Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
Lord Byron to Lord Holland, 26 September 1812
“You will think there is no end to my villanous emendations.
The fifth and sixth lines I think to alter thus:
“Ye who beheld—oh sight admired and mourn’d, Whose radiance mock’d the ruin it adorn’d; |
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because ‘night’ is repeated the next line but one; and, as it now
stands, the conclusion of the paragraph, ‘worthy him (Shakspeare) and you,’ appears to apply the
‘you’ to those only who were out of bed and in
Covent-garden market on the night of conflagration, instead of the audience or the
discerning public at large, all of whom are intended to be comprised in that
comprehensive and, I hope, comprehensible pronoun.
“By the by, one of my corrections in the fair copy sent
yesterday has dived into the bathos some sixty fathom—
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Ceasing to live is a much more serious concern, and ought not to be first;
therefore I will let the old couplet stand, with its half rhymes ‘sought’
and ‘wrote*.’ Second thoughts in every thing are best, but, in rhyme, third
and fourth don’t come amiss. I am very anxious on this business, and I do hope
that the very trouble I occasion you will plead its own
* “Such are the names that here your plaudits sought, When Garrick acted, and when
Brinsley wrote.” |
![]() At present, the couplet stands thus:— “Dear are the days that made our annals bright, Ere Garrick fled, or Brinsley
ceased to write.” |
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| A. D. 1812. | LIFE OF LORD BYRON. | 367 |
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excuse, and that it will tend to show my endeavour to make
the most of the time allotted. I wish I had known it months ago, for in that case I had
not left one line standing on another. I always scrawl in this way, and smooth as much
as I can, but never sufficiently; and, latterly, I can weave a nine-line stanza faster
than a couplet, for which measure I have not the cunning. When I began ‘Childe Harold,’ I had never tried
Spenser’s measure, and now I cannot scribble in any other.
“After all. my dear lord, if you can get a decent Address
elsewhere, don’t hesitate to put this aside. Why did you not trust your own Muse?
I am very sure she would have been triumphant, and saved the Committee their
trouble—‘’tis a joyful one’ to me, but I fear I shall not satisfy even
myself. After the account you sent me, ’tis no compliment to say, you would have
beaten your candidates; but I mean that, in that case, there
would have been no occasion for their being beaten at all.
“There are but two decent prologues in our tongue—Pope’s to Cato—Johnson’s to Drury-lane. These, with the epilogue to the
‘Distrest Mother,’
and, I think, one of Goldsmith’s, and a
prologue of old Colman’s to Beaumont and Fletcher’s
Philaster, are the best things of the kind we have.
“P.S. I am diluted to the throat with medicine for the
stone; and Boisragon wants me to try a warm climate for the
winter—but I won’t.”
George Colman the elder (1732-1794)
English playwright; schoolmate of William Cowper; manager of Covent Garden Theater
(1767-1774); author of
The Clandestine Marriage (1766).
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.
David Garrick (1717-1779)
English actor, friend of Samuel Johnson, and manager of Drury Lane Theater.
Oliver Goldsmith (1728 c.-1774)
Irish miscellaneous writer; his works include
The Vicar of
Wakefield (1766),
The Deserted Village (1770), and
She Stoops to Conquer (1773).
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
English poet and satirist; author of
The Rape of the Lock (1714)
and
The Dunciad (1728).
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
Anglo-Irish playwright, author of
The School for Scandal (1777),
Whig MP and ally of Charles James Fox (1780-1812).
