“. . . . . I have not seen more of Don Juan than some extracts in a country paper, wherein my own name is coupled with a rhyme which I thought would never be used by any person but myself when kissing one of my own children in infancy, and talking nonsense to it, which, whatever you may think of it at present as an exercise for the intellect, I hope you will one day have occasion to practise, and you will then find out its many and various excellencies. I do not yet know whether the printed poem is introduced by a dedication* to me, in a most hostile strain, which came over with it, or whether the person who has done Lord Byron the irreparable injury of sending into the world what his own publisher and his friends endeavoured, for his sake, to keep out
* This dedication, which is sufficiently scurrilous, is prefixed to the poem in the Collected Edition of Lord Byron’s Life and Works, with the following note by the Editor:— “This Dedication was suppressed in 1815 with Lord Byron’s reluctant consent; but shortly after his death its existence became notorious, in consequence of an article in the Westminster Review, generally ascribed to Sir John Hobhouse; and for several years the verses have been selling in the streets as a broadside. It could, therefore, serve no purpose to exclude them on this occasion.”—Byron’s Life and Works, vol. xv. 101. The editor seems by this to have felt some slight compunction at publishing this Dedication; but he publishes for the first time another attack upon my father a hundred-fold worse than this, contained in some “Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s Magazine,” without any apology. This subject, however, will more properly fall to be noticed in the next volume. |
| Ætat. 45. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 353 |
“The third and last volume of my Opus Majus will be published in two or
three weeks; they are printing the index. What effect will it produce? It may
tend to sober the anticipations of a young author to hear the faithful
anticipations of an experienced one. None that will be heard of. It will move
quietly from the publishers to a certain number of reading societies, and a
certain number of private libraries; enough between them to pay the expenses of
the publication. Some twenty persons in England, and some half dozen in
Portugal and Brazil will peruse it with avidity and delight. Some fifty,
perhaps, will buy the book because of the subject, and ask one another if they
have had time to look into it. A few of those who know me and love me, will
wish that I had employed the time which it has cost in writing poems; and some
of those who do not know me, will marvel that in the ripe season of my mind,
and in the summer of reputation, I should have
| 354 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 45. |
“God bless you!
