Memoir of Francis Hodgson
Lord Byron to Francis Hodgson, 14 November 1810
My dear Hodgson,1—This will arrive with an English servant whom I
send homewards with some papers
1 This letter has not before been published.
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| 174 | MEMOIR OF REV. F. HODGSON. | |
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of consequence. I have been journeying in different parts
of Greece for these last four months, and you may expect me in England
somewhere about April; but this is very dubious. Hobhouse you have doubtless seen; he went home in August to
look after his Miscellany and to arrange materials for a tour he talks of
publishing. You will find him well and scribbling; that is, scribbling if well,
and well if scribbling. I suppose you have a score of new works, all of which I
hope to see flourishing, with a hecatomb of reviews. My works are likely to
have a powerful effect with a vengeance, as I hear of divers angry people, whom
it is proper I should shoot at, by way of satisfaction. Be it so: the same
impulse which made ‘Otho a
warrior’ will make me one also. My domestic affairs being,
moreover, considerably deranged, my appetite for travelling pretty well
satiated with my late peregrinations, my various hopes in this world almost
extinct, and not very brilliant in the next, I trust I shall go through the
process with a creditable ‘sang froid’ and not
disgrace a line of cut-throat ancestors. I regret in one of your letters to
hear you talk of domestic embarrassments; indeed I am at present very well
calculated to sympathise with ![]()
| VARIOUS ADVENTURES IN THE EAST. | 175 |
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you on that point. I suppose I must
take to dram-drinking as a succedaneum for philosophy, though, as I am happily
not married, I have very little occasion for either just yet. Talking of
marriage puts me in mind of Drury (who,
I suppose, has a dozen children by this time, all fine, fretful brats); I will
never forgive matrimony for having spoiled such an excellent bachelor.
If anybody honours my name with an inquiry, tell them of
‘my whereabouts,’ and write if you like it. I am living alone in
the Franciscan Monastery with one Friar (a Capucin of
course) and one Frier (a bandy-legged Turkish cook), two
Albanian savages, a Tartar, and a Dragoman: my only Englishman departs with
this and other letters. The day before yesterday, the Waynode (or Governor of
Athens) with the Mufti of Thebes (a sort of Mussulman Bishop) supped here with
the Padre of the Convent, and my Attic feast went off with great eclât. I
have had a present of a stallion from the Pasha of the Morea. I caught a fever
going to Olympia. I was blown ashore on the Island of Salamis, in my way to
Corinth through the Gulf of Ægina. I have kicked an Athenian postmaster, I
have a friendship with the French Consul and an ![]()
| 176 | MEMOIR OF REV. F. HODGSON. | |
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Italian
painter, and am on good terms with five Teutones and Cimbri, Danes and Germans,
who are travelling for an academy. Vale!
Yours ever,
ΜΠΑΙΡΩΝ.
Henry Joseph Thomas Drury (1778-1841)
The eldest son of Joseph Drury, Byron's headmaster; he was fellow of King's College,
Cambridge and assistant-master at Harrow from 1801. In 1808 he married Ann Caroline Tayler,
whose sisters married Drury's friends Robert Bland and Francis Hodgson.
John Cam Hobhouse, baron Broughton (1786-1869)
Founder of the Cambridge Whig Club; traveled with Byron in the orient, radical MP for
Westminster (1820); Byron's executor; after a long career in politics published
Some Account of a Long Life (1865) later augmented as
Recollections of a Long Life, 6 vols (1909-1911).
Francis Hodgson (1781-1852)
Provost of Eton College, translator of Juvenal (1807) and close friend of Byron. He wrote
for the
Monthly and
Critical Reviews, and was
author of (among other volumes of poetry)
Childe Harold's Monitor; or
Lines occasioned by the last Canto of Childe Harold (1818).
