Anonymous: [Claims to “The Burial of Sir John Moore”]

The Globe & Traveller.

No. 6838.

SATURDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 30, 1824.

Price 7d.

The Ode on Sir John Moore has called up several claimants. Mr. Medwin attributed it to Lord Byron on (very bad) presumptive evidence. Somebody else has claimed it for somebody else; and the following paragraph appears in the Times:—

“We are requested to state, that the author of the Ode on Sir John Moore is Mr. H. Campbell, author of many poetical works, and editor and topographer of Ossian’s Poems. From what we have seen, however, of that gentleman’s writings, we confess we are somewhat sceptical.”

J. S. Taylor, Lord Byron and Charles Wolfe

So are we. But if Mr. H. Campbell claims it, he had better write another in support of his claim. Mr. J. Sidney Taylor has, however, in a letter to a Morning Paper, established the property to be in a student of Trinity College, Dublin, and subsequently a Clergyman in the North of Ireland, of the name of Wolfe, who died at an early age.

Go to: John Sydney Taylor, “Lord Byron and the late Rev. Charles Wolfe” in Morning Chronicle No. 17,327 (29 October 1824)

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) The author of Childe Harold and Don Juan.

Hugh Campbell (1826 fl.) An active poet and antiquary in the 1820s who signed himself “LL.D. and F.S.A.” Nothing seems to be recorded of him however, and the name may be a pseudonym. He published a forgery, The Love Letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, to James, Earl of Bothwell (1824).

Thomas Medwin (1788-1869) Lieutenant of dragoons who was with Byron and Shelley at Pisa; the author of Conversations of Lord Byron (1824) and The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (1847).

John Sydney Taylor (1795-1841) Irish journalist educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was a classmate of the poet Charles Wolfe; he wrote for the Morning Chronicle and later edited the Morning Herald.

Charles Wolfe (1791-1823) Irish clergyman and poet whose anonymous ode on the death of Sir John Moore was reprinted throughout the nineteenth century.

The Times. (1785-). Founded by John Walter, The Times was edited by Thomas Barnes from 1817 to 1841. In the romantic era it published much less literary material than its rival dailies, the Morning Chronicle and the Morning Post.

Charles Wolfe (1791-1823) “The Burial of Sir John Moore” in Newry Telegraph. (1817). This notable anthology poem was more widely disseminated by Walter Scott in the Edinburgh Annual Register; its attribution was contested until the 1840s.

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Title: “[Claims to “The Burial of Sir John Moore”]” in Globe and Traveller. No. 6838 (30 October 1824).

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