“We are here going to fight a little next month, if the Huns don’t cross the Po, and probably if they do. I can’t say more now. If any thing happens, you have matter for a posthumous work in MS.; so pray be civil. Depend upon it, there will be savage work, if once they begin here. The French courage proceeds from vanity, the German from phlegm, the Turkish from fanaticism and opium, the Spanish from pride,

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the English from coolness, the Dutch from obstinacy, the Russian from insensibility, but the Italian from anger; so you’ll see that they will spare nothing.”

“However, I suspect I know a thing or two of Italy—more than Lady Morgan has picked up in her posting. What do Englishmen know of Italians beyond their museums and saloons—and some hack * *, en passant? Now, I have lived in the heart of their houses, in parts of Italy freshest and least influenced by strangers,—have seen and become (pars magna fui) a portion of their hopes, and fears, and passions, and am almost inoculated into a family. This is to see men and things as they are.

* I had congratulated him upon arriving at what Dante calls the “mezzo cammin” of life, the age of thirty-three.

† I had mistaken the concluding words of his letter of the 9th of June.

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“What think you of the Queen? I hear Mr. Hoby says, ‘that it makes him weep to see her, she reminds him so much of Jane Shore.’

“Mr. Hoby the bootmaker’s heart is quite sore, For seeing the Queen makes him think of Jane Shore; And, in fact, * * * * *

Pray excuse this ribaldry. What is your Poem about? Write and tell me all about it and you.

“P.S. Did you write the lively quiz on Peter Bell? It has wit enough to be yours, and almost too much to be any body else’s now going. It was in Galignani the other day or week.”

“You speak of Lady * *’s illness: she is not of those who die:—the amiable only do; and those whose death would do good live. Whenever she is pleased to return, it may be presumed she will take her ‘divining rod’ along with her: it may be of use to her at home, as well as to the ‘rich man’ of the Evangelists.

“My last letters will have taught you to expect an explosion here: it was primed and loaded, but they hesitated to fire the train. One of the cities shirked from the league. I cannot write more at large for a thousand reasons. Our ‘puir hill folk’ offered to strike, and raise the first banner, but Bologna paused; and now ’tis autumn, and the season half over. ‘O Jerusalem! Jerusalem!’ The Huns are on the Po; but if once they pass it on their way to Naples, all Italy will be behind them. The dogs—the wolves—may they perish like the host of Sennacherib!

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If you want to publish the Prophecy of Dante, you never will have a better time.”

“Last post I sent you a note fierce as Faliero himself*, in answer to a trashy tourist, who pretends that he could have been introduced to me. Let me have a proof of it, that I may cut its lava into some shape.

“What Gifford says is very consolatory (of the First Act). English, sterling genuine English, is a desideratum amongst you, and I am glad that I have got so much left; though Heaven knows how I retain it: I hear none but from my valet, and his is Nottinghamshire; and I see none but in your new publications, and theirs is no language at all, but jargon. Even your * * * * is terribly stilted and affected, with ‘very, very’ so soft and pamby.

“Oh! if ever I do come amongst you again, I will give you such a ‘Baviad and Mæviad!’ not as good as the old, but even better merited. There never was such a set as your ragamuffins (I mean not yours only, but every body’s). What with the Cockneys, and the Lakers, and the followers of Scott, and Moore, and Byron, you are in the very uttermost decline and degradation of literature. I can’t think of it without all the remorse of a murderer. I wish that Johnson were alive again to crush them!”

* The angry note against English travellers appended to this tragedy, in consequence of an assertion made by some recent tourist that he (or, as it afterwards turned out, she) “had repeatedly declined an introduction to Lord Byron while in Italy.”

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“I wish you would inform Perry that his stupid paragraph is the cause of all my newspapers being stopped in Paris. The fools believe me in your infernal country, and have not sent on their gazettes, so that I know nothing of your beastly trial of the Queen.

“I cannot avail myself of Mr. Gifford’s remarks, because I have received none, except on the first act.

“So you are at your old tricks again. This is the second packet I have received unaccompanied by a single line of good, bad, or indifferent. It is strange that you have never forwarded any further observations of Gifford’s. How am I to alter or amend, if I hear no further? or does this silence mean that it is well enough as it is, or too bad to be repaired? if the last, why do you not say so at once, instead of playing pretty, while you know that soon or late you must out with the truth.

P.S. My sister tells me that you sent to her to inquire where I was, believing in my arrival, ‘driving a curricle,’ &c. &c. into Palace-yard. Do you think me a coxcomb or a madman, to be capable of such an exhibition? My sister knew me better, and told you, that could not

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be me. You might as well have thought me entering on ‘a pale horse,’ like Death in the Revelations.”

“Get from Mr. Hobhouse, and send me a proof (with the Latin) of my Hints from Horace: it has now the nonum prematur in annum complete for its production, being written at Athens in 1811. I have a notion that, with some omissions of names and passages, it will do; and I could put my late observations for Pope amongst the notes, with the date of 1820, and so on. As far as versification goes, it is good; and on looking back to what I wrote about that period, I am astonished to see how little I have trained on. I wrote better then than now; but that comes of my having fallen into the atrocious bad taste of the times. If I can trim it for present publication, what with the other things you have of mine, you will have a volume or two of variety at least, for there will be all measures, styles, and topics, whether good or no. I am anxious to hear what Gifford thinks of the tragedy: pray let me know. I really do not know what to think myself.

“If the Germans pass the Po, they will be treated to a mass out of the Cardinal de Retz’s Breviary. * *’s a fool, and could not understand this: Frere will. It is as pretty a conceit as you would wish to see on a summer’s day.

“Nobody here believes a word of the evidence against the Queen. The very mob cry shame against their countrymen, and say, that for half the money spent upon the trial, any testimony whatever may be brought out of Italy. This you may rely upon as fact. I told you as much before. As to what travellers report, what are travellers? Now I have lived among the Italians—not Florenced, and Romed, and galleried, and conversationed it for a few months, and then home again; but been of their families, and friendships, and feuds, and loves, and councils, and correspondence, in a part of Italy least known to foreigners,—and have

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been amongst them of all classes, from the Conte to the Contadine; and you may be sure of what I say to you.

“I thought that I had told you long ago, that it never was intended nor written with any view to the stage. I have said so in the preface too. It is too long and too regular for your stage, the persons too few, and the unity too much observed. It is more like a play of Alfieri’s than of your stage (I say this humbly in speaking of that great man); but there is poetry, and it is equal to Manfred, though I know not what esteem is held of Manfred.

“I thought Anastasius excellent: did I not say so? Matthews’s Diary most excellent; it, and Forsyth, and parts of Hobhouse, are all we have of truth or sense upon Italy. The Letter to Julia very good indeed. I do not despise * * * * *; but if she knit blue-stockings instead of wearing them, it would be better. You are taken in by that false stilted trashy style, which is a mixture of all the styles of the day, which are all bombastic (I don’t except my own—no one has done more through negligence to corrupt the language); but it is neither English nor poetry. Time will show.

“I am sorry Gifford has made no further remarks beyond the first Act: does he think all the English equally sterling as he thought the first? You did right to send the proofs: I was a fool; but I do really detest the sight of proofs: it is an absurdity; but comes from laziness.

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“You can steal the two Juans into the world quietly, tagged to the others. The play as you will—the Dante too; but the Pulci I am proud of; it is superb; you have no such translation. It is the best thing I ever did in my life. I wrote the play from beginning to end, and not a single scene without interruption, and being obliged to break off in the middle; for I had my hands full, and my head, too, just then; so it can be no great shake—I mean the play; and the head too, if you like.

“I open my letter to say that on reading more of the four volumes on Italy, where the author says ‘declined an introduction,’ I perceive (horresco referens) it is written by a WOMAN!!! In that case you must suppress my note and answer, and all I have said about the book and the writer. I never dreamed of it until now, in my extreme wrath at that precious note. I can only say that I am sorry that a lady should say any thing of the kind. What I would have said to one of the other sex you know already. Her book too (as a she book is not a bad one; but she evidently don’t know the Italians, or rather don’t like them, and forgets the causes of their misery and profligacy (Matthews and Forsyth are your men for truth and tact), and has gone over Italy in company—always a bad plan: you must be alone with people to know them well. Ask her, who was the ‘descendant of Lady M. W. Montague,’ and by whom? by Algarotti?

“I suspect that in Marino Faliero, you and yours won’t like the politics, which are perilous to you in these times: but recollect that it is not a political play, and that I was obliged to put into the mouths of the characters the sentiments upon which they acted. I hate all things written like Pizarro, to represent France, England, and so forth. All I

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have done is meant to be purely Venetian, even to the very prophecy of its present state.

“Mitchell’s Aristophanes is excellent. Send me the rest of it.

“These fools will force me to write a book about Italy myself, to give them ‘the loud lie.’ They prate about assassination; what is it but the origin of duelling—and ‘a wild justice,’ as Lord Bacon calls it? It is the fount of the modern point of honour in what the laws can’t or won’t reach. Every man is liable to it more or less, according to circumstances or place. For instance, I am living here exposed to it daily, for I have happened to make a powerful and unprincipled man my enemy;—and I never sleep the worse for it, or ride in less solitary places, because precaution is useless, and one thinks of it as of a disease which may or may not strike. It is true that there are those here, who, if he did, would ‘live to think on ’t;’ but that would not awake my bones: I should be sorry if it would, were they once at rest.”

“You will have now received all the Acts, corrected, of the Marino Faliero. What you say of the ‘bet of 100 guineas’ made by some one who says that he saw me last week reminds me of what happened in 1810; you can easily ascertain the fact, and it is an odd one.

“In the latter end of 1811, I met one evening at the Alfred my old school and form-fellow (for we were within two of each other, he the higher, though both very near the top of our remove) Peel, the Irish secretary. He told me that, in 1810, he met me, as he thought, in St. James’s-street, but we passed without speaking. He mentioned this, and it was denied as impossible, I being then in Turkey. A day or two

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afterward, he pointed out to his brother a person on the opposite side of the way:—‘There,’ said he, is the man whom I took for Byron.’ His brother instantly answered, ‘Why, it is Byron, and no one else.’ But this is not all:—I was seen by somebody to write down my name amongst the inquirers after the king’s health, then attacked by insanity. Now, at this very period, as nearly as I could make out, I was ill of a strong fever at Patras, caught in the marshes near Olympia, from the malaria. If I had died there, this would have been a new ghost story for you. You can easily make out the accuracy of this from Peel himself, who told it in detail. I suppose you will be of the opinion of Lucretius, who (denies the immortality of the soul, but) asserts that from the ‘flying off of the surfaces of bodies, these surfaces or cases, like the coats of an onion, are sometimes seen entire when they are separated from it, so that the shapes and shadows of both the dead and living are frequently beheld.’

“I wish you would get Peel asked how far I am accurate in my recollection of what he told me; for I don’t like to say such things without authority.

“P.S. Last year (in June, 1819) I met at Count Mosti’s, at Ferrara, an Italian who asked me ‘if I knew Lord Byron?’ I told him no (no one knows himself, you know). ‘Then,’ says he, ‘I do; I met him at Naples the other day.’ I pulled out my card and asked him if that was the way he spelt his name: be answered, yes. I suspect that it was a blackguard navy surgeon, who attended a young travelling madam about, and passed himself for a lord at the post-houses. He was a vulgar dog—quite of the cock-pit order—and a precious representative I must have had of him, if it was even so; but I don’t know. He passed himself off as a gentleman, and squired about a Countess * *

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(of this place), then at Venice, an ugly battered woman, of bad morals even for Italy.”

“Foscolo’s letter is exactly the thing wanted; firstly, because he is a man of genius; and, next, because he is an Italian, and therefore the best judge of Italics. Besides,

‘He’s more an antique Roman than a Dane;’

that is, he is more of the ancient Greek than of the modern Italian. Though ‘somewhat,’ as Dugald Dalgetty says, ‘too wild and salvage’ (like ‘Ronald of the Mist’), ’tis a wonderful man, and my friends Hobhouse and Rose both swear by him; and they are good judges of men and of Italian humanity.

‘Here are in all two worthy voices gain’d:’

Gifford says it is good ‘sterling genuine English,’ and Foscolo says that the characters are right Venetian. Shakspeare and Otway had a million of advantages over me, besides the incalculable one of being dead from one to two centuries, and having been both born blackguards (which are such attractions to the gentle living reader); let me then preserve the only one which I could possibly have—that of having been at Venice, and entered more into the local spirit of it. I claim no more.

“I know what Foscolo means about Calendaro’s spitting at Bertram; that’s national—the objection, I mean. The Italians and French, with those ‘flags of abomination,’ their pocket handkerchiefs, spit there, and here, and every where else—in your face almost, and therefore object to it on the stage as too familiar. But we who spit nowhere—but in a man’s face when we grow savage—are not likely to feel this. Remember Massinger, and Kean’s Sir Giles Overreach—

‘Lord! thus I spit at thee and at thy counsel!’

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Besides, Calendaro does not spit in Bertram’s face; he spits at him, as I have seen the Mussulmans do upon the ground when they are in a rage. Again, he does not in fact despise Bertram, though he affects it,—as we all do, when angry with one we think our inferior. He is angry at not being allowed to die in his own way (although not afraid of death); and recollect that he suspected and hated Bertram from the first. Israel Bertuccio, on the other hand, is a cooler and more concentrated fellow: he acts upon principle and impulse; Calendaro upon impulse and example.

“I return you Foscolo’s letter, because it alludes also to his private affairs. I am sorry to see such a man in straits, because I know what they are, or what they were. I never met but three men who would have held out a finger to me: one was yourself, the other William Bankes, and the other a nobleman long ago dead: but of these the first was the only one who offered it while I really wanted it; the second from goodwill—but I was not in need of Bankes’s aid, and would not have accepted it if I had (though flove and esteem him);—and the third — — — — — — — — — — *.

“P.S. Foscolo’s Ricciardo was lent, with the leaves uncut, to some Italians, now in villeggiatura, so that I have had no opportunity of hearing their decision, or of reading it. They seized on it as Foscolo’s, and on account of the beauty of the paper and printing, directly. If I find it takes, I will reprint it here. The Italians think as highly of Foscolo

* The paragraph is left thus imperfect in the original.

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as they can of any man, divided and miserable as they are, and with neither leisure at present to read, nor head nor heart to judge of any thing but extracts from French newspapers and the Lugano Gazette.

“You need never favour me with any periodical publication, except the Edinburgh, Quarterly, and an occasional Blackwood; or now and then a Monthly Review: for the rest I do not feel curiosity enough to look beyond their covers.

“To be sure I took in the Editor of the British finely. He fell precisely into the glaring trap laid for him. It was inconceivable how he could be so absurd as to imagine us serious with him.

“Recollect, that if you put my name to ‘Don Juan’ in these canting days, any lawyer might oppose my guardian right of my daughter in chancery, on the plea of its containing the parody;—such are the perils of a foolish jest. I was not aware of this at the time, but you will find it correct, I believe; and you may be sure that the Noels would not let it slip. Now I prefer my child to a poem at any time, and so should you, as having half a dozen.

“If you turn over the earlier pages of the Huntingdon peerage story, you will see how common a name Ada was in the early Plantagenet days. I found it in my own pedigree in the reign of John and Henry, and gave it to my daughter. It was also the name of Charlemagne’s sister. It is in an early chapter of Genesis, as the name of the wife of Lamech; and I suppose Ada is the feminine of Adam. It is short, ancient, vocalic, and had been in my family; for which reason I gave it to my daughter.”

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By land and sea carriage a considerable quantity of books have arrived; and I am obliged and grateful but ‘medio de fonte leporum, surgit amari aliquid,’ &c. &c which, being interpreted, means,

I’m thankful for your books, dear Murray; But why not send Scott’s Monastery?

the only book in four living volumes I would give a baioccolo to see—’bating the rest of the same author, and an occasional Edinburgh and Quarterly, as brief chroniclers of the times. Instead of this, here are Johnny Keats’s * * poetry, and three novels, by God knows whom, except that there is Peg * * *’s name to one of them—a spinster whom I thought we had sent back to her spinning. Crayon is very good; Hogg’s Tales rough, but racy, and welcome.

“Books of travels are expensive, and I don’t want them, having travelled already; besides, they lie. Thank the author of ‘the Profligate’ for his (or her) present. Pray send me no more poetry but what is rare and decidedly good. There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables that I am ashamed to look at them. I say nothing against your parsons, your S * * s and your C * * s—it is all very fine—but pray dispense me from the pleasure. Instead of poetry, if you will favour me with a few soda-powders, I shall be delighted: but all prose (‘bating travels and novels not by Scott) is welcome, especially Scott’s Tales of My Landlord, and so on.

“In the notes to Marino Faliero, it may be as well to say that ‘Benintende’ was not really of the Ten, but merely Grand Chancellor, a separate office (although important); it was an arbitrary alteration of mine. The Doges too were all buried in St. Marks’s before Faliero. It is singular that when his predecessor, Andrea Dandolo, died, the Ten made a law that all the future Doges should be buried with their families, in their own churches,—one would think by a kind of presentiment. So that all that is said of his ancestral Doges, as buried at St. John’s and Paul’s, is altered

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from the fact, they being in St. Mark’s. Make a note of this, and put Editor as the subscription to it.

“I omitted Foscolo in my list of living Venetian worthies, in the notes, considering him as an Italian in general, and not a mere provincial like the rest; and as an Italian I have spoken of him in the preface to canto 4th of Childe Harold.

“I am in a very fierce humour at not having Scott’s Monastery. You are too liberal in quantity, and somewhat careless of the quality, of your missives. All the Quarterlies (four in number) I had had before from you, and two of the Edinburgh; but no matter; we shall have new ones by and by. No more Keats, I entreat:—flay him alive; if some of you don’t, I must skin him myself. There is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the manikin.

“I don’t feel inclined to care further about ‘Don Juan.’ What do you think a very pretty Italian lady said to me the other day? She had read it in the French, and paid me some compliments, with due drawbacks, upon it. I answered that what she said was true, but that I suspected it would live longer than Childe Harold.—‘Ah but’ (said she) ‘I would rather have the fame of Childe Harold for three years than an immorality of Don Juan!’ The truth is that it is too true, and the women hate many things which strip off the tinsel of sentiment; and they are right, as it would rob them of their weapons. I never knew a woman who did not hate De Grammont’s Memoirs for the same reason: even Lady * * used to abuse them.

“Rose’s work I never received. It was seized at Venice. Such is the liberality of the Huns, with their two hundred thousand men, that they dare not let such a volume as his circulate.”

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“The Abbot has just arrived; many thanks; as also for the Monastery—when you send it!!!

“The Abbot will have a more than ordinary interest for me, for an ancestor of mine by the mother’s side, Sir J. Gordon of Gight, the handsomest of his day, died on a scaffold at Aberdeen for his loyalty to Mary, of whom he was an imputed paramour as well as her relation. His fate was much commented on in the Chronicles of the times. If I mistake not, he had something to do with her escape from Loch Leven, or with her captivity there. But this you will know better than I.

“I recollect Loch Leven as it were but yesterday. I saw it in my way to England in 1798, being then ten years of age. My mother, who was as haughty as Lucifer with her descent from the Stuarts, and her right line from the old Gordons, not the Seyton Gordons, as she disdainfully termed the ducal branch, told me the story, always reminding me how superior her Gordons were to the southern Byrons,—notwithstanding our Norman, and always masculine descent, which has never lapsed into a female, as my mother’s Gordons had done in her own person.

“Enclosed is the Dedication of Marino Faliero to Goëthe. Query,—is his title Baron or not? I think yes. Let me know your opinion, and so forth.

“P.S. Let me know what Mr. Hobhouse and you have decided about the two prose letters and their publication.

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I enclose you an Italian abstract of the German translator of Manfred’s Appendix, in which you will perceive quoted what Goëthe says of the whole body of English poetry (and not of me in particular). On this the Dedication is founded, as you will perceive, though I had thought of it before, for I look upon him as a great man.”

“SIR,

“In the Appendix to an English work lately translated into German and published at Leipsic, a judgment of yours upon English poetry is quoted as follows: ‘That in English poetry, great genius, universal power, a feeling of profundity, with sufficient tenderness and force, are to be found; but that altogether these do not constitute poets,’ &c. &c.

“I regret to see a great man falling into a great mistake. This opinion of yours only proves that the ‘Dictionary of ten thousand living English authors’ has not been translated into German. You will have read, in your friend Schlegel’s version, the dialogue in Macbeth—

‘There are ten thousand! Macbeth. Geese, villain? Answer.Authors, sir’

Now, of these ‘ten thousand authors,’ there are actually nineteen hundred and eighty-seven poets, all alive at this moment, whatever their works may be, as their booksellers well know; and amongst these there are several who possess a far greater reputation than mine, although considerably less than yours. It is owing to this neglect on the part of your German translators that you are not aware of the works of * * * * * * * *.

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“There is also another, named * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *.

“I mention these poets by way of sample to enlighten you. They form but two bricks of our Babel (Windsor bricks, by the way), but may serve for a specimen of the building.

“It is, moreover, asserted that ‘the predominant character of the whole body of the present English poetry is a disgust and contempt for life.’ But I rather suspect that, by one single work of prose, you yourself have excited a greater contempt for life than all the English volumes of poesy that ever were written. Madame de Staël says, that ‘Werther has occasioned more suicides than the most beautiful woman;’ and I really believe that he has put more individuals out of this world than Napoleon himself,—except in the way of his profession. Perhaps Illustrious Sir, the acrimonious judgment passed by a celebrated northern journal upon you in particular, and the Germans in general, has rather indisposed you towards English poetry as well as criticism. But you must not regard our critics, who are at bottom good-natured fellows, considering their two professions,—taking up the law in court, and laying it down out of it. No one can more lament their hasty and unfair judgment, in your particular, than I do; and I so expressed myself to your friend Schlegel, in 1816, at Coppet.

“In behalf of my ‘ten thousand’ living brethren, and of myself, I have thus far taken notice of an opinion expressed with regard to ‘English poetry’ in general, and which merited notice, because it was yours.

“My principal object in addressing you was to testify my sincere respect and admiration of a man, who, for half a century, has led the literature of a great nation, and will go down to posterity as the first literary character of his age.

“You have been fortunate, sir, not only in the writings which have illustrated your name, but in the name itself, as being sufficiently musical for the articulation of posterity. In this you have the advantage of some of your countrymen, whose names would perhaps be immortal also—if any body could pronounce them.

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“It may, perhaps, be supposed, by this apparent tone of levity, that I am wanting in intentional respect towards you; but this will be a mistake: I am always flippant in prose. Considering you, as I really and warmly do, in common with all your own, and with most other nations, to be by far the first literary character which has existed in Europe since the death of Voltaire, I felt, and feel, desirous to inscribe to you the following work,—not as being either a tragedy or a poem (for I cannot pronounce upon its pretensions to be either one or the other, or both, or neither), but as a mark of esteem and admiration from a foreigner to the man who has been hailed in Germany ‘the great Goëthe.’

“I have the honour to be,
“with the truest respect,
“your most obedient
“and very humble servant,

“Byron.

“Ravenna, 8bre 14°, 1820.

“P.S. I perceive that in Germany, as well as in Italy, there is a great struggle about what they call ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic,’—terms which were not subjects of classification in England, at least when I left it four or five years ago. Some of the English scribblers, it is true, abused Pope and Swift, but the reason was that they themselves did not know how to write either prose or verse; but nobody thought them worth making a sect of. Perhaps there may be something of the kind sprung up lately, but I have not heard much about it, and it would be such bad taste that I shall be very sorry to believe it.”

LETTER CCCXCIV.

TO MR. MOORE.

“Ravenna, October 17th, 1820.

“You owe me two letters—pay them. I want to know what you are about. The summer is over, and you will be back to Paris. Apropos of Paris, it was not Sophia Gail, but Sophia Gay—the English

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word Gay—who was my correspondent†. Can you tell who she is, as you did of the defunct * *?

“Have you gone on with your Poem? I have received the French of mine. Only think of being traduced into a foreign language in such an abominable travesty! It is useless to rail, but one can’t help it.

“Have you got my Memoir copied? I have begun a continuation. Shall I send it you, as far as it is gone?

“I can’t say any thing to you about Italy, for the Government here look upon me with a suspicious eye, as I am well informed. Pretty fellows!—as if I, a solitary stranger, could do any mischief. It is because I am fond of rifle and pistol shooting, I believe; for they took the alarm at the quantity of cartridges I consumed—the wiseacres!

“You don’t deserve a long letter—nor a letter at all—for your silence. You have got a new Bourbon, it seems, whom they have christened ‘Dieu-donné;’—perhaps the honour of the present may be disputed. Did you write the good lines on ——, the Laker? * *

“The Queen has made a pretty theme for the journals. Was there ever such evidence published? Why, it is worse than ‘Little’s Poems’ or ‘Don Juan.’ If you don’t write soon, I will ‘make you a speech.’

“Yours, &c.”

LETTER CCCXCV.

TO MR. MURRAY.

“Ravenna, 8bre 25, 1820.

“Pray forward the enclosed to Lady Byron. It is on business.

“In thanking you for the Abbot, I made four grand mistakes. Sir John Gordon was not of Gight, but of Bogagicht, and a son of Huntley’s. He suffered not for his loyalty, but in an insurrection. He had nothing to do with Loch Leven, having been dead some time at the period of the Queen’s confinement: and, fourthly, I am not sure that

† I had mistaken the name of the lady he inquired after, and reported her to him as dead. But, on the receipt of the above letter, I discovered that his correspondent was Madame Sophie Gay, mother of the celebrated poetess and beauty, Mademoiselle Delphine Gay.

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he was the Queen’s paramour or no, for Robertson does not allude to this, though Walter Scott does, in the list he gives of her admirers (as unfortunate) at the close of ‘the Abbot.’

“I must have made all these mistakes in recollecting my mother’s account of the matter, although she was more accurate than I am, being precise upon points of genealogy, like all the aristocratical Scotch. She had a long list of ancestors, like Sir Lucius O’Trigger’s, most of whom are to be found in the old Scotch Chronicles, Spalding, &c. in arms and doing mischief. I remember well passing Loch Leven, as well as the Queen’s Ferry: we were on our way to England in 1798.

“Yours.

“You had better not publish Blackwood and the Roberts’ prose, except what regards Pope;—you have let the time slip by.”

The Pamphlet in answer to Blackwood’s Magazine, here mentioned, was occasioned by an article in that work entitled “Remarks on Don Juan,” and, though put to press by Mr. Murray, was never published. The writer in the Magazine having, in reference to certain passages in Don Juan, taken occasion to pass some severe strictures on the author’s matrimonial conduct, Lord Byron, in his reply, enters at some length into that painful subject; and the following extracts from his defence—if defence it can be called, where there has never yet been any definite charge,—will be perused with strong interest.

“My learned brother proceeds to observe, that ‘it is in vain for Lord B. to attempt in any way to justify his own behaviour in that affair; and now that he has so openly and audaciously invited inquiry and reproach, we do not see any good reason why he should not be plainly told so by the voice of his countrymen.’ How far the ‘openness’ of an anonymous poem, and the ‘audacity’ of an imaginary character, which the writer supposes to be meant for Lady B., may be deemed to merit this formidable denunciation from their ‘most sweet voices,’ I neither know nor care; but when he tells me that I cannot ‘in any way justify my own behaviour in that affair,’ I acquiesce, because no man

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can ‘justify’ himself until he knows of what he is accused; and I have never had—and, God knows, my whole desire has ever been to obtain it—any specific charge, in a tangible shape, submitted to me by the adversary, nor by others, unless the atrocities of public rumour and the mysterious silence of the lady’s legal advisers may be deemed such. But is not the writer content with what has been already said and done? Has not ‘the general voice of his countrymen’ long ago pronounced upon the subject—sentence without trial, and condemnation without a charge? Have I not been exiled by ostracism, except that the shells which proscribed me were anonymous? Is the writer ignorant of the public opinion and the public conduct upon that occasion? If he is, I am not: the public will forget both long before I shall cease to remember either.

“The man who is exiled by a faction has the consolation of thinking that he is a martyr; he is upheld by hope and the dignity of his cause, real or imaginary: he who withdraws from the pressure of debt may indulge in the thought that time and prudence will retrieve his circumstances: he who is condemned by the law has a term to his banishment, or a dream of its abbreviation; or, it may be, the knowledge or the belief of some injustice of the law, or of its administration in his own particular: but he who is outlawed by general opinion, without the intervention of hostile politics, illegal judgment, or embarrassed circumstances, whether he be innocent or guilty, must undergo all the bitterness of exile, without hope, without pride, without alleviation. This case was mine. Upon what grounds the public founded their opinion, I am not aware; but it was general, and it was decisive. Of me or of mine they knew little, except that I had written what is called poetry, was a nobleman, had married, became a father, and was involved in differences with my wife and her relatives, no one knew why, because the persons complaining refused to state their grievances. The fashionable world was divided into parties, mine consisting of a very small minority: the reasonable

* While these sheets are passing through the press, a printed statement has been transmitted to me by Lady Noel Byron, which the reader will find inserted in the Appendix to this volume.

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world was naturally on the stronger side, which happened to be the lady’s, as was most proper and polite. The press was active and scurrilous; and such was the rage of the day, that the unfortunate publication of two copies of verses, rather complimentary than otherwise to the subjects of both, was tortured into a species of crime, or constructive petty treason. I was accused of every monstrous vice by public rumour and private rancour: my name, which had been a knightly or a noble one since my fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for William the Norman, was tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered, and muttered, and murmured, was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me. I withdrew: but this was not enough. In other countries, in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue depth of the lakes, I was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. I crossed the mountains, but it was the same; so I went a little farther, and settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who betakes him to the waters.

“If I may judge by the statements of the few friends who gathered round me, the outcry of the period to which I allude was beyond all precedent, all parallel, even in those cases where political motives have sharpened slander and doubled enmity. I was advised not to go to the theatres, lest I should be hissed, nor to my duty in parliament, lest I should be insulted by the way; even on the day of my departure, my most intimate friend told me afterwards that he was under apprehensions of violence from the people who might be assembled at the door of the carriage. However, I was not deterred by these counsels from seeing Kean in his best characters, nor from voting according to my principles: and, with regard to the third and last apprehensions of my friends, I could not share in them, not being made acquainted with their extent till some time after I had crossed the Channel. Even if I had been so, I am not of a nature to be much affected by men’s anger, though I may feel hurt by their aversion. Against all individual outrage, I could protect or redress myself; and against that of a crowd. I should probably have been enabled to defend myself, with the assistance of others, as has been done on similar occasions.

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“I retired from the country, perceiving that I was the object of general obloquy; I did not indeed imagine, like Jean Jacques Rousseau, that all mankind was in a conspiracy against me, though I had perhaps as good grounds for such a chimera as ever he had: but I perceived that I had to a great extent become personally obnoxious in England, perhaps through my own fault, but the fact was indisputable; the public in general would hardly have been so much excited against a more popular character, without at least an accusation or a charge of some kind actually expressed or substantiated, for I can hardly conceive that the common and every-day occurrence of a separation between man and wife could in itself produce so great a ferment. I shall say nothing of the usual complaints of ‘being prejudged,’ ‘condemned unheard,’ ‘unfairness,’ ‘partiality,’ and so forth, the usual changes rung by parties who have had, or are to have, a trial; but I was a little surprised to find myself condemned without being favoured with the act of accusation, and to perceive in the absence of this portentous charge or charges, whatever it or they were to be, that every possible or impossible crime was rumoured to supply its place, and taken for granted. This could only occur in the case of a person very much disliked, and I knew no remedy, having already used to their extent whatever little powers I might possess of pleasing in society. I had no party in fashion, though I was afterwards told that there was one—but it was not of my formation, nor did I then know of its existence—none in literature; and in politics I had voted with the Whigs, with precisely that importance which a Whig vote possesses in these Tory days, and with such personal acquaintance with the leaders in both houses as the society in which I lived sanctioned, but without claim or expectation of any thing like friendship from any one, except a few young men of my own age and standing, and a few others more advanced in life, which last it had been my fortune to serve in circumstances of difficulty. This was, in fact, to stand alone: and I recollect, some time after, Madame de Staël said to me in Switzerland, ‘You should not have warred with the world—it will not do—it is too strong always for any individual: I myself once tried it in early life, but it will not do.’ I perfectly acquiesce in the truth of this remark; but the world had done me the honour to begin the war; and, assuredly, if peace is only to be

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obtained by courting and paying tribute to it, I am not qualified to obtain its countenance. I thought, in the words of Campbell,

‘Then wed thee to an exiled lot, And if the world hath loved thee not, Its absence may be borne.’

“I recollect, however, that having been much hurt by Romilly’s conduct (he, having a general retainer for me, had acted as adviser to the adversary, alleging, on being reminded of his retainer, that he had forgotten it, as his clerk had so many), I observed that some of those who were now eagerly laying the axe to my roof-tree, might see their own shaken, and feel a portion of what they had inflicted.—His fell, and crushed him.

“I have heard of, and believe, that there are human beings so constituted as to be insensible to injuries; but I believe that the best mode to avoid taking vengeance is to get out of the way of temptation. I hope that I may never have the opportunity, for I am not quite sure that I could resist it, having derived from my mother something of the ‘perfervidum ingenium Scotorurm.’ I have not sought, and shall not seek it, and perhaps it may never come in my path. I do not in this allude to the party, who might be right or wrong; but to many who made her cause the pretext of their own bitterness. She, indeed, must have long avenged me in her own feelings, for whatever her reasons may have been (and she never adduced them to me at least), she probably neither contemplated nor conceived to what she became the means of conducting the father of her child, and the husband of her choice.

“So much for ‘the general voice of his countrymen:’ I will now speak of some in particular.

“In the beginning of the year 1817, an article appeared in the Quarterly Review, written, I believe, by Walter Scott, doing great honour to him, and no disgrace to me, though both poetically and personally more than sufficiently favourable to the work and the author of whom it treated. It was written at a time when a selfish man would not, and a timid one dared not, have said a word in favour of either; it was written by one to whom temporary public opinion had elevated me

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to the rank of a rival—a proud distinction, and unmerited; but which has not prevented me from feeling as a friend, nor him from more than corresponding to that sentiment. The article in question was written upon the Third Canto of Childe Harold, and after many observations, which it would as ill become me to repeat as to forget, concluded with ‘a hope that I might yet return to England.’ How this expression was received in England itself I am not acquainted, but it gave great offence at Rome to the respectable ten or twenty thousand English travellers then and there assembled. I did not visit Rome till some time after, so that I had no opportunity of knowing the fact; but I was informed, long afterwards, that the greatest indignation had been manifested in the enlightened Anglo-circle of that year, which happened to comprise within it—amidst a considerable leaven of Welbeck-street and Devonshire-place, broken loose upon their travels several really well-born and well-bred families, who did not the less participate in the feeling of the hour. ‘Why should he return to England?’ was the general exclamation—I answer why? It is a question I have occasionally asked myself, and I never yet could give it a satisfactory reply. I had then no thoughts of returning, and if I have any now, they are of business, and not of pleasure. Amidst the ties that have been dashed to pieces, there are links yet entire, though the chain itself be broken. There are duties, and connexions, which may one day require my presence—and I am a father. I have still some friends whom I wish to meet again, and, it may be, an enemy. These things, and those minuter details of business, which time accumulates during absence, in every man’s affairs and property, may, and probably will, recall me to England; but I shall return with the same feelings with which I left it, in respect to itself, though altered with regard to individuals, as I have been more or less informed of their conduct since my departure; for it was only a considerable time after it that I was made acquainted with the real facts and full extent of some of their proceedings and language. My friends, like other friends, from conciliatory motives, withheld from me much that they could, and some things which they should have unfolded; however, that which is deferred is not lost—but it has been no fault of mine that it has been deferred at all.

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“I have alluded to what is said to have passed at Rome merely to show that the sentiment which I have described was not confined to the English in England, and as forming part of my answer to the reproach cast upon what has been called my ‘selfish exile,’ and my ‘voluntary exile.’ ‘Voluntary’ it has been; for who would dwell among a people entertaining strong hostility against him? How far it has been ‘selfish’ has been already explained.”

The following passages from the same unpublished pamphlet will be found, in a literary point of view, not less curious.

“And here I wish to say a few words on the present state of English poetry. That this is the age of the decline of English poetry will be doubted by few who have calmly considered the subject. That there are men of genius among the present poets makes little against the fact, because it has been well said, that ‘next to him who forms the taste of his country, the greatest genius is he who corrupts it.’ No one has ever denied genius to Marino, who corrupted not merely the taste of Italy, but that of all Europe for nearly a century. The great cause of the present deplorable state of English poetry is to be attributed to that absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope, in which, for the last few years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most opposite opinions have united upon this topic. Warton and Churchill began it, having borrowed the hint probably from the heroes of the Dunciad, and their own internal conviction that their proper reputation can be as nothing till the most perfect and harmonious of poets—he who, having no fault, has had reason made his reproach—was reduced to what they conceived to be his level; but even they dared not degrade him below Dryden. Goldsmith, and Rogers, and Campbell, his most successful disciples; and Hayley, who, however feeble, has left one poem ‘that will not be willingly let die,’ (the Triumphs of Temper,) kept up the reputation of that pure and perfect style; and Crabbe, the first of living poets, has almost equalled the master. Then came Darwin, who was put down by a single poem in the Antijacobin; and the Cruscans, from Merry to Jerningham, who

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were annihilated (if Nothing can be said to be annihilated) by Gifford, the last of the wholesome English satirists.

* * * * * *

“These three personages, S * *, W * *, and C * *, had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope, and I respect them for it, as the only original feeling or principle which they have contrived to preserve. But they have been joined in it by those who have joined them in nothing else: by the Edinburgh Reviewers, by the whole heterogeneous mass of living English poets, excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope’s poetry with my whole soul, and hope to do so till my dying day. I would rather see all I have ever written lining the same trunk in which I actually read the eleventh book of a modern Epic poem at Malta in 1811, (I opened it to take out a change after the paroxysm of a tertian, in the absence of my servant and found it lined with the name of the maker, Eyre, Cockspur-street, and with the Epic poetry alluded to,) than sacrifice what I firmly believe in as the Christianity of English poetry, the poetry of Pope.

* * * * * *

“Nevertheless, I will not go so far as * * in his postscript, who pretends that no great poet ever had immediate fame, which, being interpreted, means that * * is not quite so much read by his cotemporaries as might be desirable. This assertion is as false as it is foolish. Homer’s glory depended upon his present popularity:—he recited,—and, without the strongest impression of the moment, who would have gotten the Iliad by heart, and. given it to tradition? Ennius, Terence, Plautus, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, Theocritus, all the great poets of antiquity, were the delight of their cotemporaries†. The very existence of a poet, previous to the

† As far as regards the poets of ancient times, this assertion is, perhaps, right; though, if there be any truth in what Ælian and Seneca have left on record, of the obscurity, during their lifetime, of such men as Socrates and Epicurus, it would seem to prove that, among the ancients, contemporary fame was a far more rare reward of literary or philosophical eminence than among us moderns. When the “Clouds” of Aristophanes was exhibited before the

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invention of printing, depended upon his present popularity; and how often has it impaired his future fame? Hardly ever. History informs us, that the best have come down to us. The reason is evident; the most popular found the greatest number of transcribers for their MSS., and that the taste of their cotemporaries was corrupt can hardly be avouched by the moderns, the mightiest of whom have but barely approached them. Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, were all the darlings of the cotemporary reader. Dante’s Poem was celebrated long before his death; and, not long after it, States negotiated for his ashes, and disputed for the sites of the composition of the Divina Commedia. Petrarch was crowned in the Capitol. Ariosto was permitted to pass free by the public robber who had read the Orlando Furioso. I would not recommend Mr. * * to try the same experiment with his Smugglers. Tasso, notwithstanding the criticisms of the Cruscanti, would have been crowned in the Capitol, but for his death.

“It is easy to prove the immediate popularity of the chief poets of the only modern nation in Europe that has a poetical language, the Italian. In our own, Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Waller, Dryden, Congreve, Pope, Young, Shenstone, Thomson, Johnson, Goldsmith, Gray, were all as popular in their lives as since. Gray’s Elegy pleased instantly, and eternally. His Odes did not, nor yet do they please like his Elegy. Milton’s politics kept him down; but the Epigram of Dryden, and the very sale of his work, in proportion to the less reading time of its publication, prove him to have been honoured by his cotemporaries. I will venture to assert, that the sale of the Paradise Lost was greater in the first four years after its publication than that of ‘the Excursion’ in the same number, with the difference of nearly a century and a half between them of time, and of thousands in point of general readers.

assembled deputies of the towns of Attica, these personages, as Ælian tells us, were unanimously of opinion, that the character of an unknown person, called Socrates, was uninteresting upon the stage; and Seneca has given the substance of an authentic letter of Epicurus, in which that philosopher declares that nothing hurt him go much, in the midst of all his happiness, as to think that Greece,—“illa nobills Græcia,”—so far from knowing him, had scarcely even heard of his existence.—Epist. 79.

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* * * * * *

“It may be asked, why, having this opinion of the present state of poetry in England, and having had it long, as my friends and others well know—possessing, or having possessed too, as a writer, the ear of the public for the time being—I have not adopted a different plan in my own compositions, and endeavoured to correct rather than encourage the taste of the day. To this I would answer, that it is easier to perceive the wrong than to pursue the right, and that I have never contemplated the prospect ‘of filling (with Peter Bell, see its Preface) permanently a station in the literature of the country.’ Those who know me best, know this, and that I have been considerably astonished at the temporary success of my works, having flattered no person and no party, and expressed opinions which are not those of the general reader. Could I have anticipated the degree of attention which has been accorded, assuredly I would have studied more to deserve it. But I have lived in far countries abroad, or in the agitating world at home, which was not favourable to study or reflection; so that almost all I have written has been mere passion,—passion, it is true, of different kinds, but always passion: for in me (if it be not an Irishism to say so) my indifference was a kind of passion, the result of experience, and not the philosophy of nature. Writing grows a habit, like a woman’s gallantry: there are women who have had no intrigue, but few who have had but one only: so there are millions of men who have never written a book, but few who have written only one. And thus, having written once, I wrote on; encouraged no doubt by the success of the moment, yet by no means anticipating its duration, and I will venture to say, scarcely even wishing it. But then I did other things besides write, which by no means contributed either to improve my writings or my prosperity.

* * * * * *

“I have thus expressed publicly upon the poetry of the day the opinion I have long entertained and expressed of it to all who have asked it, and to some who would rather not have heard it; as I told Moore not very long ago, ‘we are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell†.’

† I certainly ventured to differ from the judgment of my noble friend, no less in his attempts to depreciate that peculiar walk of the art in which he himself an grandly trod, than in

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Without being old in years, I am old in days, and do not feel the adequate spirit within me to attempt a work which should show what I think right in poetry, and must content myself with having denounced what is wrong. There are, I trust, younger spirits rising up in England, who, escaping the contagion which has swept away poetry from our literature, will recall it to their country, such as it once was and may still be.

“In the mean time, the best sign of amendment will be repentance, and new and frequent editions of Pope and Dryden.

“There will be found as comfortable metaphysics, and ten times more poetry in the ‘Essay on Man,’ than in the ‘Excursion.’ If you search for passion, where is it to be found stronger than in the epistle from Eloisa to Abelard, or in Palamon and Arcite? Do you wish for invention, imagination, sublimity, character? seek them in the Rape of the Lock, the Fables of Dryden, the Ode on Saint Cecilia’s Day, and Absalom and Achitophel; you will discover in these two poets only, all for which you must ransack innumerable metres, and God only knows how many writers of the day, without finding a tittle of the same qualities,—with the addition, too, of wit, of which the latter have none. I have not, however, forgotten Thomas Brown the Younger, nor the Fudge Family, nor Whistlecraft; but that is not wit—it is humour. I will say nothing of the harmony of Pope and Dryden in comparison, for there is not a living poet (except Rogers, Gifford, Campbell, and Crabbe,) who can write an heroic couplet. The fact is, that the exquisite beauty of their versification has withdrawn the public attention from their other excellencies, as the vulgar eye will rest more upon the splendour of the uniform than the quality of the troops. It is this very

the inconsistency of which I thought him guilty, in condemning all those who stood up for particular “schools” of poetry, and yet, at the same time, maintaining so exclusive a theory of the art himself. How little, however, he attended to either the grounds or degrees of my dissent from him, will appear by the following wholesale report of my opinion, in his “Detached Thoughts:” “One of my notions different from those of my contemporaries, is, that the present is not a high age of English poetry. There are more poets (soi-disant) than ever there were, and proportionally less poetry. “This thesis I have maintained for some years, but, strange to say, it meeteth not with favour from my brethren of the shell. Even Moore shakes his head, and firmly believes that it is the grand age of British poesy.”

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harmony, particularly in Pope, which has raised the vulgar and atrocious cant against him:—because his versification is perfect, it is assumed that it is his only perfection; because his truths are so clear, it is asserted that he has no invention; and because he is always intelligible, it is taken for granted that he has no genius. We are sneeringly told that he is the ‘Poet of Reason,’ as if this was a reason for his being no poet. Taking passage for passage, I will undertake to cite more lines teeming with imagination from Pope than from any two living poets, be they who they may. To take an instance at random from a species of composition not very favourable to imagination—Satire: set down the character of Sporus, with all the wonderful play of fancy which is scattered over it, and place by its side an equal number of verses, from any two existing poets, of the same power and the same variety—where will you find them?

“I merely mention one instance of many in reply to the injustice done to the memory of him who harmonized our poetical language. The attorneys’ clerks, and other self-educated genii, found it easier to distort themselves to the new models than to toil after the symmetry of him who had enchanted their fathers. They were besides smitten by being told that the new school were to revive the language of Queen Elizabeth, the true English; as every body in the reign of Queen Anne wrote no better than French, by a species of literary treason.

“Blank verse, which, unless in the drama, no one except Milton ever wrote who could rhyme, became the order of the day,—or else such rhyme as looked still blanker than the verse without it. I am aware that Johnson has said, after some hesitation, that he could not ‘prevail upon himself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer.’ The opinions of that truly great man, whom it is also the present fashion to decry, will ever be received by me with that deference which time will restore to him from all; but, with all humility, I am not persuaded that the Paradise Lost would not have been more nobly conveyed to posterity, not perhaps in heroic couplets, although even they could sustain the subject if well balanced, but in the stanza of Spenser, or of Tasso, or in the terza rima of Dante, which the powers of Milton could easily have grafted on our language. The Seasons of Thomson would have been better in rhyme, although still inferior to his Castle of Indolence; and Mr. Southey’s

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Joan of Arc no worse, although it might have taken up six months instead of weeks in the composition. I recommend also to the lovers of lyrics the perusal of the present laureate’s odes by the side of Dryden’s on Saint Cecilia, but let him be sure to read first those of Mr. Southey.

“To the heaven-born genii and inspired young scriveners of the day much of this will appear paradox; it will appear so even to the higher order of our critics; but it was a truism twenty years ago, and it will be a re-acknowledged truth in ten more. In the mean time, I will conclude with two quotations, both intended for some of my old classical friends who have still enough of Cambridge about them to think themselves honoured by having had John Dryden as a predecessor in their college, and to recollect that their earliest English poetical pleasures were drawn from the ‘little nightingale’ of Twickenham.

“The first is from the notes to the Poem of the ‘Friends*,’ pages 181, 182.

“‘It is only within the last twenty or thirty years that those notable discoveries in criticism have been made which have taught our recent versifiers to undervalue this energetic, melodious, and moral poet. The consequences of this want of due esteem for a writer whom the good sense of our predecessors had raised to his proper station have been numerous and degrading enough. This is not the place to enter into the subject, even as far as it affects our poetical numbers alone, and there is matter of more importance that requires present reflection.’

“The second is from the volume of a young person learning to write poetry, and beginning by teaching the art. Hear him†:

* Written by Lord Byron’s early friend, the Rev. Francis Hodgson.

† The strange verses that follow are from a poem by Keats.—In a manuscript note on this passage of the pamphlet, dated Nov. 12, 1821, Lord Byron says, “Mr. Keats died at Rome about a year after this was written, of a decline produced by his having burst a blood vessel on reading the article on his ‘Endymion’ in the Quarterly Review. I have read the article before and since; and although it is bitter, I do not think that a man should permit himself to be killed by it. But a young man little dreams what he must inevitably encounter in the course of a life ambitious of public notice. My indignation at Mr. Keats’s depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius. which, malgrè all the fantastic fopperies of his style, was undoubtedly of great promise. His fragment of ‘Hyperion’ seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Æschylus. He is a loss to our literature; and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to have

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‘But ye were dead To things ye knew not of—were closely wed To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compass vile; so that ye taught a school* Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and chip, and fit, Till, like the certain wands of Jacob’s wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of poesy. Ill-fated, impious race, That blasphemed the bright lyrist to his face, And did not know it; no, they went about Holding a poor decrepit standard out Mark’d with most flimsy mottos, and in large The name of one Boileau!’

“A little before the manner of Pope is termed

‘A scism†, Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this his land.’

“I thought ‘foppery’ was a consequence of refinement: but n’importe.

“The above will suffice to show the notions entertained by the new performers on the English lyre of him who made it most tunable, and the great improvements of their own variazioni.

“The writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six or seven new schools, in which he has learnt to write such lines and such sentiments as the above. He says ‘easy was the task’ of imitating Pope, or it may be of equalling him, I presume. I recommend him to try before he is so positive on the subject, and then compare what he will have then written and what he has now written with the humblest and earliest compositions of Pope, produced in ears still more youthful than those of Mr. K. when he invented his new

been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was reforming his style upon the more classical models of the language.” * “It was at least a grammar ‘school.’” † “So spelt by the author.”

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‘Essay on Criticism,’ entitled Sleep and Poetry (an ominous title), from whence the above canons are taken. Pope’s was written at nineteen, and published at twenty-two.

“Such are the triumphs of the new schools, and such their scholars. The disciples of Pope were Johnson, Goldsmith, Rogers, Campbell, Crabbe, Gifford, Matthias, Hayley, and the author of the Paradise of Coquettes; to whom may be added Richards, Heber, Wrangham, Bland, Hodgson, Merivale, and others who have not had their full fame, because ‘the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,’ and because there is a fortune in fame as in all other things. Now of all the new schools—I say all, for, ‘like Legion, they are many’—has there appeared a single scholar who has not made his master ashamed of him? unless it be * *, who has imitated every body, and occasionally surpassed his models. Scott found peculiar favour and imitation among the fair sex: there was Miss Holford, and Miss Mitford, and Miss Francis; but with the greatest respect be it spoken, none of his imitators did much honour to the original except Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, until the appearance of ‘The Bridal of Triermain,’ and ‘Harold the Dauntless,’ which in the opinion of some equalled if not surpassed him; and lo! after three or four years they turned out to be the Master’s own compositions. Have Southey, or Coleridge, or Wordsworth, made a follower of renown? Wilson never did well till he set up for himself in the ‘City of the Plague.’ Has Moore, or any other living writer of reputation, had a tolerable imitator, or rather disciple? Now it is remarkable that almost all the followers of Pope, whom I have named, have produced beautiful and standard works, and it was not the number of his imitators who finally hurt his fame, but the despair of imitation, and the ease of not imitating him sufficiently. This, and the same reason which induced the Athenian burgher to vote for the banishment of Aristides, ‘because he was tired of always hearing him called the Just,’ have produced the temporary exile of Pope from the State of Literature.

But the term of his ostracism will expire, and the sooner the better, not for him, but for those who banished him, and for the coming generation, who

‘Will blush to find their fathers were his foes.’

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LETTER CCCXCVI.

TO MR. MURRAY.

“Ravenna, 9bre 4, 1820.

“I have received from Mr. Galignani the enclosed letters, duplicates and receipts, which will explain themselves*. As the poems are your property by purchase, right, and justice, all matters of publication, &c. &c. are for you to decide upon. I know not how far my compliance with Mr. Galignani’s request might be legal, and I doubt that it would not be honest. In case you choose to arrange with him, I enclose the permits to you, and in so doing I wash my hands of the business altogether. I sign them merely to enable you to exert the power you justly possess more properly. I will have nothing to do with it farther, except, in my answer to Mr. Galignani, to state that the letters, &c. &c. are sent to you, and the causes thereof.

“If you can check these foreign pirates, do; if, not, put the permissive papers in the fire. I can have no view nor object whatever, but to secure to you your property.

“Yours, &c.

“P.S. I have read part of the Quarterly just arrived: Mr. Bowles shall be answered:—he is not quite correct in his statement about English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. They support Pope, I see, in the Quarterly; let them continue to do so: it is a sin, and a shame, and a damnation to think that Pope!! should require it—but he does. Those miserable mountebanks of the day, the poets, disgrace themselves and deny God in running down Pope, the most faultless of poets, and almost of men.

* Mr. Galignani had applied to Lord Byron with the view of procuring from him such legal right over those works of his Lordship of which he had hitherto been the sole publisher in France, as would enable him to present others, in future, from usurping the same privilege.

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LETTER CCCXCVII.

TO MR. MOORE.

“Ravenna, November 5th, 1820.

“Thanks for your letter, which hath come somewhat costively,—but better late than never. Of it anon. Mr. Galignani, of the Press, hath, it seems, been supplanted and sub-pirated by another Parisian publisher, who has audaciously printed an edition of L. B.’s Works, at the ultra-liberal price of 10 francs, and (as Galignani piteously observes) francs only for booksellers! ‘horresco referens.’ Think of a man’s whole works producing so little!

“Galignani sends me, post haste, a permission for him, from me, to publish, &c. &c., which permit I have signed and sent to Mr. Murray, of Albemarle-street. Will you explain to G. that I have no right to dispose of Murray’s works without his leave? and therefore I must refer him to M. to get the permit out of his claws—no easy matter, I suspect. I have written to G. to say as much; but a word of mouth from a ‘great brother author’ would convince him that I could not honestly have complied with his wish, though I might legally. What I could do, I have done, viz. signed the warrant and sent it to Murray. Let the dogs divide the carcass, if it is killed to their liking.

“I am glad of your epigram. It is odd that we should both let our wits run away with our sentiments; for I am sure that we are both Queen’s men at bottom. But there is no resisting a clinch—it is so clever! Apropos of that—we have ‘a diphthong’ also in this part of the world—not a Greek, but a Spanish one—do you understand me?—which is about to blow up the whole alphabet. It was first pronounced at Naples, and is spreading;—but we are nearer the Barbarians; who are in great force on the Po, and will pass it, with the first legitimate pretext.

“There will be the devil to pay, and there is no saying who will or who will not be set down in his bill. If ‘honour should come unlooked for’ to any of your acquaintance, make a Melody of it, that his ghost, like poor Yorick’s, may have the satisfaction of being plaintively pitied—or still more nobly commemorated, like ‘Oh breathe not his name.’

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In case you should not think him worth it, here is a Chant for you instead—

“When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home, Let him combat for that of his neighbours; Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome, And get knock’d on the head for his labours.

To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan, And is always as nobly requited; Then battle for freedom wherever you can, And, if not shot or hang’d, you’ll get knighted.

“So you have gotten the letter of ‘Epigrams’—I am glad of it. You will not be so, for I shall send you more. Here is one I wrote for the endorsement of ‘the Deed of Separation’ in 1816; but the lawyers objected to it, as superfluous. It was written as we were getting up the signing and sealing. * * has the original.

“Endorsement to the Deed of Separation, in the April of 1810.

“A year ago you swore, fond she! ‘To love, to honour,’ and so forth: Such was the vow you pledged to me, And here’s exactly what ’tis worth.

“For the anniversary of January 2, 1821, I have a small grateful anticipation, which, in case of accident, I add—

“To Penelope, January 2d, 1821.

“This day, of all our days, has done The worst for me and you:— ’Tis just six years since we were one, And five since we were two.

“Pray, excuse all this nonsense; for I must talk nonsense just now, for fear of wandering to more serious topics, which, in the present state of things, is not safe by a foreign post.

“I told you, in my last, that I had been going on with the ‘Memoirs,’ and have got as far as twelve more sheets. But I suspect they will be

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interrupted. In that case I will send them on by post, though I feel remorse at making a friend pay so much for postage, for we can’t frank here beyond the frontier.

“I shall be glad to hear of the event of the Queen’s concern. As to the ultimate effect, the most inevitable one to you and me (if they and we live so long) will be that the Miss Moores and Miss Byrons will present us with a great variety of grand-children by different fathers.

“Pray, where did you get hold of Goëthe’s Florentine husband-killing story? upon such matters, in general, I may say, with Beau Clincher, in reply to Errand’s wife—

“‘Oh the villain, he hath murdered my poor Timothy!

“‘Clincher. Damn your Timothy!—I tell you, woman, your husband has murdered me—he has carried away my fine jubilee clothes.’

“So Bowles has been telling a story, too (’tis in the Quarterly), about the woods of ‘Madeira,’ and so forth. I shall be at Bowles again, if he is not quiet. He misstates, or mistakes, in a point or two. The paper is finished, and so is the letter.

“Yours, &c.”

LETTER CCCXCVIII.

TO MR. MURRAY.

“Ravenna, 9bre 9°, 1820.

“The talent you approve of is an amiable one, and might prove a ‘national service,’ but unfortunately I must be angry with a man before I draw his real portrait; and I can’t deal in ‘generals,’ so that I trust never to have provocation enough to make a Gallery. If ‘the parson’ had not by many little dirty sneaking traits provoked it, I should have been silent, though I had observed him. Here follows an alteration: put

“Devil, with such delight in damning, That if at the resurrection Unto him the free election Of his future could be given, ’Twould be rather Hell than heaven;

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that is to say, if these two new lines do not too much lengthen out and weaken the amiability of the original thought and expression. You have a discretionary power about showing. I should think that Croker would not disrelish a sight of these light little humorous things, and may be indulged now and then.

“Why, I do like one or two vices, to be sure; but I can back a horse and fire a pistol ‘without thinking or blinking’ like Major Sturgeon; I have fed at times for two months together on sheer biscuit and water (without metaphor); I can get over seventy or eighty miles a day riding post, and swim five at a stretch, as at Venice, in 1818, or at least I could do, and have done it once.

“I know Henry Matthews; he is the image, to the very voice, of his brother Charles, only darker—his cough his in particular. The first time I ever met him was in Scrope Davies’s rooms after his brother’s death, and I nearly dropped, thinking that it was his ghost. I have also dined with him in his rooms at King’s College. Hobhouse once purposed a similar Memoir; but I am afraid that the letters of Charles’s correspondence with me (which are at Whitton with my other papers) would hardly do for the public; for our lives were not over strict, and our letters somewhat lax upon most subjects†.

* * * * * *

“Last week I sent you a correspondence with Galignani, and some documents on your property. You have now, I think, an opportunity of checking, or at least limiting, those French republications. You may let all your authors publish what they please against me and mine. A publisher is not, and cannot be, responsible for all the works that issue from his printer’s.

“The ‘White Lady of Avenel,’ is not quite so good as a real well authenticated (‘Donna Bianca’) White Lady of Colalto, or spectre in the Marca Trivigiana, who has been repeatedly seen. There is a man (a huntsman) now alive who saw her also. Hoppner could tell you all about her, and so can Rose, perhaps. I myself have no doubt of the fact,

† Here follow some details respecting his friend Charles S. Matthews, which have already been given In the First Volume of this work.

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historical and spectral. She always appeared on particular occasions, before the deaths of the family, &c. &c. I heard Madame Benzoni say, that she knew a gentleman who had seen her cross his room at Colalto Castle. Hoppner saw and spoke with the huntsman, who met her at the chase, and never hunted afterwards. She was a girl attendant, who, one day dressing the hair of a Countess Colalto, was seen by her mistress to smile upon her husband in the glass. The Countess had her shut up in the wall of the castle, like Constance de Beverley. Ever after, she haunted them and all the Colaltos. She is described as very beautiful and fair. It is well authenticated.”

LETTER CCCXCIX.

TO MR. MURRAY.

“Ravenna, 9bre 18°, 1820.

“The death of Waite is a shock to the—teeth, as well as to the feelings of all who knew him. Good God, he and Blake† both gone! I left them both in the most robust health, and little thought of the national loss in so short a time as five years. They were both as much superior to Wellington in rational greatness, as he who preserves the hair and the teeth is preferable to ‘the bloody blustering warrior’ who gains a name by breaking heads and knocking out grinders. Who succeeds him? Where is tooth-powder, mild, and yet efficacious—where is tincture—where are clearing-roots and brushes now to be obtained? Pray obtain what information you can upon these ‘Tusculan questions.’ My jaws ache to think on’t. Poor fellows! I anticipated seeing both again; and yet they are gone to that place where both teeth and hair last longer than they do in this life. I have seen a thousand graves opened, and always perceived, that whatever was gone, the teeth and hair remained with those who had died with them. Is not this odd? They go the very first things in youth, and yet last the longest in the dust, if people

* The ghost-story, in which he here professes such serious belief, forms the subject of one of Mr. Rogers’s beautiful Italian sketches.—See “Italy,” p. 43, edit. 1830.

† A celebrated hair-dresser.

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will but die to preserve them! It is a queer life, and a queer death, that of mortals.

“I knew that Waite had married, but little thought that the other decease was so soon to overtake him. Then he was such a delight, such a coxcomb, such a jewel of a man! There is a tailor at Bologna so like him! and also at the top of his profession. Do not neglect this commission. Who or what can replace him? What says the public?

“I remand you the Preface. Don’t forget that the Italian extract from the chronicle must be translated. With regard to what you say of retouching the Juans and the Hints, it is all very well; but I can’t furbish. I am like the tiger (in poesy), if I miss the first spring, I go growling back to my jungle. There is no second; I can’t correct; I can’t, and I won’t. Nobody ever succeeds in it, great or small. Tasso remade the whole of his Jerusalem; but who ever reads that version? all the world goes to the first. Pope added to ‘The Rape of the Lock,’ but did not reduce it. You must take my things as they happen to be. If they are not likely to suit, reduce their estimate accordingly. I would rather give them away than hack and hew them. I don’t say that you are not right; I merely repeat that I cannot better them. I must ‘either make a spoon or spoil a horn;’ and there’s an end.

“Yours.

“P.S. Of the praises of that little * * * Keats, I shall observe as Johnson did when Sheridan the actor got a pension: ‘What! has he got a pension? Then it is time that I should give up mine!’ Nobody could be prouder of the praise of the Edinburgh than I was, or more alive to their censure, as I showed in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. At present, all the men they have ever praised are degraded by that insane article. Why don’t they review and praise ‘Solomon’s Guide to Health?’ it is better sense and as much poetry as Johnny Keats.

“Bowles must be bowled down. ’Tis a sad match at cricket if he can get any notches at Pope’s expense. If he once get into ‘Lords ground’ (to continue the pun, because it is foolish), I think I could beat him in one innings. You did not know, perhaps, that I was once (not metaphorically, but really) a good cricketer, particularly in batting, and I played in the Harrow match against the Etonians in 1805, gaining more

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notches (as one of our chosen eleven) than any, except Lord Ipswich and Brockman on our side.”

LETTER CCCC.

TO MR. MURRAY.

“Ravenna, 9bre 23°, 1820.

“The ‘Hints,’ Hobhouse says, will require a good deal of slashing to suit the times, which will be a work of time, for I don’t feel at all laborious just now. Whatever effect they are to have would perhaps be greater in a separate form, and they also must have my name to them. Now, if you publish them in the same volume with Don Juan, they identify Don Juan as mine, which I don’t think worth a chancery suit about my daughter’s guardianship, as in your present code a facetious poem is sufficient to take away a man’s rights over his family.

“Of the state of things here it would be difficult and not very prudent to speak at large, the Huns opening all letters. I wonder if they can read them when they have opened them; if so, they may see, in my most legible hand, that I think them damned scoundrels and barbarians, and their emperor a fool, and themselves more fools than he; all which they may send to Vienna for any thing I care. They have got themselves masters of the Papal police, and are bullying away; but some day or other they will pay for all: it may not be very soon, because these unhappy Italians have no consistency among themselves; but I suppose that Providence will get tired of them at last, * * * * * *

“Yours, &c.”

LETTER CCCCI.

TO MR. MOORE.

“Ravenna, Dec. 9th, 1820.

“Besides this letter, you will receive three packets, containing, in all, 18 more sheets of Memoranda, which, I fear, will cost you more in postage than they will ever produce by being printed in the next century. Instead of waiting so long, if you could make any thing of them

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now in the way of reversion (that is, after my death), I should be very glad,—as, with all due regard to your progeny, I prefer you to your grand-children. Would not Longman or Murray advance you a certain sum now, pledging themselves not to have them published till after my decease, think you?—and what say you?

“Over these latter sheets I would leave you a discretionary power*; because they contain, perhaps, a thing or two which is too sincere for the public. If I consent to your disposing of their reversion now, where would be the harm? Tastes may change. I would, in your case, make my essay to dispose of them, not publish, now; and if you (as is most likely) survive me, add what you please from your own knowledge; and, above all, contradict any thing, if I have mis-stated; for my first object is the truth, even at my own expense.

“I have some knowledge of your countryman, Muley Moloch, the lecturer. He wrote to me several letters upon Christianity, to convert me; and, if I had not been a Christian already, I should probably have been now, in consequence. I thought there was something of wild talent in him, mixed with a due leaven of absurdity,—as there must be in all talent, let loose upon the world, without a martingale.

The ministers seem still to persecute the Queen * * * * * * * but they won’t go out, the sans of b—es. Damn Reform—I want a place—what say you? You must applaud the honesty of the declaration, whatever you may think of the intention.

“I have quantities of paper in England, original and translated—tragedy, &c. &c. and am now copying out a Fifth Canto of Don Juan, 149 stanzas. So that there will be near three thin Albemarle, or two thick volumes of all sorts of my Muses. I mean to plunge thick, too, into the contest upon Pope, and to lay about me like a dragon till I make manure of * * * for the top of Parnassus.

“Those rogues are right—we do laugh at t’others—eh?—don’t we†?

* The power here meant is that of omitting passages that might be thought objectionable. He afterwards gave me this, as well as every other right, over the whole of the manuscript. † He here alludes to a humorous article, of which I had told him, in Blackwood’s Magazine, where the poets of the day were all grouped together in a variety of fantastic shapes, with “Lord Byron and little Moore laughing behind, as if they would split,” at the rest of the fraternity.

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You shall see—you shall see what things I’ll say, ‘an it pleases Providence to leave us leisure. But in these parts they are all going to war; and there is to be liberty, and a row, and a constitution—when they can get them. But I won’t talk politics—it is low. Let us talk of the Queen, and her bath, and her bottle—that’s the only motley nowadays.

“If there are any acquaintances of mine, salute them. The priests here are trying to persecute me,—but no matter.

“Yours, &c.”

LETTER CCCCII.

TO MR. MOORE.

“Ravenna, Dec. 9th, 1820.

“I open my letter to tell you a fact, which will show the state of this country better than I can. The commandant of the troops is now lying dead in my house. He was shot at a little past eight o’clock, about two hundred paces from my door. I was putting on my great-coat to visit Madame la Contessa G. when I heard the shot. On coming into the hall, I found all my servants on the balcony, exclaiming that a man was murdered. I immediately ran down, calling on Tita (the bravest of them) to follow me. The rest wanted to hinder us from going, as it is the custom for every body here, it seems, to run away from ‘the stricken deer.’

“However, down we ran, and found him lying on his back, almost, if not quite, dead, with five wounds, one in the heart, two in the stomach, one in the finger, and the other in the arm. Some soldiers cocked their guns, and wanted to hinder me from passing. However, we passed, and I found Diego, the adjutant, crying over him like a child—a surgeon, who said nothing of his profession—a priest, sobbing a frightened prayer—and the commandant, all this time, on his back, on the hard, cold pavement, without light or assistance, or any thing around him but confusion and dismay.

“As nobody could, or would, do any thing but howl and pray, and as no one would stir a finger to move him, for fear of consequences, I lost my patience—made my servant and a couple of the mob take up the body—sent off two soldiers to the guard—despatched Diego to the

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Cardinal with the news, and had the commandant carried up stairs into my own quarter. But it was too late, he was gone—not at all disfigured—bled inwardly—not above an ounce or two came out.

“I had him partly stripped—made the surgeon examine him, and examined him myself. He had been shot by cut balls, or slugs. I felt one of the slugs, which had gone through him, all but the skin. Every body conjectures why he was killed, but no one knows how. The gun was found close by him—an old gun, half filed down.

“He only said, ‘O Dio!’ and ‘Gesu!’ two or three times, and appeared to have suffered little. Poor fellow! he was a brave officer, but had made himself much disliked by the people. I knew him personally, and had met him often at conversazioni and elsewhere. My house is full of soldiers, dragoons, doctors, priests, and all kinds of persons,—though I have now cleared it, and clapt sentinels at the doors. Tomorrow the body is to be moved. The town is in the greatest confusion, as you may suppose.

“You are to know that if I had not had the body moved, they would have left him there till morning in the street, for fear of consequences. I would not choose to let even a dog die in such a manner, without succour;—and, as for consequences, I care for none in a duty.

“Yours, &c.

“P.S. The lieutenant on duty by the body is smoking his pipe with great composure.—A queer people this.”

LETTER CCCCIII.

TO MR. MOORE.

“Ravenna, December 25th, 1820.

“You will or ought to have received the packet and letters which I remitted to your address a fortnight ago (or it may be more days), and I shall be glad of an answer, as, in these times and places, packets per post are in some risk of not reaching their destination.

“I have been thinking of a project for you and me, in case we both get to London again, which (if a Neapolitan war don’t suscitate) may be

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calculated as possible for one of us about the spring of 1821. I presume that you, too, will be back by that time, or never; but on that you will give me some index. The project, then, is for you and me to set up jointly a newspaper—nothing more nor less—weekly, or so, with some improvement or modifications upon the plan of the present scoundrels, who degrade that department,—but a newspaper, which we will edite in due form and, nevertheless, with some attention.

“There must always be in it a piece of poesy from one or other of us two, leaving room, however, for such dilettanti rhymers as may be deemed worthy of appearing in the same column; but this must be a sine quâ non; and also as much prose as we can compass. We will take an office—our names not announced, but suspected—and, by the blessing of Providence, give the age some new lights upon policy, poesy, biography, criticism, morality, theology, and all other ism, ality, and ology whatsoever.

“Why, man, if we were to take to this in good earnest, your debts would be paid off in a twelvemonth, and by dint of a little diligence and practice, I doubt not that we could distance the common-place blackguards, who have so long disgraced common sense and the common reader. They have no merit but practice and impudence, both of which we may acquire, and, as for talent and culture, the devil’s in ’t if such proofs as we have given of both can’t furnish out something better than the ‘funeral baked meats’ which have coldly set forth the breakfast table of all Great Britain for so many years. Now, what think you? Let me know; and recollect that, if we take to such an enterprise, we must do so in good earnest. Here is a hint,—do you make it a plan. We will modify it into as literary and classical a concern as you please, only let us put out our powers upon it, and it will most likely succeed. But you must live in London, and I also, to bring it to bear, and we must keep it a secret.

“As for the living in London, I would make that not difficult to you (if you would allow me), until we could see whether one means or other (the success of the plan, for instance) would not make it quite easy for you, as well as your family; and, in any case, we should have some fun, composing, correcting, supposing, inspecting, and supping together over our lucubrations. If you think this worth a thought, let me know,

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and I will begin to lay in a small literary capital of composition for the occasion.

“Yours ever affectionately,

“B.

“P.S. If you thought of a middle plan between a Spectator and a newspaper, why not?—only not on a Sunday. Not that Sunday is not an excellent day, but it is engaged already. We will call it the ‘Tenda Rossa,’ the name Tassoni gave an answer of his in a controversy, in allusion to the delicate hint of Timour the Lame, to his enemies, by a ‘Tenda’ of that colour, before he gave battle. Or we will call it ‘Gli; or ‘I Carbonari,’ if it so please you—or any other name full of ‘pastime and prodigality,’ which you may prefer. * * * * * * Let me have an answer. I conclude poetically, with the bellman, ‘A merry Christmas to you!”

The year 1820 was an era signalized, as will be remembered, by the many efforts of the revolutionary spirit which, at that time, broke forth, like ill-suppressed fire, throughout the greater part of the South of Europe. In Italy, Naples had already raised the Constitutional standard, and her example was fast operating through the whole of that country. Throughout Romagna, secret societies, under the name of Carbonari, had been organized, which waited but the word of their chiefs to break out into open insurrection. We have seen from Lord Byron’s Journal in 1814, what intense interest he took in the last struggles of Revolutionary France under Napoleon; and his exclamations, “Oh for a Republic!—‘Brutus, thou sleepest!’” show the lengths to which, in theory at least, his political zeal extended. Since then, he had but rarely turned his thoughts to politics; the tame, ordinary vicissitude of public affairs having but little in it to stimulate a mind like his, whose sympathies nothing short of a crisis seemed worthy to interest. This the present state of Italy gave every promise of affording him; and, in addition to the great national cause itself, in which there was every thing that a lover of liberty, warm from the pages of Petrarch and Dante, could desire, he had also private ties and regards to inlist him socially in the contest.

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The brother of Madame Guiccioli, Count Pietro Gamba, who had been passing some time at Rome and Naples, was now returned from his tour; and the friendly sentiments with which, notwithstanding a natural bias previously in the contrary direction, he at length learned to regard the noble lover of his sister, cannot better be described than in the words of his fair relative herself.

“At this time,” says Madame Guiccioli, “my beloved brother, Pietro, returned to Ravenna from Rome and Naples. He had been prejudiced by some enemies of Lord Byron against his character, and my intimacy with him afflicted him greatly; nor had my letters succeeded in entirely destroying the evil impression which Lord Byron’s detractors had produced. No sooner, however, had he seen and known him, than he became inspired with an interest in his favour, such as could not have been produced by mere exterior qualities, but was the result only of that union he saw in him of all that is most great and beautiful, as well in the heart as mind of man. From that moment every former prejudice vanished, and the conformity of their opinions and studies contributed to unite them in a friendship, which only ended with their lives*.”

The young Gamba, who was, at this time, but twenty years of age, with a heart full of all those dreams of the regeneration of Italy, which not only the example of Naples, but the spirit working beneath the surface all around him, inspired, had, together with his father, who was still in the prime of life, become inrolled in the secret bands now organizing throughout Romagna, and Lord Byron was, by their intervention, admitted also among the brotherhood. The following heroic

* “In quest’ epoca venne a Ravenna di ritorno da Roma e Napoli il mio diletto fratello Pietro. Egli era stato prevenuto da dei nemici di Lord Byron contro il di lui carattere; molto lo affligeva la mia intimitù con lui, e le mie lettere non avevano riuscito a bene distruggere la cattiva impressione ricevuta dei detrattori di Lord Byron. Ma appena lo vidde e lo conobbi egli pure ricevesse quella impreesione che non può essere prodotta da dei pregi esteriori, ma solamente dall utione di tuttociò che vi è di più bello e di più grande nel cuore e nella mente dell’ uomo. Svanì ogni sua anteriore prevenzione contro di Lord Byron, e la conformità della loro idee e dei studii loro contribui a stringerli in quella amicizia che non doveva avere fine che colla loro vita.”

A. D. 1820.

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Address to the Neapolitan Government (written by the noble poet in Italian*, and forwarded, it is thought, by himself to Naples, but intercepted on the way) will show how deep, how earnest, and expansive was his zeal in that great, general cause of Political Freedom, for which he soon after laid down his life among the marshes of Missolonghi.

“An Englishman, a friend to liberty, having understood that the Neapolitans permit even foreigners to contribute to the good cause, is desirous that they should do him the honour of accepting a thousand louis, which he takes the liberty of offering. Having already, not long since, been an ocular witness of the despotism of the Barbarians in the States occupied by them in Italy, he sees, with the enthusiasm natural to a cultivated man, the generous determination of the Neapolitans to assert their well-won independence. As a member of the English House of Peers, he would be a traitor to the principles which placed the reigning family of England on the throne, if he were not grateful for the noble lesson so lately given both to people and to kings. The offer which he desires to make is small in itself, as must always be that presented from an individual to a nation; but he trusts that it will not be the last they will receive from his countrymen. His distance from the frontier, and the feeling of his personal incapacity to contribute efficaciously to the service of the nation, prevents him from proposing himself as worthy of the lowest commission, for which experience and talent might be requisite. But if, as a mere volunteer, his presence were not a burden to whomsoever he might serve under, he would repair to whatever place the Neapolitan Government might point out, there to obey the orders and participate in the dangers of his commanding officer, without any other motive than that of sharing the destiny of a brave nation, defending itself against the

* A draft of this Address, in his own handwriting, was found among his papers. He is supposed to have intrusted it to a professed agent of the Constitutional Government of Naples, who had waited upon him secretly at Ravenna, and, under the pretence of having been waylaid and robbed, induced his lordship to supply him with money for his return. This man turned out afterwards to have been a spy, and the above paper, if confided to him, fell most probably into the hands of the Pontifical Government.

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self-called Holy Alliance, which but combines the vice of hypocrisy with despotism*.”

It was during the agitation of this crisis, while surrounded by rumours and alarms, and expecting, every moment, to be summoned into the field, that Lord Byron commenced the Journal which I am now about to give; and which it is impossible to peruse, with the recollection of his former Diary of 1814 in our minds, without reflecting how wholly different, in all the circumstances connected with them, were the two periods at which these records of his passing thoughts were traced. The first he wrote at a time which may be considered, to use his own words, as “the most poetical part of his whole life,”—not, certainly, in what regarded the powers of his genius, to which every succeeding year added new force and range, but in all that may be said to constitute the poetry of character,—those fresh, unworldly feelings, of which, in spite of his early plunge into experience, he still retained the gloss, and that ennobling light of imagination, which, with all his professed scorn of mankind, still followed in the track of his affections, giving a lustre to every object on which they rested. There was, indeed, in his misanthropy, as in his sorrows, at that period, to the full as much of fancy as of reality; and even those gallantries and loves in which he at the same

* “Un Inglese amico della libertà avendo sentito che i Napolitani permettono anche agli stranieri di oontribuire alla buona causa, bramerebbe l’onore di vedere accetteta la sua offerta di mille luigi, la quale egli azzarda di fare. Già testimonio oculare non molto fa della tirannia dei Barbari negli stati da loro occupati nell’ Italia, egli vede con tutto l’entusiasmo di un uomo ben nato la generosa determinazione del Napolitani per confermare la loro bene acquistata indipendenza. Membro della Camera del Pari della nazione Inglese egli sarebbe un traditore ai principii che hanno posto sul trono la famiglia regnante d’ Inghilterra se non riconoscesse la bella lezione di bel nuovo data ai popoli ed ai Re. L’ offerta che egli brama di presentare è poca in se stessa, come bisogna che sia sempre quella di un individuo ad una nazione, ma egli spera che non sarà l’ultima dalla parte dei suoi compatriotti. La sua lontananza dalle frontiere, e il sentimento della sua poca capacità personale di contribuire efficacimente a servire la nazione gl’ impedisce di proporsi come degno della più piccola commissione che domanda dell’ esperienza e del talento. Ma, se come semplice volontario la sua presenza non fosse un incomodo a quello che l’accetasse egli riparebbe a qualunque luogo indicato dal Governo Napolitano, per ubbidire agli ordini e participare ai pericoli del suo superiore, senza avere altri motivi che quello di dividere il destino di una brava nazione resistendo alla se dicente Santa Allianza la quale agguinge l’ ippocrisia al despotismo.”

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time entangled himself, partook equally, as I have endeavoured to show, of the same imaginative character. Though brought early under the dominion of the senses, he had been also early rescued from this thraldom by, in the first place, the satiety such excesses never fail to produce, and, at no long interval after, by this series of half-fanciful attachments which, though in their moral consequences to society, perhaps, still more mischievous, had the varnish at least of refinement on the surface, and by the novelty and apparent difficulty that invested them served to keep alive that illusion of imagination from which such pursuits derive their sole redeeming charm.

With such a mixture, or rather predominance, of the ideal in his loves, his hates, and his sorrows, the state of his existence at that period, animated as it was, and kept buoyant, by such a flow of success, must be acknowledged, even with every deduction for the unpicturesque associations of a London life, to have been, in a high degree, poetical, and to have worn round it altogether a sort of halo of romance, which the events that followed were but too much calculated to dissipate. By his marriage, and its results, he was again brought back to some of those bitter realities of which his youth had had a foretaste. Pecuniary embarrassment,—that ordeal, of all others, the most trying to delicacy and high-mindedness—now beset him with all the indignities that usually follow in its train; and he was thus rudely schooled into the advantages of possessing money, when he had hitherto thought but of the generous pleasure of dispensing it. No stronger proof, indeed, is wanting of the effect of such difficulties in tempering down even the most chivalrous pride, than the necessity to which he found himself reduced in 1816, not only of departing from his resolution never to profit by the sale of his works, but of accepting a sum of money, for copyright, from his publisher, which he had for some time persisted in refusing for himself, and, in the full sincerity of his generous heart, had destined for others.

The injustice and malice to which he soon after became a victim had an equally fatal effect in disenchanting the dream of his existence. Those imaginary, or, at least, retrospective sorrows, in which he had once loved to indulge, and whose tendency it was, through the medium of his fancy, to soften and refine his heart, were now exchanged for

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a host of actual, ignoble vexations, which it was even more humiliating than painful to encounter. His misanthropy, instead of being, as heretofore, a vague and abstract feeling, without any object to light upon, and losing therefore its acrimony in diffusion, was now, by the hostility he came in contact with, condensed into individual enmities, and narrowed into personal resentments; and from the lofty, and, as it appeared to himself, philosophical luxury of hating mankind in the gross, he was now brought down to the self-humbling necessity of despising them in detail.

By all these influences, so fatal to enthusiasm of character, and forming, most of them, indeed, a part of the ordinary process by which hearts become chilled and hardened in the world, it was impossible but that some material change must have been effected in a disposition at once so susceptible and tenacious of impressions. By compelling him to concentre himself in his own resources and energies, as the only stand now left against the world’s injustice, his enemies but succeeded in giving to the principle of self-dependence within him a new force and spring which, however it added to the vigour of his character, could not fail, by bringing Self into such activity, to impair a little its amiableness. Among the changes in his disposition, attributable mainly to this source, may be mentioned that diminished deference to the opinions and feelings of others which, after this compulsory rally of all his powers of resistance, he exhibited. Some portion, no doubt, of this refractoriness may be accounted for by his absence from all those whose slightest word or look would have done more with him than whole volumes of correspondence; but by no cause less powerful and revulsive than the struggle in which he had been committed could a disposition naturally diffident as his was, and diffident even through all this excitement, have been driven into the assumption of a tone so universally defying, and so full, if not of pride in his own pre-eminent powers, of such a contempt for some of the ablest among his contemporaries, as almost implied it. It was, in fact, as has been more than once remarked in these pages, a similar stirring up of all the best and worst elements of his nature, to that which a like rebound against injustice had produced in his youth:—though with a difference, in point of force and grandeur, between the

A. D. 1820.

LIFE OF LORD BYRON.

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two explosions, almost as great as between the out-breaks of a firework and a volcano.

Another consequence of the spirit of defiance now roused in him, and one that tended, perhaps, even more fatally than any yet mentioned, to sully and, for a time, bring down to earth the romance of his character, was the course of life to which, outrunning even the licence of his youth, he abandoned himself at Venice. From this, as from his earlier excesses, the timely warning of disgust soon rescued him; and the connexion with Madame Guiccioli which followed, and which, however much to be reprehended, had in it all of marriage that his real marriage wanted, seemed to place, at length, within reach of his affectionate spirit that union and sympathy for which, through life, it had thirsted. But the treasure came too late;—the pure poetry of the feeling had vanished, and those tears he shed so passionately in the garden at Bologna flowed less, perhaps, from the love which he felt at that moment, than from the saddening consciousness, how differently he could have felt formerly. It was, indeed, wholly beyond the power, even of an imagination like his, to go on investing with its own ideal glories a sentiment which,—more from daring and vanity than from an other impulse,—he had taken such pains to tarnish and debase in his own eyes. Accordingly, instead of being able, as once, to elevate and embellish all that interested him, to make an idol of every passing creature of his fancy, and mistake the form of love, which he so often conjured up, for its substance, he now degenerated into the wholly opposite and perverse error of depreciating and making light of what, intrinsically, he valued, and, as the reader has seen, throwing slight and mockery upon a tie in which it was evident some of the best feelings of his nature were wrapped up. That foe to all enthusiasm and romance, the habit of ridicule, had, in proportion as he exchanged the illusions for the realities of life, gained further empire over him; and how far it had, at this time, encroached upon the loftier and fairer regions of his mind may be seen in the pages of Don Juan,—that diversified arena, on which the two Genii, good and evil, that governed his thoughts, hold, with alternate triumph, their ever powerful combat.

Even this, too, this vein of mockery,—in the excess to which, at

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last, be carried it,—was but another result of the shock his proud mind had received from those events that had cast him off, branded and heart-stricken, from country and from home. As he himself touchingly says,

“And if I laugh at any mortal thing, ’Tis that I may not weep.”

This laughter,—which, in such temperaments, is the near neighbour of tears,—served as a diversion to him from more painful vents of bitterness; and the same philosophical calculation which made the poet of melancholy, Young, declare, that “he preferred laughing at the world to being angry with it,” led Lord Byron also to settle upon the same conclusion; and to feel, in the misanthropic views he was inclined to take of mankind, that mirth often saved him the pain of hate.

That, with so many drawbacks upon all generous effusions of sentiment, he should still have preserved so much of his native tenderness and ardour as is conspicuous, through all disguises, in his unquestionable love for Madame Guiccioli, and in the still more undoubted zeal with which he now entered, heart and soul, into the great cause of human freedom, wheresoever, or by whomsoever, asserted*,—only shows how rich must have been the original stores of sensibility and enthusiasm which even a career such as his could so little chill or exhaust. Most consoling, too, is it to reflect that the few latter years of his life should have been thus visited with a return of that poetic lustre, which, though it never had ceased to surround the bard, had but too much faded away from the character of the man; and that while Love,—reprehensible as it was,

* Among his “Detached Thoughts” I find this general passion for liberty thus strikingly expressed. After saying, in reference to his own choice of Venice as a place of residence, “I remembered General Ludlow’s domal inscription, ‘Omne solum forti patria,’ and sate down free in a country which had been one of slavery for centuries,” he adds, “But there is no freedom, even for masters, in the midst of slaves. It makes my blood boil to see the thing. I sometimes wish that I was the owner of Africa to do at once what Wilberforce will do in time, viz., sweep slavery from her deserts, and look on upon the first dance of their freedom. “As to political slavery, so general, it is men’s own fault: if they will be slaves. let them! Yet it is but ‘a word and a blow.’ See how England formerly, France, Spain, Portugal, America, Switzerland, freed themselves! There is no one instance of a long contest in which men did not triumph over systems. If Tyranny misses her first spring, he is cowardly the tiger, and retires to be hunted.”

A. D. 1820.

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but still Love,—had the credit of rescuing him from the only errors that disgraced his maturer years, for Liberty was reserved the proud, but mournful, triumph of calling the last stage of his glorious course her own, and lighting him, amidst the sympathies of the world, to his grave.

Having endeavoured, in this comparison between his present and former self, to account, by what I consider to be their true causes, for the new phenomena which his character, at this period, exhibited, I shall now lay before the reader the Journal by which these remarks were more immediately suggested, and from which I fear they will be thought to have too long detained him.

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Aelian (175 c.-235 c.) Greek rhetorician who taught at Rome.

Aeschylus (525 BC c.-456 BC c.) Greek tragic poet, author of Oresteia and Prometheus Bound.

Agis IV, king of Sparta (265 c.-241 BC) King of Sparta who succeeded his father in 245 BC.

Francesco Aglietti (1757-1836) Venetian physician and man of letters; he edited the Opere of Algarotti (Venice, 1791-94).

Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803) Italian tragic poet, author of Saul (1782), Antigone (1783), and Maria Stuart (1804); he was the consort of Louisa, (Jacobite) countess of Albany.

Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764) Italian poet and man of letters; author of Neutonianismo per le dame (1737).

Anacreon (582 BC.-485 BC) Greek lyric poet of whose writings little survives; anacreontic verse celebrates love and wine.

Henry Charles William Angelo (1756-1835) Fencing master, author of The School of Fencing (1787) and Reminiscences (1830). Educated at Eton, Angelo was on familiar terms with many persons of fashion in London, including Byron.

Anne, queen of Great Britain (1665-1714) Queen of England (1702-1714) and of Great Britain following the Union of 1707.

Christopher Anstey (1724-1805) English poet; author of the popular burlesque poem, The New Bath Guide (1766).

Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) Italian poet, author of the epic romance Orlando Furioso (1532).

Aristides [the Just] (530 c.-468 BC) Athenian statesman who apportioned the contributions to the Delian League.

Aristophanes (445 BC c.-385 BC c.) Greek comic poet, the author of eleven surviving plays including The Clouds, Lysistrata, and The Frogs.

Francis Bacon, first baron Verulam and viscount St Albans (1561-1626) English Jurist and philosopher; author of Essays (1597, 1625), The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum Organum (1620).

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).

James Beattie (1735-1803) Scottish poet and professor of moral philosophy and logic at Marischal College, author of Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770), and The Minstrel (1771, 1774).

Countess Marina Querini Benzon [née Chiara] (1757-1839) Venetian hostess at whose conversazione Byron met Terese Guiccioli.

Charles-Ferdinand de Bourbon, duc de Berry, duc de Berry (1778-1820) The younger son of Charles X of France; he was assassinated 13 February 1820 by Pierre-Louis Louvel, a saddler.

Benjamin Blake (d. 1820) A London perfumer.

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).

Markos Botsaris [Μαρκος Βοτσαρις] (1790-1823) Greek leader in the War of Independence who died heroically at the Battle of Karpenisi. He was the brother of Kostas (Constantine) Botzaries.

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.

Henry Boyd (1749-1832) Irish poet and translator, author of A Translation of the Inferno of Dante in English Verse, 2 vols (1785).

Count Bozzi (1820 fl.) Not identified; an acquaintance of Byron in Ravenna.

William Drake Brockman (1788-1847) Lord Byron's classmate at Harrow and teammate at cricket; after education at Queen's College, Cambridge he was curate of Sellinge before succeeding his father James Drake Brockman in the Beechborough estate in 1832.

Buffini (1820 fl.) Byron speaks of “Buffo Buffini of the Gran Bretagna”—a hotelier.

Ada King, countess of Lovelace [née Byron] (1815-1852) Byron's daughter by Lady Byron; in 1835 she married William King, eighth Baron King of Ockham (1805-1893), afterwards earl of Lovelace.

Allegra Byron (1817-1822) Byron's illegitimate daughter by Claire Clairmont.

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.

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).

Queen Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1768-1821) Married the Prince of Wales in 1795 and separated in 1796; her husband instituted unsuccessful divorce proceedings in 1820 when she refused to surrender her rights as queen.

Henry Francis Cary (1772-1844) English poet; he was assistant-keeper of printed books at the British Museum (1826) and translator of Dante (1805-19).

Castelli (1820 fl.) Not identified; Byron speaks of him in a letter to Hoppner; a Venetian lawyer perhaps.

Marchese Antonio Cavalli (1820 fl.) Antonio and Clelia Cavalli were relatives of Terese Guiccioli.

Susanna Centlivre (1669 c.-1723) English actress, playwright, and friend of Nicholas Rowe and Richard Steele; she wrote The Gamester (1705).

Emperor Charlemagne (742-814) King of the Franks and Emperor of the West who built his palace school at Aachen.

Charles Churchill (1732-1764) English satirist and libertine, a schoolmate of William Cowper; his brief but brilliant career began with the publication of The Rosciad (1761).

William Cobbett [Peter Porcupine] (1763-1835) English journalist and populist social critic; author of Rural Rides (1829).

Margarita Cogni [The Fornarina] (1819 fl.) A baker's wife, she was the most formidable of Byron's Venetian mistresses.

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.

William Congreve (1670-1729) English comic dramatist; author of, among others, The Double Dealer (1694), Love for Love (1695), and The Way of the World (1700).

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).

John Wilson Croker (1780-1857) Secretary of the Admiralty (1810) and writer for the Quarterly Review; he edited an elaborate edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson (1831).

George Croly (1780-1860) Anglo-Irish poet, novelist, and essayist for Blackwood's; his gothic novel Salathiel (1828) was often reprinted.

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.

Andrea Dandolo (1306-1354) He was elected doge of Venice in 1343.

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

Pierre Antoine Noël Bruno, comte Daru (1767-1829) French historian; author of Histoire de la république de Venise, 7 vols (1819).

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) English physician and philosophical poet, the author of The Loves of the Plants (1789); his interests in botany and evolution anticipated those of his more famous grandson.

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.

Sir Humphry Davy, baronet (1778-1829) English chemist and physicist, inventor of the safety lamp; in Bristol he knew Cottle, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; he was president of the Royal Society (1820).

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) French man of letters, editor of the Encyclopédie (1747-72).

John Dryden (1631-1700) English poet laureate, dramatist, and critic; author of Of Dramatick Poesie (1667), Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Alexander's Feast; or the Power of Musique (1697), The Works of Virgil translated into English Verse (1697), and Fables (1700).

Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533-1603) Queen of England 1558-1603.

Quintus Ennius (239 BC-169 BC) Early Roman poet whose works survive only in fragments.

Epicurus (341 BC-270 BC) Greek philosopher who defined the object of his science as the pursuit of happiness.

Euripides (480 BC c.-406 BC) Greek tragic poet; author of Medea, Alcestis, the Bacchae, and other plays.

Giovanni Battista Falcieri [Tita] (1798-1874) Byron's gondolier and afterwards his valet. He became a servant of Isaac D'Israeli (1832).

Marino Faliero (1285-1355) Doge of Venice 1354-55; he was executed after joining in a plot against the patricians of the city.

William Thomas Fitzgerald (1759-1829) A clerk in the Navy Office who for three decades supplied the newspapers and magazines with patriotic effusions, many first performed orally at Literary Fund banquets.

Henry Fitzroy, fifth duke of Grafton (1790-1863) Son of the fourth duke (d. 1844) and Byron's schoolmate at Harrow; he was Whig MP for Bury St. Edmunds (1826-1831) and for Thetford (1834-1842).

Joseph Forsyth (1763-1815) Scottish schoolmaster who spent much of the Napoleonic era exiled or imprisoned in France; he wrote Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters, during an Excursion in Italy (1813).

Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827) Italian poet and critic who settled in London in 1816 where he contributed essays on Italian literature to the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews.

Eliza Francis (1815 fl.) Poet and imitator of Sir Walter Scott; author of The Rival Roses, or, Wars of York and Lancaster: a Metrical Tale (1813) and Sir Wilibert de Waverley, or, the Bridal Eve (1815).

Frederick II of Prussia (1712-1786) King of Prussia (1740-86) and military commander in the War of the Austrian Succession and Seven Years War.

John Hookham Frere (1769-1846) English diplomat and poet; educated at Eton and Cambridge, he was envoy to Lisbon (1800-02) and Madrid (1802-04, 1808-09); with Canning conducted the The Anti-Jacobin (1797-98); author of Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft (1817, 1818).

Sophie Gail (1775-1819) French composer and writer whose most successful work was the opera Les Deux Jaloux (1813).

Giovanni Antonio Galignani (1757-1821) Bookseller and from 1814 publisher of Galignani's Messenger, an English newspaper issued from Paris.

Pietro Gamba (1801-1827) The brother of Teresa Guiccioli and member of Carbonieri. He followed Byron to Greece and left a memoir of his experiences.

Count Ruggiero Gamba Ghiselli (d. 1846) The father of Teresa Guiccioli and member of the political resistance to Austrian rule in the Romagna.

Charles John Gardiner, first earl of Blessington (1782-1829) The son of Luke Gardiner, first Viscount Mountjoy, educated at Eton. After a second marriage to Lady Blessington in 1818 he traveled on the Continent with his wife and Count D'Orsay, residing in Naples and Paris.

Marie Françoise Sophie Gay (1776-1852) French novelist and musician who published a memoir, Souvenirs d'une vielle fille (1834). She was the mother of Delphine Gay de Girardin.

King George III of Great Britain (1738-1820) King of Great Britain (1760-1820).

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).

Pierre-Louis Ginguené (1748-1815) French poet and critic, editor of the Correspondence of Mirabeau and Chamfort (1797).

Delphine de Girardin (1804-1855) French poet and novelist, the daughter of Sophie Gay and wife of Emile de Girardin (1806-1881).

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) German poet, playwright, and novelist; author of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Faust (1808, 1832).

Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) Italian playwright; author of Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de sa vie (1787).

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).

Sir John Gordon of Ogilvy (d. 1562) The son of George Gordon, fourth earl of Huntly; he was hanged at Aberdeen three days after the battle of Corrichie.

James Graham, first marquess of Montrose (1612-1650) Scottish Cavalier, famed for his exploits as lieutenant-general in Scotland (1644-1645).

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).

Frédéric Melchior, baron de Grimm (1723-1807) German-born man of letters; friend of Diderot and editor of Correspondance littéraire et philosophique.

Alessandro Guiccioli (1761-1840) The richest man in the Romagna and patron of the arts, who in 1818 married Teresa Guiccioli as his third wife.

Teresa Guiccioli (1800-1873) Byron's lover, who in 1818 married Alessandro Guiccioli. She composed a memoir of Byron, Lord Byron, Jugé par les Témoines de sa Vie (1868).

Jane Elizabeth Harley, countess of Oxford [née Scott] (1774-1824) The daughter of James Scott, vicar of Itchin; in 1794 she married Edward Harley, fifth Earl of Oxford. Her children by various fathers were dubbed “The Harleian Miscellany.”

William Hayley (1745-1820) English poet, patron of George Romney, William Cowper, and William Blake. His best-known poem, Triumphs of Temper (1781) was several times reprinted. Robert Southey said of him, “everything about that man is good except his poetry.”

Reginald Heber, bishop of Calcutta (1783-1826) English poet and Bishop of Calcutta, author of Palestine: a Prize Poem (1807) and the hymn “From Greenland's Icy Mountains.” He was the half-brother of the book-collector Richard Heber.

Felicia Dorothea Hemans [née Browne] (1793-1835) English poet; author of Tales, and Historic Scenes (1819), Records of Woman (1828), and other volumes. She was much in demand as a contributor to the literary annuals.

Hon. William Herbert (1778-1847) English poet, naturalist, MP, and clergyman; he was the son of Henry Herbert, first earl of Carnarvon and the author of Select Icelandic Poetry, translated from the Originals (1804, 1806).

John Hervey, second baron Hervey [Lord Fanny] (1696-1743) Courtier, wit, and friend of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who was pilloried by Pope and returned the favor. He Memoirs were published in 1848.

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).

Hoby (1820 fl.) Hoby of St. James's Street, boot-maker to the Duke of Wellington and other fashionable people.

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).

James Hogg [The Ettrick Shepherd] (1770-1835) Scottish autodidact, poet, and novelist; author of The Queen's Wake (1813) and Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).

Margaret Hodson [née Holford] (1778-1852) English poet popular in the interval between Anna Seward and Felicia Hemans; she published Wallace, or, The Fight of Falkirk (1809) and Margaret of Anjou (1816). She married Septimus Hodson in 1826.

Homer (850 BC fl.) Poet of the Iliad and Odyssey.

Marie Isabelle Hoppner [née May] (d. 1870) The daughter of Beat Lois May, seigneur d'Oron et de Brandis of Bern, Switzerland; in 1814 she married Richard Belgrave Hoppner.

Richard Belgrave Hoppner (1786-1872) The son of John Hoppner, R.A. (1758-1810) and likewise a painter; he was English consul at Venice (1814-25). He married Marie Isabella May, of Bern, in 1814.

Horace (65 BC-8 BC) Roman lyric poet; author of Odes, Epistles, Satires, and the Ars Poetica.

Washington Irving [Geoffrey Crayon] (1783-1859) American writer living in England in 1815, where he made his reputation with The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1820).

Edward Jerningham (1737-1812) English poet in the mode of high sensibility whose popularity rivaled that of William Hayley; author of The Nunnery, an Elegy (1762).

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).

Ben Jonson (1572-1637) English dramatist, critic, and epigrammatist, friend of William Shakespeare and John Donne.

Edmund Kean (1787-1833) English tragic actor famous for his Shakespearean roles.

John Keats (1795-1821) English poet, author of Endymion, "The Eve of St. Agnes," and other poems, who died of tuberculosis in Rome.

Douglas James William Kinnaird (1788-1830) Whig MP (1819-20) and banker; he introduced Byron to Isaac Nathan and managed Byron's finances.

Henry Gally Knight (1786-1846) Poet, traveler, and architectural historian; after study at Eton was at Trinity College with Byron; published oriental tales; notable among his later publications is The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Italy from Constantine to the 15th Century, 2 vols (1842-44). He was a friend of Samuel Rogers.

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) French poet, politician, and historian; he published Nouvelles méditations poétiques (1820) and Histoire des Girondins (1847).

Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713-1769) French historian; author of Histoire de la république de Venise (1758).

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.

Michele Leoni (1776-1858) Italian translator; in addition to Byron he translated Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Ossian.

Matthew Gregory Lewis [Monk Lewis] (1775-1818) English poet and novelist; author of The Monk: a Romance (1796), Castle Spectre (1797), and Tales of Wonder (1800).

Thomas Norton Longman (1771-1842) A leading London publisher whose authors included Southey, Wordsworth, Scott, and Moore.

Marquess Loratelli (1820 fl.) Not identified; an acquaintance of Byron in Ravenna.

Louis-Pierre Louvel (1783-1820) The French saddler who assassinated the Duc de Berry.

Lucretius (99 BC.-55 BC c.) Roman poet, author of the verse treatise De rerum natura.

Edmund Ludlow (1617-1692) Parliamentary officer and one of the regicide judges who condemned Charles I; he later fled to Switzerland where he died at Vevey. His Memoirs were published 1698-99.

Miss Mahoney (1820 fl.) Not identified; an Irishwoman resident in Paris. Thomas Moore describes his visits to her in his journal for 28 May 1820.

Joseph Manton (1766-1835) Renowned English gun-maker at his shop at 25 Davies Street, Berkeley Square, London. His shooting gallery was on the same premises as John Jackson's boxing club.

Giovanbattista Marino (1569-1625) Italian poet celebrated (and condemned) for the mannered wit and pathos of his verses; author of Rime, 2 vols (1602).

Queen Mary of Scotland (1542-1587) The controversial queen of Scotland (1561-1567) who found a number of champions in the romantic era; Sir Walter Scott treats her sympathetically in The Abbott (1820).

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).

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

Henry Matthews (1789-1828) Brother of Charles Skinner Matthews; he was Byron's Cambridge friend, member of King's College, and author of The Diary of an Invalid (1820), afterwards a judge in Ceylon.

John Herman Merivale (1779-1844) English poet and translator, friend of Francis Hodgson, author of Orlando in Ronscevalles: a Poem (1814). He married Louisa Drury, daughter of the headmaster at Harrow, and wrote for the Monthly Review while pursuing a career in the law.

Robert Merry [Della Crusca] (1755-1798) Della Cruscan poet and playwright who contributed to The Florence Miscellany (1785) and to The World; author of Diversity: a Poem by Della Crusca (1788) and The Pains of Memory (1796).

Hon. Judith Milbanke [née Noel] (1751-1822) The eldest daughter of the first Viscount Wentworth and mother of Annabella, Lady Byron.

Robert Pemberton Milnes (1784-1858) Fellow-commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge who took his degree before Byron arrived; he was MP for Pontefract (1806-18), friend of Theodore Hook, and the father of Richard Monckton Milnes.

John Milton (1608-1674) English poet and controversialist; author of Comus (1634), Lycidas (1638), Areopagitica (1644), Paradise Lost (1667), and other works.

Giovanni Battista Missiaglia (1838 fl.) Bookseller and proprietor of the Apollo Library in Venice.

Thomas Mitchell (1783-1845) Son of a riding master; after study at Christ's Hospital and Pembroke College, Cambridge; Mitchell worked as a tutor for Thomas Hope, wrote for the Examiner and Quarterly Review, and translated Aristophanes.

Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855) English poet, playwright, and essayist; author of Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery (1824, etc.).

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 Moore (1729-1802) Scottish physician and writer; author of the novel Zeluco: various Views of Human Nature, taken from Life and Manners, 2 vols (1786).

Thomas Moore (1779-1852) Irish poet and biographer, author of the Irish Melodies (1807-34), The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), and Lalla Rookh (1817); he was Byron's close friend and designated biographer.

Lady Sydney Morgan [née Owenson] (1778 c.-1859) Anglo-Irish novelist and socialite, author of The Wild Irish Girl (1806).

Count Mosti (1819 fl.) Not identified; of Ferrara, where Byron visited in 1819.

Thomas Samuel Mulock (1789-1869) Born in Dublin, was secretary to George Canning and a satirical writer for The Sun; he became a Baptist minister; his daughter Dinah Maria was a well-known writer.

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.

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).

Andrea Navagero (1483-1529) Italian humanist, poet, and historian.

Guido Novello da Polenta (d. 1330) Italian poet and friend of Dante; he was lord of Ravenna from 1316 until 1322.

Thomas Otway (1652-1685) English tragic poet; author of The Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserved (1682).

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) English-born political radical; author of Common Sense (1776), The Rights of Man (1791), and The Age of Reason (1794).

St Paul (5 c.-67 c.) Apostle to the Gentiles.

Pausanias (d. 470 BC c.) Regent of Sparta who commanded the Greek forces at the battle of Platea afterwards accused of treasonable negotiations with the Persians.

Sir Robert Peel, second baronet (1788-1850) Byron's schoolmate at Harrow, afterwards prime minister from 1834-1835 and 1841-1846.

James Perry (1756-1821) Whig journalist; founder and editor of the European Magazine (1782), editor of the Morning Chronicle (1790-1821).

Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) Lyric poet and founder of humanism in Italy.

Luigi dal Pinto (d. 1820) The military commandant of Ravenna who was assassinated outside the Palazzo Guiccioli on December 9th.

William Pitt the younger (1759-1806) The second son of William Pitt, earl of Chatham (1708-1778); he was Tory prime minister 1783-1801.

Plautus (254 BC c.-184 BC) Roman comic dramatist, author of Amphitruo, Menaechmi, Miles gloriosus, and other plays.

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

François Pouqueville (1770-1838) Napoleon's general consul at the court of Ali Pasha; the author of Voyage en Grèce, 5 vols, (1820-1822).

Humphrey Prideaux (1648-1724) Dean of Norwich; author of a Life of Mahomet (1697) and works of ecclesiastical history.

Bryan Waller Procter [Barry Cornwall] (1787-1874) English poet; a contemporary of Byron at Harrow, and friend of Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb. He was the author of several volumes of poem and Mirandola, a tragedy (1821).

Luigi Pulci (1432-1484) Italian poet patronized by the Medici family; author of the Il Morgante (1483).

Count Gabriel Rasponi (1820 fl.) Not identified; the Rasponis were friends of the Gamba family in Ravenna.

Cardinal Jean François Paul de Gondi de Retz (1613-1679) French cleric and statesman whose flamboyant Mémoires were published in 1717.

George Richards (1767-1837) English poet and clergyman who gained much attention with his Oxford prize-poem The Aboriginal Britons (1791).

Iakovos Rizos [Ιακοβος Ριζος] (1778-1849) Greek historian; author of Histoire moderne de la Grèce depuis la chute de l'empire d'Orient (1828).

William Roberts (1767-1849) Educated at Eton, St. Paul's School, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he was a Tory lawyer, editor of the British Review (1811-22), and biographer of Hannah More.

William Robertson (1721-1793) Educated at Edinburgh University of which he became principal (1762), he was a highly-regarded historian, the author of History of Scotland in the Reign of Queen Mary and of King James VI (1759) and The History of the Reign of Charles V (1769).

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).

Sir Samuel Romilly (1757-1818) Reformer of the penal code and the author of Thoughts on Executive Justice (1786); he was a Whig MP and Solicitor-General who died a suicide.

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).

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).

Ruppsecht (1820 fl.) A man who mailed Byron clippings from German periodicals.

Cardinal Antonio Lamberto Rusconi (1743-1825) Bishop of Imola and cardinal legate of the Romagna 1819-24.

Francis Russell, seventh duke of Bedford (1788-1861) Son of the sixth Duke (d. 1839); he took an MA from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1808 and served as Whig MP for Peterborough between 1809 and 1812 and for Bedfordshire between 1812 and 1832. He succeeded to the title in 1833.

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

Vettor Sandi (1703-1784) Italian historian; author of Principi di storia civile della repubblica di Venezia dalla sua fondazione sino all' anno di n. s. 1700, 3 vols (1755-56).

Marin Sanudo the younger (1466-1536) Venetian humanist; author of Vite de Dogi ab origine urbis (1733).

Sappho (612 BC c.-570 BC c.) Greek lyric poet, born on the Isle of Lesbos.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845) German scholar, critic, and translator of Shakespeare.

Alexander Scott (1819 fl.) Friend of Byron and Richard Belgrave Hoppner; he was a native of Scotland resident in Venice.

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

Seneca (4 BC c.-65) Roman statesman, philosopher, and tragic playwright, advisor to Nero and author of Medea, Troades, and Phaedra.

Sennacherib (d. 681 BC) King of Assyria (705-681 BC) who built a palace at Nineveh.

Tommaso Sgricci (1789-1836) Italian improvisatore who specialized in verse tragedies.

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

William Shenstone (1714-1763) English poet and landscape gardener; author of The Schoolmistress (1737, 1742) "A Pastoral Ballad" (1743).

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).

Thomas Sheridan the younger (1719-1788) Irish actor and writer on education and elocution; author of, among others, A Course of Lectures on Elocution: together with Two Dissertations on Language (1762). He was the father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Jane Shore [née Lambert] (d. 1527) Mistress of Edward IV who was accused of sorcery by Richard III and forced to do penance as a harlot.

Fanny Silvestrini (1819 fl.) The confidant of Teresa Guiccioli, afterwards spouse of Byron's servant Lega Zambelli.

Léonard Simond de Sismondi (1773-1842) Swiss historian of Italian origin; author of L'Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen-Age (1809-18).

Edward Smedley the younger (1788-1836) English poet who wrote for the British Critic and Quarterly Review; he proposed publishing a Bowdlerized edition of the Faerie Queene.

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) Scottish physician and man of letters; author of the novels Roderick Random (1747) and Humphry Clinker (1771).

Socrates (469 BC-399 BC) Athenian philosopher whose teachings were recorded by Plato and Xenophon.

Sophocles (496 BC c.-406 BC c.) Greek tragic poet; author of Antigone and Oedipus Rex.

William Sotheby (1757-1833) English man of letters; after Harrow he joined the dragoons, married well, and published Poems (1790) and became a prolific poet and translator, prominent in literary society.

Robert Southey (1774-1843) Poet laureate and man of letters whose contemporary reputation depended upon his prose works, among them the Life of Nelson, 2 vols (1813), History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (1823-32) and The Doctor, 7 vols (1834-47).

Edmund Spenser (1552 c.-1599) English poet, author of The Shepheards Calender (1579) and The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596).

Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) French woman of letters; author of the novel Corinne, ou L'Italie (1807) and De l'Allemagne (1811); banned from Paris by Napoleon, she spent her later years living in Germany, Britain, and Switzerland.

Robert Stewart, viscount Castlereagh (1769-1822) British statesman who was foreign secretary (1812-1822). He fought a duel with George Canning in 1809 and died a suicide in 1822.

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).

Torquato Tasso (1554-1595) Italian poet, author of Aminta (1573), a pastoral drama, and Jerusalem Delivered (1580).

Alessandro Tassoni (1565-1635) Italian poet, author of the burlesque La secchia rapita (1622).

Henry John Temple, third viscount Palmerston (1784-1865) After education at Harrow and Edinburgh University he was MP for Newport (1807-11) and Cambridge University (1811-31), foreign minister (1830-41), and prime minister (1855-58, 1859-65).

Terence (193 BC c.-159 BC) Roman comic dramatist, author of Eunuchus, Phormio, and other plays.

Theocritus ( 300 BC c.-260 BC c.) Greek pastoral poet whose Sicilian verse was imitated by Virgil and many later poets.

Arthur Thistlewood (1774-1820) English radical and disciple of Thomas Spence; he was hanged after the exposure of an assassination plot against the British cabinet.

James Thomson (1700-1748) Anglo-Scottish poet and playwright; while his descriptive poem, The Seasons (1726-30), was perhaps the most popular poem of the eighteenth century, the poets tended to admire more his Spenserian burlesque, The Castle of Indolence (1748).

Bertel Thorwaldsen (1770-1844) Danish sculptor who with Canova led the neoclassical school at Rome.

Jacob Tonson (1655-1736) London bookseller and member of the Kit-Kat Club; the elder Tonson published Dryden; his son, also Jacob Tonson (1682-1735), published Pope.

Virgil (70 BC-19 BC) Roman epic poet; author of Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aenead.

Countess (1820 fl.) Not identified; an acquaintance of Byron in Ravenna.

Voltaire (1694-1778) French historian and man of letters; author of, among many other works, The Age of Louis XIV (1751) and Candide (1759).

John Waite (d. 1820) Byron's dentist, who supplied him with the tooth-powders he so often requested from Murray.

Edmund Waller (1606-1687) Poet and politician remembered for the deviousness of his politics, the wealth of his estate, and the smoothness of his verse. His lyrics addressed to Sacharissa were much admired.

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).

George Watson Taylor (1771-1841) Educated at Oxford, he was MP for Newport (1816-21), Seaford (1818-2), East Looe (1820-26), and Devizes (1826-32). He was a writer, art collector, and member of the Roxburghe Club (1822-1841).

Jane Watts [née Waldie] (1793-1826) English painter who studied under Alexander Nasmyth; author of Sketches Descriptive of Italy in 1816-17; with a brief Account of Travels in various Parts of France and Switzerland (1820).

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).

Arthur Wellesley, first duke of Wellington (1769-1852) Soldier and statesman; commander in the Peninsular Campaign (1809-1813), he defeated Napoleon at Waterloo and was prime minister (1828-1830).

Robert Wilks (1665 c.-1732) Irish-born actor and manager of the Haymarket Theater.

John Wilson [Christopher North] (1785-1854) Scottish poet and Tory essayist, the chief writer for the “Noctes Ambrosianae” in Blackwood's Magazine and professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University (1820).

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.

Francis Wrangham (1769-1842) Classical scholar, translator, and book collector; author of A Few Sonnets Attempted from Petrarch in Early Life (1817), dedicated to Byron.

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.

Lega Zambelli (1827 fl.) Count Guiccioli's steward, afterwards steward to Lord Byron; he married Teresa Guiccioli's confidant Fanny Sylvestrini.

Countess Zinnani (1819 fl.) A woman of lax morals attached to a man claiming to be Byron.

The Anti-Jacobin. (1797-1798). A weekly magazine edited by William Gifford with contributions by George Canning, John Hookham Frere, and George Ellis. It was the model for many later satirical periodicals.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. (1817-1980). Begun as the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, Blackwood's assumed the name of its proprietor, William Blackwood after the sixth number. Blackwood was the nominal editor until 1834.

The British Review, and London Critical Journal. (1811-1825). A quarterly publication with a Tory and evangelical bias, edited by William Roberts (1767–1849). Byron mocked it in Don Juan as “My Grandmother's Review.”

The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal. (1802-1929). Founded by Francis Jeffery, Sydney Smith, and Henry Brougham, the Edinburgh Review was for decades a principal organ of Whig opinion in Britain.

Galignani's Messenger. (1814-95). Founded by Giovanni Antonio Galignani; it was a daily paper from 1821. Cyrus Redding was the editor 1815-18; afterwards it was edited by James S. Bowes.

Gazzetta Ticinese. (1799-). A daily paper, possibly that Byron refers to as the “Lugano Gazette.”

The Monthly Review. (1749-1844). The original editor was Ralph Griffiths; he was succeeded by his son George Edward who edited the journal from 1803 to 1825, who was succeeded by Michael Joseph Quin (1825–32).

The Quarterly Review. (1809-1967). Published by John Murray, the Quarterly was instigated by Walter Scott as a Tory rival to the Edinburgh Review. It was edited by William Gifford to 1824, and by John Gibson Lockhart from 1826 to 1853.

The Spectator. (1711-1714). Essays from the Spectator, conducted by Addison and Steele, were collected in five volumes and frequently reprinted.

“Remarks on Don Juan” in Blackwood's Magazine. Vol. 5 (August 1819): 521-22. This review provoked Byron's “Reply to Blackwood's.”

Christopher Anstey (1724-1805) The New Bath Guide: or, Memoirs of the B-r-d Family. In a Series of Poetical Epistles. (London: J. Dodsley, 1766). One of the most popular and frequently imitated of eighteenth-century satires.

Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) Orlando Furioso. (1532). A chivalric epic in forty-six cantos notable for the number of its characters and the complexity of its narrative.

Aristophanes (445 BC c.-385 BC c.) Clouds. (423 BC). A Greek comedy ridiculing Socrates.

James Beattie (1735-1803) The Minstrel; or, the Progress of Genius. A Poem. (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1771, 1774). The Minstrel is Edwin, whose education as a Bard is related in the two cantos completed.

Thomas Brown (1778-1820) The Paradise of Coquettes: a Poem in Nine Parts. (London: John Murray, 1814). By the Edinburgh philosopher of mind.

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) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: Canto the Third. (London: John Murray, 1816). Containing an account of Waterloo and Harold's travels on the Continent.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: Canto the Fourth. (London: John Murray, 1818). Harold's travels in Italy.

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) “Endorsement to the Deed of Separation, in the April of 1816” in Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron. (John Murray, 1830). The epigram, presumably written in 1816, was sent to Thomas Moore in a letter of 1820.

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) “Epigram. Mr. Hoby and the Queen” in Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron. (John Murray, 1830). On the impending royal trial for divorce, sent in a letter to Moore of 31 August 1820.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Epitaph” in Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron. (John Murray, 1830). An epigram sent in a letter to Thomas Moore of 1 January 1820.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Epitaph on Castlereagh” in Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron. (John Murray, 1830). An epigram sent in a letter to Thomas Moore of 1 January 1820; first printed 1832.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Epitaph on Pitt” in Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron. (John Murray, 1830). An epigram sent in a letter to Thomas Moore of 1 January 1820.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Epitaph on Voltaire” in Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron. (John Murray, 1830). Translated by Byron in a letter to Murray of 20 May 1820.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Francesca of Rimini” in Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron. (John Murray, 1830). A translation from the fifth canto of Dante's Inferno.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “From the French” in Morning Chronicle. (15 March 1816). Collected in Byron's Poems (1816).

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Hints from Horace” in The Miscellaneous Works. 2 vols (London: J. Murray, [1831]). Byron's suppressed paraphrase of Horace's Ars Poetica was written in 1811 and posthumously published in 1831.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) Manfred, a Dramatic Poem. (London: J. Murray, 1817). The moody hero mourns the loss of his lover Astarte amid spectacular Alpine scenery.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Marino Faliero” in Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice: An Historical Tragedy, in Five Acts. With Notes. The Prophecy of Dante, a Poem. (London: Murray, 1821). A tale of revenge involving the forty-ninth doge of Venice, who had been elected in 1354.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) Mazeppa: A Poem. (London: John Murray, 1819). A tale of the Cossacks, published with "Venice. An Ode."

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) “Morgante Maggiore” in The Liberal. Vol. 2 No. 4 (1823): 193-249. The first canto of Pulci's poem, translated in 1820.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “On My Wedding Day” in Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron. (John Murray, 1830). An epigram sent in a letter to Thomas Moore of 1 January 1820.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “The Prophecy of Dante, a Poem” in Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice: An Historical Tragedy, in Five Acts. With Notes. The Prophecy of Dante, a Poem. (London: Murray, 1821). A visionary treatment of Italian politics.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Reply to Blackwood's” in Works of Lord Byron with his Letters and Journals. (London: Murray, 1833). Byron sent his response to Blackwood's review of Don Juan to Murray in 1819; Moore published substantial excerpts in his Life of Byron (1830).

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “Stanzas” in John Bull. (28 May 1821). Two quatrains from a letter of 5 November 1820 to Thomas Moore; first published in John Bull.

George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824) “To Penelope, January 2d, 1821” in John Bull. (28 May 1821). Two quatrains from a letter of 5 November 1820 to Thomas Moore; first published in John Bull.

George Canning (1770-1827) “The Loves of the Triangles” in The Anti-Jacobin. (16 April 1798). The famous parody of Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants by George Canning and John Hookham Frere; it originally appeared in the numbers for 16 April, 23 April, and 7 May.

Susanna Centlivre (1669 c.-1723) A Bold Stroke for a Wife: a Comedy. (London: E. Curll, 1714). A play frequently revived.

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) “The Inferno” in The Divine Comedy. (1320 c.). An allegorical description of Hell, the first of the three parts of the Divine Comedy, the others being the “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso.”

John Dryden (1631-1700) Absalom and Achitophel: a Poem. (London: J. T., 1681). A on the political ambitions of Shaftesbury and Monmouth.

John Dryden (1631-1700) Alexander's Feast; or The Power of Musique. An Ode, in honour of St. Cecilia's Day. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1697). Perhaps Dryden's most popular poem, often imitated in eighteenth and nineteenth century political parodies.

John Dryden (1631-1700) Fables Ancient and Modern; translated into Verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, & Chaucer: with Original Poems. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1700). Dryden's last major work.

John Dryden (1631-1700) “Palamon and Arcite” in Fables Ancient and Modern; translated into Verse. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1700). Adapted from Chaucer.

Joseph Forsyth (1763-1815) Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters, during an Excursion in Italy in the Years 1802 and 1803. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813). Several times reprinted.

Niccolò Forteguerri (1674-1735) Ricciardetto. (1738). An Italian burlesque poem on chivalric themes; a partial translation was published by John Herman Merivale in 1820.

Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827) Ricciarda: tragedia. (London: John Murray, 1820).

John Hookham Frere (1769-1846) Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft. 2 vols (London: Murray, 1817-1818). Given its impossible title, Frere's ottava-rima burlesque is sometimes referred to, more conveniently, as “The Monks and the Giants.”

William Gifford (1756-1826) The Baviad, a paraphrastic Imitation of the First Satire of Persius. (London: R. Faulder, 1791). A satirical attack on the literary affectations of the Della Cruscan poets. Later editions were paired with Gifford's Maeviad, a satire on dramatists.

William Gifford (1756-1826) The Mæviad. By the Author of the Baviad. (London: G. Nicol; J. Bell; and W. Richardson, 1796). A satirical attack on the fashionable dramatists of the day, in the manner of Juvenal.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) Faust. Eine Tragödie. (1808, 1832). A closet drama in two parts; Goethe worked on this poem for more than half a century.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) Über Kunst und Altertum. 6 vols (1816-32). A series of volumes edited by Goethe.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) The Sorrows of Young Werther. (1774). A sentimental tale of adulterous love that created a European sensation.

Thomas Gray (1716-1771) An Elegy wrote in a Country Churchyard. (London: R. Dodsley, 1751). The most popular and most frequently imitated poem of the eighteenth century.

Anthony Hamilton (1646 c.-1719) Memoirs of the Life of Count de Grammont: containing, in particular, the amorous Intrigues of the Court of England in the Reign of King Charles II. (London: J. Round, 1713). Translated from the original French; a key was required to identify the various personages mentioned.

William Hayley (1745-1820) The Triumphs of Temper; a Poem. In Six Cantos. (London: J. Dodsley, 1781). Often reprinted into the nineteenth century.

John Cam Hobhouse, baron Broughton (1786-1869) Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold: containing Dissertations on the Ruins of Rome; and an Essay on Italian Literature. (London: Murray, 1818). The dissertation was written by Byron's closet associates, the Essay an unacknowledged work of Ugo Foscolo.

Francis Hodgson (1781-1852) The Friends: a Poem. In Four Books. (London: John Murray, 1818). A sentimental tale in irregular Spenserian stanzas.

James Hogg [The Ettrick Shepherd] (1770-1835) Winter Evening Tales collected among the Cottagers in the South of Scotland. (London: Oliver & Boyd, 1820). In prose.

Homer (850 BC fl.) The Iliad. (800 BC c.). The tale of Troy, generally read in the translation by Alexander Pope.

Thomas Hope (1769-1831) Anastasius: or, Memoirs of a Greek; written at the close of the Eighteenth Century. (London: J. Murray, 1819). A Byronic romance that went into a third edition by 1820.

John Keats (1795-1821) Endymion: a Poetic Romance. (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1818). A pastoral romance whose obscure allegory and overwrought imagery found little sympathy among the critics.

John Keats (1795-1821) “Hyperion, a Fragment” in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems. (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1820). A Miltonic fragment on themes from Greek mythology.

John Keats (1795-1821) “On Sleep and Poetry” in Poems. (London: Ollier, 1817). A poetical manifesto in couplets declaiming against eighteenth-century tastes in poetry.

Henry Luttrell (1768-1851) Advice to Julia, a Letter in Rhyme. (London: John Murray, 1820). A society epic in rhyme.

Henry Matthews (1789-1828) The Diary of an Invalid; being the Journal of a Tour in pursuit of Health in Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and France in the Years 1817, 1818, and 1819. (London: J. Murray, 1820). A second edition was published the same year; by the brother of Charles Skinner Matthews.

John Herman Merivale (1779-1844) The Two First Cantos of Richardetto. (London: John Murray, 1820). Translated from the Italian of Niccolo Forteguerri.

Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868) The Fall of Jerusalem: a Dramatic Poem. (London: J. Murray, 1820).

John Milton (1608-1674) Paradise Lost. A Poem written in Ten Books. (London: 1667). A biblical epic on the fall of man, in blank verse.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852) The Fudge Family in Paris. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818). A collection of satirical verse epistles ridiculing English parvenu abroad.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852) Intercepted Letters: or, the Two Penny Post-bag. To which are added, Trifles reprinted. (London: J. Carr, 1813). A collection of satirical epistles purportedly written by associates of the prince regent and edited by “Thomas Brown the Younger.”

Thomas Moore (1779-1852) A Selection of Irish Melodies. (London: I. Power, 1808). Moore wrote the lyrics to Irish airs arranged by Sir John Stevenson; additional songs were added down to 1834.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852) The Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little, esq. (London: J. Carpenter, 1805). A collection of love-lyrics. The title puns on the stature of “Thomas” Moore.

Thomas Samuel Mulock (1789-1869) The Answer given by the Gospel to the Atheism of all Ages: being Strictures suggested chiefly by the Works, styled theological of the late Thomas Paine. (London: A. A. Paris, 1819). A second edition was published in 1819.

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.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) “Eloisa to Abelard” in The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope. (London: Jacob Tonson and Bernard Lintot, 1717). A heroic epistle that Joseph Warton uncharacteristically admired.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) An Essay on Criticism. (London: W. Lewis, 1711). In the manner and spirit of Horace.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) An Essay on Man. (London: J. Wilford, 1733). In four epistles; the first publication was anonymous.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) Ode for Musick. (London: Bernard Lintott, 1713). Better known as the Ode for St. Ceclila's Day.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) The Rape of the Lock. An Heroi-Comical Poem. (London: Bernard Lintott, 1714). Pope's satire on fashionable manners was frequently brought into evidence in romantic debates over the nature of “true” poetry.

Luigi Pulci (1432-1484) Il Morgante. (1483). A comic romance in which Orlando adopts the giant Morgante as his companion.

John Hamilton Reynolds (1794-1852) The Fancy: a Selection from the Poetical Remains of Peter Corcoran. (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1820). Containing a burlesque of William Wordsworth.

Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) Italy, a Poem. 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1823-1828). In 1828 the poem was revised and expanded into two parts; in 1830 it was elaborately illustrated with engravings after paintings by J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Stothard.

William Stewart Rose (1775-1843) Letters from the North of Italy: addressed to Henry Hallam, esq. 2 vols (London: J. Murray, 1819).

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) The Abbot. 3 vols (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1820). A tale of Mary Queen of Scots; continued from The Monastery.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) The Bridal of Triermain, or, the Vale of St. John: in Three Cantos. (Edinburgh: John Ballantyne, 1813). Anonymous, by Sir Walter Scott.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) Harold the Dauntless: a Poem in Six Cantos. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1817). Anonymous, by Sir Walter Scott.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) Ivanhoe: a Romance. 3 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1820). A tale of the crusades.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) The Monastery: a Romance. 3 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1820). Continued in The Abbot (1820).

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) Tales of my Landlord. (Edinburgh: 1816-31). The four series consist of: The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality (1), The Heart of Mid-lothian (2), The Bride of Lammermoor and Legend of Montrose (3) and Count Robert and Castle Dangerous (4).

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Macbeth. (London: 1623). Shakespeare's comedy was first printed in the first folio.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Romeo and Juliet. (London: 1597). First printed in a 1597 quarto.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) Pizarro; a Tragedy, in Five Acts. (London: James Ridgway, 1799). By August von Kotzebue (1761-1819), adapted by Sheridan.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) The School for Scandal: a Comedy. (London: J. Bew, 1781). The author's most successful comedy.

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. 3 vols (London: W. Johnston, 1771). A comic epistolary novel.

Samuel Solomon (1769-1819) A Guide to Health or, Advice to both Sexes in a variety of Complaints. With an Essay on the Venereal Disease, Gleets, Seminal Weakness; and that destructive Habit called Onanism. (London: for the author, 1796). A frequently reprinted work.

Robert Southey (1774-1843) Joan of Arc: an Epic Poem. (Bristol: Joseph Cottle, 1796). The first of Southey's epics, written with assistance from Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) Corinne, ou L'Italie. (Paris: Garnier, 1800). Recounts the unhappy love of an Italian poetess and a Scottish aristocrat.

Torquato Tasso (1554-1595) Gerusalemme Liberata. (1581). An epic poem set during the First Crusade.

James Thomson (1700-1748) The Castle of Indolence: an Allegorical Poem. Written in imitation of Spenser. (London: A. Millar, 1748). A much-imitated Spenserian burlesque in which the Wizard of Indolence lures victims into his well-appointed country house.

James Thomson (1700-1748) The Seasons. (London: 1726-1730). A cycle of blank verse descriptive poems reprinted throughout the nineteenth century, often in illustrated editions.

Virgil (70 BC-19 BC) Aeneid. (1st cent. BC). Latin epic in twelve books relating the conquest of Italy by the Trojan Aeneas; it was usually read in the English translation by John Dryden (1697).

George Watson Taylor (1771-1841) The Profligate: a Comedy. 2 vols (London: W. Bulmer and W. Nicol, 1820).

Jane Watts [née Waldie] (1793-1826) Sketches Descriptive of Italy in 1816–17; with a brief Account of Travels in various Parts of France and Switzerland. 4 vols (London: J. Murray, 1820). The author declared that she had refused an opportunity to see Lord Byron.

John Wilson [Christopher North] (1785-1854) The City of the Plague, and other Poems. (Edinburgh: A. Constable and Co., 1817). A second edition was published in 1817.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) The Excursion, being a portion of The Recluse, a Poem. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814). A poem in nine books of blank verse.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) “The Pet Lamb, a Pastoral” in Lyrical Ballads with a few other Poems. 2 vols (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800).

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Peter Bell: a Tale in Verse. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819).

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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

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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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