Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
Lord Byron to Henry Drury, 13 January 1808
“Dorant’s Hotel, January 13th, 1808.
“MY DEAR SIR,
“Though the stupidity of my servants, or the porter of the
house, in not showing you up stairs (where I should have joined you directly) prevented
me the pleasure of seeing you yesterday, I hoped to meet you at some public place in the
evening. However, my stars decreed otherwise, as they generally do, when I have any
favour to request of them. I think you would have been surprised at my figure, for,
since our last meeting, I am reduced four stone in weight. I then weighed fourteen stone
seven pound, and now only ten stone and a half. I have disposed
of my superfluities by means of hard exercise and abstinence. *
* *
“Should your Harrow engagements allow you to visit town
between ![]()
| A. D. 1808. | LIFE OF LORD BYRON. | 139 |
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this and February, I shall be most happy to see
you in Albemarle-street. If I am not so fortunate, I shall endeavour to join you for an
afternoon at Harrow, though, I fear, your cellar will by no means contribute to my cure.
As for my worthy preceptor, Dr. B., our encounter
would by no means prevent the mutual endearments he and I were
wont to lavish on each other. We have only spoken once since my departure from Harrow in
1805, and then he politely told Tatersall I was
not a proper associate for his pupils. This was long before my strictures in verse: but,
in plain prose, had I been some years older, I should have held
my tongue on his perfections. But, being laid on my back, when that schoolboy thing was
written—or rather dictated—expecting to rise no more, my physician having taken his
sixteenth fee, and I his prescription, I could not quit this earth without leaving a
memento of my constant attachment to Butler in gratitude for his
manifold good offices.
“I meant to have been down in July; but thinking my
appearance, immediately after the publication, would be construed into an insult, I
directed my steps elsewhere. Besides, I heard that some of the boys had got hold of my
Libellus, contrary to my wishes
certainly, for I never transmitted a single copy till October, when I gave one to a boy,
since gone, after repeated importunities. You will, I trust, pardon this egotism. As you
had touched on the subject, I thought some explanation necessary. Defence I shall not
attempt, ‘Hic murus aheneus esto, nil conscire
sibi’—and ‘so on’ (as Lord
Baltimore said on his trial for a rape)—I have been so long at Trinity as
to forget the conclusion of the line; but, though I cannot finish my quotation, I will
my letter, and entreat you to believe me, gratefully and affectionately, &c.
“P.S. I will not lay a tax on your time by requiring an
answer, lest you say, as Butler said to Tatersall (when I had written his reverence an impudent
epistle on the expression before mentioned), viz.—‘that I wanted to draw him into
a correspondence.’”
George Butler (1774-1853)
Educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, he succeeded Joseph Drury as headmaster at
Harrow after a contentious election (1805) and was dean of Peterborough (1842-1853).
Frederick Calvert, sixth baron Baltimore (1732-1771)
Libertine peer. In 1768 Sarah Woodcock, a London milliner, accused him of raping her at
his country house; Lord Baltimore was eventually acquitted after much scandal.
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 Cecil Tattersall (d. 1812)
Byron's classmate at Harrow; after completing his education at Christ Church, Oxford he
entered the church.
