Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
Lord Byron to Lord Holland, 27 September 1812
“I have just received your very kind letter, and hope you
have met with a second copy corrected and addressed to Holland house, with some
omissions and this new couplet,
“As glared each rising flash*, and ghastly shone The skies with lightnings awful as their own. |
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* At present, “As glared the volumed
blaze.” |
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| 368 | NOTICES OF THE | A. D. 1812. |
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As to remarks, I can only say I will alter and acquiesce
in any thing. With regard to the part which Whitbread wishes to omit, I believe the Address will go off quicker
without it, though, like the agility of the Hottentot, at the expense of its vigour. I
leave to your choice entirely the different specimens of stucco-work; and a brick of your own will also much improve my Babylonish turret. I
should like Elliston to have it, with your leave.
‘Adorn’ and ‘mourn’ are lawful rhymes in Pope’s Death of the unfortunate Lady—Gray has ‘forlorn’ and
‘mourn’—and ‘torn’ and ‘mourn’ are in Smollet’s famous Tears of Scotland.
“As there will probably be an outcry amongst the rejected, I
hope the Committee will testify (if it be needful) that I sent in nothing to the
congress whatever, with or without a name, as your lordship well knows. All I have to do
with it is with and through you; and though I, of course, wish to satisfy the audience,
I do assure you my first object is to comply with your request, and in so doing to show
the sense I have of the many obligations you have conferred upon me.
“Yours ever,
“B.”
Henry Richard Fox, third baron Holland (1773-1840)
Whig politician and literary patron; Holland House was for many years the meeting place
for reform-minded politicians and writers. He also published translations from the Spanish
and Italian;
Memoirs of the Whig Party was published in 1852.
Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
English poet, author of “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” “Elegy written in a
Country Churchyard,” and “The Bard”; he was professor of history at Cambridge
(1768).
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
English poet and satirist; author of
The Rape of the Lock (1714)
and
The Dunciad (1728).
Tobias Smollett (1721-1771)
Scottish physician and man of letters; author of the novels
Roderick
Random (1747) and
Humphry Clinker (1771).
Samuel Whitbread (1764-1815)
The son of the brewer Samuel Whitbread (1720-96); he was a Whig MP for Bedford, involved
with the reorganization of Drury Lane after the fire of 1809; its financial difficulties
led him to suicide.
