"I sent you the whole of the Drama at three several times, act by act, in separate covers. I hope that you have, or will receive, some or the whole of it. "So Love has a conscience. By Diana! I shall make him take back the box, though it were Pandora's. The discovery of its intrinsic silver occurred on sending it to have the lid adapted to admit Marianna's portrait. Of course I had the box remitted in statu quo, and had the picture set in another, which suits it (the picture) very well. The defaulting box is not touched, hardly, and was not in the man's hands above an hour. "I am aware of what you say of Otway; and am a very great admirer of his, all except of that maudlin b-h of chaste lewdness and blubbering curiosity, Belvidera, whom I utterly despise, abhor, and detest. But the story of Marino Faliero is different, and, I think, so much finer, that I wish Otway had taken it instead: the head conspiring against the body for refusal of redress for a real injury, — jealousy — treason, with the more fixed and inveterate passions (mixed with policy) of an old or elderly man - the devil himself could not have a finer subject, and he is your only tragic dramatist. 66 6 There is still, in the Doge's palace, the black veil painted over Faliero's picture, and the staircase whereon he was first crowned Doge, and subsequently decapitated. This was the thing that most struck my imagination in Venice - - more than the Rialto, which I visited for the sake of Shylock; and more, too, than Schiller's Armenian,' a novel which took a great hold of me when a boy. It is also called the 'Ghost Seer,' and I never walked down St. Mark's by moonlight without thinking of it, and at nine o'clock he died!'. But I hate things all fiction; and therefore the Merchant and Othello have no great associations to me: but Pierre has. There should always be some foundation of There have been two articles in the Venice papers, one a Review of Glenarvon, Caroline Lamb's, and the other a Review of Childe Harold, in which it proclaims me the most rebellious and contumacious admirer of Buonaparte now surviving in Europe. Both these articles are translations from the Literary Gazette of German Jena. "Tell me that Walter Scott is better. would not have him ill for the world. I suppose it was by sympathy that I had my fever at the same time. I "I joy in the success of your Quarterly, but I must still stick by the Edinburgh; Jeffery has done so by me, I must say, through every thing, and this is more than I deserved from him. I have more than once acknowledged to you by letter the Article' (and articles); say that you have received the said letters, as I do not otherwise know what letters arrive. Both Reviews came, but nothing more. M.'s play and the extract not yet come. "Write to say whether my Magician has arrived, with all his scenes, spells, &c. "Yours ever, &c. "It is useless to send to the Foreign Office: nothing arrives to me by that con Latin version, to their edition of the Armenian History["Who answer'd me just now? Who, when I said of Moses of Chorene, published in 1736. The translation by Lord Byron is, as far as I can learn, the first that has ever been attempted in English; and as, proceeding from his pen, it must possess, of course, additional interest, the reader will not be displeased to find it in the Appendix. Annexed to the copy in my possession are the following words in his own handwriting: -" Done into English by me, January, February, 1817, at the Convent of San Lazaro, with the aid and exposition of the Armenian text by the Father Paschal Aucher, Armenian friar. - BYRON. I had also (he adds) the Latin text, but it is in many places very corrupt, and with great omissions." 'Tis nine, turn'd round and said so solemnly 2 ["Let him take heart-whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.' This sentence, by the way, is a contrast to the other one of Quem Deus vult perdere prius demental,' which may be thus done into English: "God maddens him whom 'tis his will to love. Ær. 29. LETTER TO ROGERS. 349 vevance. I suppose some zealous clerk but expect to reperuse with great pleasure thinks it a Tory duty to prevent it." LETTER 271. TO MR. ROGERS. "Venice, April 4. 1817. "It is a considerable time since I wrote to you last, and I hardly know why I should trouble you now, except that I think you will not be sorry to hear from me now and then. You and I were never correspondents, but always something better, which is, very good friends. drugs. on my return, viz. the second edition of Lope de Vega. I have heard of Moore's forthcoming poem: he cannot wish himself more success than I wish and augur for him. I have also heard great things of Tales of my Landlord,' but I have not yet received them; by all accounts they beat even Waverley, &c., and are by the same author. Maturin's second tragedy has, it seems, failed, for which I should think any body would be sorry. My health was very victorious till within the last month, when "I saw your friend Sharp in Switzerland, I had a fever. There is a typhus in these or rather in the German territory (which is parts, but I don't think it was that. Howand is not Switzerland), and he gave Hob-ever, I got well without a physician or house and me a very good route for the Bernese Alps; however we took another from a German, and went by Clarens, the Dent de Jaman to Montbovon, and through Simmenthal to Thoun, and so on to Lauterbroun; except that from thence to the Grindlewald, instead of round about, we went right over the Wengen Alps' very summit, and being close under the Jungfrau, saw it, its glaciers, and heard the avalanches in all their glory, having famous weather therefor. We of course went from the Grindlewald over the Sheidech to Brientz and its lake; past the Reichenbach and all that mountain road, which reminded me of Albania and Ætolia and Greece, except that the people here were more civilised and rascally. I do not think so very much of Chamouni (except the source of the Arveron, to which we went up to the teeth of the ice, so as to look into and touch the cavity, against the warning of the guides, only one of whom would go with us so close,) as of the Jungfrau, and the Pissevache, and Simplon, which are quite out of all mortal competition. "I was at Milan about a moon, and saw Monti and some other living curiosities, and thence on to Verona, where I did not forget your story of the assassination during your sojourn there, and brought away with me some fragments of Juliet's tomb, and a lively recollection of the amphitheatre. The Countess Goetz (the governor's wife here) told me that there is still a ruined castle of the Montecchi between Verona and Vicenza. I have been at Venice since November, but shall proceed to Rome shortly. For my deeds here, are they not written in my letters to the unreplying Thomas Moore? to him I refer you: he has received them all, and not answered one. "Will you remember me to Lord and Lady Holland? I have to thank the former for a book which I have not yet received, "I forgot to tell you that, last autumn, I furnished Lewis with bread and salt' for some days at Diodati, in reward for which (besides his conversation) he translated Goethe's Faust' to me by word of mouth, and I set him by the ears with Madame de Stael about the slave trade. I am indebted for many and kind courtesies to our Lady of Copet, and I now love her as much as I always did her works, of which I was and am a great admirer. When are you to begin with Sheridan? What are you doing, and how do you do? "Ever very truly, &c." CHAPTER XXX. 1817. VENICE.-LETTERS TO MURRAY AND MOORE.- 66 PINDEMONTE. LETTER 272. TO MR. MURRAY. "Venice, April 9. 1817. "YOUR letters of the 18th and 20th are arrived. In my own I have given you the rise, progress, decline, and fall of my recent malady. It is gone to the devil: I won't pay him so bad a compliment as to say it came from him; he is too much of a gentleman. It was nothing but a slow fever, which quickened its pace towards the end of its journey. I had been bored with it some weeks-with nocturnal burnings and morning perspirations; but I am quite well again, which I attribute to having had neither medicine nor doctor thereof. "In a few days I set off for Rome: such is my purpose. I shall change it very often before Monday next, but do you continue to direct and address to Venice, as heretofore. If I go, letters will be forwarded: I say 'if' because I never know what I shall do till it is done; and as I mean most firmly to set out for Rome, it is not unlikely I may find myself at St. Petersburg. "You tell me to take care of myself;'— faith, and I will. I won't be posthumous yet, if I can help it. Notwithstanding, only think what a Life and Adventures,' while I am in full scandal, would be worth, together with the membra' of my writing-desk, the sixteen beginnings of poems never to be finished! Do you think I would not have shot myself last year, had I not luckily recollected that Mrs. C**[Clermont], and Lady N** [Noel], and all the old women in England would have been delighted; - besides the agreeable' Lunacy,' of the Crowner's Quest,' and the regrets of two or three or half a dozen? Be assured that I would live for two reasons, or more;- - there are one or two people whom I have to put out of the world, and as many into it, before I can depart in peace;' if I do so before, I have not fulfilled my mission. Besides, when I turn thirty, I will turn devout; I feel a great vocation that way in Catholic churches, and when I hear the organ. "So Wedderburn Webster is writing again! Is there no Bedlam in Scotland? nor thumb-screw? nor gag? nor handcuff? I went upon my knees to him almost, some years ago, to prevent him from publishing a political pamphlet, which would have given him a livelier idea of ‘Habeas Corpus than the world will derive from his present production upon that suspended subject, which will doubtless be followed by the suspension of other (his Majesty's) subjects. "I condole with Drury Lane, and rejoice with Sotheby, that is, in a modest way, -on the tragical end of the new tragedy. 1 "You and Leigh Hunt have quarrelled then, it seems? I introduce him and his 1 [Maturin's tragedy of " Manuel," which had been damned at Drury Lane in the preceding month.] 2 [This amiable man died at Windsor in the November following, at the age of ninety-one. He was born at Geneva in 1726, and was many years reader to Queen Charlotte. His principal works were a treatise on Geology, and six volumes of Geological Travels.] poem to you, in the hope that (malgré politics) the union would be beneficial to both, and the end is eternal enmity; and yet I did this with the best intentions: I introduce Coleridge, and Christabel runs away with your money; my friend Hobhouse quarrels, too, with the Quarterly and (except the last) I am the innocent Isthmus (damn the word! I can't spell it, though I have crossed that of Corinth a dozen times) of these enmities. "I will tell you something about Chillon. -A Mr. De Luc, ninety years old, a Swiss, had it read to him, and is pleased with it, so my sister writes. He said that he was with Rousseau at Chillon, and that the description is perfectly correct. But this is not all: I recollected something of the name, and find the following passage in 'The Confessions,' vol. iii. page 247. liv. viii. :— 6 "De tous ces amusemens celui qui me plût davantage fut une promenade autour du Lac, que je fis en bateau avec De Luc père, sa bru, ses deux fils, et ma Thérèse. Nous mîmes sept jours à cette tournée par le plus beau temps du monde. J'en gardai le vif souvenir des sites qui m'avoient frappé à l'autre extrémité du Lac, et dont je fis la description, quelques années après, dans la Nouvelle Héloise.' "This nonagenarian, De Luc, must be one of the ' deux fils.' He is in England-infirm, but still in faculty. 2 It is odd that he should have lived so long, and not wanting in oddness that he should have made this voyage with Jean Jacques, and afterwards, at such an interval, read a poem by an Englishman (who had made precisely the same circumnavigation) upon the same scenery. "As for Manfred,' it is of no use sending proofs; nothing of that kind comes. I sent the whole at different times. The two first acts are the best; the third so so; but I was blown with the first and second heats. You must call it a Poem,' for it is no Drama, and I do not choose to have it called by so Sotheby-ish a name - a 'Poem in dialogue,' Pantomime, if you will; any thing but a green-room synonyme; and this is your motto "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, || Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' "Yours ever, &c. "My love and thanks to Mr. Gifford."s 3["Don't forget my tooth-powder. It is of no use to send it by the damned and double-damned conveyances, but by some private hand. I mean to be in Venice again in July. Nothing yet whatever from the Foreign Office. Why do you send any thing to such a den of thieves' as that?MS.] "Venice, April 11. 1817. "I shall continue to write to you while the fit is on me, by way of penance upon you for your former complaints of long silence. I dare say you would blush, if you could, for not answering. Next week I set out for Rome. Having seen Constantinople, I should like to look at t'other fellow. Besides, I want to see the Pope, and shall take care to tell him that I vote for the Catholics and no Veto. "I sha'n't go to Naples. It is but the second best sea-view, and I have seen the first and third, viz. Constantinople and Lisbon, (by the way, the last is but a riverview; however, they reckon it after Stamboul and Naples, and before Genoa,) and Vesuvius is silent, and I have passed by Ætna. So I shall e'en return to Venice in July; and if you write, I pray you to address to Venice, which is my head, or rather my heart, quarters. "My late physician, Dr. Polidori, is here on his way to England, with the present Lord Guilford and the widow of the late earl. Dr. Polidori has, just now, no more patients, because his patients are no more. He had lately three, who are now all dead-one embalmed. Horner and a child of Thomas Hope's are interred at Pisa and Rome. Lord Guilford3 died of an inflammation of the bowels : : so they took them out, and sent them (on account of their discrepancies), separately from the carcass, to England. Conceive a man going one way, and his intestines another, and his immortal soul a third-was there ever such a distribution? One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that or any other. "And so poor dear Mr. Maturin's second tragedy has been neglected by the dis 1 [Frederick North, fifth Earl of Guilford. This amiable nobleman was the third and youngest son of Lord North. While governor of Ceylon, he made the tour of the island, accompanied by the Rev. James Cordiner, who, in 1807, published a "Description of Ceylon," in two volumes quarto. Having subsequently been sent by government on a mission to the Ionian Islands, his liberal efforts introduced there a system of education, which has been productive of the most beneficial results. His Lordship died in London, October 1828.] 2 [Daughter of Thomas Boycott, Esq., of Rudge-Hall, Salop.] 3 [Francis North, fourth Earl of Guilford, was the second son of Lord North. When a young man, he was known by the appellation of "Honest Frank North," cerning public! Sotheby will be d-d glad of this, and d-d without being glad, if ever his own plays come upon any stage. "I wrote to Rogers the other day, with a message for you. I hope that he flourishes. He is the Tithonus of poetry - immortal already. You and I must wait for it. You "I hear nothing- know nothing. may easily suppose that the English don't seek me, and I avoid them. To be sure, there are but few or none here, save passengers. Florence and Naples are their Margate and Ramsgate, and much the same sort of company too, by all accounts, which hurts us among the Italians. "I want to hear of Lalla Rookh—are you out? Death and fiends! why don't you tell me where you are, what you are, and how you are? I shall go to Bologna by Ferrara, instead of Mantua: because I would rather see the cell where they caged Tasso, and where he became mad and **, than his own MSS. at Modena, or the Mantuan birthplace of that harmonious plagiary and miserable flatterer, whose cursed hexameters were drilled into me at Harrow.+ I saw Verona and Vicenza on my way here Padua too. "I go alone, but alone, because I mean to return here. I only want to see Rome. I have not the least curiosity about Florence, though I must see it for the sake of the Venus, &c. &c.; and I wish also to see the Fall of Terni. I think to return to Venice by Ravenna and Rimini, of both of which I mean to take notes for Leigh Hunt, who will be glad to hear of the scenery of his Poem. There was a devil of a review of him in the Quarterly, a year ago, which he answered. All answers are imprudent: but, to be sure, poetical flesh and blood must have the last word that's certain. I thought, and think, very highly of his Poem; but I warned him of the row his favourite antique phraseology would bring him into. "You have taken a house at Hornsey: I had much rather you had taken one in the Apennines. If you think of coming out for among all his acquaintances. He was greatly attached to theatrical performances, and in 1808 published a play called" The Kentish Barons." "He possessed," says Sir Egerton Brydges, "the hereditary talents and love of literature of his family; and, what is better, that hereditary good-nature, benevolence, freedom from guile, openness and liberality, which have for ages given a peculiar tincture to his family." He died at Pisa in January, 1817.] "I abhorr'd Too much, to conquer for the poet's sake, Childe Harold, c. iv. st. 75.] 5 [See Quart. Rev. vol. xiv. p. 473.] "By the favour of Dr. Polidori, who is here on his way to England with the present Lord Guilford, (the late earl having gone to England by another road, accompanied by his bowels in a separate coffer,) I remit to you, to deliver to Mrs. Leigh, two miniatures; but previously you will have the goodness to desire Mr. Love (as a peaceoffering between him and me) to set them in plain gold, with my arms complete, and 'Painted by Prepiani — Venice, 1817,' on the back. I wish also that you would desire Holmes to make a copy of each· that is, both - for myself, and that retain the said copies till my return. One was done while I was very unwell; the other in my health, which may account for their dissimilitude. I trust that they will reach their destination in safety. you though it is a capo d'opera of Titian, as I am no connoisseur, I say little, and thought less, except of one figure in it. There are ten thousand others, and some very fine Giorgiones amongst them, &c. &c. There is an original Laura and Petrarch, very hideous both. Petrarch has not only the dress, but the features and air of an old woman, and Laura looks by no means like a young one, or a pretty one. What struck me most in the general collection was the extreme resemblance of the style of the female faces in the mass of pictures, so many centuries or generations old to those you see and meet every day among the existing Italians. The queen of Cyprus and Giorgione's wife, particularly the latter, are Venetians as it were of yesterday; the same eyes and expression, and, to my mind, there is none finer. 66 will "I recommend the Doctor to your good offices with your government friends; and if you can be of any use to him in a literary point of view, pray be so. "To-day, or rather yesterday, for it is past midnight, I have been up to the battlements of the highest tower in Venice', and seen it and its view, in all the glory of a clear Italian sky. I also went over the Manfrini Palace, famous for its pictures. Amongst them, there is a portrait of Ariosto by Titian, surpassing all my anticipation of the power of painting or human expression: it is the poetry of portrait, and the portrait of poetry. There was also one of some learned lady, centuries old, whose name I forget, but whose features must always be remembered. I never saw greater beauty, or sweetness, or wisdom :- it is the kind of face to go mad for, because it cannot walk out of its frame. There is also a famous dead Christ and live Apostles, for which Buonaparte offered in vain five thousand louis; and of which, 1["Where Galileo used to hold commerce with the skies. It commands a fine panoramic view of Venice, and shows you all the details of this wonderful town, which rises out of the waters, like the ark of the deluge."Diary of an Invalid, p. 262.] 2 [" And when you to Manfrini's palace go, You must recollect, however, that I know nothing of painting; and that I detest it, unless it reminds me of something I have seen, or think it possible to see, for which reason I spit upon and abhor all the Saints and subjects of one half the impostures I see in the churches and palaces; and when in Flanders, I never was so disgusted in my life, as with Rubens and his eternal wives and infernal glare of colours, as they appeared to me; and in Spain I did not think much of Murillo and Velasquez. Depend upon it, of all the arts, it is the most artificial and unnatural, and that by which the nonsense of mankind is most imposed upon. 3 I never yet saw the picture or the statue which came a league within my conception or expectation; but I have seen many mountains, and seas, and rivers, and views, and two or three women, who went as far beyond it, besides some horses; and a lion (at Veli Pacha's) in the Morea; and a tiger at supper in Exeter 'Change. ♦ "When you write, continue to address to me at Venice. Where do you suppose the books you sent to me are? At Turin ! This comes of the Foreign Office, which is foreign enough, God knows, for any good it can be of to me, or any one else, and be 3 ["I leave to learned fingers and wise hands, 4["Two nights ago I saw the tigers sup at Exeter 'Change. Except Veli Pacha's lion in the Morea, who followed the Arab keeper like a dog, the fondness of the hyæna for her keeper amused me most. Such a conversazione! but the tiger talked too much."— Byron Diary, Nov. 14. 1813.] |