Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
Lord Byron to Thomas Moore, 20 February 1823
“Genoa, February 20th, 1823.
“MY DEAR TOM,
“I must again refer you to those two letters addressed to you
at Passy before I read your speech in Galignani, &c., and which you do not seem to have received*.
“Of Hunt I see little—once
a month or so, and then on his own business, generally. You may easily suppose that I
know too little of Hampstead and his satellites to have much communion or community with
him. My whole present relation to him arose from Shelley’s unexpected wreck. You would not have had me leave him in
the street with his family, would you? and as to the other plan you mention, you forget
how it would humiliate him—that his writings should be supposed
* I was never lucky enough to recover these two letters,
though frequent inquiries were made about them at the French post-office. |
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| A. D. 1823. | LIFE OF LORD BYRON. | 625 |
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to be dead weight*! Think a moment—he is perhaps the
vainest man on earth, at least his own friends say so pretty loudly; and if he were in
other circumstances, I might be tempted to take him down a peg; but not now,—it would be
cruel. It is a cursed business; but neither the motive nor the means rest upon my
conscience, and it happens that he and his brother have been so
far benefited by the publication in a pecuniary point of view. His brother is a steady,
bold fellow, such as Prynne, for example, and full of moral, and, I hear, physical
courage.
“And you are really recanting, or softening to the clergy! It will do little good for you—it
is you, not the poem, they are at. They will say they frightened you—forbid it, Ireland!
“Yours ever,
“N. B.”
James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)
English poet, journalist, and man of letters; editor of
The
Examiner and
The Liberal; friend of Byron, Keats, and
Shelley.
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.
William Prynne (1600-1669)
Puritan pamphleteer whose nose was slit for the offence of publishing his notorious
attack on stage-plays,
Histriomastix (1633).
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
English poet, with Byron in Switzerland in 1816; author of
Queen
Mab (1813),
The Revolt of Islam (1817),
The Cenci and
Prometheus Unbound (1820), and
Adonais (1821).
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.
