that I have hardly time or patience to write a short preface, which will be proper for the two plays. However, I will make it out on receiving the next proofs. "Yours ever, &c. "P. S. Please to append the letter about the Hellespont as a note to your next opportunity of the verses on Leander, &c. &c. &c. in Childe Harold. Don't forget it amidst your multitudinous avocations, which I think of celebrating in a Dithyrambic Ode to Albemarle Street. "Are you aware that Shelley has written an Elegy on Keats, and accuses the Quarterly of killing him? "Who kill'd John Keats ? ' 'I,' says the Quarterly, So savage and Tartarly; 'Twas one of my feats." "Who shot the arrow ?' The poet-priest Milman (So ready to kill man), Or Southey or Barrow.' "You know very well that I did not approve of Keats's poetry, or principles of poetry, or of his abuse of Pope; but, as he is dead, omit all that is said about him in any MSS. of mine, or publication. His Hyperion is a fine monument, and will keep his name. I do not envy the man who wrote the article ; you Review people have no more right to kill than any other footpads. However, he who would die of an article in a Review would probably have died of something else equally trivial. The same thing nearly happened to Kirke White, who died afterwards of a consumption." ["John Keats, who was killed off by one critique, Contrived to talk about the gods of late, ? There had been, a short time before, performed at the Court of Berlin a spectacle founded on the Poem of Lalla Rookh, in which the present Emperor of Russia personated Feramorz, and the Empress Lalla Rookh. 3[" Rochester had interest enough to have Settle's 'Empress of Morocco' first acted at Whitehall by the lords and ladies of the court; an honour which had hever been paid to any of Dryden's compositions, however more justly entitled to it, both from intrinsic merit, and by the author's situation as poet laureat. Rochester contributed a prologue upon this brilliant occasion, to add still more grace to Settle's triumph."-SIR WALTER SCOTT: Prose Works, vol. i. p. 157.] 4 [The following is the passage in Blackwood:-"We LETTER 442. TO MR. MOORE. Ravenna, August 2. 1821. "I had certainly answered your last letter, though but briefly, to the part to which you refer merely saying, damn the controversy;' and quoting some verses of George Colman's, not as allusive to you, but to the disputants. Did you receive this letter? It imports me to know that our letters are not intercepted or mislaid. "Your Berlin drama is an honour, unknown since the days of Elkanah Settle, whose Empress of Morocco' was represented by the Court ladies, which was, as Johnson says, the last blast of inflammation' to poor Dryden, who could not bear it, and fell foul of Settle without mercy or moderation, on account of that and a frontispiece, which he dared to put before his play.3 "Was not your showing the Memoranda to ** somewhat perilous? Is there not a facetious allusion or two which might as well be reserved for posterity? "I know Schlegel well-that is to say, I have met him occasionally at Copet. Is he not also touched lightly in the Memoranda? In a review of Childe Harold, Canto 4th, three years ago, in Blackwood's Magazine, they quote some stanzas of an elegy of Schlegel's on Rome, from which they say that I might have taken some ideas. 4 I give you my honour that I never saw it except in that criticism, which gives, I think, three or four stanzas, sent them (they say) for the nonce by a correspondent — perhaps himself. The fact is easily proved; for I don't understand German, and there was, I believe, no translation at least, it was the first time that I had lately sent to us a translation of an Elegy by William Augustus Schlegel, from which our correspondent supposes Lord Byron has borrowed not a little of the spirit, and even of the expressions, of the fourth canto. We cannot, we must confess, observe any thing more than such coincidences as might very well be expected from two great poets contemplating the same scene. The opening of the German poem appears to us to be very striking; but the whole is pitched in an elegiac key. Lord Byron handles the same topics with the deeper power of a tragedian : — "Trust not the smiling welcome Rome can give, With her green fields, and her unspotted sky; I see a monument in every stone.". -Vol. iii. p. 222.] Plagiary,' and what not. I think I now, in my time, have been accused of every thing. I have not given you details of little events here; but they have been trying to make me out to be the chief of a conspiracy, and nothing but their want of proofs for an English investigation has stopped them. Had it been a poor native, the suspicion were Mo-enough, as it has been for hundreds. "I remember having some talk with Schlegel about Alfieri, whose merit he denies. He was also wroth about the Edinburgh Review of Goethe, which was sharp enough, to be sure. He went about saying, too, of the French — I meditate a terrible vengeance against the French - I will prove that lière is no poet.' ! "I don't see why you should talk of declining.' When I saw you, you looked thinner, and yet younger, than you did when we parted several years before. You may rely upon this as fact. If it were not, I should say nothing, for I would rather not say unpleasant personal things to any one-but, as it was the pleasant truth, I tell it you. If you had led my life, indeed, changing climates and connections-thinning yourself with fasting and purgatives - besides the wear and tear of the vulture passions, and a very bad temper besides, you might talk in this wayyou! I know no man who looks so well for his years, or who deserves to look better and to be better, in all respects. You are a ***, and, what is perhaps better for your friends, a good fellow. So don't talk of decay, but put in for eighty, as you well may. 66 -- but I am, at present, occupied principally about these unhappy proscriptions and exiles, which have taken place here on account of politics. It has been a miserable sight to see the general desolation in families. I am doing what I can for them, high and low, by such interest and means as I possess or can bring to bear. There have been thousands of these proscriptions within the last month in the Exarchate, or (to speak modernly) the Legations. Yesterday, too, a man got his back broken, in extricating a dog of mine from under a mill-wheel. The dog was killed, and the man is in the greatest danger. I was not present-it happened before I was up, owing to a stupid boy taking the dog to bathe in a dangerous spot. I must, of course, provide for the poor fellow while he lives, and his family, if he dies. I would gladly have given a much greater sum than that will come to that he had never been hurt. Pray, let me hear from you, and excuse haste and hot weather. Yours, &c. 66 "You may have probably seen all sorts of attacks upon me in some gazettes in England some months ago. I only saw them, by Murray's bounty, the other day. They call me 1 This threat has been since acted upon; - the critic in question having, to the great horror of the French literati, pronounced Molière to be a "farceur." "Why don't you write on Napoleon? I have no spirits, nor'estro' to do so. His overthrow, from the beginning, was a blow on the head to me. Since that period, we have been the slaves of fools. Excuse this long letter. Ecco a translation literal of a French epigram. "Egle, beauty and poet, has too little crimes, She makes her own face, and does not make her rhymes. "I am going to ride, having been warned not to ride in a particular part of the forest on account of the ultra-politicians. "Is there no chance of your return to England, and of our Journal? I would have published the two plays in it-two or three scenes per number-and indeed all of mine in it. If you went to England, I would do so still." About this time Mr. Shelley, who had letter from Lord Byron, earnestly requesting now fixed his residence at Pisa, received a to see him, in consequence of which he immediately set out for Ravenna; and the folhis stay with his noble friend, will be read lowing extracts from letters, written during with that double feeling of interest which is always sure to be excited in hearing one man of genius express his opinions of another. "Ravenna, August 7. 1821. "I arrived last night at ten o'clock, and sat up talking with Lord Byron until five this morning: I then went to sleep, and now awake at eleven; and having despatched my breakfast as quick as possible, mean to devote the interval until twelve, when the post departs, to you. 'Lord Byron is very well, and 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. He has a permanent sort of liaison with the Contessa Guiccioli, who is now at Florence, and seems from her letters to be a very amiable woman. She is waiting there until something shall be decided as to their emigration to Switzerland or stay in Italy, which is yet undetermined on either side. was compelled to escape from the Papal territory in great haste, as measures had She already been taken to place her in a convent, where she would have been unrelentingly confined for life. The oppression of the marriage contract as existing in the laws and opinions of Italy, though less frequently exercised, is far severer than that of England. "Lord Byron had almost destroyed himself at Venice. His state of debility was such that he was unable to digest any food: he was consumed by hectic fever, and would speedily have perished but for this attachment, which reclaimed him from the excesses into which he threw himself, from carelessness and pride, rather than taste. Poor fellow he is now quite well, and immersed in politics and literature. He has given me a number of the most interesting details on the former subject; but we will not speak of them in a letter. Fletcher is here, and -as if, like a shadow, he waxed and waned with the substance of his master-has also revived his good looks, and from amidst the unseasonable grey hairs, a fresh harvest of flaxen locks has put forth. "We talked a great deal of poetry and such matters last night; and, as usual, differed -and I think more than ever. He affects to patronise 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 recognise the pernicious effects of it in the Doge of Venice; and it will cramp and limit his future efforts, however great they may be, unless he gets rid of it. I have read only parts of it, or rather he himself read them to me, and gave me the plan of the whole. Our way of life is this, and I have accommodated myself to it without much difficulty: - - Lord Byron gets up at two breakfasts we talk, read, &c. until sixthen we ride at eight, and after dinner sit talking until four or five in the morning. I get up at twelve, and am now devoting the interval between my rising and his to you. politics of Italy, and the actions he performed in consequence of it, are subjects not fit to be written, but are such as will delight and surprise you. "He is not yet decided to go to Switzerland, a place, indeed, little fitted for him: the gossip and the cabals of those Anglicised coteries would torment him as they did before, and might exasperate him into a relapse of libertinism, which, he says, he plunged into not from taste, but from despair. La Guiccioli and her brother (who is Lord Byron's friend and confidant, and acquiesces perfectly in her connection with him) wish to go to Switzerland, as Lord Byron says, merely from the novelty and pleasure of travelling. Lord Byron prefers Tuscany or Lucca, and is trying to persuade them to adopt his views. He has made me write a long letter to her to engage her to remain. An odd thing enough for an utter stranger to write on subjects of the utmost delicacy to his friend's mistress - but it seems destined that I am always to have some active part in every body's affairs whom I approach. I have set down, in tame Italian, the strongest reasons I can think of against the Swiss emigration. To tell you the truth, I should be very glad to accept as my fee his establishment in Tuscany. Ravenna is a miserable place: the people are barbarous and wild, and their language the most infernal patois that you can imagine. He would be in every respect better among the Tuscans. This "He has read to me one of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan, which is astonishingly fine. It sets him not only above, but far above all the poets of the day. Every word has the stamp of immortality. canto is in a style (but totally free from indelicacy, and sustained with incredible ease and power) like the end of the second canto : there is not a word which the most rigid assertor of the dignity of human nature could desire to be cancelled: it fulfils, in a certain degree, what I have long preached,—of producing something wholly new, and relative to the age, and yet surpassingly beautiful. It may be vanity, but I think I see the trace of my earnest exhortations to him, to create something wholly new. * * * "Lord Byron is greatly improved in every respect-in genius, in temper, in moral views, in health and happiness. His connection "I am sure, if I asked, it would not be with La Guiccioli has been an inestimable refused; yet there is something in me that benefit to him. He lives in considerable makes it impossible. Lord Byron and I are splendour, but within his income, which is excellent friends; and were I reduced to ponow about four thousand a year, one thou-verty, or were I a writer who had no claim sand of which he devotes to purposes of to a higher station than I possess, or did I charity. He has had mischievous passions, but these he seems to have subdued; and he is becoming, what he should be, a virtuous [The Canto thus warmly eulogised was the fifth; which was concluded at Ravenna in October 1820, but was not published till the close of the year 1821.] possess a higher than I deserve, we should appear in all things as such, and I would freely ask him any favour. Such is not now the case: the demon of mistrust and of pride lurks between two persons in our situation, poisoning the freedom of our intercourse. This is a tax, and a heavy one, which we must pay for being human. I think the fault is not on my side; nor is it likely, I being the weaker. I hope that in the next world these things will be better managed. What is passing in the heart of another rarely escapes the observation of one who is a strict anatomist of his own. * * "Lord Byron here has splendid apartments in the palace of Count Guiccioli, who is one of the richest men in Italy. She is divorced, with an allowance of twelve thousand crowns a year; — a miserable pittance from a man who has a hundred and twenty thousand a year. There are two monkeys, five cats, eight dogs, and ten horses, all of whom (except the horses) walk about the house like the masters of it. Tita, the Venetian, is here, and operates as my valeta fine fellow, with a prodigious black beard, who has stabbed two or three people, and is the most good-natured-looking fellow I ever saw. Wednesday, Ravenna. "I told you I had written, by Lord Byron's desire, to La Guiccioli, to dissuade her and her family from Switzerland. Her answer is this moment arrived, and my repre sentation seems to have reconciled them to the unfitness of the step. 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 bontà mi fa ardita di chiedervi un favore; me lo accorderete 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. I shall reply, of course, that the boon is granted; and that if Lord Byron is reluctant to quit Ravenna after I have made arrangements for receiving him at Pisa, I am bound to place myself in the same situation as now, to assail him with importunities to rejoin her. Of this there is fortunately no need; and I need not tell you that there is no fear that this chivalric submission of mine to the great general laws of antique courtesy, against which I never rebel, and which is my religion, should interfere with my soon returning, and long remaining with you, dear girl. "We ride out every evening as usual, and practise pistol-shooting at a pumpkin, and I am not sorry to observe that I approach towards my noble friend's exactness of aim. I have the greatest trouble to get away; and Lord Byron, as a reason for my stay, has urged, that without either me or the Guiccioli, he will certainly fall into his old habits. I then talk, and he listens to reason; and I earnestly hope that he is too well aware of the terrible and degrading consequences of his former mode of life, to be in danger from the short interval of temptation that will be left him." LETTER 443. TO MR. MURRAY. "Ravenna, August 10. 1821. "Your conduct to Mr. Moore is certainly very handsome; and I would not say so if I could help it, for you are not at present by any means in my good graces. "With regard to additions, &c. there is a Journal which I kept in 1814 which you may ask him for; also a Journal which you must get from Mrs. Leigh, of my journey in the Alps, which contains all the germs of Manfred. I have also kept a small Diary here for a few months last winter, which I would send you, and any continuation. You letters, and do not neglect this (in case of acciwould easy find access to all my papers and dents) on account of the mass of confusion in which they are; for out of that chaos of papers you will find some curious ones of circumstances, however (which is almost immine and others, if not lost or destroyed. If possible), made me ever consent to a publication in my lifetime, you would in that case, I make Moore some advance, in proportion to the likelihood or non-likelihood of success. You are both sure to survive me, however. suppose, You must also have from Mr. Moore the correspondence between me and Lady B., to whom I offered the sight of all which regards herself in these papers. This is important. He has her letter, and a copy of my answer. I would rather Moore edited me than another. "I sent you Valpy's letter to decide for yourself, and Stockdale's to amuse you. I nani's affair, and you with me-now and am always loyal with you, as I was in Galigthen. "I return you Moore's letter, which is very creditable to him, and you, and me. "Yours ever." LETTER 444. TO MR. MURRAY. "Ravenna, August 16. 1821. "I regret that Holmes can't or won't come: it is rather shabby, as I was always very civil and punctual with him. But he is but one ** more. One meets with none else among the English. "I wait the proofs of the MSS. with proper impatience. 66 So you have published, or mean to publish, the new Juans? Ar'n't you afraid of the Constitutional Assassination of Bridge Street? When first I saw the name of Murray, I thought it had been yours; but was solaced by seeing that your synonyme is an attorneo, and that you are not one of that atrocious crew. "I am in a great discomfort about the probable war, and with my trustees not getting me out of the funds. If the funds break, it is my intention to go upon the highway. All the other English professions are at present so ungentlemanly by the conduct of those who follow them, that open robbing is the only fair resource left to a man of any principles; it is even honest, in comparison, by being undisguised. "I wrote to you by last post, to say that you had done the handsome thing by Moore and the Memoranda. You are very good as times go, and would probably be still better but for the march of events' (as Napoleon called it), which won't permit any body to be better than they should be. "Love to Gifford. Believe me, &c. "P. S. I restore Smith's letter, whom thank for his good opinion. Is the bust by Thorwaldsen arrived?" 1 One of the charges of plagiarism brought against him by some scribblers of the day was founded (as I have already observed in the early part of this work) on his having sought in the authentic records of real shipwrecks those materials out of which he has worked his own powerful description in the second canto of Don Juan. With as much justice might the Italian author, (Galeani, if I recollect right,) who wrote a Discourse on the Military Science displayed by Tasso in his Battles, have reproached that poet with the sources from which he drew his knowledge: - with as much justice might Puysegur and Segrais, who have pointed out the same merit in Homer and Virgil, have withheld their praise because the science on which this merit was founded must have been derived by the skill and industry of these poets from others. So little was Tasso ashamed of those casual imitations of other poets which are so often branded as plagiarism, that, in his Commentary on his right he takes pains to point out and avow whatever coincidences of this kind occur in his own verses. While on this subject, I may be allowed to mention one RAVENNA. CHAPTER XLVI. 1821. LETTERS ΤΟ MURRAY AND MOORE. - ALLEGED PLAGIARISMS.-ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG ANDALUSIAN NOBLEMAN.-DRAMA OF CAIN COMPLETED.THE IRISH AVATAR.-PREPARATIONS FOR LEAVING RAVENNA.-LETTERS TO MURRAY AND MOORE CONCERNING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY. LETTER TO LADY BYRON. THE VISION OF JUDGMENT. LETTER 445. TO MR. MURRAY. "Ravenna, August 23. 1821. 'ENCLOSED are the two acts corrected. With regard to the charges about the shipwreck, I think that I told both you and Mr. Hobhouse, years ago, that there was not a single circumstance of it not taken from fact; not, indeed, from any single shipwreck, but all from actual facts of different wrecks.1 Almost all Don Juan is real life, either my own, or from people I knew. By the way, much of the description of the furniture, in Canto third, is taken from Tully's Tripoli (pray note this), and the rest from my own conceal this at all, and have only not stated observation. Remember, I never meant to it, because Don Juan had no preface nor name to it. If you think it worth while to make this statement, do so in your own way. I laugh at such charges, convinced that no writer ever borrowed less, or made his materials more his own. Much is coincidence: for instance, Lady Morgan (in a really ex single instance, where a thought that had lain perhaps indistinctly in Byron's memory since his youth, comes out so improved and brightened as to be, by every right of genius, his own. In the Two Noble Kinsmen of Beaumont and Fletcher (a play to which the picture of passionate friendship, delineated in the characters of Palamon and Arcite, would be sure to draw the attention of Byron in his boyhood,) we find the following passage: "Oh never Shall we two exercise, like twins of Honour, Out of this somewhat forced simile, by a judicious transposition of the comparison, and by the substitution of the more definite word "waves" for "seas," the clear noble thought in one of the cantos of Childe Harold has been produced — "Once more upon the waters! yet once more! |