Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
Lord Byron to John Murray, 5 October 1816
* * * * * *
“Save me a copy of ‘Buck’s Richard
III.’ republished by Longman; but
do not send out more books, I have too many.
“The ‘Monody’ is in too many paragraphs, which makes it unintelligible to me;
if any one else understands it in the present form, they are wiser; however, as it
cannot be rectified till my return, and has been already published, even publish it on
in the collection—it will fill up the place of the omitted epistle.
“Strike out ‘by request of a friend,’
which is sad trash, and must have been done to make it ridiculous.
“Be careful in the printing the stanzas beginning,
‘Though the day of my destiny’s, &c’ |
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which I think well of as a composition.
“‘The
Antiquary’ is not the best of the three, but much above all the last
twenty years, saving its elder brothers. Holcroft’s Memoirs are valuable as showing strength of endurance in the man, which is
worth more than all the talent in the world.
“And so you have been publishing ‘Margaret of Anjou’ and an Assyrian tale, and refusing W. W.’s Waterloo, and the ‘Hue and
Cry.’ I know not which most to admire, your rejections or acceptances. I
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| A. D. 1816. | LIFE OF LORD BYRON. | 43 |
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believe that prose is, after all, the most reputable,
for certes, if one could foresee—but I won’t go on—that is, with this sentence;
but poetry is, I fear, incurable. God help me! if I proceed in this scribbling, I shall
have frittered away my mind before I am thirty, but it is at times a real relief to me.
For the present—good evening.”
George Buck (1560-1622)
English poet and master of the revels; he left a manuscript history of Richard
III.
Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809)
English playwright and novelist; a friend of William Godwin indicted for treason in 1794;
author of
The Road to Ruin (1792). His
Memoirs (1816) were completed by William Hazlitt.
Thomas Norton Longman (1771-1842)
A leading London publisher whose authors included Southey, Wordsworth, Scott, and
Moore.
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.
James Wedderburn Webster (1789-1840)
Byron's friend who visited him in Athens (1810) and to whom Byron lent money he could ill
afford. Webster published
Waterloo, and other Poems (1816).
George Buck (1560-1622)
The History of the Life and Reigne of Richard the Third. Composed in five
Bookes. (London: 1646). Left in ms by George Buck, then altered, printed, and claimed by the author's
great-nephew, also George Buck. A reprinted was announced in 1815, though it does not seem
to have been published.
