"Sept. 29th. the Alfred my old school and form-fellow (for we were "I open my letter to say that, on reading more of within two of each other, he the higher, though both the four volumes on Italy, where the author says very near the top of our remove) Peel, the Irish se'declined an introduction,' I perceive (horresco refe-cretary. He told me that, in 1810, he met me, as he rens) 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 have done is meant to be purely Venetian, even to the very prophecy of its present state. "Your Angles in general know little of the Italians, who detest them for their numbers and their GENOA treachery. Besides, the English travellers have not been composed of the best company. How could they? out of 100,000, how many gentlemen were there, or honest men? "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.” LETTER CCCLXXXIX. TO MR MURRAY. "Ravenna, 8bre 6o, 1820. "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 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 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.' 66 'But if they are, are their coats and waistcoats also seen? I do not disbelieve that we may be two by some unconscious process, to a certain sign, but which of these two I happen at present to be, I leave you to decide." I only hope that t'other me behaves like a gemman. "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. "I am not sure that I was not spoken with; but this also you can ascertain. I have written to you such letters that I stop. "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: he 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 ** (of this place), then at Venice, an ugly battered woman, of bad morals even for Italy." LETTER CCCXC. TO MR MURRAY. Ravenna, 8bre 8°, 1820. "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, 'Lord! thus I spit at thee and at thy counsel!' 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. "So there's argument for you. "The Doge repeats;-true, but it is from engrossing passion, and because he sees different persons, and is always obliged to recur to the cause uppermost in his mind. His speeches are long ;true, but I wrote for the closet, and on the French and Italian model rather than yours, which I think not very highly of, for all your old dramatists, who are long enough too, God knows:-look into any of them. "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 good-will-but I was not in need of Bankes's aid, and would not have accepted it if I had (though I love and esteem him); and the third "So you see that I have seen some strange things in my time. As for your own offer, it was in 1815, when I was in actual uncertainty of five pounds. I rejected it; but I have not forgotten it, although you probably have. "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 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. "We are all looking at one another, like wolves falling on to do unutterable things. They are a great on their prey in pursuit, only waiting for the first world in chaos, or angels in hell, which you please; but out of chaos came paradise, and out of helli don't know what; but the devil went in there, and he was a fine fellow once, you know. "You need never favour me with any periodical occasional Blackwood; or now and then a Monthly publication, except the Edinburgh, Quarterly, and an 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. "Let me know your notions. "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 my daughter." LETTER CCCXCI. TO MR MURRAY. “ Ravenna, 8bre 12, 1820. "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, * The paragraph is left thus imperfect in the original. "I'm thankful for your books, dear Murray; 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 send 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 Ss and your C✶✶s-it is all very finebut 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 Mark'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 from the fact, they being in St Mark's. Make a note of this, and put Editor as the subscription to it. "As I make such pretensions to accuracy, I should not like to be twitted even with such trifles on that score. Of the play they may say what they please, but not so of my costume and dram. pers., they having been real existences. 66 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. "The French translation of us!!! oimè! oimè!and the German; but I don't understand the latter, and his long dissertation at the end about the Fausts. Excuse haste. Of politics it is not safe to speak, but nothing is decided as yet. "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 tome the other day? She had read it in the French, and paid me some compliments, with due DRAW BACKS, 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 IMMORTALITY 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. LETTER CCCXCII. TO MR MURRAY. "Ravenna, 8bre 16o, 1820. "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. "I have written you so often lately that the brevity of this will be welcome. "Yours, &c." LETTER CCCXCIII. TO MR MURRAY. "Ravenna, 8bre 17°, 1820. "Enclosed is the Dedication of Marino Faliero to Goethe. 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. "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." The very singular Dedication transmitted with this letter has never before been published, nor, as far as I can learn, ever reached the hands of the illustrious German. It is written in the poet's most whimsical and mocking mood; and the unmeasured severity poured out in it upon the two favourite objects of his wrath and ridicule compels me to deprive the reader of some of its most amusing passages, "DEDICATION TO BARON GOETHE. “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. Authors, sir.'. "My principal object in addressing you was to testify my sincere respect and admiration of a man, who, far 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. "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 GOETHE.' "I have the honour to be, "Ravenna, 8bre, 14°, 1820. "P.S. 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. "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 "Ravenna, October 17th, 1820. a celebrated northern journal upon you in particular, and the Germans in general, has rather indisposed to know what you are about. The summer is over, "You owe me two letters-pay them. I want you towards English poetry as well as criticism. But you must not regard our critics, who are at bottom and you will be back to Paris. Apropos of Paris, it good-natured fellows, considering their two profes-word Gay-who was my correspondent.* Can you was not Sophia Gail but Sophia Gay-the English sions, 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; TO MR MOORE. * I had mistaken the name of the lady he inquired after. and reported her to him as dead. But, on the receipt of tell who she is, as you did of the defunct ✶ ✶ ? 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, "Have you got my Memoir copied? I have be--if defense it can be called, where there has never gun 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 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.' 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 coun trymen.' 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 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 "I must have made all these mistakes in recollect- will retrieve his circumstances: he who is condemned ing my mother's account of the matter, although she by the law has a term to his banishment, or a dream was more accurate than I am, being precise upon of its abbreviation; or, it may be, the knowledge or points of genealogy, like all the aristocratical Scotch. the belief of some injustice of the law, or of its admiShe had a long list of ancestors, like Sir Lucius O'nistration in his own particular: but he who is outTrigger'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 the above letter, I discovered that his correspondent was Madame Sophie Gay, mother of the celebrated poetess and beauty, Mademoiselle Delphine Gay. lawed by general opinion, without the intervention of hostile politics, illegal judgment, or embarrassed eircumstances, 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 deci sive. 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 * 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. |