by Lord Byron
“The poet has told us how ‘Ladies wish to be who love their Lords;’ but this is the first public demonstration in our times to show us how Ladies wish to be who love, not their own, but others’ Lords. ‘Better be with the dead than thus,’ cried the jealous fair; and, casting a languishing look at Lord B — , who, Heaven knows, is more like Pan than Apollo, she whipt up as pretty a little dessert-knife as a Lady could desire to commit suicide with,
‘And stuck it in her wizzard.’
“The desperate Lady was carried out of the room, and the affair endeavoured to be hushed up, etc., etc.”
318 — to John Wilson Croker
Bt. Str., August 2, 1813.
Dear Sir, — I was honoured with your unexpected and very obliging letter, when on the point of leaving London, which prevented me from acknowledging my obligation as quickly as I felt it sincerely. I am endeavouring all in my power to be ready before Saturday — and even if I should not succeed, I can only blame my own tardiness, which will not the less enhance the benefit I have lost. I have only to add my hope of forgiveness for all my trespasses on your time and patience, and with my best wishes for your public and private welfare, I have the honour to be, most truly, Your obliged and most obedient servant,
Byron.
319 — to John Murray
If you send more proofs, I shall never finish this infernal story — ”Ecce signum” — thirty-three more lines enclosed! to the utter discomfiture of the printer, and, I fear, not to your advantage.
B.
320 — to John Murray
Half-past two in the morning, Aug. 10, 1813.
Dear Sir, — Pray suspend the proofs, for I am bitten again, and have quantities for other parts of the bravura. Yours ever,
B.
P. S. — You shall have them in the course of the day.
321 — To James Wedderburn Webster
August 12, 1813.
My Dear Webster, — I am, you know, a detestable correspondent, and write to no one person whatever; you therefore cannot attribute my silence to any thing but want of good breeding or good taste, and not to any more atrocious cause; and as I confess the fault to be entirely mine — why — you will pardon it.
I have ordered a copy of the Giaour (which is nearly doubled in quantity in this edition) to be sent, and I will first scribble my name in the title page. Many and sincere thanks for your good opinion of book, and (I hope to add) author.
Rushton shall attend you whenever you please, though I should like him to stay a few weeks, and help my other people in forwarding my chattels. Your taking him is no less a favor to me than him; and I trust he will behave well. If not, your remedy is very simple; only don’t let him be idle; honest I am sure he is, and I believe good-hearted and quiet. No pains has been spared, and a good deal of expense incurred in his education; accounts and mensuration, etc., he ought to know, and I believe he does.
I write this near London, but your answer will reach me better in Bennet Street, etc. (as before). I am going very soon, and if you would do the same thing — as far as Sicily — I am sure you would not be sorry. My sister, Mrs. L. goes with me — her spouse is obliged to retrench for a few years (but he stays at home); so that his link boy prophecy (if ever he made it) recoils upon himself.
I am truly glad to hear of Lady Frances’s good health. Have you added to your family? Pray make my best respects acceptable to her Ladyship.
Nothing will give me more pleasure than to hear from you as soon and as fully as you please. Ever most truly yours,
Byron.
322 — to Thomas Moore
Bennet Street, August 22, 1813.
As our late — I might say, deceased — correspondence had too much of the town-life leaven in it, we will now, paulo majora, prattle a little of literature in all its branches; and first of the first — criticism. The Prince is at Brighton, and Jackson, the boxer, gone to Margate, having, I believe, decoyed Yarmouth to see a milling in that polite neighbourhood.
Mad’e. de Staël Holstein has lost one of her young barons, who has been carbonadoed by a vile Teutonic adjutant, — kilt and killed in a coffee-house at Scrawsenhawsen. Corinne is, of course, what all mothers must be, — but will, I venture to prophesy, do what few mothers could — write an Essay upon it. She cannot exist without a grievance — and somebody to see, or read, how much grief becomes her. I have not seen her since the event; but merely judge (not very charitably) from prior observation.
In a “mail-coach copy” of the Edinburgh I perceive The Giaour is second article. The numbers are still in the Leith smack — pray which way is the wind? The said article is so very mild and sentimental, that it must be written by Jeffrey in love; — you know he is gone to America to marry some fair one, of whom he has been, for several quarters, éperdument amoureux. Seriously — as Winifred Jenkins says of Lismahago — Mr. Jeffrey (or his deputy) “has done the handsome thing by me,” and I say nothing. But this I will say, if you and I had knocked one another on the head in this quarrel, how he would have laughed, and what a mighty bad figure we should have cut in our posthumous works. By the by, I was call’d in the other day to mediate between two gentlemen bent upon carnage, and — after a long struggle between the natural desire of destroying one’s fellow-creatures, and the dislike of seeing men play the fool for nothing, — I got one to make an apology, and the other to take it, and left them to live happy ever after.
One was a peer, the other a friend untitled, and both fond of high play; — and one, I can swear for, though very mild, “not fearful,” and so dead a shot, that, though the other is the thinnest of men, he would have split him like a cane. They both conducted themselves very well, and I put them out of pain as soon as I could.
There is an American Life of G. F. Cooke, Scurra deceased, lately published. Such a book! — I believe, since Drunken Barnaby’s Journal nothing like it has drenched the press. All green-room and tap-room — drams and the drama — brandy, whisky-punch, and, latterly, toddy, overflow every page. Two things are rather marvellous, — first, that a man should live so long drunk, and, next, that he should have found a sober biographer. There are some very laughable things in it, nevertheless; — but the pints he swallowed, and the parts he performed, are too regularly registered.
All this time you wonder I am not gone; so do I; but the accounts of the plague are very perplexing — not so much for the thing itself as the quarantine established in all ports, and from all places, even from England. It is true, the forty or sixty days would, in all probability, be as foolishly spent on shore as in the ship; but one likes to have one’s choice, nevertheless. Town is awfully empty; but not the worse for that. I am really puzzled with my perfect ignorance of what I mean to do; — not stay, if I can help it, but where to go? Sligo is for the North; — a pleasant place, Petersburgh, in September, with one’s ears and nose in a muff, or else tumbling into one’s neckcloth or pocket-handkerchief! If the winter treated Buonaparte with so little ceremony, what would it inflict upon your solitary traveller? — Give me a sun, I care not how hot, and sherbet, I care not how cool, and my Heaven is as easily made as your Persian’s.
The Giaour is now a thousand and odd lines. “Lord Fanny spins a thousand such a day,” eh, Moore? — thou wilt needs be a wag, but I forgive it. Yours ever,
Byron.
P. S. — I perceive I have written a flippant and rather cold-hearted letter! let it go, however. I have said nothing, either, of the brilliant sex; but the fact is, I am at this moment in a far more serious, and entirely new, scrape than any of the last twelve months, — and that is saying a good deal. It is unlucky we can neither live with nor without these women.
I am now thinking of regretting that, just as I have left Newstead, you reside near it. Did you ever see it? do — but don’t tell me that you like it. If I had known of such intellectual neighbourhood, I don’t think I should have quitted it. You could have come over so often, as a bachelor, — for it was
a thorough bachelor’s mansion — plenty of wine and such sordid sensualities — with books enough, room enough, and an air of antiquity about all (except the lasses) that would have suited you, when pensive, and served you to laugh at when in glee. I had built myself a bath and a vault — and now I sha’n’t even be buried in it. It is odd that we can’t even be certain of a grave, at least a particular one. I remember, when about fifteen, reading your poems there, which I can repeat almost now, — and asking all kinds of questions about the author, when I heard that he was not dead according to the preface; wondering if I should ever see him — and though, at that time, without the smallest poetical propensity myself, very much taken, as you may imagine, with that volume. Adieu — I commit you to the care of the gods — Hindoo, Scandinavian, and Hellenic!
P. S. 2d. — There is an excellent review of Grimm’s Correspondence and Madame de Staël in this No. of the E[dinburgh] R[eview]. Jeffrey, himself, was my critic last year; but this is, I believe, by another hand. I hope you are going on with your grand coup — pray do — or that damned Lucien Buonaparte will beat us all. I have seen much of his poem in MS., and he really surpasses every thing beneath Tasso. Hodgson is translating him against another bard. You and (I believe Rogers,) Scott, Gifford, and myself, are to be referred to as judges between the twain, — that is, if you accept the office. Conceive our different opinions! I think we, most of us (I am talking very impudently, you will think — us, indeed!) have a way of our own, — at least, you and Scott certainly have.
Byron.
Francis Charles Seymour Conway, Earl of Yarmouth (1777-1842), succeeded his father as second Marquis of Hertford in 1822. The colossal libertinism and patrician splendour of his life inspired Disraeli to paint him as “Monmouth” in Coningsby, and Thackeray as “Steyne” in Vanity Fair. He married, in 1798, Maria Fagniani, claimed as a daughter by George Selwyn and by “Old Q.,” and enriched by both. Yarmouth, as an intimate friend of the Regent, and the son of the Prince’s female favourite, was the butt of Moore and the Whig satirists. Byron gibes at Yarmouth’s red whiskers, which helped to gain him the name of “Red Herrings” in the Waltz, line 142, note 1. Yarmouth, like Byron, patronized the fancy, and, like him also, was a frequenter of Manton’s shooting-gallery in Davies Street; but there is no record of their being acquainted, though the house, which Byron occupied (13, Piccadilly Terrace) during his brief married life, was in the occupation of Lord Yarmouth before Byron took it from the Duchess of Devonshire.
“led an irregular life, and met a deplorable death at Doberan, a small city of the duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, on the coast of the Baltic Sea, a favourite resort in summer for bathing, gambling, etc. Some officers of the état-major of Bernadotte had gone to try their luck in this place of play and pleasure. They quarrelled over some louis, and a duel immediately ensued. I well remember that the Grand-Duke Paul of Mecklenburg-Schwerin told me he was there at the time, and, while walking with his tutors in the park, suddenly heard the clinking of swords in a neighbouring thicket. They ran to the place, and reached it just in time to see the head of Albert fall, cleft by one of those long and formidable sabres which were carried by the Prussian cavalry.”
The above passage is quoted from the unpublished Souvenirs of M. Pictet de Sergy, given by A. Stevens in his Life of Madame de Staël, vol. ii. pp. 204, 205.
In the Edinburgh Review for July, 1813, the Giaour was reviewed as a poem “full of spirit, character, and originality,” and producing an effect at once “powerful and pathetic.” But the reviewer considers that “energy of character and intensity of emotion… presented in combination with worthlessness and guilt,” are “most powerful corrupters and perverters of our moral nature,” and he deplores Byron’s exclusive devotion to gloomy and revolting subjects.
Jeffrey is described at considerable length by Ticknor, in a letter, dated February 8, 1814 (Life of G. Ticknor, vol. i. pp. 43-47):
“You are to imagine, then, before you a short, stout, little gentleman, about five and a half feet high, with a very red face, black hair, and black eyes. You are to suppose him to possess a very gay and animated countenance, and you are to see in him all the restlessness of a will-o’-wisp … He enters a room with a countenance so satisfied, and a step so light and almost fantastic, that all your previous impressions of the dignity and severity of the Edinburgh Review are immediately put to flight … It is not possible, however, to be long in his presence without understanding something of his real character, for the same promptness and assurance which mark his entrance into a room carry him at once into conversation. The moment a topic is suggested — no matter what or by whom — he comes forth, and the first thing you observe is his singular fluency,” etc., etc.
By the side of this description may be set that given of Jeffrey by Francis Horner (Life of Jeffrey, 2nd edition, vol. i. p. 212):
“His manner is not at first pleasing; what is worse, it is of that cast which almost irresistibly impresses upon strangers the idea of levity and superficial talents. Yet there is not any man whose real character is so much the reverse.”
The secret of his success, both as editor and critic, is that he made the Review the expression of the Whig character, both in its excellences and its limitations. A man of clear, discriminating mind, of cool and placid judgment, he refused to accept the existing state of things, was persuaded that it might be safely improved, saw the practical steps required, and had the courage of his convictions. He was suspicious of large principles, somewhat callous to enthusiasm or sentiment, intolerant of whatever was incapable of precise expression. His intellectual strength lay not in the possession of one great gift, but in the simultaneous exercise of several well-adjusted talents. His literary taste was correct; but it consisted rather in recognizing compliance with accepted rules of proved utility than in the readiness to appreciate novelties of thought and treatment. Hence his criticism, though useful for his time, has not endured beyond his day. It may be doubted whether more could be expected from a man who was eminently successful in addressing a jury. “He might not know his subject, but he knew his readers” (Bagehot’s Literary Studies, vol. i. p. 30).
Byron, believing him to have been the author of the famous article on Hours of Idleness, attacked him bitterly in English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers; (lines 460-528). He afterwards recognized his error. Don Juan (Canto X. stanza xvi.) expresses his mature opinion of a critic who, whatever may have been his faults, was as absolutely honest as political prejudice would permit:
“And all our little feuds, at least all mine,
Dear Jeffrey, once my most redoubted foe
(As far as rhyme and criticism combine
To make such puppets of us things below),
Are over; Here’s a health to ‘Auld Lang Syne!’
I do not know you, and may never know
Your face — but you have acted, on the whole,
Most nobly; and I own it from my soul.”
Jeffrey reviewed Childe Harold in the Edinburgh Review, No. 38, art. 10; the Giaour, No. 42, art. 2; the Corsair and Bride of Abydos, No. 45, art. 9; Byron’s Poetry, No. 54, art. I; Manfred, No. 56, art. 7; Beppo, No. 58, art. 2; Marino Faliero, No. 70, art. I; Byron’s Tragedies, No. 72, art. 5.
Byron uses the word scurra, which generally means a “parasite,” in its other sense of a “buffoon.” Memoirs of George Frederic Cooke, late of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, by W. Dunlap, in 2 vols., was published in 1813
“Drunken Barnaby” was also the burden of an old ballad quoted by Haslewood:
“Barnaby, Barnaby, thou’st been drinking,
I can tell by thy nose, and thy eyes winking;
Drunk at Richmond, drunk at Dover,
Drunk at Newcastle, drunk all over.
Hey, Barnaby! tak’t for a warning,
Be no more drunk, nor dry in a morning!”
“A Persian’s Heav’n is easily made —
‘Tis but black eyes and lemonade.”
323 — to John Murray
August 26, 1813.
Dear Sir, — I have looked over and corrected one proof, but not so carefully (God knows if you can read it through, but I can’t) as to preclude your eye from discovering some omission of mine or commission of y’e Printer. If you have patience, look it over. Do you know any body who can stop — I mean point-commas, and so forth? for I am, I hear, a sad hand at your punctuation. I have, but with some difficulty, not added any more to this snake of a poem, which has been lengthening its rattles every month. It is now fearfully long, being more than a canto and a half of C. H., which contains but 882 lines per book, with all late additions inclusive.
The last lines Hodgson likes — it is not often he does — and when he don’t, he tells me with great energy, and I fret and alter. I have thrown them in to soften the ferocity of our Infidel, and, for a dying man, have given him a good deal to say for himself.
Do you think you shall get hold of the female MS. you spoke of to day? if so, you will let me have a glimpse; but don’t tell our master (not W’s), or we shall be buffeted.
I was quite sorry to hear you say you stayed in town on my account, and I hope sincerely you did not mean so superfluous a piece of politeness.
Our six critiques! — they would have made half a Quarterly by themselves; but this is the age of criticism.
Ever yours,
B.
324 — to Thomas Moore
August 28, 1813.