“Fatigued with sitting up till four in the morning for the last two days at hazard*, I take up my pen to inquire how your highness and the rest of my female acquaintance at the seat of archiepiscopal grandeur go on. I know I deserve a scolding for my negligence in not writing more frequently; but racing up and down the country for these last three months, how was it possible to fulfil the duties of a correspondent? Fixed at last for six weeks, I write, as thin as ever (not having gained an ounce since my reduction), and rather in better humour;—but, after all, Southwell was a detestable residence. Thank St. Dominica, I have done with it: I have been twice within eight miles of it, but could not prevail on myself to suffocate in its heavy atmosphere. This place is wretched enough—a villanous chaos of din and drunkenness, nothing but hazard and burgundy, hunting, mathematics and Newmarket, riot and racing. Yet it is a paradise compared with the eternal dullness of Southwell. Oh! the misery of doing nothing but make love, enemies, and verses.
“Next January (but this is entre nous only, and pray let it be so, or
* We observe here, as in other parts of his early letters, that sort of display and boast of rakishness which is but too common a folly at this period of life, when the young aspirant to manhood persuades himself that to be profligate is to be manly. Unluckily, this boyish desire of being thought worse than he really was remained with Lord Byron, as did some other feelings and foibles of his boyhood, long after the period when, with others, they are past and forgotten: and his mind, indeed, was but beginning to outgrow them, when he was snatched away. |
| A. D. 1807. | LIFE OF LORD BYRON. | 121 |
“I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear. When I brought him here, they asked me what I meant to do with him, and my reply was, ‘he should sit for a fellowship.’ Sherard will explain the meaning of the sentence, if it is ambiguous. This answer delighted them not. We have several parties here, and this evening a large assortment of jockies, gamblers, boxers, authors, parsons, and poets, sup with me,—a precious mixture, but they go on well together; and for me, I am a spice of every thing, except a jockey; by the by, I was dismounted again the other day.
“Thank your brother in my name for his treatise. I have written 214 pages of a novel,—one poem of 380 lines*, to be published (without my name) in a few weeks, with notes,—560 lines of Bosworth Field, and 250 lines of another poem in rhyme, besides half a dozen smaller pieces. The poem to be published is a Satire. Apropos, I have been praised to the skies in the Critical Review†, and abused greatly in another publication‡. So much the better, they tell me, for the sale of the book; it
* The Poem afterwards enlarged and published under the title of “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.” It appears from this that the ground-work of that satire had been laid some time before the appearance of the article in the Edinburgh Review. |
† Sept. 1807. This Review, in pronouncing upon the young author’s future career, showed itself somewhat more “prophet-like” than the great oracle of the north. In noticing the Elegy on Newstead Abbey, the writer says, “We could not but had with something of prophetic rapture, the hope conveyed in the closing stanza:
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‡ The first number of a monthly publication called “the Satirist,” in which there appeared afterwards some low and personal attacks upon him. |
| 122 | NOTICES OF THE | A. D. 1807. |
“P.S. Write, write, write!!!”
