The Life of Lord Byron

“Since I last wrote to you, I have been on a visit to Lord Byron at Ravenna. The result of this visit was a determination on his part to come and live at Pisa, and I have taken the finest palace on the Lung’ Arno for him. But the material part of my visit consists in a message which he desires me to give you, and which I think ought to add to your determination—for such a one I hope you have formed—of restoring your shattered health and spirits by a migration to these ‘regions mild, of calm and serene air.’

“He proposes that you should come, and go shares with him and me in a periodical work to be conducted here, in which each of the contracting parties should publish all their original compositions, and share the profits. He proposed it to Moore, but for some reason it was never brought to bear. There can be no doubt that the profits of any scheme in which you and Lord Byron engage must, for various yet co-operating reasons, be very great. As to myself, I am, for the present, only a sort of link between you and him, until you can know each other, and effectuate the arrangement; since (to intrust you with a secret, which for your sake I withhold from Lord Byron) nothing would induce me to share in the profits, and still less in the borrowed splendour of such a partnership. You and he, in different manners, would be equal, and would bring in a different manner, but in the same proportion, equal stocks of reputation and success. Do not let my frankness with you, nor my belief that you deserve it more than Lord Byron, have the effect of deterring you from assuming a station in modern literature, which the

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THE LIFE OF

universal voice of my contemporaries forbids me either to stoop or aspire to. I am, and I desire to be, nothing.

“I did not ask Lord Byron to assist me in sending a remittance for your journey; because there are men, however excellent, from whom we would never receive an obligation in the worldly sense of the word; and I am as jealous for my friend as for myself. I, as you know, have it not; but I suppose that at last I shall make up an impudent face, and ask Horace Smith to add to the many obligations he has conferred on me. I know I need only ask.” * * *

Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (London: Henry Colburn, 1828)

An article was written in “The Westminster Review” (Medwin says by Mr. Hobhouse) to show that the Conversations were altogether unworthy of credit. There are doubtless many inaccuracies in the latter; but the spirit remains undoubted; and the author of the criticism was only vexed, that such was the fact. He assumes, that Lord Byron could not have made this or that statement to Captain Medwin, because the statement was erroneous or untrue; but an anonymous author has no right to be believed in preference to one who speaks in his own name: there is nothing to show that Mr. Hobhouse might not have been as mistaken about a date or an epigram as Mr. Medwin; and when we find him giving us his own version of a fact, and Mr. Medwin asserting that Lord Byron gave him another, the only impression left upon the mind of any body who knew his Lordship is, that the fault most probably lay in the loose corners of the noble Poet’s vivacity. Such is the impression made upon the author of an unpublished Letter to Mr. Hobhouse, which has been shown me in print; and he had a right to it. The reviewer, to my knowledge, is mistaken upon some points, as well as the person he reviews. The assumption, that nobody can know any thing about Lord Byron but two or three persons who were conversant with him for a certain space of time, and whom he spoke of with as little ceremony, and would hardly treat with more confidence than he did a hundred others, is ludicrous; and can only end, as the criticism has done, in doing no good either to him or them. . . .

John Galt, “Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine Vol. 2 No. 11 (December 1830)

“Dear Sir;—Amongst the agreeable things which you say of me in your life of Lord Byron, you conjecture that I ‘condemned’ Childe Harold previously to its publication. There is not the slightest foundation for this supposition—nor is it true as you state, ‘that I was the only person who had seen the poem in manuscript, as I was with Lord Byron whilst he was writing it.’ I had left Lord Byron before he had finished the two cantos, and, excepting a few fragments, I had never seen them until they were printed. My own persuasion is, that the story told in Dallas’s Recollections of some person, name unknown, having dissuaded Lord Byron from publishing Childe Harold, is a mere fabrication, for it is at complete variance with all Lord Byron himself told me on the subject. At any rate, I was not that person; if I had been, it is not very likely that the poem which I had endeavoured to stifle in its birth, should, in its complete, or, as Lord Byron says, in its ‘concluded state,’ be dedicated to me. I must, therefore, request you will take the earliest opportunity of relieving me from this imputation, which, so far as a man can be written down by any other author than himself, cannot fail to produce a very prejudicial effect, and to give me more uneasiness than I think it can be your wish to inflict on any man who has never given you provocation or excuse for injustice. . . .

John Galt, “Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine Vol. 2 No. 11 (December 1830)

I am glad to find my college stories administered relief to your nerves, when we were together in the Malta packet some one and twenty years ago; and I am not sorry that my wearing a red coat at Cagliari, and cutting my finger in the quarries of Pentelicus, should have furnished materials for your present volume; but to repay me for having supplied these timely episodes, as well as for your copious extracts from my travels in Albania, and also for inserting my note about Madame Guiccioli without my leave, you must positively cancel the passage respecting Childe Harold in page 161 of your little volume. . . .

John Galt, “Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine Vol. 2 No. 11 (December 1830)

I wonder that even common policy did not induce you to be more cautious in making statements which might be so easily disproved, and which have, indeed, been already incontrovertibly refuted. The very conversation, which you have judiciously selected from Medwin, as one of those parts of his trumpery book to the truth of which you can speak, I know to be a lie; for I never went the tour of the lake of Geneva with Lord Byron. . . .

John Galt, “Pot versus Kettle” in Fraser’s Magazine Vol. 2 No. 11 (December 1830)

You tell me that your wish has been to give only an outline of his intellectual character. I am at a loss to understand how your gossip about him and me, and the silly anecdotes you have copied from very discreditable authorities, can be said to be fairly comprised in such an outline. But your plan ought certainly to have compelled you to make yourself thoroughly acquainted with his poetry, and to quote him just as he wrote. Nevertheless, you have misrepresented him at least nine times in the ten stanzas of that poem which you call the last, and which was not the last, he ever wrote. Oh, for shame! stick to your acknowledged fictions—there you are safe—you may deal with Leddy Grippy and Laurie Todd as you please, but not with those who have really lived, or who are still alive. . . .

[John Wilson et. al.], “Noctes Ambrosianae XVII” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Vol. 16 No. 94 (November 1824)

And there was another funny thing o’ his, till a queer looking lad, one Mr. Skeffington, that wrote a tragedy, that was called “The Mysterious Bride,” the whilk thing made the Times newspaper for once witty—for it said no more o’t, than just “Last night a play called The Mysterious Bride, by the Honorable Mr. Skeffington, was performed at Drury Lane. The piece was damned.” Weel, ye see it happened that there was a masquerade some nights after, and Mr. Cam Hobhouse gaed till’t in the disguise o’ a Spanish nun, that had been ravished by the French army— . . .