*

disposed to publish, it will be for his benefit, and it is to and for him that you will name a price, if you take upon you the work. I would edite it myself, but am too far off, and too lazy to undertake it; but I wish that it could be done. The letters of Lord Hervey, in Mr Rose's opinion and mine, are good; and the short French love letters certainly are Lady M. W. Montague's the French not good, but the sentiments beautiful. Gray's letter good; and Mason's tolerable. The whole correspondence must be well weeded; but this being done, a small and pretty popular volume might be made of it.-There are many ministers' letters-Gray, the ambassador at Naples, Horace Mann, and others of the same kind of animal.

"I thought of a preface, defending Lord Hervey against Pope's attack, but Pope-quoad Pope, the poet-against all the world, in the unjustifiable attempts begun by Warton, and carried on at this day by the new school of critics and scribblers, who think themselves poets because they do not write like Pope. I have no patience with such cursed humbug and bad taste; your whole generation are not worth a Canto of the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man, or the Dunciad, or any thing that is his.'-But it is three in the matin, and I must go to bed.

"Yours alway, &c."

LETTER CCCXV.

TO MR MURRAY.

"Venice, April 17th, 1818. "A few days ago, I wrote to you a letter, requesting you to desire Hanson to desire his messenger to come on from Geneva to Venice, because I won't go from Venice to Geneva; and if this is not done, the messenger may be damned, with him who mis-sent him. Pray reiterate my request.

"With the proofs returned, I sent two additional stanzas for Canto Fourth: did they arrive?

"Your monthly reviewer has made a mistake: Cavaliere, alone, is well enough; but 'Cavalier' servente' has always the e mute in conversation, and omitted in writing; so that it is not for the sake of metre; and pray let Griffiths know this, with my compliments. I humbly conjecture that I know as much of Italian society and language as any of his people; but, to make assurance doubly sure, I asked,

Among Lord Byron's papers, I find some verses aadressed to him, about this time, by Mr W. Rose, with the following note annexed to them:-" These verses were sent to me by W. S. Rose, from Abaro, in the spring of 1818. They are good and true; and Rose is a fine fellow, and one of the few English who understand Italy, without which Italian is nothing," The verses begin thus:

"Byron, while you make gay what circle fits ye,
Bandy Venitian slang with the Benzòn,

Or play at company with the Albrizzi,

The self-pleased pedant, and patrician crone,
Grimanis, Mocenigos, Balbis, Rizzi,
Compassionate our cruel case,-alone,

Our pleasure an academy of frogs,

Who nightly serenade us from the bogs," &c. &c.

+"I have hunted out a precedent for this unceremonious audress."

"Did you receive two additional stanzas, to be inserted toward the close of Canto Fourth? Respond, that (if not) they may be sent.

"Tell Mr and Mr Hanson that they may as well expect Geneva to come to me, as that I should go to Geneva. The messenger may go on or return, as he pleases; I won't stir: and I look upon it as a piece of singular absurdity in those who know me imagining that I should-not to say malice, in attempting unnecessary torture. If, on the occasion, my interests should suffer, it is their neglect that is to blame; and they may all be d-d together.

* "It is ten o'clock and time to dress.

*

"Yours, &c."

LETTER CCCXV1.

TO MR MURRAY.

April 23d, 1818.

"The time is past in which I could feel for the dead, or I should feel for the death of Lady Melbourne, the best, and kindest, and ablest female I ever knew, old or young. But I have supped full of horrors,' and events of this kind have only a kind of numbness worse than pain,-like a violent blow on the elbow or the head. There is one link less between England and myself.

"Now to business. I presented you with Beppo, as part of the contract for Canto Fourth,-considering the price you are to pay for the same, and intending to eke you out in case of public caprice or my own poetical failure. If you choose to suppress it entirely, at Mr ****'s suggestion, you may do as you please. But recollect it is not to be published in a garbled or mutilated state. I reserve to my friends and myself the right of correcting the press; if the publication continue, it is to continue in its present form.

"As Mr * * says that he did not write this letter, &c., I am ready to believe him; but for the firmness of my former persuasion, I refer to Mr ****, who can inform you how sincerely I erred on this point. He has also the note-or, at least, had it, for I gave it to him with my verbal comments thereupon. As to 'Beppo,' I will not alter or suppress a syllable for any man's pleasure but my own.

"You may tell them this; and add, that nothing but force or necessity shall stir me one step towards the places to which they would wring me.

LETTER CCCXVII.

TO MR MOORE.

"Palazzo Mocenigo, Canal Grande, "Venice, June 1st, 1818. "Your letter is almost the only news, as yet, of Canto 4th, and it has by no means settled its fate,at least, does not tell me how the 'Poeshie' has been received by the public. But I suspect, no great things,-firstly, from Murray's horrid stillness;' secondly, from what you say about the stanzas running into each other,† which I take not to be yours, but a notion you have been dinned with among the Blues. The fact is, that the terza rima of the Italians, which always runs on and in, may have led me into experiments, and carelessness into conceit-or conceit into carelessness-in either of which events failure will be probable, and my fair woman, 'superne,' end in a fish; so that Childe Harold will be like the mermaid, my family crest, with the Fourth Canto for a tail thereunto. I won't quarrel with the public, however, for the Bulgars' are generally right; and if I miss now, I may hit another time:-and so, the 'gods give us joy.'

“ You like Beppo, that's right. * * * * I have not had the Fudges yet, but live in hopes. I need not say that your successes are mine. By the way, Lydia White is here, and has just borrowed my copy of 'Lalla Rookh.'

*

*

*

*

" Hunt's letter is probably the exact piece of vulgar coxcombry you might expect from his situation. He is a good man, with some poetical elements in his chaos; but spoilt by the Christ-Church Hospital and a Sunday newspaper,-to say nothing of the Surry Jail, which conceited him into a martyr. But he is a good man. When I saw Rimini' in MS., I told him that I deemed it good poetry at bottom, disfigured only by a strange style. His answer was, that his style was a system, or upon system, or some such cant; and, when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless: so I said no more to him, and very little to any one else. "He believes his trash of vulgar phrases tortured into compound barbarisms to be old English; and we may say of it as Aimwell says of Captain Gibbet's regiment, when the Captain calls it an 'old corps, the oldest in Europe, if I may judge by your uniform.' He sent out his Foliage' by Percy Shelley and, of all the ineffable Centaurs that were ever begotten by Self-love upon a Night-mare, I think this monstrous Sagittary the most prodigious. He (Leigh H.) is an honest Charlatan, who has persuaded himself into a belief of his own impostures, and talks Punch in pure simplicity of heart, taking himself (as poor Fitzgerald said of himself in the Morning Post) for Vates in both senses, or nonsenses, of the word. Did you look at the translations of his own which he prefers to Pope and Cowper, and says so? Did you read his skimble-skamble about * being at the head of his own profession, in the eyes of those who followed it? I thought that poetry was an art, or an attribute, and not a profession;-but

*

+ I had said, I think, in my letter to him, that this practice of carrying one stanza into another was "something like taking on horses another stage without baiting."

|

"I do not know any good model for a life of Sheridan but that of Savage. Recollect, however, that the life of such a man may be made far more amusing than if he had been a Wilberforce;-and this without offending the living, or insulting the dead. The whigs abuse him; however, he never left them, and such blunderers deserve neither credit nor compas sion. As for his creditors,-remember, Sheridan never had a shilling, and was thrown, with great powers and passions, into the thick of the world, and placed upon the pinnacle of success, with no other external means to support him in his elevation. Did Fox * * * pay his debts?-or did Sheridan take a subscription? Was the Duke of Norfolk's drunkenness more excusable than his? Were his intrigues more notorious than those of all his contemporaries ? and is his memory to be blasted, and theirs respected? Don't let yourself be led away by clamour, but compare him with the coalitioner Fox, and the pensioner Burke, as a man of principle, and with ten hundred thousand in personal views, and with none in talent, for he beat them all out and out. Without means, without connexion, without character (which might be false at first, and make him mad afterwards from desperation), he beat them all, in all he ever attempted. But alas poor human nature! Good night or, rather, morning. It is four,—and the dawn gleams over the Grand Canal, and unshadows the Rialto. I must to bed; up all night-but, as George Philpot says, 'it's life, though; damme, it's life!' "Ever yours,

"B.

"Excuse errors-no time for revision. The post goes out at noon, and I sha'n't be up then. I will write again soon about your plan for a publication."

During the greater part of the period which this last series of letters comprises, he had continued to occupy the same lodgings in an extremely narrow street called the Spezieria, at the house of the linen-draper,

* I had, in first transcribing the above letter for the press, omitted the whole of this caustic and, perhaps, oversevere character of Mr Hunt; but the tone of that gentleman's book having, as far as himself is concerned, released me from all those scruples which prompted the suppression, I have considered myself at liberty to restore the passage.

gave

of the workings of Byron's mind, during his visit, him a far higher idea of its powers than he had ever before entertained. It was, indeed, then that Shelley sketched out, and chiefly wrote, his poem of "Julian and Maddalo," in the latter of which personages he has so picturesquely shadowed forth his noble friend and the allusions to "the Swan of Albion," in his "Lines written among the Euganean Hills," were also, I understand, the result of the same access of admiration and enthusiasm.

In speaking of the Venetian women, in one of the preceding letters, Lord Byron, it will be recollected, remarks, that the beauty for which they were once so celebrated is no longer now to be found among the "Dame," or higher orders, but all under the "fazzioli," or kerchiefs of the lower. It was, unluckily, among these latter specimens of the "bel sangue" of Venice that he now, by a suddenness of descent in the scale of refinement, for which nothing but the present wayward state of his mind can account, chose to select the companions of his disengaged hours;and an additional proof that, in this short, daring career of libertinism, he was but desperately seeking relief for a wronged and mortified spirit, and

"What to us seem'd guilt might be but woe,"is that, more than once, of an evening, when his house has been in the possession of such visitants, he has been known to hurry away in his gondola, and pass the greater part of the night upon the water, as if hating to return to his home. It is, indeed, certain, that to this least defensible portion of his whole life he always looked back, during the short remainder of it, with painful self-reproach; and among the

lighted to see me, and our first conversation of course consisted in the object of our visit. *** He took me in

his gondola, across the Laguna, to a long, strandy sand,

which defends Venice from the Adriatic. When we dis

embarked, we found his horses waiting for us, and we rode along the sands, talking. Our conversation consisted in histories of his own wounded feelings, and questions as to my affairs, with great professions of friendship and regard for me. He said that if he had been in England, at the time of the Chancery affair, he would have moved heaven and earth to have prevented such a decision. He talked of literary matters, his Fourth Canto, which he says is very good, and indeed repeated some stanzas, of great energy, to me. When we returned to his palace, which is one of the most magnificent in Venice, &c. &c."

* In the preface also to this poem, under the fictitious name of Count Maddalo, the following just and striking portrait of Lord Byron is drawn :

"He is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men, and instead of the latter having been employed in curbing the former they have mutually lent each other strength. His ambition preys upon itself for want of objects which it can consider worthy of exertion. I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no other word to express the concentered and impatient feelings which consume him; but it is on his own hopes and affections only that he seems to trample, for in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication. He has travelled much; and there is an inexpressible charm in his relation of his adventures in different countries."

causes of the detestation which he afterwards felt for Venice, this recollection of the excesses to which he had there abandoned himself was not the least prominent.

The most distinguished and, at last, the reigning favourite of all this unworthy Haram was a woman named Margarita Cogni, who has been already mentioned in one of these letters, and who, from the trade of her husband, was known by the title of the Fornarina. A portrait of this handsome virago, drawn by Harlowe when at Venice, having fallen into the hands of one of Lord Byron's friends after the death of that artist, the noble poet, on being applied to for some particulars of his heroine, wrote a long letter on the subject, from which the following are extracts :"Since you desire the story of Margarita Cogni, you shall be told it, though it may be lengthy. "Her face is the fine Venetian cast of the old time; her figure, though perhaps too tall, is not less fineand taken altogether in the national dress.

"In the summer of 1817, ✶✶✶✶ and myself were sauntering on horseback along the Brenta one evening, when, amongst a group of peasants, we remarked two girls as the prettiest we had seen for some time. About this period, there had been great distress in the country, and I had a little relieved some of the people. Generosity makes a great figure at very little cost in Venetian livres, and mine had probably been exaggerated as an Englishman's. Whether they remarked us looking at them or no, I know not;

but one of them called out to me in Venetian, 'Why do not you, who relieve others, think of us also?' I turned round and answered her- Cara, tu sei troppo bella e giovane per aver' bisogna del' soccorso mio.' She answered, 'If you saw my hut and my food, you would not say so. All this passed half jestingly, and I saw no more of her for some days.

"A few evenings after, we met with these two girls again, and they addressed us more seriously, assuring us of the truth of their statement. They were cousins; Margarita married, the other single. As I doubted still of the circumstances, I took the business in a different light, and made an appointment with them for the next evening.

*

In short, in a few evenings we arranged our affairs, and for a long space of time she was the only one who preserved over me an ascendancy which was often disputed, and never impaired.

*

*

*

*

*

"The reasons of this were, firstly, her person;very dark, tall, the Venetian face, very fine black eyes. She was two-and-twenty years old, * * ** She was besides a thorough Venetian in her dialect, in her thoughts, in her countenance, in every thing, with all their naïveté and pantaloon humour. Besides, she could neither read nor write, and could not plague me with letters,-except twice that she paid sixpence to a public scribe, under the piazza, to make a letter for her, upon some occasion when I was ill and could not see her. In other respects, she was somewhat fierce and 'prepotente,' that is over. bearing, and used to walk in whenever it suited her, with no very great regard to time, place, nor persons: and if she found any women in her way, she knocked them down.