But he goes on to speak of the poem (p. 354) as
"a hortus
siccus of pretty flowers," and an illustration of "the difference
between inspiration and versification."
If Rogers ever saw Byron's
Question and Answer
(1818), he was
generous enough to forget the satire. In
Italy
he paid a noble
tribute to the genius of the dead poet—
"He is now at rest;
And praise and blame fall on his ear alike,
Now dull in death. Yes, Byron, thou art gone,
Gone like a star that through the firmament
Shot and was lost, in its eccentric course
Dazzling, perplexing. Yet thy heart, methinks,
Was generous, noble—noble in its scorn
Of all things low or little; nothing there
Sordid or servile. If imagined wrongs
Pursued thee, urging thee sometimes to do
Things long regretted, oft, as many know,
None more than I, thy gratitude would build
On slight foundations; and, if in thy life
Not happy, in thy death thou surely wert,
Thy wish accomplished; dying in the land
Where thy young mind had caught ethereal fire,
Dying in Greece, and in a cause so glorious!
They in thy train—ah, little did they think,
As round we went, that they so soon should sit
Mourning beside thee, while a Nation mourned,
Changing her festal for her funeral song;
That they so soon should hear the minute-gun,
As morning gleamed on what remained of thee,
Roll o'er the sea, the mountains, numbering
Thy years of joy and sorrow.
Thou art gone;
And he who would assail thee in thy grave,
Oh, let him pause! For who among us all,
Tried as thou wert—even from thy earliest years,
When wandering, yet unspoilt, a Highland boy—
Tried as thou wert, and with thy soul of flame;
Pleasure, while yet the down was on thy cheek,
Uplifting, pressing, and to lips like thine,
Her charmed cup—ah, who among us all
Could say he had not erred as much, and more?"
List of Letters
Contents
8, St. James's Street, November 17, 1811.
Dear Hodgson,—I
been waiting for the letter
which was to have
been sent by you
immediately
, and must again jog your memory on
the subject. I believe I wrote you a full and true account of poor —'s
proceedings.
his reunion to —,
I have heard nothing further
from him. What a pity! a man of talent, past the heyday of life, and a
clergyman, to fall into such imbecility. I have heard from Hobhouse, who
has at last sent more copy to Cawthorn for his
Travels
. I franked
an enormous cover for you yesterday, seemingly to convey at least twelve
cantos on any given subject. I fear the I aspect of it was too
epic
for the post. From this and other coincidences I augur a
publication on your part, but what, or when, or how much, you must
disclose immediately.
I don't know what to say about coming down to Cambridge at present, but
live in hopes. I am so completely superannuated there, and besides feel
it something brazen in me to wear my magisterial habit, after all my
buffooneries, that I hardly think I shall venture again. And being now
an
Greek: ariston men hydôr
disciple I won't come within wine-shot of
such determined topers as your collegiates. I have not yet subscribed to
Bowen. I mean to cut Harrow "
enim unquam
" as somebody classically
said for a farewell sentence. I am superannuated there too, and, in
short, as old at twenty-three as many men at seventy.
Do write and send this letter that hath been so long in your custody. It
is important that Moore should be certain that I never received it, if
it be
his
. Are you drowned in a bottle of Port? or a Kilderkin of
Ale? that I have never heard from you, or are you fallen into a fit of
perplexity? Cawthorn has declined, and the MS. is returned to him. This
is all at present from yours in the faith,
Greek: Mpairon
On November 17, 1811, Hodgson writes to Byron:
"I
enclose you the long-delayed letter, which, from the similarity of
hands alone, Davies and I will go shares in a bet of ten to one is
the cartel in question."
The names are carefully erased by Hodgson.
List of Letters
Contents
8, St. James's Street, December 4, 1811.
My Dear Hodgson
,—I
seen Miller
, who will see Bland
, but I have no great hopes of his obtaining the
translation from the crowd of candidates. Yesterday I wrote to Harness,
who will probably tell you what I said on the subject. Hobhouse has sent
me my Romaic MS., and I shall require your aid in correcting the press,
as your Greek eye is more correct than mine. But these will not come to
type this month, I dare say. I
put some soft lines on ye Scotch in
the
Curse of Minerva
; take them;
"Yet Caledonia claims some native worth," etc.
3
If you are not content now, I must say with the Irish drummer to the
deserter who called out,
"Flog high, flog low"
"The de'il burn ye, there's no pleasing you, flog where one will."
Have you given up wine, even British wine?
I
read Watson to Gibbon
. He proves nothing, so I am where I
was, verging towards Spinoza; and yet it is a gloomy Creed, and I want a
better, but there is something Pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In
short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything. The post brings me to a
conclusion. Bland has just been here. Yours ever,
BN.
See
Letters
, vol. i. p. 319,
note
2 [Footnote 1 of
Letter 158].
Byron was endeavouring to secure for Bland (see
Letters
, vol. i. p. 271,
note
1 [Footnote 2 of Letter 137]), the work of translating
Lucien Buonaparte's poem of
Charlemagne
. He did not succeed. The
poem, translated by Dr. Butler, Head-master of Shrewsbury, afterwards
Bishop of Lichfield, and Francis Hodgson, was published in 1815.
Lines 149-156.
An Apology for Christianity, in a Series of Letters to
Edward Gibbon, Esq.
, by Richard Watson, D.D. (1776). Gibbon had a
great respect for Watson, at this time Professor of Divinity at
Cambridge, afterwards Bishop of Llandaff, whom he describes as "a
prelate of a large mind and liberal spirit." In a letter to Holroyd
(November 4, 1776), he speaks of the
Apology
as "feeble," but
"uncommingly genteel." To his stepmother he writes, November 29, 1776,
that Watson's answer is "civil" and "too dull to deserve your notice."
List of Letters
Contents
210—to William Harness1
8, St. James's Street, Dec. 6, 1811.
My Dear Harness,—I write again, but don't suppose I mean to lay such a
tax on your pen and patience as to expect regular replies. When you are
inclined, write: when silent, I shall have the consolation of knowing
that you are much better employed. Yesterday, Bland and I called on Mr.
Miller, who, being then out, will call on Bland to-day or to-morrow. I
shall certainly endeavour to bring them together.—You are censorious,
child; when you are a little older, you will learn to dislike every
body, but abuse nobody.
With regard to the person of whom you speak, your own good sense must
direct you. I never pretend to advise, being an implicit believer in the
old proverb. This present frost is detestable. It is the first I have
felt for these three years, though I longed for one in the oriental
summer, when no such thing is to be had, unless I had gone to the top of
Hymettus for it.
I thank you most truly for the concluding part of your letter. I have
been of late not much accustomed to kindness from any quarter, and am
not the less pleased to meet with it again from one where I had known it
earliest. I have not changed in all my ramblings,— Harrow, and, of
course, yourself, never left me, and the
"Dulces reminiscitur Argos"
attended me to the very spot to which that sentence alludes in the mind
of the fallen Argive.—Our intimacy began before we began to date at
all, and it rests with you to continue it till the hour which must
number it and me with the things that
were
.
Do read mathematics.—I
think
X plus Y
at least as amusing
as the
Curse of Kehama
,
and much more intelligible. Master Southey's poems
are
, in fact,
what parallel lines might be—viz. prolonged
ad infinitum
without
meeting anything half so absurd as themselves.
"What news, what news? Queen Orraca,
What news of scribblers five?
S——, W——, C——, L——d, and L——e?
All damn'd, though yet alive."
is lecturing
.
"
Many an old fool," said Hannibal to some such lecturer, "but such as
this, never."
4
Ever yours, etc.
See
Letters
, vol. i. p. 177,
note
1.
[Footnote 1 of Letter 92]
Robert Southey (1774-1843) published his
Curse of
Kehama
in 1810. It formed a part of a series of heroic poems in
which he intended to embody the chief mythologies of the world. In spite
of Byron's adverse opinion, it contains magnificent passages, and
disputes with
Roderick, the Last of the Goths
(1814), the claim
to be the finest of his longer poems. Southey's literary activity was
immense. He had already produced
Joan of Arc
(1796),
Thalaba
(1801),
Madoc
(1805), and many other works in
prose and verse. At this time he was personally unknown to Byron, who
had ridiculed his "annual strains." They met for the first time at
Holland House, in September, 1813. (See Byron's
to Moore,
September 27, 1813, and
, p. 331.) The animosity between the two
men belongs to a later date, and in its origin was partly political,
partly personal. Southey, in early life, had been a republican and a
Unitarian, if not a deist. He collaborated with Coleridge in the
Fall
of Robespierre
(1794), wrote a portion of the
Conciones ad
Populum
(1795), which the Government considered seditious; and,
according to Poole (
Thomas Pools and his Friends
, vol. i. chap,
vi.), wavered "between Deism and Atheism." He became a champion of
monarchical principles and of religious orthodoxy, and attacked the
views, which he had once held and expressed in
Wat Tyler
(written
in 1794, and piratically published in 1817), with the bitterness of a
reactionary. He had also, as Byron believed, circulated, if not
invented, a report that Byron and Shelley had formed "a league of
incest" at Geneva, in 1816-17, with "two girls," Mary Godwin (Mrs.
Shelley) and Jane Clairmont. Byron not only denied the charge, but
retorted upon him, in his "Observations upon an Article in
Blackwood's
Magazine
" (March 15, 1820), as the author of
Wat Tyler
and
poet laureate, the man who "wrote treason and serves the King," the
ex-pantisocrat who advocated "all things, including women, in common."
Southey's
Vision of Judgment
, an apotheosis of George III.,
published in 1821, gave Byron a second provocation and a second
opportunity, by speaking in the preface of his "Satanic spirit of pride
and audacious impiety." Byron again replied in prose; and Southey
(January 5, 1820), in a letter to the
London Courier
, invited him
to attack him in rhyme. In Byron's
Vision of Judgment
he found
his invitation accepted, and himself pilloried in that tremendous
satire. Southey overvalued his own narrative poetry. It is as a man, a
prominent figure in literary history, a leader in the romantic revival,
a master of prose, and the author of the best short biography in the
English language—the
Life of Nelson
(1813)—that he lives at the
present day. His name also deserves to be remembered with gratitude by
all who have read the nursery classic of "
The Three Bears
." Byron
parodies a stanza in Southey's "Queen Orraca and the Five Martyrs of
Morocco" (
Works
, vol. vi. pp. 166-173):
"What news, O King Affonso,
What news of the Friars five?
Have they preached to the Miramamolin;
And are they still alive?"
The blanks stand for Scott or Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lloyd, and
Lamb(e), with the lines from
New Morality
in his mind:
"Coleridge and Southey, Lloyd and Lamb and Co.,
Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux."
Coleridge, beginning November 18, 1811, and ending January
27, 1812, delivered a course of seventeen lectures on Shakespeare and
Milton, "in illustration of the principles of poetry." The lectures were
given under the auspices of the London Philosophical Society, in the
Scot's Corporation Hall, Crane Court, Fleet Street. Single tickets for
the whole course were two guineas, or three guineas "with the privilege
of introducing a lady." J. Payne Collier took shorthand notes of the
lectures and published a portion of his material, the rest being lost
(
Lectures on Shakespear
, from notes by J. P. Collier), The notes,
with other contemporary reports from the
Times
,
Morning
Chronicle
,
Dublin Chronicle
, Crabb Robinson's
Diary
,
and other sources, were republished in 1883 by Mr. Ashe (
Lectures and
Notes on Shakspere and other English Poets
).
Collier, in his notes of Coleridge's conversation (November I, 1811),
gives the substance, in all probability, of the attack on Campbell
alluded to in the next letter. Coleridge said that
"neither Southey,
Scott, nor Campbell would by their poetry survive much beyond the day
when they lived and wrote. Their works seemed to him not to have the
seeds of vitality, the real germs of long life. The two first were
entertaining as tellers of stories in verse; but the last, in his
Pleasures of Hope, obviously had no fixed design, but when a
thought (of course, not a very original one) came into his head, he put
it down in couplets, and afterwards strung the
disjecta membra
(not
poetæ) together. Some of the best things in it were
borrowed; for instance the line:
'And freedom shriek'd when Kosciusko fell,'
was taken from a much-ridiculed piece by Dennis, a pindaric on William
III.:
'Fair Liberty shriek'd out aloud, aloud Religion groaned.'
It is the same production in which the following much-laughed-at
specimen of bathos is found:
'Nor Alps nor Pyreneans keep him out,
Nor fortified redoubt.'
Coleridge had little toleration for Campbell, and considered him, as far
as he had gone, a mere verse-maker "
(Ashe's Introduction to
Lectures
on Shakspere
, pp. 16, 17).
Hannibal, in exile at Ephesus, was taken to hear a lecture
by a peripatetic philosopher named Phormio. The lecturer (
homo
copiosus
) discoursed for some hours on the duties of a general, and
military subjects generally. The delighted audience asked Hannibal his
opinion of the lecture. He replied in Greek,
"I have seen many old fools often, but such an old fool as Phormio,
never
(Multos se deliros senes sæpe vidisse; sed qui magis, quam
Phormio, deliraret, vidisse neminem)"
(Cicero,
De Oratore
, ii. 18).
List of Letters
Contents
8, St. James's St., Dec. 7th, 1811.
My Dear W.,—I was out of town during the arrival of your letters, but
forwarded all on my return.
I hope you are going on to your satisfaction, and that her Ladyship is
about to produce an heir with all his mother's Graces and all his Sire's
good qualities. You know I am to be a Godfather. Byron Webster! a most
heroic name, say what you please.
Don't be alarmed; my "
caprice
" won't lead me in to Dorset. No,
Bachelors
for me! I consider you as dead to us, and all my future
devoirs
are but tributes of respect to your
Memory
. Poor
fellow! he was a facetious companion and well respected by all who knew
him; but he is gone. Sooner or later we must all come to it.
I see nothing of you in the
papers
, the only place where I don't
wish to see you; but you will be in town in the Winter.
dost thou
do? shoot, hunt, and "wind up y'e Clock" as Caleb Quotem says
?
That thou art vastly happy, I doubt not.
I see your brother in law at times, and like him much; but we miss you
much; I shall leave town in a fortnight to pass my Xmas in Notts.
Good afternoon, Dear W.
Believe me, Yours ever most truly,
B.
Byron alludes to Caleb Quotem's song in
The Review, or
Wags of Windsor
(act ii. sc. 2), by George Colman the Younger:
"I'm parish clerk and sexton here,
My name is Caleb Quotem,
I'm painter, glazier, auctioneer,
In short, I am factotum."
...
"At night by the fire, like a good, jolly cock,
When my day's work is done and all over,
I tipple, I smoke, and I wind up the clock,
With my sweet Mrs. Quotem in clover.
List of Letters
Contents
St. James's Street, Dec. 8, 1811.
Behold a most formidable sheet, without gilt or black edging, and
consequently very vulgar and indecorous, particularly to one of your
precision; but this being Sunday, I can procure no better, and will
atone for its length by not filling it. Bland I have not seen since my
last letter; but on Tuesday he dines with me, and will meet Moore, the
epitome of all that is exquisite in poetical or personal
accomplishments. How Bland has settled with Miller, I know not. I have
very little interest with either, and they must arrange their concerns
according to their own gusto. I have done my endeavours,
at your request
, to bring them together, and hope they may agree to their
mutual advantage.