Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
Lord Byron to John Murray, 25 January 1819
“Venice, January 25th, 1819.
“You will do me the favour to print privately (for private
distribution) fifty copies of ‘Don
Juan.’ The list of the men to whom I wish it to be presented, I will
send hereafter. The other two poems had best be added to the collective edition: I do
not approve of their being published separately. Print
Don Juan
entire, omitting, of course, ![]()
| 202 | NOTICES OF THE | A. D. 1819. |
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the
lines on Castlereagh, as I am not on the spot to
meet him. I have a Second Canto ready, which will be sent by and by. By this post, I
have written to Mr. Hobhouse, addressed to your
care.
“Yours, &c.
“P.S. I have acquiesced in the request and representation;
and having done so, it is idle to detail my arguments in favour of my own self-love
and ‘Poeshie;’ but I protest. If the poem has
poetry, it would stand; if not, fall; the rest is ‘leather and
prunello,’ and has never yet affected any human production ‘pro or
con.’ Dulness is the only annihilator in such cases. As to the cant of the day,
I despise it, as I have ever done all its other finical fashions, which become you as
paint became the ancient Britons. If you admit this prudery, you must omit half
Ariosto, La
Fontaine, Shakspeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, all the Charles Second writers; in short,
something of most who have written before Pope
and are worth reading, and much of Pope himself, Read him—most of you don’t—but do—and I will forgive you; though the inevitable consequence
would be that you would burn all I have ever written, and all your other wretched
Claudians of the day (except Scott and Crabbe)
into the bargain. I wrong Claudian, who was a poet, by naming him with such fellows; hut he
was the ‘ultimus Romanorum,’ the tail of the
comet, and these persons are the tail of an old gown cut into a waistcoat for
Jackey; but being both tails, I have
compared the one with the other, though very unlike, like all similes. I write in a
passion and a sirocco, and I was up till six this morning at the Carnival: but I protest, as I did in my former letter.”
Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533)
Italian poet, author of the epic romance
Orlando Furioso
(1532).
Francis Beaumont (1585-1616)
English playwright, often in collaboration with John Fletcher; author of
The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607).
Claudian (397 fl.)
Late Roman poet, author of
The Rape of Proserpine.
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).
John Fletcher (1579-1625)
English playwright, author of
The Faithful Shepherdess (1610) and
of some fifteen plays in collaboration with Francis Beaumont.
John Ford (1586-1639 c.)
Jacobean playwright who collaborated with Thomas Dekker and others; the author of
'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633). His works were edited by William
Gifford.
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).
Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695)
French poet whose
Fables were first translated into English in
1734.
Philip Massinger (1583-1649)
Jacobean playwright; author of
A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625);
his works were edited by William Gifford (1805, 1813).
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).
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.
