Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
Lord Byron to John Murray, 15 March 1820
“Ravenna, March 14th, 1820.
“Enclosed is Dante’s Prophecy—Vision—or what not*. Where I have left more than one
reading (which I have done often), you may adopt that which Gifford, Frere, Rose, and Hobhouse, and others of your Utican Senate think the best, or least bad. The
preface will explain all that is explicable. These are but the four first cantos: if
approved, I will go on.
“Pray mind in printing; and let some good Italian scholar
correct the Italian quotations.
“Four days ago I was overturned in an open carriage between
the river and a steep bank:—wheels dashed to pieces, slight bruises, narrow escape, and
all that; but no harm done, though coachman, footman, horses, and vehicle, were all
mixed together like macaroni. It was owing to bad driving, as I say; but the coachman
swears to a start on the part of the horses. We went against a post on the verge of a
steep bank, and capsized. I usually go out of the town in a carriage, and meet the
saddle horses at the bridge; it was in going there that we boggled; but I got my ride,
as usual, after the accident. They say here
* There were in this Poem, originally, three lines of remarkable strength and severity,
which, as the Italian poet against whom they were directed was then living, were
omitted in the publication. I shall here give them from memory. “The prostitution of his Muse and wife, Both beautiful, and both by him debased, Shall salt him bread and give him means of life.” |
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| A. D. 1820. | LIFE OF LORD BYRON. | 309 |
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it was all owing to St. Antonio of
Padua (serious, I assure you),—who does thirteen miracles a day,—that
worse did not come of it. I have no objection to this being his fourteenth in the
four-and-twenty hours. He presides over overturns and all escapes therefrom, it seems;
and they dedicate pictures, &c. to him, as the sailors once did to Neptune, after ‘the high Roman fashion.’
“Yours, in haste.”
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).
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).
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).
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.
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).
