Byron by John Nichol - Page 2 of 4

him to Corinth. They then separated, and Byron went on to Patras in the Morea, where he had business with the Consul. He dates from there at the close of July. It is impossible to give a consecutive account of his life during the next ten months, a period consequently filled up with the contradictory and absurd mass of legends before referred to. A few facts only of any interest are extricable. During at least half of the time his head-quarters were at Athens, where he again met his friend the Marquis, associated with the English Consul and Lady Hester Stanhope, studied Romaic in a Franciscan monastery–where he saw and conversed with a motley crew of French, Italians, Danes, Greeks, Turks, and Americans,–wrote to his mother and others, saying he had swum from Sestos to Abydos, was sick of Fletcher bawling for beef and beer, had done with authorship, and hoped on his return to lead a quiet recluse life. He nevertheless made notes to _Harold_, composed the _Hints from Horace_ and the _Curse of Minerva_, and presumably brooded over, and outlined in his mind, many of his verse romances. We hear no more of the, _Maid of Athens_, but there is no fair ground to doubt that the _Giaour_ was suggested by his rescue of a young woman whom, for the fault of an amour with some Frank, a party of Janissaries were about to throw, sewn up in a sack, into the sea. Mr. Galt gives no authority for his statement, that the girl’s deliverer was the original cause of her sentence. We may rest assured that if it had been so, Byron himself would have told us of it.

A note to the _Siege of Corinth_ is suggestive of his unequalled restlessness. “I visited all three–Tripolitza, Napoli, and Argos–in 1810-11; and in the course of journeying through the country, from my first arrival in 1809, crossed the Isthmus eight times on my way from Attica to the Morea.” In the latter locality we find him during the autumn the honoured guest of the Vizier Valhi (a son of Ali Pasha), who presented him with a fine horse. During a second visit to Patras, in September, he was attacked by the same sort of marsh fever from which, fourteen years afterwards, in the near neighbourhood, he died. On his recovery, in October, he complains of having been nearly killed by the heroic measures of the native doctors: “One of them trusts to his genius, never having studied; the other, to a campaign of eighteen months against the sick of Otranto, which he made in his youth with great effect. When I was seized with my disorder, I protested against both these assassins, but in vain.” He was saved by the zeal of his servants, who asseverated that if his lordship died they would take good care the doctors should also; on which the learned men discontinued their visits, and the patient revived. On his final return to Athens, the restoration of his health was retarded by one of his long courses of reducing diet; he lived mainly on rice, and vinegar and water. From that city he writes in the early spring, intimating his intention of proceeding to Egypt; but Mr. Hanson, his man of business, ceasing to send him remittances, the scheme was abandoned. Beset by letters about his debts, he again declares his determination to hold fast by Newstead, adding that if the place which is his only tie to England is sold, he won’t come back at all. Life on the shores of the Archipelago is far cheaper and happier, and “Ubi bene ibi patria,” for such a citizen of the world as he has become. Later he went to Malta, and was detained there by another bad attack of tertian fever. The next record of consequence is from the “Volage” frigate, at sea, June 29, 1811, when he writes in a despondent strain to Hodgson, that he is returning home “without a hope, and almost without a desire,” to wrangle with creditors and lawyers about executions and coal pits. “In short, I am sick and sorry; and when I have a little repaired my irreparable affairs, away I shall march, either to campaign in Spain, or back again to the East, where I can at least have cloudless skies and a cessation from impertinence. I am sick of fops, and poesy, and prate, and shall leave the whole Castalian state to Bufo, or anybody else. Howbeit, I have written some 4000 lines, of one kind or another, on my travels.” With these, and a collection of marbles, and skulls, and hemlock, and tortoises, and servants, he reached London about the middle of July, and remained there, making some arrangements about business and publication. On the 23rd we have a short but kind letter to his mother, promising to pay her a visit on his way to Rochdale. “You know you are a vixen, but keep some champagne for me,” he had written from abroad. On receipt of the letter she remarked, “If I should be dead before he comes down, what a strange thing it, would be.” Towards the close of the month she had an attack so alarming that he was summoned; but before, he had time to arrive she had expired, on the 1st of August, in a fit of rage brought on by reading an upholsterer’s bill. On the way Byron heard the intelligence, and wrote to Dr. Pigot: “I now feel the truth of Gray’s observation, that we can only have _one_ mother. Peace be with her!” On arriving at Newstead, all their storms forgotten, the son was so affected that he did not trust himself to go to the funeral, but stood dreamily gazing at the cortege from the gate of the Abbey. Five days later, Charles S. Matthews was drowned.

CHAPTER V.

SECOND PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP–IN LONDON–CORRESPONDENCE WITH SCOTT

The deaths of Long, Wingfield, Eddlestone, Matthews, and of his mother, had narrowed the circle of the poet’s early companions; and, though he talks of each loss in succession as if it had been that of an only friend, we can credit a degree of loneliness, and excuse a certain amount of bitterness in the feelings with which he returned to London. He had at this time seen very little of the only relative whom he over deeply loved. He and his half-sister met casually in 1804, and again in the following year. After her marriage (1807), Byron writes from abroad (1810), regretting having distressed her by his quarrel with Lord Carlisle. In 1811 she is mentioned as reversionary heiress of his estate. Towards the close of 1813, there are two allusions which testify to their mutual affection. Next wo come to the interesting series of letters of 1815-16, published with the Memoir of Mr. Hodgson, to whom, along with Hobhouse and Scrope Davies, his lordship in a will and codicil leaves the management of his property. Harness appears frequently at this period among his surviving intimates: to this list there was shortly added another. In speaking of his _Bards and Reviewers_, the author makes occasional reference to the possibility of his being called to account for some of his attacks. His expectation was realized by a letter from the poet Moore, dated Dublin, Jan. 1, 1810, couched in peremptory terms, demanding to know if his lordship avowed the authorship of the insults contained in the poem. This letter, being entrusted to Mr. Hodgson, was not forwarded to Byron abroad; but shortly after his return, he received another in more conciliatory terms, renewing the complaint. To this he replied, in a stiff but manly letter, that he had never meant to insult Mr. Moore; but that he was, if necessary, ready to give him satisfaction. Moore accepting the explanation, somewhat querulously complained of his advances to friendship not being received. Byron again replied that much as he would feel honoured by Mr. Moore’s acquaintance, he being practically threatened by the irate Irishman could hardly make the first advances. This called forth a sort of apology; the correspondents met at the house of Mr. Rogers, and out of the somewhat awkward circumstances, owing to the frankness of the “noble author,” as the other ever after delights to call him, arose the life-long intimacy which had such various and lasting results. Moore has been called a false friend to Byron, and a traitor to his memory. The judgment is somewhat harsh, but the association between them was unfortunate. Thomas Moore had some sterling qualities. His best satirical pieces are inspired by a real indignation, and lit up by a genuine humour. He was also an exquisite musician in words, and must have been occasionally a fascinating companion. But he was essentially a worldling, and, as such, a superficial critic. He encouraged the shallow affectations of his great friend’s weaker work, and recoiled in alarm before the daring defiance of his stronger. His criticisms on all Byron wrote and felt seriously on religion are almost worthy of a conventicle. His letters to others on _Manfred_, and _Cain_, and _Don Juan_, are the expression of sentiments which he had never the courage to state explicitly to the author. On the other hand, Byron was attracted beyond reasonable measure by his gracefully deferential manners, paid too much regard to his opinions, and overestimated his genius. For the subsequent destruction of the memoirs, urged by Mr. Hobhouse and Mrs. Leigh, he was not wholly responsible; though a braver man, having accepted the position of his lordship’s literary legatee, with the express understanding that he would seue to the fulfilment of the wishes of his dead friend, would have to the utmost resisted their total frustration.

Meanwhile, on landing in England, the poet had placed in the hands of Mr. Dallas the _Hints from Horace_, which he intended to have brought out by the publisher Cawthorne. Of this performance–an inferior edition, relieved by a few strong touches, of the _Bards and Reviewers_–Dallas ventured to express his disapproval. “Have you no other result of your travels?” he asked; and got for answer, “A few short pieces; and a lot of Spenserian stanzas; not worth troubling you with, but you are welcome to them.” Dallas took the remark literally, saw they were a safe success, and assumed to himself the merit of the discovery, the risks, and the profits. It is the converse of the story of Gabriel Harvey and the _Faery Queene_. Tho first two cantos of _Childe Harold_ bear no comparison with the legend of _Una and the Red Cross Knight_; but there was no mistake about their proof of power, their novelty, and adaptation to a public taste as yet unjaded by eloquent and imaginative descriptions of foreign scenery, manners, and climates.

The poem–after being submitted to Gifford, in defiance of the protestations of the author, who feared that the reference might seem to seek the favour of the august _Quarterly_–was accepted by Mr. Murray, and proceeded through the press, subject to change and additions, during the next five months. The _Hints from Horace_, fortunately postponed and then suspended, appeared posthumously in 1831. Byron remained at Newstead till the close of October, negotiating with creditors and lawyers, and engaged in a correspondence about his publications, in the course of which he deprecates any identification of himself and his hero, though he had at first called him Childe Byron. “Instruct Mr. Murray,” he entreats, “not to allow his shopman to call the work ‘Child of Harrow’s Pilgrimage,’ as he has done to some of my astonished friends, who wrote to inquire after my _sanity_ on the occasion, as well they might.” At the end of the month we find him in London, again indulging in a voyage in “the ship of fools,” in which Moore claims to have accompanied him; but at the same time exhibiting remarkable shrewdness in reference to the affairs of his household. In February, 1812, he again declares to Hodgson his resolve to leave England for ever, and fix himself in “one of the fairest islands of the East.” On the 27th he made in the House of Lords his speech on a Bill to introduce special penalties against the frame-breakers of Nottingham. This effort, on which he received many compliments, led among other results to a friendly correspondence with Lord Holland. On April 21st of the same year, he again addressed the House on behalf of Roman Catholic Emancipation; and in June, 1813, in favour of Major Cartwright’s petition. On all these occasions, as afterwards on the continent, Byron espoused the Liberal side of politics. But his role was that of Manlius or Caesar, and he never fails to remind us that he himself was _for_ the people, not _of_ them. His latter speeches, owing partly to his delivery, blamed as too Asiatic, were less successful. To a reader the three seem much on the same level. They are clever, but evidently set performances, and leave us no ground to suppose that the poet’s abandonment of a parliamentary career was a serious loss to the nation.

On the 29th of February the first and second cantos of _Childe Harold_ appeared. An early copy was sent to Mrs. Leigh, with the inscription: “To Augusta, my dearest sister and my best friend, who has ever loved me much better than I deserved, this volume is presented by her father’s son and most affectionate brother, B.” The book ran through seven editions in four weeks. The effect of the first edition of Burns, and the sale of Scott’s _Lays_, are the only parallels in modern poetic literature to this success. All eyes were suddenly fastened on the author, who let his satire sleep, and threw politics aside, to be the romancer of his day and for two years the darling of society. Previous to the publition, Mr. Moore confesses to have gratified his lordship with the expression of the fear that _Childe Harold_ was too good for the age. Its success was due to the reverse being the truth. It was just on the level of its age. Its flowing verse, defaced by rhymical faults perceptible only to finer ears, its prevailing sentiment, occasional boldness relieved by pleasing platitudes, its half affected rakishness, here and there elevated by a rush as of morning air, and its frequent richness–not yet, as afterwards, splendour–of description, were all appreciated by the fashionable London of the Regency; while the comparatively mild satire, not keen enough to scarify, only gave a more piquant flavour to the whole. Byron’s genius, yet in the green leaf, was not too far above the clever masses of pleasure-loving manhood by which it was surrounded. It was natural that the address on the reopening of Drury Lane theatre should be written by “the world’s new joy”–the first great English poet-peer; as natural as that in his only published satire of the period he should inveigh against almost the only amusement in which he could not share. The address was written at the request of Lord Holland, when of some hundred competitive pieces none had been found exactly suitable–a circumstance which gave rise to the famous parodies entitled _The Rejected Addresses_–and it was thought that the ultimate choice would conciliate all rivalry. The care which Byron bestowed on the correction of the first draft of this piece, is characteristic of his habit of writing off his poems at a gush, and afterwards carefully elaborating them.

_The Waltz_ was published anonymously in April, 1813. It was followed in May by the _Giaour_, the first of the flood of verse romances which, during the three succeeding years, he poured forth with impetuous fluency, and which were received with almost unrestrained applause. The plots and sentiments and imagery are similar in them all. The Giaour steals the mistress of Hassan, who revenges his honour by drowning her. The Giaour escapes; returns, kills Hassan, and then goes to a monastery. In the _Bride of Abydos_, published in the December of the same year, Giaffir wants to marry his daughter Zuleika to Carasman Pasha. She runs off with Selim, her reputed brother–in reality her cousin, and so at last her legitimate lover. They are caught; he is slain in fight; she dies, to slow music. In the _Corsair_, published January, 1814, Conrad, a pirate, “linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes!” is beloved by Medora, who on his predatory expeditions, sits waiting for him (like Hassan’s and Sisera’s mother) in a tower. On one of these he attacks Seyd Pasha, and is overborne by superior force; but Gulnare, a female slave of Seyd, kills her master, and runs off with Conrad, who finds Medora dead and vanishes. In _Lara_, the sequel to this–written in May and June, published in August–a man of mystery appears in the Morea, with a page, Kaled. After adventures worthy of Mrs. Radcliffe–from whose Schledoni the Giaour is said to have been drawn–Lara falls in battle with his deadly foe, Ezzelin, and turns out to be Conrad, while Kaled is of course Gulnare. The _Hebrew Melodies_, written in December, 1814, are interesting, in connexion with the author’s early familiarity with the Old Testament, and from the force and music that mark the best of them; but they can hardly be considered an important contribution to the devotional verse of England. The _Siege of Corinth_ and _Parisina_, composed after his marriage in the summer and autumn of 1815, appeared in the following year. The former is founded on the siege of the city, when the Turks took it from Menotti; but our attention is concentrated on Alp the renegade, another sketch from the same protoplastic ruffian, who leads on the Turks, is in love with the daughter of the governor of the city, tries to save her, but dies. The poem is frequently vigorous, but it ends badly. _Parisina_, though unequal, is on the whole a poem of a higher order than the others of the period. The trial scene exhibits some dramatic power, and the shriek of the lady mingling with Ugo’s funeral dirge lingers in our ears, along with the convent bells–

In the grey square turret swinging,
With a deep sound, to and fro,
Heavily to the heart they go.

These romances belong to the same period of the author’s poetic career as the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_. They followed one another like brilliant fireworks. They all exhibit a command of words, a sense of melody, and a flow of rhythm and rhyme, which mastered Moore and even Scott on their own ground. None of them are wanting in passages, as “He who hath bent him o’er the dead,” and the description of Alp leaning against a column, which strike deeper than any verse of either of those writers. But there is an air of melodrama in them all. Harmonious delights of novel readers, they will not stand against the winnowing wind of deliberate criticism. They harp on the same string, without the variations of a Paganini. They are potentially endless reproductions of one phase of an ill-regulated mind–the picture of the same quasi-melancholy vengeful man, who knows no friend but a dog, and reads on the tombs of the great only “the glory and the nothing of a name,” the exile who cannot flee from himself, “the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind,” who has not loved the world nor the world him,–

Whose heart was form’d for softness, warp’d by wrong, Betray’d too early, and beguiled too long–

all this, _decies repetita_, grows into a weariness and vexation. Mr. Carlyle harshly compares it to the screaming of a meat-jack. The reviewers and the public of the time thought differently. Jeffrey, penitent for the early _faux pas_ of his _Review_, as Byron remained penitent for his answering assault, writes of _Lara_, “Passages of it may be put into competition with anything that poetry has produced in point either of pathos or energy.” Moore–who afterwards wrote, not to Byron, that seven devils had entered into _Manfred_–professes himself “enraptured with it.” Fourteen thousand copies of the _Corsair_ wore sold in a day. But hear the author’s own half-boast, half-apology: “_Lara_ I wrote while undressing after coming home from balls and masquerades, in the year of revelry 1814. The _Bride_ was written in four, the _Corsair_ in ten days. This I take to he a humiliating confession, as it proves my own want of judgment in publishing, and the public’s in reading, things which cannot have stamina for permanence.”

The pecuniary profits accruing to Byron from his works began with _Lara_, for which he received 700_l_. He had made over to Mr. Dallas, besides other gifts to the same ungrateful recipient, the profits of _Harold_, amounting to 600_l_, and of the _Corsair_, which brought 525_l_. The proceeds of the _Giaour_ and the _Bride_ were also surrendered.

During this period, 1813-1816, he had become familiar with all the phases of London society, “tasted their pleasures,” and, towards the close, “felt their decay.” His associates in those years were of two classes–men of the world, and authors. Feted and courted in all quarters, he patronized the theatres, became in 1815 a member of the Drury Lane Committee, “liked the dandies,” including Beau Brummell, and was introduced to the Regent. Their interview, in June 1812, in the course of which the latter paid unrestrained compliments to _Harold_ and the poetry of Scott, is naively referred to by Mr. Moore “as reflecting even still more honour on the Sovereign himself than on the two poets.” Byron, in a different spirit, writes to Lord Holland: “I have now great hope, in the event of Mr. Pye’s decease, of warbling truth at Court, like Mr. Mallet of indifferent memory. Consider, one hundred marks a year! besides the wine and the disgrace.” We can hardly conceive the future author of the _Vision of Judgment_ writing odes to dictation. He does not seem to have been much fascinated with the first gentleman of Europe, whom at no distant date he assailed in the terrible “Avatar,” and left the laureateship to Mr. Southey.

Among leaders in art and letters he was brought into more or less intimate contact with Sir Humphry Davy, the Edgeworths, Sir James Mackintosh, Colman the dramatic author, the older Kean, Monk Lewis, Grattan, Curran, and Madame de Stael. Of a meeting of the last two he remarks, “It was like the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone, and they were both so ugly that I could not help wondering how the best intellects of France and Ireland could have taken up respectively such residences.”

About this time a communication from Mr Murray in reference to the meeting with the Regent led to a letter from Sir Walter Scott to Lord Byron, the beginning of a life-long friendship, and one of the most pleasing pages of biography. These two great men were for a season perpetually pitted against one another, as the foremost competitors for literary favour. When _Rokeby_ came out, contemporaneously with the _Giaour_, the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge ran races to catch the first copies, and laid bets as to which of the rivals would win. During the anti-Byronic fever of 1840-1860 they were perpetually contrasted as the representatives of the manly and the morbid schools. A later sentimentalism has affected to despise the work of both. The fact therefore that from an early period the men themselves knew each other as they were, is worth illustrating.

Scott’s letter, in which a generous recognition of the pleasure he had derived from tho work of the English poet, was followed by a manly remonstrance on the subject of the attack in the _Bards and Reviewers_, drew from Byron in the following month (July 1812) an answer in the same strain, descanting on the Prince’s praises of the _Lay_ and _Marmion_, and candidly apologizing for the “evil works of his nonage.” “The satire,” he remarks, “was written when I was very young and very angry, and fully bent on displaying my wrath and my wit; and now I am haunted by the ghosts of my wholesale assertions.” This, in turn, called forth another letter to Byron eager for more of his verses, with a cordial invitation to Abbotsford on the ground of Scotland’s maternal claim on him, and asking for information about Pegasus and Parnassus. After this the correspondence continues with greater freedom, and the same display on either side of mutual respect. When Scott says “the _Giaour_ is praised among our mountains,” and Byron returns “_Waverley_ is the best novel I have read,” there is no suspicion of flattery–it is the interchange of compliments between men,

Et cantare pares et respondere parati.

They talk in just the same manner to third parties. “I gave over writing romances,” says the elder, in the spirit of a great-hearted gentleman,” because Byron beat me. He hits the mark, where I don’t even pretend to fledge my arrow. He has access to a stream of sentiment unknown to me.” The younger, on the other hand, deprecates the comparisons that were being invidiously drawn between them. He presents his copy of the _Giaour_ to Scott, with the phrase “To the monarch of Parnassus,” and compares the feeling of those who cavilled at his fame to that of the Athenians towards Aristides. From those sentiments, he never swerves, recognizing to the last the breadth of character of the most generous of his critics, and referring to him, during his later years in Italy, as the Wizard and the Ariosto of the North. A meeting was at length arranged between them. Scott looked forward to it with anxious interest, humorously remarking that Byron should say,–

Art thou the man whom men famed Grissell call?

And he reply–

Art thou the still more famed Tom Thumb the small?

They met in London during the spring of 1815. The following sentences are from Sir Walter’s account of it:–“Report had prepared me to meet a man of peculiar habits and quick temper, and I had some doubts whether we were likely to suit each other in society. I was most agreeably disappointed in this respect. I found Lord Byron in the highest degree courteous, and even kind. We met for an hour or two almost daily in Mr. Murray’s drawing-room, and found a great deal to say to each other. Our sentiments agreed a good deal, except upon the subjects of religion and politics, upon neither of which I was inclined to believe that Lord Byron entertained very fixed opinions. On politics he used sometimes to express a high strain of what is now called Liberalism; but it appeared to me that the pleasure it afforded him as a vehicle of displaying his wit and satire against individuals in office was at the bottom of this habit of thinking. At heart, I would have termed Byron a patrician on principle. His reading did not seem to me to have been very extensive. I remember repeating to him the fine poem of Hardyknute, and some one asked me what I could possibly have been telling Byron by which he was so much agitated. I saw him for the last time in (September) 1815, after I returned from France; he dined or lunched with me at Long’s in Bond Street. I never saw him so full of gaiety and good humour. The day of this interview was the most interesting I ever spent. Several letters passed between us–one perhaps every half year. Like the old heroes in Homer we exchanged gifts; I gave Byron a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the redoubted Elfi Bey. But I was to play the part of Diomed in the _Iliad_, for Byron sent me, some time after, a large sepulchral vase of silver, full of dead men’s bones, found within the land walls of Athens. He was often melancholy, almost gloomy. When I observed him in this humour I used either to wait till it went off of its own accord, or till some natural and easy mode occurred of leading him into conversation, when the shadows almost always left his countenance, like the mist arising from a landscape. I think I also remarked in his temper starts of suspicion, when he seemed to pause and consider whether there had not been a secret and perhaps offensive meaning in something that was said to him. In this case I also judged it best to let his mind, like a troubled spring, work itself clear, which it did in a minute or two. A downright steadiness of manner was the way to his good opinion. Will Rose, looking by accident at his feet, saw him scowling furiously; but on his showing no consciousness, his lordship resumed his easy manner. What I liked about him, besides his boundless genius, was his generosity of spirit as well as of purse, and his utter contempt of all the affectations of literature. He liked Moore and me because, with all our other differences, we were both good-natured fellows, not caring to maintain our dignity, enjoying the _mot-pour-rire_. He wrote from impulse never from effort, and therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetic geniuses of my time, and of half a century before me. We have many men of high poetic talents, but none of that ever-gushing and perennial fountain of natural waters.”

Scott, like all hale men of sound sense, regretted the almost fatal incontinence which, in the year of his greatest private troubles, led his friend to make a parade of them before the public. He speaks more than once of his unhappy tendency to exhibit himself as the dying gladiator, and even compares him to his peacock, screeching before his window because he chooses to bivouack apart from his mate; but he read a copy of the Ravenna diary without altering his view that his lordship was his own worst maligner. Scott, says Lockhart, considered Byron the only poet of transcendent talents we had had since Dryden. There is preserved a curious record of his meeting with a greater poet than Dryden, but one whose greatness neither he nor Scott suspected. Mr. Crabb Robinson reports Wordsworth to have said, in Charles Lamb’s chambers, about the year 1808, “These reviewers put me out of patience. Here is a young man who has written a volume of poetry; and these fellows, just because he is a lord, set upon him. The young man will do something, if he goes on as he has begun. But these reviewers seem to think that nobody may write poetry unless he lives in a garret.” Years after, Lady Byron, on being told this, exclaimed, “Ah, if Byron had known that, he would never have attacked Wordsworth. He went one day to meet him at dinner, and I said, ‘Well, how did the young poet get on with the old one?’ ‘Why, to tell the truth,’ said he, ‘I had but one feeling from the beginning of the visit to the end, and that was _reverence_.'” Similarly, he began by being on good terms with Southey, and after a meeting at Holland House, wrote enthusiastically of his prepossessing appearance.

Byron and the leaders of the so-called Lake School were, at starting, common heirs of the revolutionary spirit; they were, either in their social views or personal feelings, to a large extent influenced by the most morbid, though in some respects the most magnetic, genius of modern France, J.J. Rousseau; but their temperaments were in many respects fundamentally diverse; and the pre-established discord between them ere long began to make itself manifest in their following out widely divergent paths. Wordsworth’s return to nature had been preluded by Cowper; that of Byron by Burns. The revival of the one ripened into a restoration of simpler manners and old beliefs; the other was the spirit of the storm. When they had both become recognized powers, neither appreciated the work of the other. A few years after this date Byron wrote of Wordsworth, to a common admirer of both: “I take leave to differ from you as freely as I once agreed with you. His performances, since the _Lyrical Ballads_, are miserably inadequate to the ability that lurks within him. There is, undoubtedly, much natural talent spilt over the _Excursion_; but it is rain upon rocks, where it stands and stagnates; or rain upon sand, where it falls without fertilizing.” This criticism with others in like strain, was addressed to Mr. Leigh Hunt, to whom, in 1812, when enduring for radicalism’s sake a very comfortable incarceration, Byron had, in company with Moore, paid a courteous visit.

Of the correspondence of this period–flippant, trenchant, or sparkling–few portions are more calculated to excite a smile than the record of his frequent resolutions made, reasseverated, and broken, to have done with literature; even going the length on some occasions of threatening to suppress his works, and, if possible, recall the existing copies. He affected being a man of the world unmercifully, and had a real delight in clever companions who assumed the same role. Frequent allusion is made to his intercourse with Erskine and Sheridan: the latter he is never tired of praising, as “the author of the best modern comedy (_School for Scandal_), the best farce (_The Critic_), and the best oration (the famous Begum speech) ever heard in this country.” They spent many an evening together, and probably cracked many a bottle. It is Byron who tells the story of Sheridan being found in a gutter in a sadly incapable state; and, on some one asking “Who is this?” stammering out “Wilberforce.” On one occasion he speaks of coming out of a tavern with the dramatist, when they both found the staircase in a very cork-screw condition: and elsewhere, of encountering a Mr. C—-, who “had no notion of meeting with a bon-vivant in a scribbler,” and summed the poet’s eulogy with the phrase, “he drinks like a man.” Hunt, the tattler, who observed his lordship’s habits in Italy, with the microscope of malice ensconced within the same walls, makes it a charge against his host that he would not drink like a man. Once for all it may be noted, that although there was no kind of excess in which Byron, whether from bravado or inclination, failed occasionally to indulge, he was never for any stretch of time given over, like Burns, to what is technically termed intemperance. His head does not seem to have been strong, and under the influence of stimulants he may have been led to talk a great deal of his dangerous nonsense. But though he could not say, with Wordsworth, that only once, at Cambridge, had his brain been “excited by the fumes of wine,” his prevailing sins were in other directions.

CHAPTER VI.

MARRIAGE, AND FAREWELL TO ENGLAND.

“As for poets,” says Scott, “I have seen all the best of my time and country, and, though Burns had the most glorious eye imaginable, I never thought any of them would come up to an artist’s notion of the character, except Byron. His countenance is a thing to dream of.” Coleridge writes to the same effect, in language even stronger. We have from all sides similar testimony to the personal beauty which led the unhappiest of his devotees to exclaim, “That pale face is my fate!”

Southern critics, as Chasles, Castelar, even Mazzini, have dealt leniently with the poet’s relations to the other sex; and Elze extends to him in this regard the same excessive stretch of charity. “Dear Childe Harold,” exclaims the German professor, “was positively besieged by women. They have, in truth, no right to complain of him: from his childhood he had seen them on their worst side.” It is the casuistry of hero-worship to deny that Byron was unjust to women, not merely in isolated instances, but in his prevailing views of their character and claims. “I regard them,” he says, in a passage only distinguished from others by more extravagant petulance, “as very pretty but inferior creatures, who are as little in their place at our tables as they would be in our council chambers. The whole of the present system with regard to the female sex is a remnant of the barbarism of the chivalry of our forefathers. I look on them as grown-up children; but, like a foolish mamma, I am constantly the slave of one of them. The Turks shut up their women, and are much happier; give a woman a looking-glass and burnt almonds, and she will be content.”

In contrast with this, we have the moods in which he drew his pictures of Angiolina, and Haidee, and Aurora Raby, and wrote the invocations to the shade of Astarte, and his letters in prose and verse to Augusta; but the above passage could never have been written by Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Shelley. The class whom he was reviling seemed, however, during “the day of his destiny,” bent on confirming his judgment by the blindness of their worship. His rank and fame, the glittering splendour of his verse, the romance of his travels, his picturesque melancholy and affectation of mysterious secrets, combined with the magic of his presence to bewitch and bewilder them. The dissenting malcontents, condemned as prudes and blues, had their revenge. Generally, we may say that women who had not written books adored Byron; women who had written or were writing books distrusted, disliked, and made him a moral to adorn their tales, often to point their fables with. He was by the one set caressed and spoilt, and “beguiled too long;” by the other, “betrayed too late.” The recent memoirs of Frances Ann Kemble present a curious record of the process of passing from one extreme to the other. She dwells on the fascination exerted over her mind by the first reading of his poetry, and tells how she “fastened on the book with a grip like steel,” and carried it off and hid it under her pillow; how it affected her “like an evil potion,” and stirred her whole being with a tempest of excitement, till finally she, with equal weakness, flung it aside, “resolved to read that grand poetry no more, and broke through the thraldom of that powerful spell.” The confession brings before us a type of the transitions of the century, on its way from the Byronic to the anti-Byronic fever, of which later state Mrs. Norton and Miss Martineau are among the most pronounced representatives.

Byron’s garrulity with regard to those delicate matters on which men of more prudence or chivalry are wont to set the seal of silence, has often the same practical effect as reticence; for he talks so much at large–every page of his Journal being, by his own admission, apt to “confute and abjure its predecessor”–that we are often none the wiser. Amid a mass of conjecture, it is manifest that during the years between his return from Greece and final expatriation (1811-1816), including the whole period of his social glory–though not yet of his solid fame–he was lured into liaisons of all sorts and shades. Some, now acknowledged as innocent, were blared abroad by tongues less skilled in pure invention than in distorting truth. On others, as commonplaces of a temperament “all meridian,” it were waste of time to dwell. Byron rarely put aside a pleasure in his path; but his passions were seldom unaccompanied by affectionate emotions, genuine while they lasted. The verses to the memory of a lost love veiled as “Thyrza,” of moderate artistic merit, were not, as Moore alleges, mere plays of imagination, but records of a sincere grief.[1] Another intimacy exerted so much influence on this phase of the poet’s career, that to pass it over would be like omitting Vanessa’s name from the record of Swift. Lady Caroline Lamb, granddaughter of the first Earl Spencer, was one of those few women of our climate who, by their romantic impetuosity, recall the “children of the sun.” She read Burns in her ninth year, and in her thirteenth idealized William Lamb (afterwards Lord Melbourne) as a statue of Liberty. In her nineteenth (1805) she married him, and lived for some years, during which she was a reigning belle and toast, a domestic life only marred by occasional eccentricities. Rogers, whom in a letter to Lady Morgan she numbers among her lovers, said she ought to know the new poet, who was three years her junior, and the introduction took place in March, 1812. After the meeting, she wrote in her journal, “Mad–bad–and dangerous to know;” but, when the fashionable Apollo called at Melbourne House, she “flew to beautify herself.” Flushed by his conquest, he spent a great part of the following year in her company, during which time the apathy or self-confidence of the husband laughed at the worship of the hero. “Conrad” detailed his travels and adventures, interested her, by his woes, dictated her amusements, invited her guests, and seems to have set rules to the establishment. “Medora,” on the other hand, made no secret of her devotion, declared that they were affinities, and offered him her jewels. But after the first excitement, he began to grow weary of her talk about herself, and could not praise her indifferent verses: “he grew moody, and she fretful, when their mutual egotisms jarred.” Byron at length concurred in her being removed for a season to her father’s house in Ireland, on which occasion he wrote one of his glowing farewell letters. When she came back, matters were little better. The would-be Juliet beset the poet with renewed advances, on one occasion penetrating to his rooms in the disguise of a page, on another threatening to stab herself with a pair of scissors, and again, developing into a Medea, offering her gratitude to any one who would kill him. “The ‘Agnus’ is furious,” he writes to Hodgson, in February, 1813, in one of the somewhat ungenerous bursts to which he was too easily provoked. “You can have no idea of the horrible and absurd things she has said and done since (really from the best motives) I withdrew my homage…. The business of last summer I broke off, and now the amusement of the gentle fair is writing letters literally threatening my life.” With one member of the family, Lady Melbourne, Mr. Lamb’s mother, and sister of Sir Ralph Milbanke, he remained throughout on terms of pleasant intimacy. He appreciated the talent and sense, and was ready to profit by the experience and tact of “the cleverest of women.” But her well-meant advice had unfortunate results, for it was on her suggestion that he became a suitor for the hand of her niece, Miss Milbanke. Byron first proposed to this lady in 1813; his offer was refused, but so graciously that they continued to correspond on friendly, which gradually grew into intimate terms, and his second offer, towards the close of the following year, was accepted.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Trelawny says that Thyrza was a cousin, but that on this subject Byron was always reticent. Mr. Minto, as we have seen, associates her with the disguised girl of 1807-8.]

After a series of vain protests, and petulant warnings against her cousin by marriage, who she said was punctual at church, and learned, and knew statistics, but was “not for Conrad, no, no, no!” Lady Caroline lapsed into an attitude of fixed hostility; and shortly after the crash came, and her predictions were realized, vented her wrath in the now almost forgotten novel of _Glenarvon_, in which some of Byron’s real features were represented in conjunction with many fantastic additions. Madame de Stael was kind enough to bring a copy of the book before his notice when they met on the Lake of Geneva, but he seems to have been less moved by it than by most attacks. We must however, bear in mind his own admission in a parallel case. “I say I am perfectly calm; I am, nevertheless, in a fury.” Over the sad vista of the remaining years of the unhappy lady’s life we need not linger. During a considerable part of it she appears hovering about the thin line that separates some kinds of wit and passion from madness; writing more novels, burning her hero’s effigy and letters, and then clamouring for a lock of his hair, or a sight of his portrait; separated from, and again reconciled to, a husband to whose magnanimous forbearance and compassion she bears testimony to the last, comparing herself to Jane Shore; attempting Byronic verses, loudly denouncing and yet never ceasing inwardly to idolize, the man whom she regarded as her betrayer, perhaps only with justice in that he had unwittingly helped to overthrow her mental balance. After eight years of this life, lit up here and there by gleams of social brilliancy, we find her carriage, on the 12th of July, 1824, suddenly confronted by a funeral. On hearing that the remains of Byron were being carried to the tomb, she shrieked, and fainted. Her health finally sank, and her mind gave way under this shock; but she lingered till January, 1828, when she died, after writing a calm letter to her husband, and bequeathing the poet’s miniature to her friend, Lady Morgan.

“I have paid some of my debts, and contracted others,” Byron writes to Moore, on September 15th, 1814; “but I have a few thousand pounds which I can’t spend after my heart in this climate, and so I shall go back to the south. I want to see Venice and the Alps, and Parmesan cheeses, and look at the coast of Greece from Italy. All this however depends upon an event which may or may not happen. Whether it will I shall probably know tomorrow, and if it does I can’t well go abroad at present.” “A wife,” he had written, in the January of the same year, “would be my salvation;” but a marriage entered upon in such a flippant frame of mind could, scarcely have been other than disastrous. In the autumn of the year we are told that a friend,[2] observing how cheerless was the state both of his mind and prospects, advised him to marry, and after much discussion he consented, naming to his correspondent Miss Milbanke. To this his adviser objected, remarking that she had, at present, no fortune, and that his embarrassed affairs would not allow him to marry without one, etc. Accordingly, he agreed that his friend should write a proposal to another lady, which was done. A refusal arrived as they were one morning sitting together. “‘You see,’ said Lord Byron, ‘that after all Miss Milbanke is to be the person,’ and wrote on the moment. His friend, still remonstrating against his choice, took up the letter; but, on reading it, observed, ‘Well, really, this is a very pretty letter; it is a pity it should not go.’ ‘Then it _shall_ go,’ said Lord Byron, and, in so saying, sealed and sent off this fiat of his fate.” The incident seems cut from a French novel; but so does the whole strange story–one apparently insoluble enigma in an otherwise only too transparent life. On the arrival of the lady’s answer he was seated at dinner, when his gardener came in, and presented him with his mother’s wedding-ring, lost many years before, and which had just been found, buried in the mould beneath her window. Almost at the same moment the letter arrived; and Byron exclaimed, “If it contains a consent (which it did), I will be married with this very ring.” He had the highest anticipations of his bride, appreciating her “talents, and excellent qualities;” and saying, “she is so good a person that I wish I was a better.” About the same date he writes to various friends in the good spirits raised by his enthusiastic reception from the Cambridge undergraduates, when in the course of the same month he went to the Senate House to give his vote for a Professor of Anatomy.

[Footnote 2: Doubtless Moore himself, who tells the story.]

The most constant and best of those friends was his sister, Augusta Leigh, whom, from the death of Miss Chaworth to his own, Byron, in the highest and purest sense of the word, loved more than any other human being. Tolerant of errors, which she lamented, and violences in which she had no share, she had a touch of their common family pride, most conspicuous in an almost cat-like clinging to their ancestral home. Her early published letters are full of regrets about the threatened sale of Newstead, on the adjournment of which, when the first purchaser had to pay 25,000_l_. for breaking his bargain, she rejoices, and over the consummation of which she mourns, in the manner of Milton’s Eve–

Must I then leave thee, Paradise?

In all her references to the approaching marriage there are blended notes of hope and fear. In thanking Hodgson for his kind congratulations, she trusts it will secure her brother’s happiness. Later she adds her testimony to that of all outsiders at this time, as to the graces and genuine worth of the object of his choice. After the usual preliminaries, the ill-fated pair were united, at Seaham House, on the 2nd of January, 1815. Byron was married like one walking in his sleep. He trembled like a leaf, made the wrong responses, and almost from the first seems to have been conscious of his irrevocable mistake.

I saw him stand
Before an altar with a gentle bride: Her face was fair, but was not that which made The starlight of his boyhood. He could see Not that which was–but that which should have been– But the old mansion, the accustom’d hall. And she who was his destiny came back,
And thrust herself between him and the light.

Here we have faint visions of Miss Chaworth, mingling with later memories. In handing the bride into the carriage he said, “Miss Milbanke, are you ready?”–a mistake said to be of evil omen. Byron never really loved his wife; and though he has been absurdly accused of marrying for revenge, we must suspect that he married in part for a settlement. On the other hand, it is not unfair to say that she was fascinated by a name, and inspired by the philanthropic zeal of reforming a literary Corsair. Both were disappointed. Miss Milbanke’s fortune was mainly settled on herself; and Byron, in spite of plentiful resolutions gave little sign of reformation. For a considerable time their life, which, after the “treacle moon,” as the bridegroom called it, spent at Halnaby, near Darlington, was divided between residence at Seaham and visits to London, seemed to move smoothly. In a letter, evidently mis-dated the 15th December, Mrs. Leigh writes to Hodgson: “I have every reason to think that my beloved B. is very happy and comfortable. I hear constantly from him and _his rib_. It appears to me that Lady B. sets about making him happy in the right way. I had many fears. Thank God that they do not appear likely to be realized. In short, there seems to me to be but one drawback to all our felicity, and that, alas, is the disposal of dear Newstead. I never shall feel reconciled to the loss of that sacred revered Abbey. The thought makes me more melancholy than perhaps the loss of an inanimate object ought to do. Did you ever hear that _landed property_, the GIFT OF THE CROWN, could not be sold? Lady B. writes me word that she never saw her father and mother so happy; that she believes the latter would go to the bottom of the sea herself to find fish for B.’s dinner, &c.” Augusta Ada was born in London on the 10th of December, 1815. During the next months a few cynical mutterings are the only interruptions to an ominous silence; but these could be easily explained by the increasing embarrassment of the poet’s affairs, and the importunity of creditors, who in the course of the last half-year had served seven or eight executions on his house and furniture. Their expectations were raised by exaggerated reports of his having married money; and by a curious pertinacity of pride he still declined, even when he had to sell his books, to accept advances from his publisher. In January the storm which had been secretly gathering suddenly broke. On the 15th, i.e. five weeks after her daughter’s birth, Lady Byron left home with the infant to pay a visit, as had been agreed, to her own family at Kirkby Mallory in Leicestershire. On the way she despatched to her husband a tenderly playful letter, which has been often quoted. Shortly afterwards he was informed–first by her father, and then by herself–that she did not intend ever to return to him. The accounts of their last interview, as in the whole evidence bearing on the affair, not only differ but flatly contradict one another. On behalf of Lord Byron it is asserted, that his wife, infuriated by his offering some innocent hospitality on occasion of bad weather to a respectable actress, Mrs. Mardyn, who had called on him about Drury Lane business, rushed into the room exclaiming, “I leave you for ever”–and did so. According to another story, Lady Byron, finding him with a friend, and observing him to be annoyed at her entrance, said, “Am I in your way, Byron?” whereupon he answered, “Damnably.” Mrs. Leigh, Hodgson, Moore, and others, did everything that mutual friends could do to bring about the reconciliation for which Byron himself professed to be eager, but in vain; and in vain the effort was renewed in later years. The wife was inveterately bent on a separation, of the causes of which the husband alleged he was never informed, and with regard to which as long as he lived she preserved a rigid silence.

For some time after the event Byron spoke of his wife with at least apparent generosity. Rightly or wrongly, he blamed her parents, and her maid–Mrs. Clermont, the theme of his scathing but not always dignified “Sketch;” but of herself he wrote (March 8, 1816), “I do not believe that there ever was a brighter, and a kinder, or a more amiable or agreeable being than Lady Byron. I never had nor can have any reproach to make to her, when with me.” Elsewhere he adds, that he would willingly, if he had the chance, “renew his marriage on a lease of twenty years.” But as time passed and his overtures were rejected, his patience gave way, and in some of his later satires he even broke the bounds of courtesy. Lady Byron’s letters at the time of the separation, especially those first published in the _Academy_ of July 19, 1879, are to Mrs. Leigh always affectionate and confidential, often pathetic, asking her advice “in this critical moment,” and protesting that, “independent of malady, she does not think of the past with any spirit of resentment, and scarcely with the sense of injury.” In her communications to Mr. Hodgson, on the other hand–the first of almost the same date, the second a few weeks later–she writes with intense bitterness, stating that her action was due to offences which she could only condone on the supposition of her husband’s insanity, and distinctly implying that she was in danger of her life. This supposition having been by her medical advisers pronounced erroneous, she felt, in the words only too pungently recalled in _Don Juan_, that her duty both to man and God prescribed her course of action. Her playful letter on leaving she seems to defend on the ground of the fear of personal violence. Till Lord Byron’s death the intimacy between his wife and sister remained unbroken; through the latter he continued to send numerous messages to the former, and to his child, who became a ward in Chancery; but at a later date it began to cool. On the appearance of Lady Byron’s letter, in answer to Moore’s first volume, Augusta speaks of it as “a despicable tirade,” feels “disgusted at such unfeeling conduct,” and thinks “nothing can justify any one in defaming the dead.” Soon after 1830 they had an open rupture on a matter of business, which was never really healed, though the then Puritanic precisian sent a message of relenting to Mrs. Leigh on her death-bed (1851).

The charge or charges which, during her husband’s life, Lady Byron from magnanimity or other motive reserved, she is ascertained after his death to have delivered with important modifications to various persons, with little regard to their capacity for reading evidence or to their discretion. On one occasion her choice of a confidante was singularly unfortunate. “These,” wrote Lord Byron in his youth, “these are the first tidings that have ever sounded like fame in my ears–to be redde on the banks of the Ohio.” Strangely enough, it is from the country of Washington, whom the poet was wont to reverence as the purest patriot of the modern world, that in 1869 there emanated the hideous story which scandalized both continents, and ultimately recoiled on the retailer of the scandal. The grounds of the reckless charge have been weighed by those who have wished it to prove false, and by those who have wished it to prove true, and found wanting. The chaff has been beaten in every way and on all sides, without yielding an ounce of grain; and it were ill-advised to rake up the noxious dust that alone remains. From nothing left on record by either of the two persons most intimately concerned can we derive any reliable information. It is plain that Lady Byron was during the later years of her life the victim of hallucinations, and that if Byron knew the secret, which he denies, he did not choose to tell it, putting off Captain Medwin and others with absurdities, as that “He did not like to see women eat,” or with commonplaces, as “The causes, my dear sir, were too simple to be found out.”

Thomas Moore, who had the Memoirs[3] supposed to have thrown light on the mystery, in the full knowledge of Dr. Lushington’s judgment and all the gossip of the day, professes to believe that “the causes of disunion did not differ from those that loosen the links of most such marriages,” and writes several pages on the trite theme that great genius is incompatible with domestic happiness. Negative instances abound to modify this sweeping generalization; but there is a kind of genius, closely associated with intense irritability, which it is difficult to subject to the most reasonable yoke; and of this sort was Byron’s. His valet, Fletcher, is reported to have said that “Any woman could manage my lord, except my lady;” and Madame De Stael, on reading the _Farewell_, that “She would have been glad to have been in Lady Byron’s place.” But it may be doubted if Byron would have made a good husband to any woman; his wife and he were even more than usually ill-assorted. A model of the proprieties, and a pattern of the learned philanthropy of which in her sex he was wont to make a constant butt, she was no fit consort for that “mens insana in corpore insano.” What could her stolid temperament conjecture of a man whom she saw, in one of his fits of passion, throwing a favourite watch under the fire, and grinding it to pieces with a poker? Or how could her conscious virtue tolerate the recurring irregularities which he was accustomed, not only to permit himself, but to parade? The harassment of his affairs stimulated his violence, till she was inclined to suspect him to be mad. Some of her recently printed letters–as that to Lady Anne Barnard, and the reports of later observers of her character–as William Howitt, tend to detract from the earlier tributes to her consistent amiability, and confirm our ideas of the incompatibility of the pair. It must have been trying to a poet to be asked by his wife, impatient of his late hours, when he was going to leave off writing verses; to be told he had no real enthusiasm; or to have his desk broken open, and its compromising contents sent to the persons for whom they were least intended. The smouldering elements of discontent may have been fanned by the gossip of dependants, or the officious zeal of relatives, and kindled into a jealous flame by the ostentation of regard for others beyond the circle of his home. Lady Byron doubtless believed some story which, when communicated to her legal advisers, led them to the conclusion that the mere fact of her believing it made reconciliation impossible; and the inveterate obstinacy which lurked beneath her gracious exterior, made her cling through life to the substance–not always to the form, whatever that may have been–of her first impressions. Her later letters to Mrs. Leigh, as that called forth by Moore’s _Life_, are certainly as open to the charge of self-righteousness, as those of her husband’s are to self-disparagement.

[Footnote 3: Captain Trelawney, however, doubts if he ever read them.]

Byron himself somewhere says, “Strength of endurance is worth all the talent in the world.” “I love the virtues that I cannot share.” His own courage was all active; he had no power of sustained endurance. At a time when his proper refuge was silence, and his prevailing sentiment–for he admits he was somehow to blame–should have been remorse, he foolishly vented his anger and his grief in verses, most of them either peevish or vindictive, and some of which he certainly permitted to be published. “Woe to him,” exclaims Voltaire, “who says all he could on any subject!” Woe to him, he might have added, who says anything at all on the subject of his domestic troubles! The poet’s want of reticence at this crisis started a host of conjectures, accusations, and calumnies, the outcome, in some degree at least, of the rancorous jealousy of men of whose adulation he was weary. Then began that burst of British virtue on which Macaulay has expatiated, and at which the social critics of the continent have laughed. Cottle, Cato, Oxoniensis, Delia, and Styles, were let loose, and they anticipated the _Saturday_ and the _Spectator_ of 1869, so that the latter might well have exclaimed, “Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.” Byron was accused of every possible and impossible vice, he was compared to Sardanapalus, Nero, Tiberius, the Duke of Orleans, Heliogabalus, and Satan–all the most disreputable persons mentioned in sacred and profane history; his benevolences were maligned, his most disinterested actions perverted. Mrs. Mardyn, the actress, was on his account, on one occasion, driven off the public stage. He was advised not to go to the theatres, lest he should be hissed; nor to Parliament, lest he should be insulted. On the very day of his departure a friend told him that he feared violence from mobs assembling at the door of his carriage. “Upon what grounds,” the poet writes, in a trenchant survey of the circumstances, in August, 1819, “the public formed their opinion, I am not aware; but it was general, and it was decisive. Of me and of mine they knew little, except that I had written poetry, was a nobleman, bad 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 press was active and scurrilous;.. my name–which had been a knightly or a noble one since my fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for William the Norman–was tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered and muttered and murmured was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me. I withdrew; but this was not enough. In other countries–in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue depth of the lakes–I was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. I crossed the mountains, but it was the same; so I went a little farther, and settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who betakes himself to the waters.”

On the 16th of April, 1816, shortly before his departure, he wrote to Mr. Rogers: “My sister is now with me, and leaves town to-morrow. We shall not meet again for some time, at all events, if ever (it was their final meeting), and under these circumstances I trust to stand excused to you and Mr. Sheridan for being unable to wait upon him this evening.” In all this storm and stress, Byron’s one refuge was in the affection which rises like a well of purity amid the passions of his turbid life.

In the desert a fountain is springing, In the wild waste there still is a tree; And a bird in the solitude singing,
That speaks to my spirit of thee.

The fashionable world was tired of its spoilt child, and he of it. Hunted out of the country, bankrupt in purse and heart, he left it, never to return; but he left it to find fresh inspiration by the “rushing of the arrowy Rhone,” and under Italian skies to write the works which have immortalized his name.

DESCENT OF LADY BYRON AND LADY C. LAMB

DESCENT OF ALLEGRA

CHAPTER VII

LIFE ABROAD–SWITZERLAND TO VENICE–THIRD PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP.–CHILDE HAROLD, III., IV.–MANFRED.

On the 25th of April, 1816, Byron embarked for Ostend. From the “burning marl” of the staring streets he planted his foot again on the dock with a genuine exultation.

Once more upon the waters, yet once more, And the waves bound beneath me as a steed That knows her rider. Welcome to the roar!

But he brought with him a relic of English extravagance, sotting out on his land travels in a huge coach, copied from that of Napoleon taken at Genappe, and being accompanied by Fletcher, Rushton, Berger, a Swiss, and Polidori, a physician of Italian descent, son of Alfieri’s secretary, a man of some talent but indiscreet. A question arises as to the source from which he obtained the means for these and subsequent luxuries, in striking contrast with Goldsmith’s walking-stick, knapsack, and flute. Byron’s financial affairs are almost inextricably confused. We can, for instance, nowhere find a clear statement of the result of the suit regarding the Rochdale Estates, save that he lost it before the Court of Exchequer, and that his appeal to the House of Lords was still unsettled in 1822. The sale of Newstead to Colonel Wildman in 1818, for 90,000 _l_., went mostly to pay off mortgages and debts. In April, 1819, Mrs. Leigh writes, after a last sigh over this event:–“Sixty thousand pounds was secured by his (Byron’s) marriage settlement, the interest of which he receives for life, and which ought to make him very comfortable.” This is unfortunately decisive of the fact that he did not in spirit adhere to the resolution expressed to Moore never to touch a farthing of his wife’s money, though we may accept his statement to Medwin, that he twice repaid the dowry of 10,000 _l_. brought to him at the marriage, as in so far diminishing the obligation. None of the capital of Lady Byron’s family came under his control till 1822, when, on the death of her mother, Lady Noel, Byron arranged the appointment of referees, Sir Francis Burdett on his behalf, Lord Dacre on his wife’s. The result was an equal division of a property worth about 7000 _l_ a year. While in Italy the poet received besides about 10,000 _l_ for his writings–4000 _l_. being given for _Childe Harold_ (iii., iv.), and _Manfred_. “Ne pas etre dupe” was one of his determinations, and, though he began by caring little for making money, he was always fond of spending it. “I tell you it is too much,” he said to Murray, in returning a thousand guineas for the _Corinth_ and _Partsina_. Hodgson, Moore, Bland, Thomas Ashe, the family of Lord Falkland, the British Consul at Venice, and a host of others, were ready to testify to his superb munificence. On the other hand, he would stint his pleasures, or his benevolences, which were among them, for no one; and when he found that to spend money he had to make it, he saw neither rhyme nor reason in accepting less than his due. In 1817 he begins to dun Murray, declaring, with a frankness in which we can find no fault, “You offer 1500 guineas for the new canto (_C. H_., iv.). I won’t take it. I ask 2500 guineas for it, which you will either give or not, as you think proper.” During the remaining years of his life he grew more and more exact, driving hard bargains for his houses, horses, and boats, and fitting himself, had he lived, to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in the newly-liberated State, from which he took a bond securing a fair interest for his loan. He made out an account in _L. s. d_. against the ungrateful Dallas, and when Leigh Hunt threatened to sponge upon him he got a harsh reception; but there is nothing to countenance the view that Byron was ever really possessed by the “good old gentlemanly vice” of which lie wrote. The Skimpoles and Chadbands of the world are always inclined to talk of filthy lucre: it is equally a fashion of really lavish people to boast that they are good men of business.

We have only a few glimpses of Byron’s progress. At Brussels the Napoleonic coach was set aside for a more serviceable caleche. During his stay in the Belgian capital lie paid a visit to the scene of Waterloo, wrote the famous stanzas beginning, “Stop, for thy tread is on an empire’s dust!” and in unpatriotic prose, recorded his impressions of a plain which appeared to him to “want little but a better cause” to make it vie in interest with those of Platea and Marathon.

The rest of his journey lay up the Rhine to Basle, thence to Berne, Lausanne, and Geneva, where he settled for a time at the Hotel Secheron, on the western shore of the lake. Here began the most interesting literary relationship of his life, for here he first came in contact with the impassioned Ariel of English verse, Percy Bysshe Shelley. They lived in proximity after they left the hotel, Shelley’s headquarters being at Mont Alegre, and Byron’s for the remainder of the summer at the Villa Diodati; and their acquaintance rapidly ripened into an intimacy which, with some interruptions, extended over the six remaining years of their joint lives. The place for an estimate of their mutual influence belongs to the time of their Italian partnership. Meanwhile, we hear of them mainly as fellow-excursionists about the lake, which on one occasion departing from its placid poetical character, all but swallowed them both, along with Hobhouse, off Meillerie. “The boat,” says Byron, “was nearly wrecked near the very spot where St. Preux and Julia were in danger of being drowned. It would have been classical to have been lost there, but not agreeable. I ran no risk, being so near the rocks and a good swimmer; but our party wore wet and incommoded.” The only anxiety of Shelley, who could not swim, was, that no one else should risk a life for his. Two such revolutionary or such brave poets were, in all probability, never before nor since in a storm in a boat together. During this period Byron complains of being still persecuted. “I was in a wretched state of health and worse spirits when I was in Geneva; but quiet and the lake–better physicians than Polidori–soon set me up. I never led so moral a life as during my residence in that country, but I gained no credit by it. On the contrary, there is no story so absurd that they did not invent at my cost. I was watched by glasses on the opposite side of the lake, and by glasses, too, that must have had very distorted optics. I was waylaid in my evening drives. I believe they looked upon me as a man-monster.” Shortly after his arrival in Switzerland he contracted an intimacy with Miss Clairmont, a daughter of Godwin’s second wife, and consequently a connexion by marriage of the Shelleys, with whom she was living, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, Allegra, at Great Marlow, in February, 1817. The noticeable events of the following two months are a joint excursion to Chamouni, and a visit in July to Madame de Stael at Coppet, in the course of which he met Frederick Schlegel. During a wet week, when the families were reading together some German ghost stories, an idea occurred of imitating them, the main result of which was Mrs. Shelley’s _Frankenstein_. Byron contributed to the scheme a fragment of _The Vampire_, afterwards completed and published in the name of his patron by Polidori. The eccentricities of this otherwise amiable physician now began to give serious annoyance; his jealousy of Shelley grew to such a pitch that it resulted in the doctor’s giving a challenge to the poet, at which the latter only laughed; but Byron, to stop further outbreaks of the kind, remarked, “Recollect that, though Shelley has scruples about duelling, I have none, and shall be at all times ready to take his place.” Polidori had ultimately to be dismissed, and, after some years of vicissitude, committed suicide.

The Shelleys left for England in September, and Byron made an excursion with Hobhouse through the Bernese Oberland. They went by the Col de Jaman and the Simmenthal to Thun; then up the valley to the Staubbach, which he compares to the tail of the pale horse in the Apocalypse–not a very happy, though a striking comparison. Thence they proceeded over the Wengern to Grindelwald and the Rosenlau glacier; then back by Berne, Friburg, and Yverdun to Diodati. The following passage in reference to this tour may be selected as a specimen of his prose description, and of the ideas of mountaineering before the days of the Alpine Club:–

“Before ascending the mountain, went to the torrent again, the sun upon it forming a rainbow of the lower part, of all colours but principally purple and gold, the bow moving as you move. I never saw anything like this; it is only in the sunshine…. Left the horses, took off my coat, and went to the summit, 7000 English feet above the level of the sea, and 5000 feet above the valley we left in the morning. On one side our view comprised the Jungfrau, with all her glaciers; then the Dent d’Argent, shining like truth; then the Eighers and the Wetterhorn. Heard the avalanches falling every five minutes. From where we stood on the Wengern Alp we had all these in view on one side; on the other, the clouds rose up from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices, like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring tide; it was white and sulphury, and immeasurably deep in appearance…. Arrived at the Grindelwald; dined; mounted again, and rode to the higher glacier–like a frozen hurricane; starlight beautiful, but a devil of a path. Passed whole woods of withered pines, all withered; trunks stripped and barkless, branches lifeless; done by a single winter. Their appearance reminded me of me and my family.”

Students of _Manfred_ will recognize whole sentences, only slightly modified in its verse. Though Byron talks with contempt of authorship, there is scarce a fine phrase in his letters or journal which is not pressed into the author’s service. He turns his deepest griefs to artistic gain, and uses five or six times for literary purposes the expression which seems to have dropped from him naturally about his household gods being shivered on his hearth. His account of this excursion concludes with a passage equally characteristic of his melancholy and incessant self-consciousness:–

“In the weather for this tour, I have been very fortunate…. I was disposed to be pleased. I am a lover of nature, &c…. But in all this the recollection of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory around, above, and beneath me.”

Such egotism in an idle man would only provoke impatience; but Byron was, during the whole of this period, almost preternaturally active. Detained by bad weather at Ouchy for two days (Juno 26, 27), he wrote the _Prisoner of Chillon_, which, with its noble introductory sonnet on Bonnivard, in some respects surpasses any of his early romances. The opening lines,–

Lake Leman lies by Chillon’s walls;
A thousand feet in depth below,
Its massy waters meet and flow,–

bring before us in a few words the conditions of a hopeless bondage. The account of the prisoner himself, and of the lingering deaths of the brothers; the first frenzy of the survivor, and the desolation which succeeds it–

I only loved: I only drew
The accursed breath of dungeon dew,–

the bird’s song breaking on the night of his solitude; his growing enamoured of despair, and regaining his freedom with a sigh, are all strokes from a master hand. From the same place, at the same date, he announces to Murray the completion of the third canto of _Childe Harold_. The productiveness of July is portentous. During that month he wrote the _Monody on Sheridan, The Dream, Churchill’s Grave_, the _Sonnet to Lake Leman, Could I remount the River of my Years_, part of _Manfred, Prometheus_, the _Stanzas to Augusta_, beginning,

My sister! My sweet sister! If a name Dearer and purer were, it should be thine;

and the terrible dream of _Darkness_, which at least in the ghastly power of the close, where the survivors meet by the lurid light of a dim altar fire, and die of each other’s hideousness, surpasses Campbell’s _Last Man_[1]. At Lausanne the poet made a pilgrimage to the haunts of Gibbon, broke a sprig from his acacia-tree, and carried off some rose leaves from his garden. Though entertaining friends, among them Mr. M.G. Lewis and Scrope Davies, he systematically shunned “the locust swarm of English tourists,” remarking on their obtrusive platitudes; as when he heard one of them at Chamouni inquire, “Did you ever see anything more truly rural?” Ultimately he got tired of the Calvinistic Genevese–one of whom is said to have swooned as he entered the room–and early in October set out with Hobhouse for Italy. They crossed the Simplon, and proceeded by the Lago Maggiore to Milan, admiring the pass, but slighting the somewhat hothouse beauties of the Borromean Islands. From Milan he writes, pronouncing its cathedral to be only a little inferior to that of Seville, and delighted with “a correspondence, all original and amatory, between Lucretia Borgia and Cardinal Bembo.” He secured a lock of the golden hair of the Pope’s daughter, and wished himself a cardinal.

[Footnote 1: This only appeared in 1831, but Campbell claims to have given Byron in conversation the suggestion of the subject.]

At Verona, Byron dilates on the amphitheatre, as surpassing anything he had seen even in Greece, and on the faith of the people in the story of Juliet, from whose reputed tomb he sent some pieces of granite to Ada and his nieces. In November we find him settled in Venice, “the greenest isle of his imagination.” There he began to form those questionable alliances which are so marked a feature of his life, and so frequent a theme in his letters, that it is impossible to pass them without notice. The first of his temporary idols was Mariana Segati, “the wife of a merchant of Venice,” for some time his landlord. With this woman, whom he describes as an antelope with oriental eyes, wavy hair, voice like the cooing of a dove, and the spirit of a Bacchante, he remained on terms of intimacy for about eighteen months, during which their mutual devotion was only disturbed by some outbursts of jealousy. In December the poet took lessons in Armenian, glad to find in the study something craggy to break his mind upon. Ho translated into that language a portion of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians. Notes on the carnival, praises of _Christabel_, instructions about the printing of _Childe Harold_ (iii.), protests against the publication under his name of some spurious “domestic poems,” and constant references, doubtfully domestic, to his Adriatic lady, fill up the records of 1816. On February 15, 1817, he announces to Murray the completion of the first sketch of _Manfred_, and alludes to it in a bantering manner as “a kind of poem in dialogue, of a wild metaphysical and inexplicable kind;” concluding, “I have at least rendered it _quite impossible_ for the stage, for which my intercourse with Drury Lane has given me the greatest contempt.”

About this time Byron seems to have entertained the idea of returning to England in the spring, i.e. after a year’s absence. This design, however, was soon set aside, partly in consequence of a slow malarian fever, by which he was prostrated for several weeks. On his partial recovery, attributed to his having had neither medicine nor doctor, and a determination to live till he had “put one or two people out of the world,” he started on an expedition to Rome.

His first stage was Arqua; then Ferrara, where he was inspired, by a sight of the Italian poet’s prison, with the _Lament of Tasso_; the next, Florence, where he describes himself as drunk with the beauty of the galleries. Among the pictures, he was most impressed with the mistresses of Raphael and Titian, to whom, along with Giorgione, he is always reverential; and he recognized in Santa Croce the Westminster Abbey of Italy. Passing through Foligno, he reached his destination early in May, and met his old friends, Lord Lansdowne and Hobhouse. The poet employed his short time at Rome in visiting on horseback the most famous sites in the city and neighbourhood–as the Alban Mount, Tivoli, Frascati, the Falls of Terni, and the Clitumnus–re-casting the crude first draft of the third act of _Manfred_, and sitting for his bust to Thorwaldsen. Of this sitting the sculptor afterwards gave some account to his compatriot, Hans Andersen: “Byron placed himself opposite to me, but at once began to put on a quite different expression from that usual to him. ‘Will you not sit still?’ said I. ‘You need not assume that look.’ ‘That is my expression,’ said Byron. ‘Indeed,’ said I; and I then represented him as I wished. When the bust was finished he said, ‘It is not at all like me; my expression is more unhappy.'” West, the American, who five years later painted his lordship at Leghorn, substantiates the above half-satirical anecdote, by the remark, “He was a bad sitter; he assumed a countenance that did not belong to him, as though he were thinking of a frontispiece for _Chlde Harold_.” Thorwaldsen’s bust, the first cast of which was sent to Hobhouse, and pronounced by Mrs. Leigh to be the best of the numerous likenesses of her brother, was often repeated. Professor Brandes, of Copenhagen, introduces his striking sketch of the poet by a reference to the model, that has its natural place in the museum named from the great sculptor whose genius had flung into the clay the features of a character so unlike his own. The bust, says the Danish critic, at first sight impresses one with an undefinable classic grace; on closer examination the restlessness of a life is reflected in a brow over which clouds seem to hover, but clouds from which we look for lightnings. The dominant impression of the whole is that of some irresistible power (Unwiderstehlichkeit). Thorwaldsen, at a much later date (1829-1833) executed the marble statue, first intended for the Abbey, which is now to be seen in the library of Trinity College, in evidence that Cambridge is still proud of her most brilliant son.

Towards the close of the month–after almost fainting at the execution by guillotine of three bandits–he professes impatience to get back to Mariana, and early in the next we find him established with her near Venice, at the villa of La Mira, where for some time he continued to reside. His letters of June refer to the sale of Newstead, the mistake of Mrs. Leigh and others in attributing to him the _Tales of a Landlord_, the appearance of _Lalla Rookh_, preparations for _Marino Faliero_, and the progress of _Childe Harold_ iv. This poem, completed in September, and published early in 1818 (with a dedication to Hobhouse, who had supplied most of the illustrative notes), first made manifest the range of the poet’s power. Only another slope of ascent lay between him and the pinnacle, over which shines the red star of _Cain_. Had Lord Byron’s public career closed when he left England, he would have been remembered for a generation as the author of some musical minor verses, a clever satire, a journal in verse exhibiting flashes of genius, and a series of fascinating romances–also giving promise of higher power–which had enjoyed a marvellous popularity. The third and fourth cantos of _Childe Harold_ placed him on another platform, that of the _Dii Majores_ of English verse. These cantos are separated from their predecessors, not by a stage, but by a gulf. Previous to their publication he had only shown how far the force of rhapsody could go; now he struck with his right hand, and from the shoulder. Knowledge of life and study of Nature were the mainsprings of a growth which the indirect influence of Wordsworth, and the happy companionship of Shelley, played their part in fostering. Faultlessness is seldom a characteristic of impetuous verse, never of Byron’s; and even in the later parts of the _Childe_ there are careless lines, and doubtful images. “Self-exiled Harold wanders forth again,” looking “pale and interesting;” but we are soon refreshed by a higher note. No familiarity can distract from “Waterloo,” which holds its own by Barbour’s “Bannockburn,” and Scott’s “Flodden.” Sir Walter, referring to the climax of the opening, and the pathetic lament of the closing lines, generously doubts whether any verses in English surpass them in vigour. There follows “The Broken Mirror,” extolled by Jeffrey with an appreciation of its exuberance of fancy, and negligence of diction; and then the masterly sketch of Napoleon, with the implied reference to the writer at the end.

The descriptions in both cantos perpetually rise from a basis of rhetoric to a real height of poetry. Byron’s “Rhine” flows, like the river itself, in a stream of “exulting and abounding” stanzas. His “Venice” may be set beside the masterpieces of Ruskin’s prose. They are together the joint pride of Italy and England. The tempest in the third canto is in verse a splendid microcosm of the favourites, if not the prevailing mood, of the writer’s mind. In spite of manifest flaws, the nine stanzas beginning “It is the hush of night,” have enough in them to feed a high reputation. The poet’s dying day, his sun and moon contending over the Rhaetian hill, his Thrasymene, Clitumnus, and Velino, show that his eye has grown keener, and his imagery at least more terse, and that he can occasionally forgot himself in his surroundings. The Drachenfels, Ehrenbreitstein, the Alps, Lake Leman, pass before us like a series of dissolving views. But the stability of the book depends on its being a Temple of Fame, as well as a Diorama of Scenery. It is no mere versified Guide, because every resting-place in the pilgrimage is made interesting by association with illustrious memories. Coblontz introduces the tribute to Marceau; Clarens an almost complete review, in five verses, of Rousseau; Lausanne and Ferney the quintessence of criticism on Gibbon and Voltaire. A tomb in Arqua suggests Petrarch; the grass-grown streets of Ferrara lead in the lines on Tasso; the white walls of the Etrurian Athens bring back Alfieri and Michael Angelo, and the prose bard of the hundred tales, and Dante, “buried by the upbraiding shore,” and–

The starry Galileo and his woes.

Byron has made himself so master of the glories and the wrecks of Rome, that almost everything else that has been said of them seems superfluous. Hawthorne, in his _Marble Fawn_, comes nearest to him; but Byron’s Gladiator and Apollo, if not his Laocoon, are unequalled. “The voice of Marius,” says Scott, “could not sound more deep and solemn among the ruins of Carthage, than the strains of the pilgrim among the broken shrines and fallen statues of her subduer.” As the third canto has a fitting close with the poet’s pathetic remembrance of his daughter, so the fourth is wound up with consummate art,–the memorable dirge on the Princess Charlotte being followed by the address to the sea, which, enduring unwrinkled through all its ebbs and flows, seems to mock at the mutability of human life.

_Manfred_, his witch drama, as the author called it, has had a special attraction for inquisitive biographers, because it has been supposed in some dark manner to reveal the secrets of his prison house. Its lines have been tortured, like the witches of the seventeenth century, to extort from them the meaning of the “all nameless hour,” and every conceivable horror has been alleged as its _motif_. On this subject Goethe writes with a humorous simplicity: “This singularly intellectual poet has extracted from my _Faust_ the strongest nourishment for his hypochondria; but he has made use of the impelling principles for his own purposes…. When a bold and enterprising young man, he won the affections of a Florentine lady. Her husband discovered the amour, and murdered his wife; but the murderer was the same night found dead in the street, and there was no one to whom any suspicion could be attached. Lord Byron removed from Florence, but these spirits have haunted him all his life. This romantic incident explains innumerable allusions,” e.g.,–

I have shed
Blood, but not hers,–and yet her blood was shed.

Were it not for the fact that the poet had never seen the city in question when he wrote the poem, this explanation would be more plausible than most others, for the allusions are all to some lady who has been done to death. Galt asserts that the plot turns on a tradition of unhallowed necromancy–a human sacrifice, like that of Antinous attributed to Hadrian. Byron himself says it has no plot, but he kept teasing his questioners with mysterious hints, e.g. “It was the Staubbach and the Jungfrau, and something else more than Faustus, which made me write _Manfred_;” and of one of his critics he says to Murray, “It had a better origin than he can devise or divine, for the soul of him.” In any case most methods of reading between its lines would, if similarly applied, convict Sophocles, Schiller, and Shelley of incest, Shakespeare of murder, Milton of blasphemy, Scott of forgery, Marlowe and Goethe of compacts with the devil. Byron was no dramatist, but he had wit enough to vary at least the circumstances of his projected personality. The memories of both Fausts–the Elizabethan and the German–mingle, in the pages of this piece, with shadows of the author’s life; but to these it never gives, nor could be intended to give, any substantial form.

_Manfred_ is a chaos of pictures, suggested by the scenery of Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald, half animated by vague personifications and sensational narrative. Like _Harold_, and Scott’s _Marmion_, it just misses being a great poem. The Coliseum is its masterpiece of description, the appeal, “Astarte, my beloved, speak to me,” its nearest approach to pathos. The lonely death of the hero makes an effective close to the moral tumult of the preceding scenes. But the reflections, often striking, are seldom absolutely fresh: that beginning,

The mind, which is immortal, makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts, Is its own origin of ill and end,
And its own place and time,

is transplanted from Milton with as little change as Milton made in transplanting it from Marlowe. The author’s own favourite passage, the invocation to the sun (act iii., sc. 2), has some sublimity, marred by lapses. The lyrics scattered through the poem sometimes open well, e.g.,–

Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains; They crowned him long ago,
On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, With a null of snow;

but they cannot sustain themselves like true song-birds, and fall to the ground like spent rockets. This applies to Byron’s lyrics generally; turn to the incantation in the _Deformed Transformed_: the first line and a half are in tune,–

Beautiful shadow of Thetis’s boy,
Who sleeps in the meadow whose grass grows o’er Troy.

Nor Sternhold nor Hopkins has more ruthlessly outraged our ears than the next two–

From the red earth, like Adam, thy likeness I shape, As the Being who made him, whose actions I ape(!)

Of his songs: “There be none of Beauty’s daughters,” “She walks in beauty,” “Maid of Athens,” “I enter thy garden of roses,” the translation “Sons of the Greeks,” and others, have a flow and verve that it is pedantry to ignore; but in general Byron was too much of the earth earthy to be a great lyrist. Some of the greatest have lived wild lives, but their wings were not weighted with the lead of the love of the world.

The summer and early months of the autumn of 1817 were spent at La Mira, and much of the poet’s time was occupied in riding along the banks of the Brenta, often in the company of the few congenial Englishmen who came in his way; others, whom he avoided, avenged themselves by retailing stories, none of which wore “too improbable for the craving appetites of their slander-loving countrymen.” In August he received a visit from Mr. Hobhouse, and on this occasion drew up the remarkable document afterwards given to Mr. M. G. Lewis for circulation in England, which appeared in the _Academy_ of October 9th, 1869. In this document he says, “It has been intimated to me that the persons understood to be the legal advisers of Lady Byron have declared their lips to be sealed up on the cause of the separation between her and myself. If their lips are sealed up they are not sealed up by me, and the greatest favour they can confer upon me will be to open them.” He goes on to state, that he repents having consented to the separation–will be glad to cancel the deed, or to go before any tribunal, to discuss the matter in the most public manner; adding, that Mr. Hobhouse (in whose presence he was writing) proposed, on his part, to go into court, and ending with a renewed asseveration of his ignorance of the allegations against him, and his inability to understand for what purpose they had been kept back, “unless it was to sanction the most infamous calumnies by silence.” Hobhouse, and others, during the four succeeding years, ineffectually endeavoured to persuade the poet to return to England. Moore and others insist that Byron’s heart was at home when his presence was abroad, and that, with all her faults, he loved his country still. Leigh Hunt, on the contrary, asserts that he cared nothing for England or its affairs. Like many men of genius, Byron was never satisfied with what he had at the time. “Romae Tibur amem ventosus Tibure Romam.” At Seaham he is bored to death, and pants for the excitement of the clubs; in London society he longs for a desert or island in the Cyclades; after their separation, he begins to regret his wife; after his exile, his country. “Where,” he exclaimed to Hobhouse, “is real comfort to be found out of England?” He frequently fell into the mood in which he wrote the verse,–

Yet I was born where men are proud to be, Not without cause: and should I leave behind Th’immortal island of the sage and free, And seek me out a home by a remoter sea?

But the following, to Murray (June 7, 1819), is equally sincere. “Some of the epitaphs at Ferrara pleased me more than the more splendid monuments of Bologna; for instance–

‘Martini Luigi
Implora pace.’

‘Lucrezia Picini
Implora eterna quiete.'”

Can anything be more full of pathos? These few words say all that can be said or sought; the dead had had enough of life; all they wanted was rest, and this they implore. There is all the helplessness, and humble hope, and death-like prayer that can arise from the grave–‘implora pace.’ “I hope, whoever may survive me, and shall see me put in the foreigner’s burying-ground at the Lido, within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see these two words, and no more, put over me. I trust they won’t think of pickling and bringing me home to Clod, or Blunderbuss Hall. I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country.” Hunt’s view is, in this as in other subtle respects, nearer the truth than Moore’s; for with all Byron’s insight into Italian vice, he hated more the master vice of England–hypocrisy; and much of his greatest, and in a sense latest, because unfinished work, is the severest, as it might be the wholesomest, satire ever directed against a great nation since the days of Juvenal and Tacitus.

In September (1817) Byron entered into negotiations, afterwards completed, for renting a country house among the Euganean hills near Este, from Mr. Hoppner, the English Consul at Venice, who bears frequent testimony to his kindness and courtesy. In October we find him settled for the winter in Venice, where he first occupied his old quarters, in the Spezieria, and afterwards hired one of the palaces of the Countess Mocenigo on the Grand Canal. Between this mansion, the cottage at Este, and the villa of La Mira, he divided his time for the next two years. During the earlier part of his Venetian career he had continued to frequent the salon of the Countess Albrizzi, where he met with people of both sexes of some rank and standing who appreciated his genius, though some among them fell into absurd mistakes. A gentleman of the company informing the hostess, in answer to some inquiry regarding Canova’s busts, that Washington, the American President, was shot in a duel by Burke, “What, in the name of folly, are you thinking of?” said Byron, perceiving that the speaker was confounding Washington with Hamilton, and Burke with Burr. He afterwards transferred himself to the rival coterie of the Countess Benzoni, and gave himself up with little reserve to the intrigues which cast discredit on this portion of his life. Nothing is so conducive to dissipation as despair, and Byron had begun to regard the Sea-Cybele as a Sea-Sodom–when he wrote, “To watch a city die daily, as she does, is a sad contemplation. I sought to distract my mind from a sense of her desolation and my own solitude, by plunging into a vortex that was anything but pleasure.” In any case, he forsook the “Dame,” and, by what his biographer calls a “descent in the scale of refinement, for which nothing but the wayward state of his mind can account,” sought the companions of his leisure hours among the wearers of the “fazzioli.” The carnivals of the years 1818, 1819, mark the height of his excesses. Early in the former, Mariana Segati fell out of favour, owing to Byron’s having detected her in selling the jewels he had given as presents, and so being led to suspect a large mercenary element in her devotion. To her succeeded Margarita Cogni, the wife of a baker who proved as accommodating as his predecessor, the linen-draper. This woman was decidedly a character, and Senor Castelar has almost elevated her into a heroine. A handsome virago, with brown shoulders, and black hair, endowed with the strength of an Amazon, “a face like Faustina’s, and the figure of a Juno–tall and energetic as a pythoness,” she quartered herself for twelve months in the palace as “Donna di governo,” and drove the servants about without let or hindrance. Unable to read or write she intercepted his lordship’s letters to little purpose; but she had great natural business talents, reduced by one half the expenses of his household, kept everything in good order, and, when her violences roused his wrath, turned it off with some ready retort or witticism. She was very devout, and would cross herself three times at the Angelus. One instance, of a different kind of devotion, from Byron’s own account, is sufficiently graphic:–“In the autumn one day, going to the Lido with my gondoliers, we were overtaken by a heavy squall, and the gondola put in peril, hats blown away, boat filling, oar lost, tumbling sea, thunder, rain in torrents, and wind unceasing. On our return, after a tight struggle, I found her on the open stops of the Mocenigo Palace on the Grand Canal, with her great black eyes flashing through her tears, and the long dark hair which was streaming, drenched with rain, over her brows. She was perfectly exposed to the storm; and the wind blowing her dress about her thin figure, and the lightning flashing round her, made her look like Medea alighted from her chariot, or the Sibyl of the tempest that was rolling around her, the only living thing within hail at that moment, except ourselves. On seeing me safe she did not wait to greet me, as might have been expected; but, calling out to me, ‘Ah! can’ della Madonna, xe esto il tempo per andar’ al’ Lido,’ ran into the house, and solaced herself with scolding the boatmen for not foreseeing the ‘temporale.’ Her joy at seeing me again was moderately mixed with ferocity, and gave me the idea of a tigress over her recovered cubs.”

Some months after she became ungovernable–threw plates about, and snatched caps from the heads of other women who looked at her lord in public places. Byron told her she must go home; whereupon she proceeded to break glass, and threaten “knives, poison, fire;” and on his calling his boatmen to get ready the gondola, threw herself in the dark night into the canal. She was rescued, and in a few days finally dismissed; after which he saw her only twice, at the theatre. Her whole picture is more like that of Theroigne de Mericourt than that of Raphael’s Fornarina, whose name she received.

Other stories, of course, gathered round this strange life–personal encounters, aquatic feats, and all manner of romantic and impossible episodes; their basis being, that Byron on one occasion thrashed, on another challenged, a man who tried to cheat him, was a frequent rider, and a constant swimmer, so that he came to be called “the English fish,” “water-spaniel,” “sea-devil,” &c. One of the boatmen is reported to have said, “He is a good gondolier, spoilt by being a poet and a lord;” and in answer to a traveller’s inquiry, “Where does he get his poetry?” “He dives for it.” His habits, as regards eating, seem to have been generally abstemious; but he drank a pint of gin and water over his verses at night, and then took claret and soda in the morning.

Riotous living may have helped to curtail Byron’s life, but it does not seem to have seriously impaired his powers. Among these adverse surroundings of the “court of Circe,” he threw off _Beppo_, _Mazeppa_, and the early books of _Don Juan_. The first canto of the last was written in November, 1818, the second in January, 1819, the third and fourth towards the close of the same year. _Beppo_, its brilliant prelude, sparkles like a draught of champagne. This “Venetian story,” or sketch, in which the author broke ground on his true satiric field–the satire of social life–and first adopted the measure avowedly suggested by _Whistlecraft_ (Frere), was drafted in October, 1817, and appeared in May, 1818. It aims at comparatively little, but is perfectly successful in its aim, and unsurpassed for the incisiveness of its side strokes, and the courtly ease of a manner that never degenerates into mannerism. In _Mazeppa_ the poet reverts to his earlier style, and that of Scott; the description of the headlong ride hurries us along with a breathless expectancy that gives it a conspicuous place among his minor efforts. The passage about the howling of the wolves, and the fever faint of the victim, is as graphic as anything in Burns–

The skies spun like a mighty wheel,
I saw the trees like drunkards reel.

In the May or June of 1818 Byron’s little daughter, Allegra, had been sent from England, under the care of a Swiss nurse too young to undertake her management in such trying circumstances, and after four months of anxiety he placed her in charge of Mrs. Hoppner. In the course of this and the next year there are frequent allusions to the child, all, save one which records a mere affectation of indifference, full of affectionate solicitude. In June, 1819, he writes, “Her temper and her ways, Mr. Hoppner says, are like mine, as well as her features; she will make, in that case, a manageable young lady.” Later he talks of her as “flourishing like a pomegranate blossom.” In March, 1820, we have another reference. “Allegra is prettier, I think, but as obstinate as a mule, and as ravenous as a vulture; health good, to judge by the complexion, temper tolerable, but for vanity and pertinacity. She thinks herself handsome, and will do as she pleases.” In May he refers to having received a letter from her mother, but gives no details. In the following year, with the approval of the Shelleys then at Pisa, he placed her for education in the convent of Cavalli Bagni in the Romagna. “I have,” he writes to Hoppner, who had thought of having her boarded in Switzerland, “neither spared care, kindness, nor expense, since the child was sent to me. The people may say what they please. I must content myself with not deserving, in this instance, that they should speak ill. The place is a _country_ town, in a good air, and less liable to objections of every kind. It has always appeared to me that the moral defect in Italy does _not_ proceed from a _conventual_ education; because, to my certain knowledge, they come out of their convents innocent, even to ignorance of moral evil; but to the state of society into which they are directly plunged on coming out of it. It is like educating an infant on a mountain top, and then taking him to the sea, and throwing him into it, and desiring him to swim.” Elsewhere he says, “I by no means intend to give a natural child an English education, because, with the disadvantages of her birth, her after settlement would be doubly difficult. Abroad, with a fair foreign education, and a portion of 5000_l_. or 6000_l_. (his will leaving her 5000_l_., on condition that she should not marry an Englishman, is here explained and justified), she might, and may, marry very respectably. In England such a dowry would be a pittance, while elsewhere it is a fortune. It is, besides, my wish that she should be a Roman Catholic, which I look upon as the best religion, as it is assuredly the oldest of the various branches of Christianity.” It only remains to add that, when he heard that the child had fallen ill of fever in 1822, Byron was almost speechless with agitation, and, on the news of her death, which took place April 22nd, he seemed at first utterly prostrated. Next day he said, “Allegra is dead; she is more fortunate than we. It is God’s will, let us mention it no more.” Her remains rest beneath the elm-tree at Harrow which her father used to haunt in boyhood, with the date of birth and death, and the scripture–

I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.

The most interesting of the visits paid to Byron during the period of his life at Venice was that of Shelley, who, leaving his wife and children at Bagni di Lucca, came to see him in August, 1818. He arrived late, in the midst of a thunderstorm; and next day they sailed to the Lido, and rode together along the sands. The attitude of the two poets towards each other is curious; the comparatively shrewd man of the world often relied on the idealist for guidance and help in practical matters, admired his courage and independence, spoke of him invariably as the best of men, but never paid a sufficiently warm tribute in public to his work. Shelley, on the other hand, certainly the most modest of great poets, contemplates Byron in the fixed attitude of a literary worshipper.

The introduction to _Julian and Maddalo_, directly suggested by this visit, under the slight veil of a change in the name, gives a summary of the view of his friend’s character which he continued to entertain. “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;” but “in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as by a spell.”

Subsequently to this visit Byron lent the villa at Este to his friend, and during the autumn weeks of their residence there were written the lines among the Euganean hills, where, in the same strain of reverence, Shelley refers to the “tempest-cleaving swan of Albion,” to the “music flung o’er a mighty thunder-fit,” and to the sunlike soul destined to immortalize his ocean refuge,–

As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Seamander’s wasting springs, As divinest Shakespeare’s might
Fills Avon and the world with light.

“The sun,” he says, at a later date, “has extinguished the glowworm;” and again, “I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may; and there is no other with whom it is worth contending.”

Shelley was, in the main, not only an exquisite but a trustworthy critic; and no man was more absolutely above being influenced by the fanfaronade of rank or the din of popularity. These criticisms are therefore not to be lightly set aside, nor are they unintelligible. Perhaps those admirers of the clearer and more consistent nature, who exalt him to the rank of a greater poet, are misled by the amiable love of one of the purest characters in the history of our literature. There is at least no difficulty in understanding why he should have been, as it were, concussed by Byron’s greater massiveness and energy into a sense–easy to an impassioned devotee–of inferiority. Similarly, most of the estimates– many already reversed, others reversible–by the men of that age, of each other, can be explained. We can see how it was that Shelley overestimated both the character and the powers of Hunt; and Byron depreciated Keats, and was ultimately repelled by Wordsworth, and held out his hand to meet the manly grasp of Scott. The one enigma of their criticism is the respect that they joined in paying to the witty, genial, shallow, worldly, musical Tom Moore.

This favourite of fortune and the minor muses, in the course of a short tour through the north of Italy in the autumn of 1819, found his noble friend on the 8th of October at La Mira, went with him on a sight-seeing expedition to Venice, and passed five or six days in his company. Of this visit he has recorded his impressions, some of which relate to his host’s personal appearance, others to his habits and leading incidents of his life. Byron “had grown fatter, both in person and face, and the latter had suffered most by the change, having lost by the enlargement of the features some of that refined and spiritualized look that had in other times distinguished it, but although less romantic he appeared more humorous.” They renewed their recollections of the old days and nights in London, and compared them with later experiences of Bores and Blues, in a manner which threatened to put to flight the historical and poetical associations naturally awakened by the City of the Sea. Byron had a rooted dislike to any approach to fine talk in the ordinary intercourse of life; and when his companion began to rhapsodize on the rosy hue of the Italian sunsets, he interrupted him with, “Come, d–n it, Tom, _don’t_ be poetical.” He insisted on Moore, who sighed after what he imagined would be the greater comforts of an hotel, taking up his quarters in his palace; and as they were groping their way through the somewhat dingy entrance, cried out, “Keep clear of the dog!” and a few paces farther, “Take care, or the monkey will fly at you!” an incident recalling the old vagaries of the menagerie at Newstead. The biographer’s reminiscences mainly dwell on his lordship’s changing moods and tempers and gymnastic exercises, his terror of interviewing strangers, his imperfect appreciation of art, his preference of fish to flesh, his almost parsimonious economy in small matters, mingled with allusions to his domestic calamities, and frequent expressions of a growing distaste to Venetian society. On leaving the city, Moore passed a second afternoon at La Mira, had a glimpse of Allegra, and the first intimation of the existence of the notorious Memoirs. “A short time after dinner Byron left the room, and returned carrying in his hand a white leather bag. ‘Look here,’ he said, holding it up; ‘this would be worth something to Murray, though _you_, I dare say, would not give sixpence for it.’ ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘My life and adventures,’ he answered. ‘It is not a thing,’ he answered, ‘that can be published during my lifetime, but you may have it if you like. There, do whatever you please with it.’ In taking the bag, and thanking him most warmly, I added, ‘This will make a nice legacy for my little Tom, who shall astonish the latter days of the nineteenth century with it.'”[2] Shortly after, Moore for the last time bade his friend farewell, taking with him from Madame Guiccioli, who did the honours of the house, an introduction to her brother, Count Gamba, at Rome. “Theresa Guiccioli,” says Castelar, “appears like a star on the stormy horizon of the poet’s life.” A young Romagnese, the daughter of a nobleman of Ravenna, of good descent but limited means, she had been educated in a convent, and married in her nineteenth year to a rich widower of sixty, in early life a friend of Alfieri, and noted as the patron of the National Theatre. This beautiful blonde, of pleasing manners, graceful presence, and a strong vein of sentiment, fostered by the reading of Chateaubriand, met Byron for the first time casually when she came in her bridal dress to one of the Albrizzi reunions; but she was only introduced to him early in the April of the following year, at the house of the Countess Benzoni. “Suddenly the young Italian found herself inspired with a passion of which till that moment her mind could not have formed the least idea; she had thought of love but as an amusement, and now became its slave.” Byron, on the other hand, gave what remained of a heart, never alienated from her by any other mistress. Till the middle of the month they met every day; and when the husband took her back to Ravenna she despatched to her idol a series of impassioned letters, declaring her resolution to mould her life in accordance with his wishes. Towards the end of May she had prepared her relatives to receive Byron as a visitor. He started in answer to the summons, writing on his way the beautiful stanzas to the Po, beginning–

River that rollest by the ancient walls Where dwells the lady of my love.

[Footnote 2: In December, 1820, Byron sent several more sheets of memoranda from Ravenna, and in the following year suggested an arrangement by which Murray paid over to Moore, who was then in difficulties, 2000_l_. for the right of publishing the whole, under the condition, among others, that Lady Byron should see them, and have the right of reply to anything that might seem to her objectionable. She on her part declined to have anything to do with them. When the Memoirs were destroyed, Moore paid back the 2000_l_., but obtained four thousand guineas for editing the _Life and Correspondence_.]

Again passing through Ferrara, and visiting Bologna, he left the latter on the 8th, and on his arrival at his destination found the Countess dangerously ill; but his presence, and the attentions of the famous Venetian doctor, Aglietti, who was sent for by his advice, restored her. The Count seems to have been proud of his guest. “I can’t make him out at all,” Byron writes; “he visits me frequently, and takes me out (like Whittington the Lord Mayor) in a coach and six horses. The fact appears to be, that he is completely governed by her–and, for that matter, so am I.” Later he speaks of having got his horses from Venice, and riding or driving daily in the scenery reproduced in the third canto of _Don Juan_:–

Sweet hour of twilight! in the solitude Of the pine forest, and the silent shore Which bounds Ravenna’s immemorial wood.

On Theresa’s recovery, in dread of a possible separation he proposed to fly with her to America, to the Alps, to “some unsuspected isle in the far seas;” and she suggested the idea of feigning death, like Juliet, and rising from the tomb. Neither expedient was called for. When the Count went to Bologna, in August, with his wife, Lord Byron was allowed to follow; and–after consoling himself during an excursion which the married pair made to their estate, by hovering about her empty rooms and writing in her books–he established himself, on the Count’s return to his headquarters, with her and Allegra at Bologna. Meanwhile, Byron had written _The Prophecy of Dante_, and in August the prose letter, _To the Editor of the British Review_, on the charge of bribery in _Don Juan_. Than this inimitable epistle no more laughter-compelling composition exists. About the same time, we hear of his leaving the theatre in a convulsion of tears, occasioned by the representation of Alfieri’s _Mirra_.

He left Bologna with the Countess on the 15th of September, when they visited the Euganean hills and Arqua, and wrote their names together in the Pilgrim’s Book. On arriving at Venice, the physicians recommending Madame Guiccioli to country air, they settled, still by her husband’s consent, for the autumn at La Mira, where Moore and others found them domesticated. At the beginning of November the poet was prostrated by an attack of tertian fever. In some of his hours of delirium he dictated to his careful nurses, Fletcher and the Countess, a number of verses, which she assures us were correct and sensible. He attributes his restoration to cold water and the absence of doctors; but, ere his complete recovery, Count Guiccioli had suddenly appeared on the scene, and run away with his own wife. The lovers had for a time not only to acquiesce in the separation, but to agree to cease their correspondence. In December, Byron in a fit of spleen had packed up his belongings, with a view to return to England. “He was,” we are told, “ready dressed for the journey, his boxes on board the gondola, his gloves and cap on, and even his little cane in his hand, when my lord declares that if it should strike one–which it did–before everything was in order, he would not go that day. It is evident he had not the heart to go.” Next day he heard that Madame Guiccioli was again seriously ill, received and accepted the renewed invitation which bound him to her and to the south. He left Venice for the last time almost by stealth, rushed along the familiar roads, and was welcomed at Ravenna.

CHAPTER VIII.

1820-1821.

RAVENNA–DRAMAS–CAIN–VISION OF JUDGMENT.

Byrons’s life at Ravenna was during the first months comparatively calm; nevertheless, he mingled in society, took part in the Carnival, and was received at the parties of the Legate. “I may stay,” he writes in January, 1820, “a day–a week–a year–all my life.” Meanwhile, he imported his movables from Venice, hired a suite of rooms in the Guiccioli palace, executed his marvellously close translation of Pulci’s _Morgante Maggiore_, wrote his version of the story of _Francesca of Rimini_, and received visits from his old friend Bankes and from Sir Humphrey Davy. At this time he was accustomed to ride about armed to the teeth, apprehending a possible attack from assassins on the part of Count Guiccioli. In April his letters refer to the insurrectionary movements then beginning against the Holy Alliance. “We are on the verge of a row here. Last night they have over-written all the city walls with ‘Up with the Republic!’ and ‘Death to the Pope!’ The police have been searching for the subscribers, but have caught none as yet. The other day they confiscated the whole translation of the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_, and have prosecuted the translator.” In July a Papal decree of separation between the Countess and her husband was obtained, on condition of the latter paying from his large income a pittance to the lady of 200 _l_. a year, and her undertaking to live in her father’s house–an engagement which was, first in the spirit, and subsequently in the letter, violated. For a time, however, she retired to a villa about fifteen miles from Ravenna, where she was visited by Byron at comparatively rare intervals. By the end of July he had finished _Marino Faliero_, and ere the close of the year the fifth canto of _Don Juan_. in September he says to Murray, “I am in a fierce humour, at not having Scott’s _Monastery_. No more Keats,[1] I entreat. 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 to me the other day, when I remarked that ‘it would live longer than _Childe Harold_’? ‘Ah! but I would rather have the fame of _Childe Harold_ for three years than an immortality of _D. J._'” This is to-day the common female judgment; it is known to have been La Guiccioli’s, as well as Mrs. Leigh’s, and by their joint persuasion Byron was for a season induced to lay aside “that horrid, wearisome Don.” About this time he wrote the memorable reply to the remarks on that poem in _Blackwood’s Magazine_’, where he enters on a defence of his life, attacks the Lakers, and champions Pope against the new school of poetry, lamenting that his own practice did not square with his precept; and adding, “We are all wrong, except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell.”

[Footnote 1: In a note on a similar passage, bearing the date November 12, 1821, he, however, confesses:–“My indignation at Mr. Keats’ depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius, which malgre all the fantastic fopperies of his style was undoubtedly of great promise. His fragment of Hyperion seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as AEschylus. He is a loss to our literature.”]

In November he refers to reports of his letters being opened by the Austrian officials, and the unpleasant things the Huns, as he calls them, are likely to find therein. Early in the next month he tells Moore that the commandant of their troops, a brave officer, but obnoxious to the people, had been found lying at his door, with five slugs in him, and, bleeding inwardly, had died in the palace, where he had been brought to be nursed.

This incident is versified in _Don Juan_, v. 33-39, with anatomical minuteness of detail. After trying in vain to wrench an answer out of death, the poet ends in his accustomed strain–

But it was all a mystery. Here we are, And there we go:–but _where_? Five bits of lead– Or three, or two, or one–send very far!

Assassination has sometimes been the prelude to revolution, but it may be questioned if it has over promoted the cause of liberty. Most frequently it has served as a pretext for reaction, or a red signal. In this instance–as afterwards in 1848–overt acts of violence made the powers of despotism more alert, and conduced with the half-hearted action of their adversaries to the suppression of the rising of 1820-21. Byron’s sympathy with the movement seems to have been stimulated by his new associations. Theresa’s brother, Count Pietro, an enthusiastic young soldier, having returned from Rome and Naples, surmounting a prejudice not wholly unnatural, became attached to him, and they entered into a partnership in behalf of what–adopting a phrase often flaunted in opposite camps–they called constitutional principles. Finally the poet so committed himself to the party of insurrection that, though his nationality secured him from direct attack, his movements were necessarily affected by the fiasco. In July the Gambas were banished from the Romagna, Pietro being actually carried by force over the frontier; and, according to the articles of her separation, the Countess had to follow them to Florence. Byron lingered for some mouths, partly from a spirit of defiance, and partly from his affection towards a place where he had enlisted the regards of numerous beneficiaries. The Gambas were for some time bent on migrating to Switzerland; but the poet, after first acquiescing, subsequently conceived a violent repugnance to the idea, and early in August wrote to Shelley, earnestly requesting his presence, aid, and counsel. Shelley at once complied, and, entering into a correspondence with Madame Guiccioli, succeeded in inducing her relatives to abandon their transmontane plans, and agree to take up their headquarters at Pisa. This incident gave rise to a series of interesting letters, in which the younger poet gives a vivid and generous account of the surroundings and condition of his friend. On the 2nd of August he writes from Ravenna:–“I arrived last night at ten o’clock, and sat up talking with Lord B. till five this morning. He was delighted to see me. He has, in fact, completely recovered his health, and lives a life totally the reverse of that which he led at Venice…. Poor fellow! he is now quite well, and immersed in politics and literature. We talked a great deal of poetry and such matters last night, and, as usual, differed, I think, more than ever. He affects to patronize a system of criticism fit only for the production of mediocrity; and, although all his finer poems and passages have been produced in defiance of this system, yet I recognize the pernicious effects of it in the _Doge of Venice_.” Again, on the 15th: “Lord B. is greatly improved in every respect–in genius, in temper, in moral views, in health, and happiness. His connexion with La Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him. He lives in considerable splendour, but within his income, which is now about 4000_l_. a year, 1000_l_. of which he devotes to purposes of charity. Switzerland is little fitted for him; the gossip and the cabals of those Anglicised coteries would torment him, as they did before. Ravenna is a miserable place. He would in every respect be better among the Tuscans. He has read to me one of the unpublished cantos of _Don Juan_. It sets him not only above, but far above, all the poets of the day. Every word has the stamp of immortality…. I have spoken to him of Hunt, but not with a direct view of demanding a contribution. I am sure, if I asked, it would not be refused; yet there is something in me that makes it impossible. Lord B. and I are excellent friends; and were I reduced to poverty, or were I a writer who had no claim to a higher position than I possess, I would freely ask him any favour. Such is not now the case.” Later, after stating that Byron had decided upon Tuscany, he says, in reference to La Guiccioli, “At the conclusion of a letter, full of all the fine things she says she has heard of me, is this request, which I transcribe:–‘Signore, la vostra bonta mi fa ardita di chiedervi un favore, me lo accordarete voi? _Non partite da Ravenna senza milord_.’ Of course, being now by all the laws of knighthood captive to a lady’s request, I shall only be at liberty on my parole until Lord Byron is settled at Pisa.”

Shelley took his leave, after a visit of ten days’ duration, about the 17th or 18th of April. In a letter, dated August 26, he mentions having secured for his lordship the Palazzo Lanfranchi, an old spacious building

Byron by John Nichol (page 2)