Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
Lord Byron to John Murray, 12 April 1818
“This letter will be delivered by Signor Gioe. Bata. Missiaglia, proprietor of the Apollo
library, and the principal publisher and bookseller now in Venice. He sets out for
London with a view to business and correspondence with the English booksellers: and it
is in the hope that it may be for your mutual advantage that I furnish him with this
letter of introduction to you. If you can be of use to him, either by recommendation to
others, or by any personal attention on your own part, you will oblige him, and gratify
me. You may also perhaps both be able to derive advantage, or establish some mode of
literary communication, pleasing to the public, and beneficial to one another.
“At any rate, be civil to him for my sake, as well as for
the honour and glory of publishers and authors now and to come for ever-more.
“With him I also consign a great number of MS. letters
written in English, French, and Italian, by various English established in Italy during
the last century:—the names of the writers, Lord
Hervey, Lady M. W. Montague (hers
are but few—some billets-doux in French to Algarotti, and one letter in English, Italian, and all sorts of jargon,
to the same), Gray, the poet (one letter),
Mason (two or three), Garrick, Lord
Chatham, David Hume, and many of
lesser note,—all addressed to Count Algarotti. Out of these, I
think, with discretion, an amusing miscellaneous volume of letters might be extracted,
provided some good editor were disposed to undertake the selection, and preface, and a
few notes, &c.
“The proprietor of these is a friend of mine, Dr. Aglietti,—a great name in
Italy,—and if you are disposed to publish, it will be for his
benefit, and it is to and for him that you will name a price, if you take upon
you the work. I would edite it myself, but
am too far off, and too lazy to undertake it; but I wish that it could be done. The
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| A. D. 1818. | LIFE OF LORD BYRON. | 173 |
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of Lord
Hervey, in Mr. Rose’s opinion
and mine, are good; and the short French love letters certainly are Lady M. W.
Montague’s—the French not good, but the
sentiments beautiful. Gray’s letter good;
and Mason’s tolerable. The whole
correspondence must be well weeded; but this being done, a small
and pretty popular volume might be made of it.—There are many ministers’
letters—Gray, the ambassador at Naples, Horace Mann, and others of the same kind of animal.
“I thought of a preface, defending Lord Hervey against Pope’s
attack, but Pope—quoad Pope, the poet—against all the world,
in the unjustifiable attempts begun by Warton,
and carried on at this day by the new school of critics and scribblers, who think
themselves poets because they do not write like Pope. I have no
patience with such cursed humbug and bad taste; your whole generation are not worth a
Canto of the Rape of the Lock, or the
Essay on Man, or the Dunciad, or ‘any thing that is
his.’—But it is three in the matin, and I must go to bed.
“Yours alway, &c.”
Francesco Aglietti (1757-1836)
Venetian physician and man of letters; he edited the
Opere of
Algarotti (Venice, 1791-94).
Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764)
Italian poet and man of letters; author of
Neutonianismo per le
dame (1737).
David Garrick (1717-1779)
English actor, friend of Samuel Johnson, and manager of Drury Lane Theater.
Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
English poet, author of “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” “Elegy written in a
Country Churchyard,” and “The Bard”; he was professor of history at Cambridge
(1768).
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).
Sir Horace Mann (1706-1786)
The friend and correspondent of Horace Walpole; he was the British envoy at Florence
1740-86.
William Mason (1725-1797)
English poet, the friend and biographer of Thomas Gray; author of
Odes (1756),
Elfrida (1752), and
The
English Garden (4 books, 1772-81).
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu [née Pierrepont] (1689-1762)
English poet and epistolary writer, daughter of the first duke of Kingston; she quarreled
with Alexander Pope and after living in Constantinople (1716-18) introduced inoculation to
Britain.
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.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
English poet and satirist; author of
The Rape of the Lock (1714)
and
The Dunciad (1728).
William Stewart Rose (1775-1843)
Second son of George Rose, treasurer of the navy (1744-1818); he introduced Byron to
Frere's
Whistlecraft poems and translated Casti's
Animale parlante (1819).
Joseph Warton (1722-1800)
English poet and literary critic; headmaster of Winchester School (1766-1800); author of
An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756, 1782).
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.
