Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
Lord Byron to John Murray, 9 October 1821
“Ravenna, October 9th, 1821.
“You will please to present or convey the enclosed poem to
Mr. Moore. I sent him another copy to Paris;
but he has probably left that city.
“Don’t forget to send me my first act of ‘Werner’ (if Hobhouse can find it amongst my papers)—send it by the
post (to Pisa); and also cut out Sophia Lee’s
‘German’s Tale’
from the ‘Canterbury
Tales,’ and send it in a letter also. I began that tragedy in 1815.
“By the way, you have a good deal of my prose tracts in
MS.? Let me have proofs of them all again—I mean the
controversial ones, including the last two or three years of time. Another
question!—The Epistle of St. Paul, which I translated from
the Armenian, for what reason have you kept it back, though you published that stuff
which gave rise to the ‘Vampire?’ Is it because you are afraid to print any thing in opposition
to the cant of the Quarterly about
Manicheism? Let me have a proof of that Epistle directly. I am a better Christian than
those parsons of yours, though not paid for being so.
“Send—Faber’s Treatise on the Cabiri.
“Sainte
Croix’s
Mystères du Paganisme (scarce,
perhaps, but to be found, as Mitford refers to
his work frequently).
“A common Bible, of a good legible print (bound in russia).
I have one; but as it was the last gift of my sister (whom I shall probably never see again), I can only use it
carefully, and less frequently, because I like to keep it in good order. Don’t
forget this, for I am a great reader and admirer of those books, and had read them
through and through before I was eight years old,—that is to say, the Old Testament, for the New struck me as a task, but the other as a pleasure. I
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| A. D. 1821. | LIFE OF LORD BYRON. | 545 |
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as a boy, from the
recollected impression of that period at Aberdeen in 1796.
“Any novels of Scott, or
poetry of the same. Ditto of Crabbe, Moore, and the Elect; but none of your curst
common-place trash,—unless something starts up of actual merit, which may very well be,
for ‘tis time it should.”
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).
George Stanley Faber (1773-1854)
Evangelical divine; author of
A Dissertation on the Mysteries of the
Cabiri, or, the great Gods of Phoenicia, Samothrace, Egypt, Troas, Greece, Italy, and
Crete, 2 vols, (1803) and
The Origin of Pagan Idolatry
(1816).
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).
Sophia Priscilla Lee (1750-1824)
English novelist, playwright, and poet, sister of the novelist Harriet Lee (1758-1851);
her first play,
The Chapter of Accidents, was produced at the
Haymarket in 1780.
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.
William Mitford (1744-1827)
English historian, author of
The History of Greece, 5 vols
(1784-1818) and other works.
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.
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.
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.
George Stanley Faber (1773-1854)
A Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri; or, the great Gods of Phenicia,
Samothrace, Egypt, Troas, Greece, Italy, and Crete; being an Attempt to deduce the several
Orgies of Isis, Ceres, Mithras, Bacchus, Rhea, Adonis, and Hecate, from a Union of the
Rites commemorative of the Deluge with the Adoration of the Hosts of Heaven. 2 vols (Oxford: For the author, 1803).
