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Great as was the advance which his powers had made, under the influence of that resentment from which he now drew his inspiration, they were yet, even in his Satire, at an immeasurable distance from the point to which they afterwards so triumphantly rose. It is, indeed, remarkable that, essentially as his genius seemed connected with, and, as it were, springing out of his character, the developement of the one should so long have preceded the full maturity of the resources of the other. By her very early and rapid expansion of his sensibilities, Nature had given him notice of what she destined him for, long before he understood the call; and those materials of poetry with which his own fervid temperament abounded were but by slow degrees, and after much self-meditation, revealed to him. In his Satire, though vigorous, there is but little foretaste of the wonders that followed it. His spirit was stirred, but he had not yet looked down into its depths, nor does even his bitterness taste of the bottom of the heart, like those sarcasms which he afterwards flung in the face of mankind. Still less had the other countless feelings and passions, with which his soul had been long labouring, found an organ worthy of them;—the gloom, the grandeur, the tenderness of his nature, all were left without a voice, till his mighty genius, at last, awakened in its strength.

In stooping, as he did, to write after established models, as well in the Satire as in his still earlier poems, he showed how little he had yet explored his own original resources, or found out those distinctive marks by which he was to be known through all time. But, bold and energetic as was his general character, he was, in a remarkable degree, diffident in his intellectual powers. The consciousness of what he could achieve was but by degrees forced upon him, and the discovery of so rich a mine of genius in his soul came with no less surprise on himself than on the world. It was from the same slowness of self-appreciation that, afterwards, in the full flow of his fame, he long doubted, as we shall see, his own aptitude for works of wit and humour,—till the happy

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experiment of “Beppo” at once dissipated this distrust, and opened a new region of triumph to his versatile and boundless powers.

But, however far short of himself his first writings must be considered, there is in his Satire a liveliness of thought, and, still more, a vigour and courage, which, concurring with the justice of his cause and the sympathies of the public on his side, could not fail to attach instant celebrity to his name. Notwithstanding, too, the general boldness and recklessness of his tone, there were occasionally mingled with this defiance some allusions to his own fate and character, whose affecting earnestness seemed to answer for their truth, and which were of a nature strongly to awaken curiosity as well as interest. One or two of these passages, as illustrative of the state of his mind at this period, I shall here extract. The loose and unfenced state in which his youth was left to grow wild upon the world is thus touchingly alluded to:—

“Ev’n I—least thinking of a thoughtless throng, Just skill’d to know the right and choose the wrong, Freed at that age when Reason’s shield is lost To fight my course through Passion’s countless host, Whom every path of Pleasure’s flowery way Has lured in turn, and all have led astray—* Ev’n I must raise my voice, ev’n I must feel Such scenes, such men destroy the public weal: Although some kind, censorious friend will say, What art thou better, meddling fool†, than they? And every brother Rake will smile to see That miracle, a Moralist, in me.”

“The time hath been, when no harsh sound would fall From lips that now may seem imbued with gall,

---

* In the MS. remarks on his Satire, to which I have already referred, he says, on this passage—“Yea, and a pretty dance they have led me.”

† “Fool then, and but little wiser now.”—MS. ibid.

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Nor fools nor follies tempt me to despise The meanest thing that crawl’d beneath my eyes. But now so callous grown, so changed from youth,” &c.

“’Tis time this heart should be unmoved, Since others it has ceased to move; Yet, though I cannot be beloved, Still let me love!”

It is much, I own, to be questioned, whether, even under the most favourable circumstances, a disposition such as I have here described could have escaped ultimate disappointment, or found anywhere a resting-place for its imaginings and desires. But, in the case of Lord Byron, disappointment met him on the very threshold of life. His mother, to whom his affections first, naturally and with ardour, turned, either repelled them rudely or capriciously trifled with them. In speaking of

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his early days to a friend at Genoa, a short time before his departure for Greece, he traced the first feelings of pain and humiliation he had ever known to the coldness with which his mother had received his caresses in infancy, and the frequent taunts on his personal deformity with which she had wounded him.

The sympathy of a sister’s love, of all influences on the mind of a youth the most softening, was also, in his early days, denied to him,—his sister Augusta and he having seen but little of each other while young. A vent through the calm channel of domestic affections might have brought down the high current of his feelings to a level nearer that of the world he had to traverse, and thus saved them from the tumultuous rapids and fails to which this early elevation, in their after-course, exposed them. In the dearth of all home endearments, his heart had no other resource but in those boyish friendships which he formed at school; and when these were interrupted by his removal to Cambridge, he was again thrown back, isolated, on his own restless desires. Then followed his ill-fated attachment to Miss Chaworth, to which, more than to any other cause, he himself attributed the desolating change then wrought in his disposition.

“I doubt sometimes” (he says, in his “Detached Thoughts”) “whether, after all, a quiet and unagitated life would have suited me; yet I sometimes long for it. My earliest dreams (as most boys’ dreams are) were martial; but a little later they were all for love and retirement, till the hopeless attachment to M * * * C * * * began and continued (though sedulously concealed) very early in my teens; and so upwards for a time. This threw me out again ‘alone on a wide, wide sea.’ In the year 1804 I recollect meeting my sister at General Harcourt’s in Portland Place. I was then one thing, and as she had always till then found me. When we met again in 1805 (she told me since) that my temper and disposition were so completely altered that I was hardly to be recognized. I was not then sensible of the change; but I can believe it, and account for it.”

I have already described his parting with Miss Chaworth previously to her marriage. Once again, after that event, he saw her, and for the last time,—being invited, by Mr. Chaworth to dine at Annesley not long

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before his departure from England. The few years that had elapsed since their last meeting had made a considerable change in the appearance and manners of the young poet. The fat, unformed schoolboy was now a slender and graceful young man. Those emotions and passions, which, at first, heighten, and then destroy, beauty, had, as yet, produced only their favourable effects on his features; and, though with but little aid from the example of refined society, his manners had subsided into that tone of gentleness and self-possession which more than any thing marks the well-bred gentleman. Once only was the latter of these qualities put to the trial, when the little daughter of his fair hostess was brought into the room. At the sight of the child, he started involuntarily,—it was with the utmost difficulty he could conceal his emotion; and to the sensations of that moment we are indebted for those touching stanzas, “Well—thou art happy,” &c.* which appeared afterwards in a Miscellany published by one of his friends, and are now to be found in the general collection of his works. Under the influence of the same despondent passion he wrote two other poems at this period, from which, as they exist only in the Miscellany I have just alluded to, and that collection has for some time been out of print, a few stanzas may, not improperly, be extracted here.

“When man, expell’d from Eden’s bowers, A moment linger’d near the gate, Each scene recall’d the vanish’d hours, And bade him curse his future fate.

But, wandering on through distant climes, He learnt to bear his load of grief; Just gave a sigh to other times, And found in busier scenes relief.

---

* Dated, in his original copy, Nov. 2, 1808.

† Entitled, in his original manuscript, “To Mrs. * * *, on being asked my reason for quitting England in the spring.” The date subjoined is Dec. 2, 1808.

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“Thus, lady*, must it be with me, And I must view thy charms no more; For, whilst I linger near to thee, I sigh for all I knew before.” &c. &c.

“’Tis done—and shivering in the gale The bark unfurls her snowy sail; And whistling o’er the bending mast, Loud sings on high the fresh’ning blast; And I must from this land be gone, Because I cannot love but one. * * * *

“As some lone bird, without a mate, My weary heart is desolate; I look around, and cannot trace One friendly smile or welcome face, And ev’n in crowds am still alone, Because I cannot love but one.

“And I will cross the whitening foam, And I will seek a foreign home; Till I forget a false fair face, I ne’er shall find a resting-place; My own dark thoughts I cannot shun, But ever love, and love but one. * * * *

“I go—but wheresoe’er I flee There’s not an eye will weep for me; There’s not a kind congenial heart, Where I can claim the meanest part; No thou, who hast my hopes undone, Wilt sigh, although I love but one.

---

* In his first copy, “Thus, Mary.”

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“To think of every early scene, Of what we are, and what we’ve been, Would whelm some softer hearts with woe— But mine, alas! has stood the blow; Yet still beats on as it begun, And never truly loves but one.

“And who that dear loved one may be Is not for vulgar eyes to see, And why that early love was crost, Thou know’st the best, I feel the most; But few that dwell beneath the sun Have loved so long, and loved but one.

“I’ve tried another’s fetters too, With charms, perchance, as fair to view; And I would fain have loved as well, But some unconquerable spell Forbade my bleeding breast to own A kindred care for aught but one.

“’Twould soothe to take one lingering view, And bless thee in my last adieu; Yet wish I not those eyes to weep For him that wanders o’er the deep; His home, his hope, his youth are gone, Yet still he loves, and loves but one*.”

While thus, in all the relations of the heart, his thirst after affection was thwarted, in another instinct of his nature, not less strong—the desire of eminence and distinction—he was, in an equal degree, checked in his aspirings, and mortified. The inadequacy of his means to his station was early a source of embarrassment and humiliation to him; and those high, patrician notions of birth in which he indulged but made the disparity between his fortune and his rank the more galling. Ambition, however, soon whispered to him that there were other and nobler ways

* Thus corrected by himself in s copy of the Miscellany now in my possession;—the two last lines being, originally, follows:— “Though wheresoe’er my bark may run, I love but thee, I love but one.”

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to distinction. The eminence which talent builds for itself might, one day, he proudly felt, be his own; nor was it too sanguine to hope that, under the favour accorded usually to youth, he might with impunity venture on his first steps to fame. But here, as in every other object of his heart, disappointment and mortification awaited him. Instead of experiencing the ordinary forbearance, if not indulgence, with which young aspirants for fame are received by their critics, he found himself instantly the victim of such unmeasured severity as is not often dealt out even to veteran offenders in literature; and, with a heart fresh from the trials of disappointed love, saw those resources and consolations which he had sought in the exercise of his intellectual strength also invaded.

“My passions” (he says, in his “Detached Thoughts,”) “were developed very early—so early that few would believe me if I were to state the period and the facts which accompanied it. Perhaps this was one of the reasons which caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts,—having anticipated life. My earlier poems are the thoughts of one at least ten years older than the age at which they were written,—I don’t mean for their solidity, but their experience. The two first Cantos of Childe Harold were completed at twenty-two; and they are written as if by a man older than I shall probably ever be.”

Though the allusions in the first sentence of this extract have reference to a much earlier period, they afford an opportunity of remarking, that however dissipated may have been the life which he led during the two or three years previous to his departure on his travels, yet the notion caught up by many, from his own allusions, in Childe Harold, to irregularities and orgies of which Newstead had been the scene, is, like most other imputations against him founded on his own testimony,

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greatly exaggerated. He describes, it is well known, the home of his poetical representative as a “monastic dome, condemned to uses vile,” and then adds,—

“Where Superstition once had made her den, Now Paphian girls were known to sing and smile.”

Mr. Dallas, too, giving in to the same strain of exaggeration, says, in speaking of the poet’s preparations for his departure, “already satiated with pleasure, and disgusted with those companions who have no other resource, he had resolved on mastering his appetites;—he broke up his harams.” The truth, however, is that the narrowness of Lord Byron’s means would alone have prevented such oriental luxuries. The mode of his life at Newstead was simple and unexpensive. His companions, though not averse to convivial indulgences, were of habits and tastes too intellectual for mere vulgar debauchery; and, with respect to the alleged “Harams,” it appears certain that one or two suspected “Subintroductæ” (as the ancient monks of the Abbey would have styled them), and those, too, among the ordinary menials of the establishment, were all that even scandal itself could ever fix upon to warrant such an assumption.

“I have a notion (he says) that gamblers are as happy as many people, being always excited. Women, wine, fame, the table,—even ambition, sate now and then; but every turn of the card and cast of the dice keeps the gamester alive: besides, one can game ten times longer than one can do any thing else. I was very fond of it when young, that is to say, of hazard, for I hate all card games,—even faro. When macco (or whatever they spell it) was introduced, I gave up the whole thing, for I loved and missed the rattle and dash of the box and dice, and the glorious uncertainty, not only of good luck or bad luck, but of any luck at all, as one had sometimes to throw often to decide at all. I have thrown as many as fourteen mains running, and carried off all the cash upon the table occasionally; but I had no coolness, or judgment, or calculation. It was the delight of the thing that pleased me. Upon the whole, I left off in time, without being much a winner or loser. Since one-and-twenty

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years of age I played but little, and then never above a hundred, or two, or three.”

When Pope, at the age of five-and-twenty, complained of being

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weary of the world, he was told by Swift that he “had not yet acted or suffered enough in the world to have become weary of it*.” But far different was the youth of Pope and of Byron;—what the former but anticipated in thought, the latter had drunk deep of in reality;—at an age when the one was but looking forth on the sea of life, the other had plunged in, and tried its depths. Swift himself, in whom early disappointments and wrongs had opened a vein of bitterness that never again closed, affords a far closer parallel to the fate of our noble poet†, as well in the untimeliness of the trials he had been doomed to encounter, as in the traces of their havoc which they left in his character.

That the romantic fancy of youth, which courts melancholy as an indulgence, and loves to assume a sadness it has not had time to earn, may have had some share in, at least, fostering the gloom by which the mind of the young poet was overcast, I am not disposed to deny. The circumstance, indeed, of his having, at this time, among the ornaments of his study, a number of skulls highly polished, and placed on light stands round the room, would seem to indicate that he rather courted than shunned such gloomy associations‡. Being a sort of boyish mimickry, too, of the use to which the poet Young is said to have applied a skull, such a display might well induce some suspicion of the sincerity of his gloom, did we not, through the whole course of his subsequent life and writings, track visibly the deep vein of melancholy which nature had imbedded in his character.

Such was the state of mind and heart,—as, from his own testimony and that of others, I have collected it,—in which Lord Byron now set

* I give the words an Johnson has reported them;—in Swift’s own letter they are, if I recollect right, rather different.

† There is, at least, one striking point of similarity between their characters in the disposition which Johnson has thus attributed to Swift:—“The suspicions of Swift’s irreligion,” he says, “proceeded, in a great measure, from his dread of hypocrisy; instead of wishing to seem better, he delighted in seeming worse than he was.”

‡ Another use to which he appropriated one of the skulls found in digging at Newstead was the having it mounted in silver, and converted into a drinking-cup. This whim has been commemorated in some well-known verses of his own; and the cup itself, which, apart from any revolting ideas it may excite, forms by no means an inelegant object to the eye, is, with many other interesting relics of Lord Byron, in the possession of the present proprietor of Newstead Abbey, Colonel Wildman.

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out on his indefinite pilgrimage; and never was there a change wrought in disposition and character to which Shakspeare’s fancy of “sweet bells jangled out of tune” more truly applied. The unwillingness of Lord Carlisle to countenance him, and his humiliating position in consequence, completed the full measure of that mortification towards which so many other causes had concurred. Baffled, as he had been, in his own ardent pursuit of affection and friendship, his sole revenge and consolation lay in doubting that any such feelings really existed. The various crosses he had met with, in themselves sufficiently irritating and wounding,—were rendered still more so by the high, impatient temper with which he encountered them. What others would have bowed to, as misfortunes, his proud spirit rose against, as wrongs; and the vehemence of this reaction produced, at once, a revolution throughout his whole character*, in which, as in revolutions of the political world, all that was bad and irregular in his nature burst forth with all that was most energetic and grand. The very virtues and excellencies of his disposition ministered to the violence of this change. The same ardour that had burned through his friendships and loves now fed the fierce explosions of his indignation and scorn. His natural vivacity and humour but lent a fresher flow to his bitterness†, till he, at last, revelled in it as an indulgence; and that hatred of hypocrisy, which had hitherto only shown itself in a too shadowy colouring of his own youthful frailties, now hurried him, from his horror of all false pretensions to virtue, into the still more dangerous boast and ostentation of vice.

The following letter to his mother, written a few days before he sailed, gives some particulars respecting the persons who composed his suite. Robert Rushton, whom he mentions so feelingly in the Postscript, was the boy introduced, as his Page, in the First Canto of Childe Harold.

* Rousseau appears to have been conscious of a similar sort of change in his own nature:—“They have laboured without intermission,” he says, in a letter to Madame de Boufflers, “to give to my heart, and, perhaps, at the same time to my genius, a spring and stimulus of action, which they have not inherited from nature. I was born weak,—ill-treatment has made me strong.”—Hume’s Private Correspondence.

† “It was bitterness that they mistook for frolic.”—Johnson’s account of himself at the university, in Boswell.

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“I am about to sail in a few days; probably before this reaches you. Fletcher begged so hard that I have continued him in my service. If he does not behave well abroad, I will send him back in a transport. I have a German servant (who has been with Mr. Wilbraham in Persia before, and was strongly recommended to me by Dr. Butler of Harrow), Robert and William; they constitute my whole suite. I have letters in plenty—you shall hear from me at the different ports I touch upon; but you must not be alarmed if my letters miscarry. The continent is in a fine state—an insurrection has broken out at Paris, and the Austrians are beating Buonaparte—the Tyrolese have risen.

“P.S.—Pray tell Mr. Rushton his son is well, and doing well; so is Murray, indeed better than I ever saw him; he will be back in about a month. I ought to add, the leaving Murray to my few regrets, as his age perhaps will prevent my seeing him again. Robert I take with me; I like him, because, like myself, he seems a friendless animal.”

To those who have in their remembrance his poetical description of the state of mind in which he now took leave of England, the gaiety and levity of the letters I am about to give will appear, it is not improbable, strange and startling. But, in a temperament like that of Lord

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Byron, such bursts of vivacity on the surface are by no means incompatible with a wounded spirit underneath*; and the light, laughing tone that pervades these letters, but makes the feeling of solitariness that breaks out in them the more striking and affecting.

“We sail to-morrow in the Lisbon packet, having been detained till now by the lack of wind, and other necessaries. These being at last procured, by this time to-morrow evening we shall be embarked on the vide vorld of vaters, vor all the vorld like Robinson Crusoe. The Malta vessel not sailing for some weeks, we have determined to go by way of Lisbon, and, as my servants term it, to see ‘that there Portingale;’—thence to Cadiz and Gibraltar, and so on our old route to Malta and Constantinople, if so be that Captain Kidd, our gallant commander, understands plain sailing and Mercator, and takes us on our voyage all according to the chart.

“Will you tell Dr. Butler† that I have taken the treasure of a

* The poet Cowper, it is well known, produced that master-piece of humour, John Gilpin, during one of his fits of morbid dejection, and he himself says, “Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all.”

† The reconciliation which took place between him and Dr. Butler, before his departure, is one of those instances of placability and pliableness with which his life abounded. We have seen, too, from the manner in which he mentions the circumstance in one of his note-books, that the reconcilement was of that generously retrospective kind, in which not only the feeling of hostility is renounced in future, but a strong regret expressed that it had been ever entertained. Not content with this private atonement to Dr. Butler, it was his intention, had he published another edition of the Hours of Idleness, to substitute for the offensive verses against that gentleman a frank avowal of the wrong he had been guilty of in giving vent to them. This fact, so creditable to the candour of his nature, I learn from a loose sheet in his handwriting, containing the following corrections, in place of the passage beginning “Or if my Muse a pedant’s portrait drew,” he meant to insert— If once my Muse a harsher portrait drew, Warm with her wrongs, and deem’d the likeness true,

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servant, Friese, the native of Prussia Proper, into my service from his recommendation. He has been all among the Worshippers of Fire in Persia, and has seen Persepolis and all that.

“H * * has made woundy preparations for a book on his return;—100 pens, two gallons of japan ink, and several volumes of best blank, is no bad provision for a discerning public. I have laid down my pen, but have promised to contribute a chapter on the state of morals, &c. &c.

‘The cock is crowing, I must be going, And can no more.’—GHOST OF GAFFER THUMB.

“Adieu.—Believe me, &c. &c.”

“Before this reaches you, Hobhouse, two officers’ wives, three children, two waiting-maids, ditto subalterns for the troops, three Portuguese esquires and domestics, in all nineteen souls, will have sailed in the Lisbon packet, with the noble Captain Kidd, a gallant commander as ever smuggled an anker of right Nantz.

“We are going to Lisbon first, because the Malta packet has sailed, d’ye see?—from Lisbon to Gibraltar, Malta, Constantinople, and ‘all that,’ as Orator Henley said, when he put the Church, and ‘all that,’ in danger.

By cooler judgment taught, her fault she owns,— With noble minds a fault, confess’d, atones.” And to the passage immediately succeeding his warm praise of Dr. Drury,—“Pomposus fills his magisterial chair,” it was his intention to give the following turn:— “Another fills his magisterial chair; Reluctant Ida owns a stranger’s care; Oh may like honours crown his future name,— If such his virtues, such shall he his fame”

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“This town of Falmouth, as you will partly conjecture, is no great ways from the sea. It is defended on the sea-side by tway castles, St. Maws and Pendennis, extremely well calculated for annoying every body except an enemy. St. Maws is garrisoned by an able-bodied person of fourscore, a widower. He has the whole command and sole management at six most unmanageable pieces of ordnance, admirably adapted for the destruction of Pendennis, a like tower of strength on the opposite side of the Channel. We have seen St. Maws, but Pendennis they will not let us behold, save at a distance, because Hobhouse and I are suspected of having already taken St. Maws by a coup de main.

“Hodgson! remember me to the Drury, and remember me to yourself, when drunk:—I am not worth a sober thought. Look to my Satire at Cawthorne’s, Cockspur-street. * * *

“I don’t know when I can write again, because it depends on that experienced navigator, Captain Kidd, and the ‘stormy winds that (don’t) blow’ at this season. I leave England without regret—I shall return to it without pleasure. I am like Adam, the first convict, sentenced to transportation, but I have no Eve, and have eaten no apple but what was sour as a crab;—and thus ends my first chapter. Adieu. Yours, &c.”

“Falmouth Roads, June 30th, 1809. 1. “Huzza! Hodgson, we are going, Our embargo’s off at last; Favourable breezes blowing Bend the canvas o’er the mast. From aloft the signal’s streaming, Hark! the farewell gun is fired,

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Women screeching, tars blaspheming, Tell us that our time’s expired. Here’s a rascal Come to task all, Prying from the Custom-house; Trunks unpacking, Cases cracking, Not a corner for a mouse Scapes unsearch’d amid the racket, Ere we sail on board the Packet.

2. Now our boatmen quit their mooring, And all hands must ply the oar; Baggage from the quay is lowering, We’re impatient—push from shore. ‘Have a care! that case holds liquor.— ‘Stop the boat—I’m sink—oh Lord!’ ‘Sick, ma’am, damme, you’ll be sicker ‘Ere you’ve been an hour on board.’ Thus are screaming Men and women, Gemmen, ladies, servants, Jacks; Here entangling, All are wrangling, Stuck together close as wax.— Such the general noise and racket, Ere we reach the Lisbon Packet.

3. Now we’ve reach’d her, lo! the captain, Gallant Kidd, commands the crew; Passengers their births are clapt in, Some to grumble, some to spew. ‘Hey day! call you that a cabin? Why ’tis hardly three feet square; Not enough to stow Queen Mab in— Who the deuce can harbour there?’ ‘Who, sir? plenty— Nobles twenty Did at once my vessel fill’—

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‘Did they? Jesus, How you squeeze us! Would to God they did so still: Then I’d scape the heat and racket Of the good ship, Lisbon Packet.’

4. “Fletcher! Murray! Bob! where are you? Stretch’d along the deck like logs— Bear a hand, you jolly tar, you! Here’s a rope’s end for the dogs. H * * muttering fearful curses, As the hatchway down he rolls; Now his breakfast, now his verses, Vomits forth—and damns our souls. ‘Here’s a stanza On Braganza— Help!’—‘A couplet?’—‘No, a cup Of warm water—’ ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Zounds! my liver’s coming up; I shall not survive the racket Of this brutal Lisbon Packet.’

5. “Now at length we’re off for Turkey, Lord knows when we shall come back! Breezes foul and tempests murky May unship us in a crack. But, since life at most a jest is, As philosophers allow, Still to laugh by far the best is, Then laugh on—as I do now. Laugh at all things, Great and small things, Sick or well, at sea or shore; While we’re quaffing, Let’s have laughing— Who the devil cares for more?— Some good wine! and who would lack it, Ev’n on board the Lisbon Packet? “Byron.”

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The following letters, from Lord Byron to his friend Mr. Hodgson, though written in his most light and schoolboy strain, will give some idea of the first impressions that his residence in Lisbon made upon him. Such letters, too, contrasted with the noble stanzas on Portugal in “Childe Harold,” will show how various were the moods of his versatile mind, and what different aspects it could take when in repose or on the wing.

“Thus far have we pursued our route, and seen all sorts of marvellous sights, palaces, convents, &c.—which, being to be heard in my friend Hobhouse’s forthcoming Book of Travels, I shall not anticipate by smuggling any account whatsoever to you in a private and clandestine manner. I must just observe that the village of Cintra in Estremadura is the most beautiful, perhaps, in the world. * * *

“I am very happy here because I loves oranges, and talk bad Latin to the monks, who understand it, as it is like their own,—and I goes

* Lord Byron used sometimes to mention a strange story, which the commander of the packet, Captain Kidd, related to him on the passage. This officer stated that, being asleep, one night, in his birth, he was awakened by the pressure of something heavy on his limbs, and, there being a faint light in the room, could see, as he thought, distinctly, the figure of his brother, who was, at that time, in the naval service in the East Indies, dressed in his uniform and stretched across the bed. Concluding it to be an illusion of the senses, he shut his eyes and made an effort to sleep. But still the same pressure continued, and still, as often as he ventured to take another look, he saw the figure lying across him in the same position. To add to the wonder, on putting his hand forth to touch this form, he found the uniform, in which it appeared to be dressed, dripping wet. On the entrance of one of his brother officers, to whom he called out in alarm, the apparition vanished; but in a few months after, he received the startling intelligence that on that night his brother had been drowned in the Indian seas. Of the supernatural character of this appearance, Captain Kidd himself did not appear to have the slightest doubt.

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into society (with my pocket-pistols), and I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhoea and bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring. * * *

“To-morrow we start to ride post near 400 miles as far as Gibraltar, where we embark for Melita and Byzantium. A letter to Malta will find me, or to be forwarded, if I am absent. Pray embrace the Drury and Dwyer and all the Ephesians you encounter. I am writing with Butler’s donative pencil, which makes my bad hand worse. Excuse illegibility. * * *

“Hodgson! send me the news, and the deaths and defeats and capital crimes and the misfortunes of one’s friends; and let us hear of literary matters, and the controversies and the criticisms. All this will be pleasant—‘Suave mari magno,’ &c. Talking of that, I have been seasick, and sick of the sea. Adieu. Yours faithfully, &c’

“I have just arrived at this place after a journey through Portugal, and a part of Spain, of nearly 500 miles. We left Lisbon and travelled on horseback to Seville and Cadiz, and thence in the Hyperion frigate to Gibraltar. The horses are excellent—we rode seventy miles a day.

* The baggage and part of the servants were sent by sea to Gibraltar.

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Eggs and wine and hard beds are all the accommodation we found, and, in such torrid weather, quite enough. My health is better than in England. * * *

“I have seen Sir John Carr at Seville and Cadiz, and, like Swift’s barber, have been down on my knees to beg he would not put me into black and white. Pray remember me to the Drurys and the Davies, and all of that stamp who are yet extant*. Send me a letter and news to Malta. My next epistle shall be from Mount Caucasus or Mount

* “This sort of passage,” says Mr. Hodgson, in a note on his copy of this letter, “constantly occurs in his correspondence. Nor was his interest confined to mere remembrances and inquiries after health. Were it possible to state all he has done for numerous friends, he would appear amiable indeed. For myself, I am bound to acknowledge, in the fullest and warmest manner, his most generous and well-timed aid; and, were my poor friend Bland alive, he would as gladly bear the like testimony;—though I have most reason, of all men, to do so.”

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Sion. I shall return to Spain before I see England, for I am enamoured of the country. Adieu, and believe me, &c.”

In a letter to Mrs. Byron, dated a few days later, from Gibraltar, he recapitulates the same account of his progress, only dwelling rather more diffusely on some of the details. Thus, of Cintra and Mafra,—“To make amends for this*, the village of Cintra, about fifteen miles from the capital, is, perhaps in every respect, the most delightful in Europe; it contains beauties of every description, natural and artificial. Palaces and gardens rising in the midst of rocks, cataracts, and precipices; convents on stupendous heights—a distant view of the sea and the Tagus; and, besides (though that is a secondary consideration), is remarkable as the scene of Sir H. D.’s Convention†. It unites in itself all the wildness of the western highlands, with the verdure of the south of France. Near this place, about ten miles to the right, is the palace of Mafra, the boast of Portugal, as it might be of any country, in point of magnificence without elegance. There is a convent annexed; the monks, who possess large revenues, are courteous enough, and understand Latin, so that we had a long conversation: they nave a large library, and asked me if the English had any books in their country.”

An adventure which he met with at Seville, characteristic both of the country and of himself, is thus described in the same letter to Mrs. Byron:—

“We lodged in the house of two Spanish unmarried ladies, who possess six houses in Seville, and gave me a curious specimen of Spanish manners. They are women of character, and the eldest a fine woman, the youngest pretty, but not so good a figure as Donna Josepha. The freedom of manner, which is general here, astonished me not a little; and in the course of further observation I find that reserve is not the characteristic of the Spanish belles, who are, in general, very handsome,

* The filthiness of Lisbon and its inhabitants.

† Colonel Napier, in a note in his able History of the Peninsular War, notices the mistake into which Lord Byron and others were led on this subject;—the signature of the Convention, as well as all the other proceedings connected with it, having taken place at a distance of thirty miles from Cintra.

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with large black eyes, and very fine forms. The eldest honoured your unworthy son with very particular attention, embracing him with great tenderness at parting (I was there but three days), after cutting off a lock of his hair, and presenting him with one of her own, about three feet in length, which I send, and beg you will retain till my return. Her last words were, ’Adios, tu hermoso! me gusto mucho.’—‘Adieu, you pretty fellow, you please me much.’ She offered a share of her apartment, which my virtue induced me to decline; she laughed and said I had some English ‘amante’ (lover), and added that she was going to be married to an officer in the Spanish army.”

“The night before I left it, I sat in the box at the Opera with Admiral * * *’s family, an aged wife and a fine daughter, Sennorita * * *. The girl is very pretty, in the Spanish style; in my opinion, by no means inferior to the English in charms, and certainly superior in fascination. Long, black hair, dark languishing eyes, clear olive complexions, and forms more graceful in motion than can be conceived by an Englishman used to the drowsy, listless air of his countrywomen, added to the most becoming dress, and, at the same time, the most decent in the world, render a Spanish beauty irresistible.

“Miss * * * and her little brother understood a little French, and, after regretting my ignorance of the Spanish, she proposed to become my preceptress in that language. I could only reply, by a low bow, and express my regret that I quitted Cadiz too soon to permit me to make the progress which would doubtless attend my studies under so charming a directress. I was standing at the back of the box, which resembles our Opera boxes (the theatre is large, and finely decorated, the music ad-

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mirable), in the manner in which Englishmen generally adopt, for fear of incommoding the ladies in front, when this fair Spaniard dispossessed an old woman (an aunt or a duenna) of her chair, and commanded me to be seated next herself, at a tolerable distance from her mamma. At the close of the performance I withdrew, and was lounging with a party of men in the passage, when, en passant, the lady turned round and called me, and I had the honour of attending her to the admiral’s mansion. I have an invitation on my return to Cadiz which I shall accept, if I repass through the country on my return from Asia.”

To these adventures, or rather glimpses of adventures, which he met with in his hasty passage through Spain, he adverted, I recollect, briefly, in the early part of his “Memoranda;” and it was the younger, I think, of his fair hostesses at Seville, whom he there described himself as having made earnest love to, with the help of a dictionary. “For some time,” he said, “I went on prosperously both as a linguist and a lover, till, at length, the lady took a fancy to a ring which I wore, and set her heart on my giving it to her, as a pledge of my sincerity. This, however, could not be;—any thing but the ring, I declared, was at her service, and much more than its value,—but the ring itself I had made a vow never to give away.” The young Spaniard grew angry as the contention went on, and it was not long before the lover became angry also; till, at length, the affair ended by their separating unsuccessful on both sides. “Soon after this,” said he, “I sailed for Malta, and there parted with both my heart and ring.”

In the letter from Gibraltar, just cited, he adds—“I am going over to Africa to-morrow; it is only six miles from this fortress. My next stage is Cagliari in Sardinia, where I shall be presented to his majesty. I have a most superb uniform as a court-dress, indispensable in travelling.” His plan of visiting Africa was, however, relinquished. After a short stay at Gibraltar, during which he dined one day with Lady Westmoreland, and another with General Castanos, he, on the 19th of

* We find an allusion to this incident in Don Juan:— “’Tis pleasing to be school’d in a strange tongue By female lips and eyes—that is, I mean, When both the teacher and the taught are young, As was the case, at least, where I have been.” &c, &c,

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August, took his departure for Malta in the packet, having first sent Joe Murray and young Rushton back to England,—the latter being unable, from ill health, to accompany him any further. “Pray,” he says to his mother, “show the lad every kindness, as he is my great favourite*.”

“I have sent Robert home with Mr. Murray, because the country which I am about to travel through is in a state which renders it unsafe, particularly for one so young. I allow you to deduct five-and-twenty pounds a year for his education for three years, provided I do not return before that time, and I desire he may be considered as in my service. Let every care be taken of him, and let him be sent to school. In case of my death I have provided enough in my will to render him independent. He has behaved extremely well, and has travelled a great deal for the time of his absence. Deduct the expense of his education from your rent.

It was the fate of Lord Byron, throughout life, to meet, wherever he went, with persons who, by some tinge of the extraordinary in their own fates or characters, were prepared to enter, at once, to full sympathy with his; and to this attraction, by which he him all strange and eccentric spirits, he owed some of the most agreeable connexions of his life, as well as some of the most troublesome. Of the

* The postscript to this letter is as follows:— “P.S. So Lord G. is married to a rustic! Well done! If I wed, I will bring you home a Sultana, with half a dozen cities for dowry, and reconcile you to an Ottoman daughter-in-law with a bushel of pearls, not larger than ostrich eggs, or smaller than walnuts.”

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former description was an intimacy which he now cultivated during his short sojourn at Malta. The lady with whom he formed this acquaintance was the same addressed by him under the name of “Florence” in Childe Harold, and in a letter to his mother from Malta, he thus describes her in prose:—“This letter is committed to the charge of a very extraordinary woman, whom you have doubtless heard of, Mrs. S* S*, of whose escape the Marquis de Salvo published a narrative a few years ago. She has since been shipwrecked, and her life has been from its commencement so fertile in remarkable incidents, that in a romance they would appear improbable. She was born at Constantinople, where her father, Baron H*, was Austrian ambassador; married unhappily, yet has never been impeached in point of character; excited the vengeance of Buonaparte by a part in some conspiracy; several times risked her life; and is not yet twenty-five. She is here on her way to England, to join her husband, being obliged to leave Trieste, where she was paying a visit to her mother, by the approach of the French, and embarks soon in a ship of war. Since my arrival here, I have had scarcely any other companion. I have found her very pretty, very accomplished, and extremely eccentric. Buonaparte is even now so incensed against her, that her life would be in some danger if she were taken prisoner a second time.”

The tone in which he addresses this fair heroine in Childe Harold is (consistently with the above dispassionate account of her) that of the purest admiration and interest, unwarmed by any more ardent sentiment:—

“Sweet Florence! could another ever share This wayward, loveless heart, it would be thine: But, check’d by every tie, I may not dare To cast a worthless offering at thy shrine, Nor ask so dear a breast to feel one pang for mine.

“Thus Harold deem’d, as on that lady’s eye He look’d, and met its beam without a thought, Save admiration, glancing harmless by,” &c. &c.

In one so imaginative as Lord Byron, who, while he infused so much of his life into his poetry, mingled also not a little of poetry with

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his life, it is difficult, in unravelling the texture of his feelings, to distinguish at all times between the fanciful and the real. His description here, for instance, of the unmoved and “loveless heart,” with which he contemplated even the charms of this attractive person, is wholly at variance, not only with the anecdote from his “Memoranda” which I have recalled, but with the statements in many of his subsequent letters, and, above all, with one of the most graceful of his lesser poems, purporting to be addressed to this same lady during a thunderstorm on his road to Zitza*.

Notwithstanding, however, these counter evidences, I am much disposed to believe that the representation of the state of his heart in the foregoing extract from Childe Harold may be regarded as the true one; and that the notion of his being in love was but a dream that sprung up afterwards, when the image of the fair Florence had become idealized in his fancy, and every remembrance of their pleasant hours among “Calypso’s isles” came invested by his imagination with the warm aspect of love. It will be recollected that to the chilled and sated feelings which early indulgence, and almost as early disenchantment, had left behind, he attributes in these verses the calm and passionless regard, with which even attractions like those of Florence were viewed by him. That such was actually ins distaste, at this period, to all real objects of love or passion (however his fancy could call up creatures of its own to worship)

* The following stanzas from this little poem have a music in them, which, independently of all meaning, is enchanting:— “And since I now remember thee In darkness and in dread, As in those hours of revelry, Which mirth and music sped; “Do thou, amidst the fair white walls, If Cadiz yet be free, At times, from out her latticed halls, Look o’er the dark blue sea; “Then think upon Calypso’s tales, Endear’d by days gone by; To others give a thousand smiles, To me a single sigh, &c. &c.

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there is every reason to believe; and the same morbid indifference to those pleasures he had once so ardently pursued still continued to be professed by him on his return to England. No anchoret, indeed, could claim for himself much more apathy towards all such allurements than he did at that period. But to be thus saved from temptation was a dear-bought safety, and, at the age of three-and-twenty, satiety and disgust are but melancholy substitutes for virtue.

While at Malta, in consequence of some trifling misunderstanding, he was on the point of fighting a duel with an officer of the Staff of General Oakes. To this circumstance we shall find him, in some of his subsequent letters, alluding; and I have more than once heard the gentleman who acted as his adviser on the occasions speak of the cool and manly courage with which he conducted himself through the whole affair. The meeting being appointed for a very early hour in the morning, his companion had to awake him from a sound sleep; but, on their arrival at the place of rendezvous on the sea-shore, the adverse party, from some mistake in the arrangements, was not forthcoming. Though their baggage was already on board the brig that was to convey them to Albania, Lord Byron determined to give his antagonist the chances of, at least, another hour, and for nearly that space of time his friend and he sauntered about the shore. At length an officer, deputed by his expected adversary, arrived, and not only accounted satisfactorily for the delay that had taken place, but made every other explanation, with respect to the supposed offence, that the two friends could require.

The route which Lord Byron now took through Albania, as well as those subsequent journeys through other parts of Turkey, which he performed in company with his friend Mr. Hobhouse, may be traced, by such as are desirous of details on the subject, in the account which the latter gentleman has given of his travels;—an account which, interesting from

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its own excellence in every merit that should adorn such a work, becomes still more so from the feeling that Lord Byron is, as it were, present through its pages, and that we there follow his first youthful footsteps into the land, with whose name he has intertwined his own for ever. As I am enabled, however, by the letters of the noble poet to his mother, as well as by others, still more curious, which are now for the first time published, to give his own rapid and lively sketches of his wanderings, I shall content myself, after this general reference to the volume of Mr. Hobhouse, with such occasional extracts from its pages as may throw light upon the letters of his friend.

“I have now been some time in Turkey: this place is on the coast, but I have traversed the interior of the province of Albania o a visit to the Pacha. I left Malta in the Spider, a brig of war, on the 21st of September, and arrived in eight days at Prevesa. I thence have been about 150 miles, as far as Tepaleen, his highness’s country palace, where I stayed three days. The name of the Pacha is Ali, and he is considered a man of the first abilities: he governs the whole of Albania (the ancient Illyricum), Epirus, and part of Macedonia. His son, Vely Pacha, to whom he has given me letters, governs the Morea, and has great influence in Egypt; in short he is one of the most powerful wen in the Ottoman empire. When I reached Yanina, the capital, after a journey of three days over the mountains, through a country of the most picturesque beauty, I found that Ali Pacha was with his army in Illyricum, besieging Ibrahim Pacha in the castle of Peret. He had heard that an Englishman of rank was in his dominions, and had left orders in Yanina with the commandant to provide a house, and supply me with every kind of necessary gratis: and, though I have been allowed to make presents to the slaves, &c. I have rot beer permitted to pay for a single article of household consumption.

“I rode out on the vizier’s horses, and saw the palaces of himself

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and grandsons: they are splendid, but too much ornamented with silk and gold. I then went over the mountains through Zitza, a village with a Greek monastery (where I slept on my return), in the most beautiful situation (always excepting Cintra, in Portugal) I ever beheld. In nine days I reached Tepaleen. Our journey was much prolonged by the torrents that had fallen from the mountains, and intersected the roads. I shall never forget the singular scene* on entering Tepaleen at five in

* The following is Mr. Hobhouse’s less embellished description of this scene:—“The court at Tepellene, which was enclosed on two sides by the palace, and on the other two sides by a high wall, presented us, at our first entrance, with a sight something like what we might have, perhaps, beheld some hundred years ago in the castle-yard of a great feudal lord. Soldiers, with their arms piled against the wall near them) were assembled in different parts of the square: some of them pacing slowly backwards and forwards, and others sitting on the ground in groups. Several horses, completely caparisoned, were leading about, whilst others were neighing under the hands of the grooms. In the Dart farthest from the dwelling, preparations were making for the feast of the night; and several kids and sheep were being dressed by cooks who were themselves half armed. Every thing wore a most martial look, though not exactly in the style of the head-quarters of a christian general; for many of the soldiers were in the most common dress, without shoes, and having more wildness in their air and manner than the Albanians we had before seen.” On comparing this description, which is itself sufficiently striking, with those which Lord Byron has given of the same scene, both in the letter to his mother, and in the Second Canto of Childe Harold, we gain some insight into the process by which imagination elevates, without falsifying, reality, and facts become brightened and refined into poetry. Ascending from the representation drawn faithfully on the spot by the traveller, to the more fanciful arrangement of the same materials in the letter of the poet, we at length, by one step more, arrive at that consummate, idealized picture, the result of both memory and invention combined, which in the following splendid stanzas it presented to us; “Amidst no common pomp the despot sate, While busy preparation shook the court, Slaves, eunuchs, soldiers, guests, and santons wait; Within, a palace, and without, a fort: Here men of every clime appear to make resort. “Richly caparison’d a ready row Of armed horse, and many a warlike store, Circled the wide extending court below; Above, strange groups adorn’d the corridore; And oft-times through the area’s echoing door Some high-capp’d Tartar spurr’d his steed sway: The Turk, the Greek, the Albanian, and the Moor, Here mingled in their many-hued array, While the deep war-drum’s sound announced the close of day.

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the afternoon, as the sun was going down. It brought to my mind (with some change of dress, however) Scott’s description of Branksome Castle in his Lay, and the feudal system. The Albanians, in their dresses (the most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, gold-worked cloak, crimson velvet gold-laced jacket and waistcoat, silver-mounted pistols and daggers), the Tartars with their high caps, the Turks in their vast pelisses and turbans, the soldiers and black slaves with the horses, the former in groups in an immense large open gallery in front of the palace, the latter placed in a kind of cloister below it, two hundred steeds ready caparisoned to move in a moment, couriers entering or passing out with despatches, the kettle-drums beating, boys calling the hour from the minaret of the mosque, altogether, with the singular appearance of the building itself, formed a new and delightful spectacle to a stranger. I was conducted to a very handsome apartment, and my health inquired after by the vizier’s secretary, à-la-mode Turque!’

“The next day I was introduced to Ali Pacha. I was dressed in a full suit of staff uniform, with a very magnificent sabre, &c. The vizier received me in a large room paved, with marble; a fountain was playing in the centre; the apartment was surrounded by scarlet ottomans. He received me standing, a wonderful compliment from a Mussulman, and

“The wild Albanian kirtled so his knee, With shawl-girt head and ornamented gun, And gold-embroider’d garments, fair to see; The crimson-scarfed men of Macedon; The Delhi with his cap of terror on, And crooked glaive; the lively, supple Greek; And swarthy Nubia’s mutilated son; The bearded Turk that rarely deigns to speak, Master of all around, too potent to be meek, “Are mix’d conspicuous; some reclining in groups, Scanning the motley scene that varies round; There some grave Moslem to devotion stoops, And some that smoke, end some the. play, are found; Here the Albanian proudly treads the ground; Half whispering there the Greek is heard to prate; Hark! from the mosque the nightly solemn sound, The Muezin’s rati doth shake the minaret, There is no god but God!—to prayer—lo! God is great!’” CHILDE HAROLD, CANTO II.

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made me sit down on his right hard. I have a Greek interpreter for general use, but a physician of Ali’s, named Femlario, who understands Latin, acted for me on this occasion. His first question was, why, at so early an age, I left my country?—(the Turks have no idea of travelling for amusement). He then said, the English minister, Captain Leake, had told him I was of a great family, and desired his respects to my mother; which I now, in the name of All Pacha, present to you. He said he was certain I was a man of birth, because I had small ears, curling hair, and little white hands*, and expressed himself pleased with my appearance and garb. He told me to consider him as a father whilst I was in Turkey, and said he looked on me as his son. Indeed, he treated me like a child, sending me almonds and sugared sherbet, fruit and sweetmeats, twenty times a day. He begged me to visit him often, and at night, when he was at leisure. I then, after coffee and pipes, retired for the first time. I saw him thrice afterwards. It is singular, that the Turks, who have no hereditary dignities, and few great families, except the Sultans, pay so much respect to birth; for I found my pedigree more regarded them my title†.

“To-day I saw the remains of the town of Actium, near which Antony lost the world, in a small bay, where two frigates could hardly manœeuvre: a broken wall is the sole remnant. On another part of the gulf stand the ruins of Nicopolis, built by Augustus in honour of his victory. Last night I was a Greek marriage; but this and a thousand things more I have neither time nor space to describe.

“I am going to-morrow, with a guard of fifty men, to Patras in the Morea, and thence to Athens, where I shall Winter. Two days ago I was

* In the shape of the hands, as a mark of high birth, Lord Byron himself had as implicit faith as the Pacha; see his note on the line, “Though on more thorough-bred or fairer fingers,” in Don Juan.

† A few sentences are here and elsewhere omitted, as having no reference to Lord Byron himself, but merely containing some particulars relating to Ali and his grandsons, which may be found in various books of travels. Ali had not forgotten his noble guest when Dr. Holland, a few years after, visited Albania:—“I mentioned to him, generally (says this intelligent traveller), Lord Byron’s poetical description of Albania, the interest it had excited in England, and Mr. Hobhouse’s intended publication of his travels in the same country. He seemed pleased with these circumstances, and stated his recollections of Lord Byron.”

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nearly lost in a Turkish ship of war, owing to the ignorance of the captain and crew, though the storm was not violent. Fletcher yelled after his wife, the Greeks called on all the saints, the Mussulmans on Alla; the captain burst into tears and ran below deck, telling us to call on God; the sails were split, the main-yard shivered, the wind blowing fresh, the night setting in, and all our chance was to make Corfu, which is in possession of the French, or (as Fletcher pathetically termed it) ‘a watery grave.’ I did what I could to console Fletcher, but finding him incorrigible, wrapped myself up in my Albanian capote (an immense cloak), and lay down on deck to wait the worst*. I have learnt to philosophize in my travels, and if I had not, complaint was useless. Luckily the wind abated, and only drove us on the coast of Suli, on the main land, where we landed, and proceeded, by the help of the natives, to Prevesa again; but I shall not trust Turkish sailors in future, though the Pacha had ordered one of his own galliots to take me to Patras. I am therefore going as far as Missolonghi by land, and there have only to cross a small gulf to get to Patras.

“Fletcher’s next epistle will be full of marvels: we were one night lost for nine hours in the mountains in a thunder-storm†, and since nearly wrecked. In both cases, Fletcher was sorely bewildered, from appre-

* I have heard the poet’s fellow traveller describe this remarkable instance of his coolness and courage even still more strikingly than it is here stated by himself. Finding that, from his lameness, he was unable to be of any service in the exertions which their very serious danger called for, after a laugh or two at the panic of his valet, he not only wrapped himself up and lay down, in the manner he mentioned, but, when their difficulties were surmounted, was found fast asleep.

† In the route from Ioannina to Zitza, Mr. Hobhouse and the Secretary of Ali, accompanied by one of the servants, had rode on before the rest of the party, and arrived at the village just as the evening set in. After describing the sort of hovel in which they were to take up their quarters for the night, Mr. Hobhouse thus continues:—“Vasilly was despatched into the village to procure eggs and fowls, that would be ready, as we thought, by the arrival of the second party. But an hour passed away and no one appeared. It was seven o’clock, and the storm had increased to a fury I had never before, and, indeed, have never since, seen equalled. The roof of our hovel shook under the clattering torrents and gusts of wind. The thunder roared, as it seemed, without any intermission; for the echoes of one peal had not ceased to roll in the mountains, before another tremendous crush burst over our heads; whilst the plains and the distant hills (visible through the cracks of the cabin) appeared in a perpetual blaze. The tempest was altogether terrific and worthy of the Grecian Jove; and the peasants, no less

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hensions of famine and banditti in the first, and drowning in the second instance. His eyes were a little hurt by the lightning, or crying (I don’t know which), but are now recovered. When you write, address to me at Mr. Strané’s, English consul, Patras, Morea.

“I could tell you I know not how many incidents that I think would amuse you, but they crowd on my mind as much as they would swell my paper, and I can neither arrange them in the one, nor put them down on the other, except in the greatest confusion. I like the Albanians much; they are not all Turks; some tribes are Christians. But their religion makes little difference in their manner or conduct. They are esteemed the best troops in the Turkish service. I lived on my route

religious than their Ancestors, confessed their alarm. The women wept, and the men, calling on the name of God, crossed themselves at every repeated peal. “We were very uneasy that the party did not arrive; but the Secretary assured me that the guides knew every part of the country, as did also his own servant, who was with them, and that they had certainly taken shelter in a village at an hour’s distance. Not being satisfied with the conjecture, I ordered fires to be lighted on the hill above the village, and some musquets to be discharged: this was at eleven o’clock, and the storm had not abated. I lay down in my greet coat; but all sleeping was out of the question, as any pauses in the tempest were filled up by the barking of the dogs, end the shouting of the shepherds in the neighbouring mountains. “A little after midnight, a man, panting and pale, and drenched with rain, rushed into the room, and, between crying and roaring, with a profusion of action, communicated something to the Secretary, of which I understood only—that they had all fallen down. I learnt, however, that no accident had happened, except the falling of the luggage horses, and losing their way, and that they were now waiting for fresh horses and guides. Ten were immediately sent to them, together with several men with pine torches; but it was not till two o’clock in the morning that we heard they were approaching, and my Friend, with the priest and the servants, did not enter our hut before three. “I now learnt from him that they had lost their way from the commencement of the storm, when not above three miles from the village; and that, after wandering up and down in total ignorance of their position, they had, at last, stopped near some Turkish tombstones and a torrent which they saw by the flashes of lightning. They had been thus exposed for nine hours; and the guides, so far from assisting them, only augmented the confusion, by running away, after being threatened with death by George the Dragoman, who, in an agony of rage and fear, and without giving any warning, fired off both his pistols, and drew from the English servant an involuntary scream of horror; for he fancied they were beset by robbers. “I had not, as you have seen, witnessed the distressing part of this adventure myself; but from the lively picture drawn of it by my Friend, and from the exaggerated descriptions of George, I fancied myself a good judge of the whole situation, and should consider this to have been one of the most considerable of the few adventures that befel either of us during our tour in Turkey. It was long before we ceased to talk of the thunder-storm in the plain of Zitza.”

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two days at once, and three days again, in a barrack at Salora, and never found soldiers so tolerable, though I have been in the garrisons of Gibraltar and Malta, and seen Spanish, French, Sicilian, and British troops in abundance. I have had nothing stolen, and was always welcome to their provision and milk. Not a week ago an Albanian chief (every village has its chief, who is called Primate), after helping us out of the Turkish galley in her distress, feeding us, and lodging my suite, consisting of Fletcher, a Greek, two Athenians, a Greek priest, and my companion, Mr. Hobhouse, refused any compensation but a written paper stating that I was well received; and when I pressed urn to accept a few sequins, ‘No,’ he replied; ‘I wish you to love me, not to pay me.’ These are his words.

“It is astonishing how far money goes in this country. While I was in the capital, I had nothing to pay, by the vizier’s order; but since, though I have generally had sixteen horses, and generally six or seven men, the expense has not been half as much as staying only three weeks in Malta, though Sir A. Ball, the governor, gave me a house for nothing, and I had only one servant. By the by, I expect H * * to remit regularly; for I am not about to stay in this province for ever. Let him write to me at Mr. Strané’s, English consul, Patras. The fact is, the fertility of the plains is wonderful, and specie is scarce, which makes this remarkable cheapness. I am going to Athens to study modern Greek, which differs much from the ancient, though radically similar. I have no desire to return to England, nor shall I unless compelled by absolute want, and H * *’s neglect; but I shall not enter into Asia for a year or two, as I have much to see in Greece, and I may perhaps cross into Africa, at least the Egyptian part. Fletcher, like all Englishmen, is very much dissatisfied, though a little reconciled to the Turks by a present of eighty piastres from the vizier, which, if you consider every thing, and the value of specie here, is nearly worth ten guineas English. He has suffered nothing but from cold, heat, and vermin, which those who lie in cottages and cross mountains in a cold country must undergo, and of which I have equally partaken with himself, but he is not valiant, and is afraid of robbers and tempests. I have no one to be remembered

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to in England, and wish to hear nothing from it, but that you are well, and a letter or two on business from H * *, whom you may tell to write. I will write when I can, and beg you to believe me

“Your affectionate son,

“Byron.”

About the middle of November, the young traveller took his departure from Prevesa (the place where the foregoing letter was written), and proceeded, attended by his guard of fifty Albanians*, through Acarnania and Ætolia, towards the Morea.

“And therefore did he take a trusty band To traverse Acarnania’s forest wide, In war well season’d, and with labours tann’d, Till he did greet white Achelous’ tide, And from his further bank Ætolia’s wolds espied.” CHILDE HAROLD, CANTO II.

His description of the night-scene at Utraikey (a small place situated in one of the bays of the Gulf of Arta) is, no doubt, vividly in the recollection of every reader of these pages; nor will it diminish their enjoyment of the wild beauties of that picture to be made acquainted with the real circumstances on which it was founded, in the following animated details of the same scene by his fellow-traveller:—

“In the evening the gates were secured, and preparations were made for feeding our Albanians. A goat was killed and roasted whole, and four fires were kindled in the yard, round which the soldiers seated themselves in parties. After eating and drinking, the greater part of them assembled round the largest of the fires, and whilst ourselves and the elders of the party were seated on the ground, danced round the blaze to their own songs, in the manner before described, but with n astonishing energy. All their songs were relations of some robbing exploits. One of them, which detained them more than an hour, began

* Mr. Hobhouse, I think, makes number of this guard but thirty-seven, and Lord Byron, in a subsequent letter, rates them at forty.

A. D. 1809.

LIFE OF LORD BYRON.

211

thus—‘When we set out from Parga there were sixty of us:’—then came the burden of the verse,

‘Robbers all at Parga Robbers all at Parga!’ ‘Κλεϕτεις ποτε Παργα! Κλεϕτεις ποτε Παργα!’

And as they roared out this stave they whirled round the fire, dropped and rebounded from their knees, and again whirled round as the chorus was again repeated. The rippling of the waves upon the pebbly margin where we were seated filled up the pauses of the song with a milder and not more monotonous music. The night was very dark, but by the flashes of the fires we caught a glimpse of the woods, the rocks, and the lake, which, together with the wild appearance of the dancers, presented us with a scene that would have made a fine picture in the hands of such an artist as the author of the Mysteries of Udolpho.”

Having traversed Acarnania, the travellers passed to the Ætolian side of the Achelous, and on the 21st of November reached Missolonghi. And here,—it is impossible not to pause, and send a mournful thought forward to the visit which, fifteen years after, he paid to this same spot,—when, in the full meridian both of his age and fame, he came to lay down his life as the champion of that land, through which he now wandered a stripling and a stranger. Could some spirit have here revealed to him the events of that interval,—have shown him, on the one side, the triumphs that awaited him, the power his varied genius would acquire over all hearts, alike to elevate or depress, to darken or illuminate them,—and then place, on the other side, all the penalties of this gift, the waste and wear of the heart through the imagination, the havoc of that perpetual fire within, which, while it dazzles others, consumes the possessor,—the invidiousness of such an elevation in the eyes of mankind, and the revenge they take on him who compels them to look up to it,—would he, it may be asked, have welcomed glory on such conditions? would he not rather have felt that the purchase was too costly, and that such warfare with an ungrateful world, while living,

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would be ill recompensed even by the immortality it might award him afterwards?

At Missolonghi he dismissed his whole band of Albanians, with the exception of one, named Dervish, whom he took into his service, and who, with Basilius, the attendant allotted him by Ali Pacha, continued with him during the remainder of his stay in the East. After a residence of near a fortnight at Patras, he next directed his course to Vostizza,—on approaching which town the snowy peak of Parnassus, towering on the other side of the Gulf, first broke on his eyes; and, in two days after, among the sacred hollows of Delphi, the stanzas, with which that vision had inspired him, were written*.

It was at this time that, in riding along the sides of Parnassus, he saw an unusually large flight of eagles in the air—a phenomenon which seems to have affected his imagination with a sort of poetical superstition, as he, more than once, recurs to the circumstance in his journals. Thus, “Going to the fountain of Delphi (Castri) in 1809, I saw a flight of twelve eagles (H. says they were vultures—at least, in conversation), and I seized the omen. On the day before, I composed the lines to Parnassus (in Childe Harold), and, on beholding the birds, had a hope that Apollo had accepted my homage. I have at least had the name and fame of a poet during the poetical part of life (from twenty to thirty);—whether it will last is another matter.”

He has also, in reference to this journey from Patras, related a little anecdote of his own sportsmanship, which, by all but sportsmen, will be thought creditable to his humanity. “The last bird I ever fired at was an eaglet, on the shore of the Gulf of Lepanto, near Vostizza. It was only wounded, and I tried to save it—the eye was so bright. But it pined, and died in a few days; and I never did since, and never will, attempt the death of another bird.”

* “Oh, thou Parnassus! whom I now survey, Not in the phrensy of a dreamer’s eye, Not in the fabled landscape of a lay, But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky, In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!” CHILDE HAROLD, CANTO I.

A. D. 1809.

LIFE OF LORD BYRON.

213

To a traveller in Greece, there are few things more remarkable than the diminutive extent of those countries, which have filled such a wide space in fame. “A man might very easily,” says Mr. Hobhouse, “at a moderate pace, ride from Livadia to Thebes and back again between breakfast and dinner; and the tour of all Bœotia might certainly be made in two days without baggage.” Having visited, within a very short space of time, the fountains of Memory and Oblivion at Livadia, and the haunts of the Ismenian Apollo at Thebes, the travellers at length turned towards Athens, the city of their dreams, and, after crossing Mount Cithæron, arrived in sight of the ruins of Phyle, on the evening of Christmas-day, 1809.

Though the poet has left, in his own verses, an ever-during testimony of the enthusiasm with which he now contemplated the scenes around him, it is not difficult to conceive that, to superficial observers, Lord Byron at Athens might have appeared an untouched spectator of much that throws ordinary travellers into, at least, verbal raptures. For pretenders of every sort, whether in taste or morals, he entertained, at all times, the most profound contempt; and if, frequently, his real feelings of admiration disguised themselves under an affected tone of indifference and mockery, it was out of pure hostility to the cant of those, who, he well knew, praised without any feeling at all. It must be owned, too, that while he thus justly despised the raptures of the common herd of travellers, there were some pursuits, even of the intelligent and tasteful, in which he took but very little interest. With the antiquarian and connoisseur his sympathies were few and feeble;—“I am not a collector” he says, in one of his notes on Childe Harold, “nor an admirer of collections.” For antiquities, indeed, unassociated with high names and deeds, he had no value whatever; and of works of art he was content to admire the general effect, without professing, or aiming at any knowledge of the details. It was to nature, in her lonely scenes of grandeur and beauty, or, as at Athens, shining, unchanged among the ruins of glory and of art, that the true, fervid homage of his whole soul was paid. In the few notices of his travels, appended to Childe Harold, we find the sites and scenery of the different places he visited far more fondly dwelt upon than their classic or historical associations. To the valley of Zitza

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A. D. 1810.

he reverts, both in prose and verse, with a much warmer recollection than to Delphi or the Troad; and the plain of Athens itself is chiefly praised by him as “a more glorious prospect than even Cintra or Istambol.” Where, indeed, could Nature assert such claims to his worship as in scenes like these, where he beheld her blooming, in indestructible beauty, amid the wreck of all that Man deems most worthy of duration. “Human institutions,” says Harris, “perish, but Nature is permanent:”—or, as Lord Byron has amplified this thought* in one of his most splendid passages:—

“Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild; Sweet are thy groves and verdant are thy fields, Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled, And still his honied wealth Hymettus yields; There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds, The free-born wanderer of thy mountain-air; Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds, Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare; Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.” CHILDE HAROLD, CANTO II.

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Ali Pasha of Yannina (1740-1822) Albanian warlord who expanded his territories during the Napoleonic wars but was eventually suppressed by the Ottoman Turks; he entertained Byron in 1809.

Mark Antony (83 BC-30 BC) Roman statesman and general; victorious over the republicans at Philippi, defeated by Octavian at Actium.

Augustus, Emperor of Rome (63 BC-14 AD) Emperor of Rome from 31 BC; he was the patron of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Livy.

William John Bankes (1786-1855) Byron's Cambridge friend; the son of Henry Bankes, MP, he was MP for Truro, Cambridge, Marlborough, and Dorset, and an Egyptian traveller who translated Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Giovanni Finati 2 vols (1830).

Joseph Blacket (1786-1810) English shoemaker-poet; Specimens of the Poetry of Joseph Blacket (1809) was published under the patronage of Samuel Jackson Pratt; in failing health he was later supported by Sir Ralph Milbanke, whose gamekeeper was a relation.

Robert Bland (1779 c.-1825) Under-master at Harrow 1796-1805, where he taught Byron; he was a friend of Byron and of Francis Hodgson. With John Herman Merivale he published Translations, chiefly from the Greek Anthology (1806).

Nicholas Boileau-Despréaux (1636-1711) French neoclassical poet, author of Le Lutrin (1683) and L'Art Poetique (1674).

Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte, comtesse de Boufflers-Rouvrel (1724-1800) Literary hostess and patron of Rousseau.

William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850) English poet and critic; author of Fourteen Sonnets, elegiac and descriptive, written during a Tour (1789), editor of the Works of Alexander Pope, 10 vols (1806), and writer of pamphlets contributing to the subsequent Pope controversy.

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).

Anne Isabella Noel Byron [née Milbanke] [Annabella] (1792-1860) The only child of Sir Ralph Milbanke; married Byron in 1815, separating shortly after the birth of their daughter Ada in January 1816.

Catherine Byron [née Gordon] (1764-1811) Byron's mother, who married Capt. John Byron 12 May 1785.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) The author of Childe Harold and Don Juan.

Admiral John Byron [Foulweather Jack] (1723-1786) In 1741 Byron was shipwrecked while serving as a midshipman in the Pacific under Commodore Anson, an account of which he published as The Narrative of the Hon. John Byron (1768).

Sophia Byron [née Trevannion] (1758 fl.) The daughter of John Trevannion of Carhays, Cornwall who married Admiral John Byron 8 September 1748; their two sons were both captains in the Royal Navy.

William Byron, fifth baron Byron (1722-1798) Byron's misanthropic great-uncle, from whom he inherited Newstead Abbey.

Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) Scottish poet and man of letters; author of The Pleasures of Hope (1799), Gertrude of Wyoming (1808) and lyric odes. He edited the New Monthly Magazine (1821-30).

Sir John Carr (1772-1832) English travel writer educated at Rugby School who, beginning with The Stranger in Paris (1803), published popular volumes on Ireland, Holland, Scotland, and Spain.

Captain Cary (1809 fl.) The aide-de-camp on the staff of General Oakes at Malta who Byron challenged.

Charles John Cary, ninth viscount Falkland (1768-1809) Captain in the Royal Navy and friend of Lord Byron; he was mortally wounded in a duel with Arthur Powell.

Christiana Cary, viscountess Falkland [née Anton] (d. 1822) Married Captain Charles John Cary, ninth Viscount Falkland in 1802; their third child, born 5 October 1808, was named “Byron,” after Lord Byron, who was much shaken when the father was killed in a duel a few months later.

Francisco Javier de Castaños, duke of Bailén (1758-1852) Spanish general who defeated the French general Dupont at Cadiz in 1808.

James Cawthorne (1832 fl.) London bookseller who published Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809); he had a shop at 132 Strand from 1810-32.

Hewson Clarke (1787-1845 fl.) The Cambridge-educated son of a barber, the editor of The Scourge (1811-12) and contributor to The Satirist (1807-14) was an early mocker of Lord Byron; later in life he published a continuation of Hume's History of England, 2 vols (1832).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) English poet and philosopher who projected Lyrical Ballads (1798) with William Wordsworth; author of Biographia Literaria (1817), On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and other works.

Abbé Charles Cotin (1604-1681) Academician and court poet attacked by Boileau in his Satires and Molière in Les Femmes savantes.

William Cowper (1731-1800) English poet, author of Olney Hymns (1779), John Gilpin (1782), and The Task (1785); Cowper's delicate mental health attracted as much sympathy from romantic readers as his letters, edited by William Hayley, did admiration.

George Crabbe (1754-1832) English poet renowned for his couplet verse and gloomy depictions of country persons and places; author of the The Village (1783), The Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), and Tales of the Hall (1819).

Charlotte Dacre [née King] [Rosa Matilda] (1782 c.-1825) English poetess, daughter of the radical writer John King; she published in the Morning Post and Morning Herald under the name “Rosa Matilda.” In 1815 she married Nicholas Byrne, owner and editor of the Morning Post.

Robert Charles Dallas (1754-1824) English poet, novelist, and translator who corresponded with Byron. His sister Charlotte Henrietta Dallas (d. 1793) married Captain George Anson Byron (1758-1793); their son George Anson Byron (1789-1868) inherited Byron's title in 1824.

Sir Hew Whitefoord Dalrymple, first baronet (1750-1830) British general who commanded the Gibraltar garrison (1806-08) and signed the unpopular Convention of Cintra; he was created baronet 1815.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) Florentine poet, the author of the Divine Comedy and other works.

Scrope Berdmore Davies (1782-1852) Byron met his bosom friend while at Cambridge. Davies, a professional gambler, lent Byron funds to pay for his travels in Greece and Byron acted as second in Davies' duels.

Wentworth Dillon, fourth earl of Roscommon (1637-1685) English poet; author of the acclaimed Essay on Translated Verse (1684) in imitation of Horace's Ars Poetica.

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.

Joseph Drury (1751-1834) Byron's instructor at Harrow School, where he was headmaster from 1784 to 1805.

Edward Dwyer (1813 fl.) A college (?) friend of Byron, Hodgson, and Henry Drury. An Edward Dwyer (d. 1838) was secretary to the Catholic Association and an ally of Daniel O'Connell

Jane Fane, countess of Westmorland [née Saunders] (d. 1857) Daughter of Richard Huck Saunders; she married John Fane, tenth Earl of Westmorland in 1800.

John Fitzgibbon, second earl of Clare (1792-1851) A Harrow friend of Byron's, son of the Lord Chamberlain of Ireland; he once fought a duel with Henry Grattan's son in response to an aspersion on his father. Lord Clare was Governor of Bombay between 1830 and 1834.

William Fletcher (1831 fl.) Byron's valet, the son of a Newstead tenant; he continued in service to the end of the poet's life, after which he was pensioned by the family. He married Anne Rood, formerly maid to Augusta Leigh, and was living in London in 1831.

Henry Richard Fox, third baron Holland (1773-1840) Whig politician and literary patron; Holland House was for many years the meeting place for reform-minded politicians and writers. He also published translations from the Spanish and Italian; Memoirs of the Whig Party was published in 1852.

Frederick Augustus, Duke of York (1763-1827) He was commander-in-chief of the Army, 1798-1809, until his removal on account of the scandal involving his mistress Mary Anne Clarke.

Sir William Gell (1777-1836) English traveler and archaeologist; author of the Topography of Troy (1804), Geography and Antiquities of Ithaca (1807), the Itinerary of Greece, with a Commentary on Pausanias (1810), Itinerary of the Morea (1817), Narrative of a Journey in the Morea (1823), and Itinerary of Greece (1827).

William Gifford (1756-1826) Poet, scholar, and editor who began as a shoemaker's apprentice; after Oxford he published The Baviad (1794), The Maeviad (1795), and The Satires of Juvenal translated (1802) before becoming the founding editor of the Quarterly Review (1809-24).

Charles Grey, second earl Grey (1764-1845) Whig statesman and lover of the Duchess of Devonshire; the second son of the first earl (d. 1807), he was prime minister (1831-34).

Francis Grose (1731-1791) English antiquary, Fellow of the Royal Society, author of Antiquities of England and Wales (1772-1787), Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), and Antiquities of Scotland (1789-91).

John Hanson (1755-1841) Byron's solicitor and business agent.

William Harcourt, third earl Harcourt (1743-1830) He fought in both American wars, commanded cavalry in Flanders 1793-94, succeeded his brother in the earldom in 1809, and was field marshall at the Coronation of George IV.

William Harness (1790-1869) A Harrow friend and early correspondent of Byron. He later answered the poet in The Wrath of Cain (1822) and published an edition of Shakespeare (1825) and other literary projects. Harness was a longtime friend of Mary Russell Mitford.

James Harris (1709-1780) English philosopher and man of letters, friend of Fielding, John Upton, and the Wartons; author of Hermes, or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (1751).

John Hatchard (1768-1849) Prominent London bookseller whose evangelical connections included Hannah More, William Wilberforce, and the Christian Observer which he published from 1802.

John Henley [Orator Henley] (1692-1756) Dissenting minister, editor of The Hyp Doctor (1730-42), whose pretensions to reviving the art of oratory were mocked by Pope and Hogarth.

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).

Sir Henry Holland, first baronet (1788-1873) English physician and frequenter of Holland House, the author of Travels in the Ionian Isles, Albania, Thessaly, Macedonia etc. during 1812 and 1813 (1814) and Recollections of Past Life (1872). His second wife, Saba, was the daughter of Sydney Smith.

Charles Hoyle (1772 c.-1848) College Librarian at Trinity College, Cambridge during Byron's tenure there; author of Exodus; an Epic Poem (1807) and other works.

Frederick Howard, fifth earl of Carlisle (1748-1825) The Earl of Carlisle was appointed Lord Byron's guardian in 1799; they did not get along. He published a volume of Poems (1773) that included a translation from Dante.

Hon. Frederick Howard (1785-1815) The son of Lord Carlisle; he was a major in the 10th Hussars killed the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815.

David Hume (1711-1776) Scottish philosopher and historian; author of Essays Moral and Political (1741-42), Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) and History of Great Britain (1754-62).

Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey (1773-1850) Scottish barrister, Whig MP, and co-founder and editor of the Edinburgh Review (1802-29). As a reviewer he was the implacable foe of the Lake School of poetry.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English man of letters, among many other works he edited A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and Shakespeare (1765), and wrote Lives of the Poets (1779-81).

Don José de Cordóva (1809 fl.) Admiral of the Spanish fleet defeated by Sir John Jervis at the Battle of Cape St Vincent (1797); Byron supposedly met him in Spain in 1809, though Luis de Córdova died in 1796.

Captain Kidd (1809 fl.) The Captain of the Lisbon packet, Princess Elizabeth, which Byron took to Portugal.

George Lamb (1784-1834) Lawyer and Whig MP for Westminster (1819) and Dungarvan (1822-34), he was the son of Elizabeth Lamb Viscountess Melbourne, possibly by the Prince of Wales. He was author of a gothic drama, Whistle for It (1807) and served with Byron on the management-committee of Drury Lane. His sister-in-law was Lady Caroline Lamb.

William Martin Leake (1777-1860) The British envoy to Ali Pasha in Albania; author of, among other titles, Researches in Greece (1814), Travels in the Morea, 3 vols (1830) and Travels in Northern Greece, 4 vols (1835).

Hon. Augusta Mary Leigh [née Byron] (1783-1851) Byron's half-sister; the daughter of Amelia Darcy, Baroness Conyers, she married Lieutenant-Colonel George Leigh on 17 August 1807.

Charles Skinner Matthews (1785-1811) The libertine friend of Byron and Hobhouse at Trinity College, Cambridge; he was drowned in the Cam.

Joe Murray (d. 1820) Byron's elderly steward at Newstead Abbey who had served under the previous lord Byron.

John Murray II (1778-1843) The second John Murray began the Quarterly Review in 1809 and published works by Scott, Byron, Austen, Crabbe, and other literary notables.

Mary Ann Musters [née Chaworth] (1785-1832) The grand-niece of the Chaworth who was killed by “Wicked Jack” Byron; she was the object of Byron's affections before and after she married John Musters in 1805.

Sir William Francis Patrick Napier (1785-1860) British general; served in Spain and Portugal (1808-13); author of History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France, from the Year 1807 to the Year 1814, 6 vols (1828).

Emperor Napoleon I (1769-1821) Military leader, First Consul (1799), and Emperor of the French (1804), after his abdication he was exiled to Elba (1814); after his defeat at Waterloo he was exiled to St. Helena (1815).

Sir Hildebrand Oakes, first baronet (1754-1822) Commander of the Malta garrison from March 1808 to October 1813; Byron was visiting him in September 1809 when he issued the challenge to his aide-de-camp, Cary. Thomas Wildman, who purchased Newstead Abbey in 1818, was his brother-in-law.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) English poet and satirist; author of The Rape of the Lock (1714) and The Dunciad (1728).

Arthur Powell (1809 fl.) He killed Byron's friend Captain Charles John Cary, ninth Viscount Falkland, in a duel on Golder's Green.

Samuel Jackson Pratt [Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814) English miscellaneous writer who abandoned a clerical career to become an actor and voluminous writer of sentimental literature; regarded as a charlatan by many who knew him, Pratt acquired a degree of respectability in his latter years. He patronized the poetical shoemaker-poet Joseph Blacket.

Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) English poet, banker, and aesthete, author of the ever-popular Pleasures of Memory (1792), Columbus (1810), Jaqueline (1814), and Italy (1822-28).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) Swiss-born man of letters; author of, among others, Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloïse (1761), Émile (1762) and Les Confessions (1782).

Robert Rushton (1790 c.-1827 fl.) Byron's English servant.

Mr. Rushton (1760 c.-1809 fl.) The father of Byron's servant, Robert Rushton.

Carlo, marchese di Salvo (1787-1860) Sicilian author of Travels in the year 1806 ... containing the Particulars of the Liberation of Mrs. Spencer Smith (1807). Sir Walter Scott thought him a bore when he visited Abbotsford.

George Sanders (1774-1846) Scottish portrait painter, educated in Edinburgh; he made several portraits of Lord Byron.

John Scott, first earl of Eldon (1751-1838) Lord chancellor (1801-27); he was legal counsel to the Prince of Wales and an active opponent of the Reform Bill.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) Scottish poet, novelist, antiquary, biographer, editor, and sheriff.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) The Bard of Avon.

Constance Spencer Smith [née Herbert] (1785-1829) Daughter of Baron Herbert, Austrian ambassador to Constantinople, and wife of the diplomat John Spencer Smith, with whom Byron had an affair in Malta. She died in Vienna.

William Smyth (1765-1849) The son of a Liverpool banker, he was educated at Eton and Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was Professor of Modern History at Cambridge (1807). He published of English Lyricks (1797) and Lectures on Modern History (1840).

Nicholas Strané [Νικολος Στραν] (1813 fl.) The English consul at Patras when Byron visited in 1809.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Dean of St Patrick's, Scriblerian satirist, and author of Battle of the Books with Tale of a Tub (1704), Drapier Letters (1724), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729).

Dervish Tahiri (1815 fl.) Byron's servant in his 1809 travels in Greece and Albania.

Veli Pasha (d. 1822) Son of Ali Pasha; he was Vizier of the Morea before he was executed during his father's struggle with the Turks.

Randle Wilbraham (1773-1861) The son of Richard Wilbraham, MP, of Rode Hall, Cheshire; in his youth he was a traveler in Persia.

Thomas Wildman (1787-1859) Schoolfellow of Byron's at Harrow, purchaser and preserver of Newstead Abbey; he served in the Peninsular War under Sir John Moore and was equerry to the Duke of Sussex.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) With Coleridge, author of Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.

Edward Young (1683-1765) English poet, author of The Complaint; or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742-44), a poem that fostered a taste for gothic literature.

The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine. (1798-1821). Edited by John Gifford as a continuation of the brilliant Anti-Jacobin Magazine (1797-98) with no plates, less poetry, and more book reviews.

The Gentleman's Magazine. (1731-1905). A monthly literary miscellany founded by Edward Cave; edited by John Nichols 1778-1826, and John Bowyer Nichols 1826-1833.

Morning Post. (1772-1937). A large-circulation London daily that published verse by many of the prominent poets of the romantic era. John Taylor (1750–1826), Daniel Stuart (1766-1846), and Nicholas Byrne (d. 1833) were among its editors.

The Satirist, or, Monthly Meteor. (1807-1814). Originally issued with colored plates, the Tory-inspired Satirist was edited by George Manners (1778–1853) from October 1807 to June 1812, and William Jerdan (1782–1869) from July 1812 to August 1814; it was continued as Tripod, or, New Satirist (July-Aug. 1814). The humor was coarse, and Byron the target in a series of pieces by Hewson Clarke (1787-1845 fl.).

James Boswell (1740-1795) The Life of Samuel Johnson. 2 vols (London: 1791). One of the most widely-read books of the romantic era, and a model for Moore's Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830) and Lockhart's Life of Scott (1837-38).

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) Beppo a Venetian Story. (London: Murray, 1818). A comic Venetian story in the ottava rima Byron adopted after reading Frere's Whistlecraft poems.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: a Romaunt. (London: John Murray, 1812-1818). A burlesque topographical poem in Spenserian stanzas; Cantos I-II were published in 1812, III in 1816, and IV in 1818.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) Don Juan. (London: 1819-1824). A burlesque poem in ottava rima published in installments: Cantos I and II published in 1819, III, IV and V in 1821, VI, VII, and VIII in 1823, IX, X, and XI in 1823, XII, XIII, and XIV in 1823, and XV and XVI in 1824.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. (London: Cawthorn, 1809). Byron's revisions ended with the third edition in 1810; he later attempted to suppress his pointed satire on the literary establishment.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “The Farewell to a Lady” in Imitations and Translations from the ancient and modern Classics. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809). One of nine poems by Byron in this miscellany volume by John Cam Hobhouse.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Lines inscribed upon a Cup formed from a Skull” in Childe Harold. (London: Murray, 1812-1818). Composed 1808; these verses were added in the seventh edition.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) Memoir. (1824: destroyed). The autobiographical memoranda begun in 1818 and given to Thomas Moore in 1819; after Byron's death it was suppressed with the encouragement of John Cam Hobhouse and John Murray.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Stanzas composed October 11th 1809, during the night, in a thunder-storm” in Childe Harold. (London: Murray, 1812-1818). These verses were added in the seventh edition.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Stanzas to * * * On Leaving England” in Imitations and Translations from the ancient and modern Classics. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809). Addressed to “Mrs. Musters”; one of nine poems by Byron in this miscellany volume published by John Cam Hobhouse.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Well! Thou Art Happy” in Imitations and Translations from the ancient and modern Classics. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809). One of nine poems by Byron in this miscellany volume by John Cam Hobhouse.

Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) Gertrude of Wyoming; a Pennsylvanian Tale. And other Poems. (London: Longman, 1809). If Campbell's long-awaited successor to the Pleasures of Hope initially proved something of a disappointment it had a lasting influence on descriptive poems in Spenserian stanzas.

Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) Pleasures of Hope, with other Poems. (Edinburgh: Mundell, 1799). One of the most widely admired and frequently reprinted poems of the nineteenth century; with Samuel Rogers' Pleasures of Memory (1792) it propelled the busy “Poems of the Pleasures” genre.

William Cowper (1731-1800) The History of John Gilpin, as related by the late Mr. Henderson. Shewing how he went farther than he intended, and came home safe at last. (London: W. Lane, 1785). The comic progress of London linen-draper on horseback.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) The Divine Comedy. (1320 c.). In the romantic era most readers encountered Dante in the English translation by Henry Francis Cary (1805-1814).

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) Convivio. (1304-07). A fragment of a prose treatise in Italian, also known as the Convito ("Banquet"), first published in 1490, in which Dante offers an exposition of his works.

Henry Fielding (1707-1754) Tom Thumb. A Tragedy. (London: J. Roberts, 1730). A satire on the Walpole administration.

John Cam Hobhouse, baron Broughton (1786-1869) Imitations and Translations from the ancient and modern Classics, together with Original Poems never before published. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809). The volume includes nine early poems by Byron signed “L. B.”

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) The Dunciad. (London: A. Dodd, 1728). Pope's mock-heroic satire on the abuse of literature unfolded over time, appearing as The Dunciad: an Heroic Poem in Three Books (1728), The Dunciad Variorum (1729), The New Dunciad (1742), and The Dunciad in Four Books (1743). The original hero, Lewis Theobald, was replaced by Colley Cibber in 1743.

Ann Radcliffe [née Ward] (1764-1823) The Mysteries of Udolpho, a Romance; interspersed with some Pieces of Poetry. 4 vols (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794). The most successful of the gothic romances of the 1790s, notable for its evocative landscapes.

Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) “Jacqueline, a Tale” in Lara, a Tale. Jacqueline, a Tale. (London: Murray, 1814). First printed with “Lara” by Lord Byron.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) The Lay of the Last Minstrel: a Poem. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805). The first of Scott's metrical romances, the Lay recounts the love of Margaret of Branksome for Henry of Cranstoun during a sixteenth-century border raid.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) Marmion; a Tale of Flodden Field. (Edinburgh: Constable, 1808). A narrative poem set in the sixteenth century; the six cantos are introduced by epistles addressed to William Stewart Rose, James Marriot, William Erskine, James Skene, George Ellis, and Richard Heber.

Robert Southey (1774-1843) The Curse of Kehama. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1810). A Hindoo mythological tale in twenty-four books of irregular verse.

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INFORMATION FROM TEI HEADER

Source Description:

Author: Moore, Thomas, 1779-1852

Title:  Letters and Journals of Lord Byron 2 Vols (London: John Murray, 1830).

Electronic Edition:

Series: Lord Byron and his Times: http://lordbyron.org

Encoding Description: Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.   Obvious and unambiguous compositors’ errors have been silently corrected.

Markup and editing by:  David Hill Radcliffe

Completed September 2008

Publication Statement:

Publisher: Center for Applied Technologies in the Humanities, Virginia Tech

Availability: Published under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

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