with impatient strokes of the pen, in the
original.” I
presume,
” says that I shall end (if not earlier
by accident, or some such termination) life like
” And here, on the
instant, he flies off at a tangent:—“dying at top.
’ I confess I do not contemplate
this with so much horror as he apparently did for some years before it happened. But
old sort of feel.Oh! there is an organ, playing in the street—a
waltz, too! I must leave off to listen. They are playing a waltz, which I have heard ten
thousand times at the balls in London, between 1812 and 1815. Music is a strange
thing.
” Ay, God knows, it is a strange thing; awaking in us, as
the feeling of a former world and
future!
”
That
How admirably does the irritated dramatist characterise our theatrical
managers, when, in utter defiance of all entreaty and remonstrance, they impudently persisted
in dragging his tragedy of Marino
FalieroWhat curst fools those speculating
buffoons must be not to see that it is unfit for their fair—or their booth!
” And
how we “dote upon” his truly gentlemanly, his truly aristocratic feeling—guineas
versus pounds! “You are an excellent fellow, mio caro
”—“I shall
always be frank with you; as, for instance, whenever you talk with the votaries of
” True; pounds,
shillings, and pence should be handled by none but dirty shopkeepers.
We love, too, the kind and amiable spirit in which
While in Italy,
” This drew forth some verses, “full of strong and
indignant feeling,
”—every stanza concluding pointedly with the words
“Charity Ball.
”
“What matter the pangs of a husband and father, If his sorrows in exile be great or be small, So the Pharisee’s glories around her she gather, And the Saint patronises her ‘Charity Ball.’ “What matters—a heart, which though faulty was feeling, Be driven to excesses which once could appal— That the sinner should suffer is only fair dealing, As the Saint keeps her charity back for ‘the Ball.’”
We wonder what Pisa, November 17th,
1821.
” We regret our inability to find room for this kind and liberal, this generous
and magnanimous effusion. Here are some of its closing sentences:—“I assure you that I
bear you
” now (whatever I may have done) no resentment whatever.
Remember, that if you have injured me in aught, this forgiveness is
something; and that, if I have injured you, it is something more
still, if it be true, as the moralists say, that the most offending are the least
forgiving. Whether the offence has been solely on my side, or reciprocal, or yours chiefly,
I have ceased to reflect upon any but two things,—viz., that you
In a letter to To-day is the 9th, and
the 10th is my surviving daughter’s birth-day. [His natural daughter,
”
Hastening towards a close, we designedly pass over all that relates to the
As to friendship, it is a propensity in which my genius is very
limited. I do not know the male human being, except
” To be sure, he does, afterwards, make an
“excepting, perhaps,
” in favour of “
” How flattering!
When in Greece—whither his natural constitutional restlessness, his want of new
excitement, as we have already expressed ourselves, sent him—he thus writes to the deserted
I was a fool to come here; but,
being here, I must see what is to be done.
”
We have said, the “deserted”
“The fire that on my bosom preys Is lone as some volcanic isle; No torch is kindled at its blaze— A funeral pile!” “Tread those reviving passions down, Unworthy manhood!—unto thee Indifferent should the smile or frown Of beauty be.”
What has become of the erring, but lovely and devoted woman we know not; for
Nor have we any new information respecting the death of
“Many pictures have been painted of him, with various success; but the
excessive beauty of his lips escaped every painter and sculptor. In their ceaseless play
they represented every emotion, whether pale with anger, curled in disdain, smiling in
triumph, or dimpled with archness and love. This extreme facility of expression was
sometimes painful, for I have seen him look absolutely ugly—I have seen him look so hard
and cold, that you must hate him, and then, in a moment, brighter than the sun, with such
playful softness in his look, such affectionate eagerness kindling in his eyes, and
dimpling his lips into something more sweet than a smile, that you forgot the man, the
” * * *
We have been told that, some way or other—Heaven knows how—