LETTER XX. p. 25.

To Mr. Crosby:-Crosby was the publisher of Monthly Literary Recreations, a 'Magazine of General Information and Amusement'; and the thirteenth Number (July 1807) of this print set forth a review of Hours of Idleness:-'The young and noble author of these poems introduces them to public notice with a degree of modesty which does honour to his feelings as a poet and a lord. Many are dedicated to a subject which all ages, all nations, civilised and unpolished, etc. . . . The poem entitled The Tear is one of his happiest effusions, etc. . . . Truth compels us to acknowledge that the lines To Mary on Receiving her Picture' teem with fire and genuine, etc. . . . The young bard, etc. . . . Lachiny-Gair is written with fire, etc. . . . Childish Recollections, one of the most solid foundations manly nature

pleasing melancholy . . . flowing harmony. . . companions of his youthful studies and enjoyments . . . orphan and brotherless state. . . inexpressible charm. . the whole of this production. The young poet, etc. etc. etc. To this same number of M. L. R. Byron contributed his review of Wordsworth.

LETTER XXI. p. 27.

Bosworth Field:-These verses were never published.

Hutton's Account:-William Hutton (c. 1723-1815), F.S. A. Edin., was a Birmingham bookseller, who wrote a History of Birmingham to 1780; a History of Blackpool; a Journey from Birmingham to London; and The Battle of Bosworth Field between Richard III. and Henry, Earl of Richmond (Birmingham, 1788).

LETTER Xxii. p. 28.

On Sunday next, etc. :-'This plan (which he never put in practice) had been talked of by him before he left Southwell, and is thus noticed in a letter of his fair correspondent to her brother :"How can you ask if Lord B. is going to visit the Highlands in the summer? Why, don't you know that he never knows his own mind for ten minutes together? I tell him he is as fickle as the winds, and as uncertain as the waves."'-MOORE.

Last week I swam in the Thames :-This was Leigh Hunt's first glimpse of Byron. He witnessed the performance in part, and he noticed a respectable, manly-looking person, who was eyeing something in the distance' (Byron's head). The manly-looking' one was Gentleman Jackson. (See post, p. 316, Note to Letter xxxi.)

LETTER Xxiii. p. 30.

My cousin, Captain Bettesworth :-'Captain George Edward Byron Bettesworth, born in 1781, was the son of a clergyman in the north of England. In the short space of eight years from his first entering the service as a boy he had risen by his merit to the post of Commander. When the above letter was written he had just been appointed to the Tartar frigate, in which he was killed in the May following, while engaging with some Danish gunboats off Bergen. He had recently married Lady Hannah Althea Grey, sister to Earl Grey; who afterwards married the Right Hon. Edward Ellice.'-MOORE.

Another poem of 250 lines:-This was English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

Praised to the skies:-See The Critical Review, 3rd Series, vol. xii. p. 47.

Another Periodical:-The Satirist: A Monthly Meteor, ran from 1807 to 1812, and reviewed Hours of Idleness in its first issue (October 1807). If the noble Lord,' it says, 'had not presented his Hours of Idleness, no human being would have guessed the quantity of time he had spent in doing nothing. Finally, 'The rest of the verses are of the same stamp as the earlier ones, and completely prove, that although George Gordon, Lord Byron, a minor, may be a gentleman, an orator, or a statesman, unless he improves wonderfully, he never can be a poet.'

LETTER XXIV. p. 32.

My dear Sir:-Henry Joseph Thomas Drury (1778-1841), the son of Byron's 'Dear Preceptor,' was born at Harrow-(he was a master there for many years)-and was educated at Eton and at King's (Cambridge), of which he was duly a Fellow. He was one of the men-Hodgson, Matthews, Hobhouse, Scrope Davies-who composed what one is now at liberty to call 'the Byron Set'; Byron, who read with him, had a very great regard for him; and he, for his part (he called a son of his, afterwards Admiral Drury, 'Byron'), returned the regard with interest. In 1828-29 he was a candidate for the Head Mastership of Harrow; but though he was backed by some hundreds of good men- -(as Butler of Shrewsbury, Peel, and Sumner)—he was 'most unexpectedly beaten' by Longley (afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury), a young man who had only quite recently taken his degree.' Having lived to see his son the Rev. Henry (afterwards Archdeacon Drury) edit the Arundines Cami (1841), he died at Harrow, whither his

old schoolmate Hodgson, ever his friend and correspondent, by this time Provost of Eton, posted to administer the Sacrament to him: 'just before his death,' in the presence of the Head Master, Dr. Wordsworth, now (1878) Bishop of Lincoln.'-(JAMES T. HODGSON, Memoir of the Rev. Francis Hodgson, 1878.)

My Worthy Preceptor:-Dr. Butler, the Pomposus of 'Childish Recollections.'

Tatersall:-John Cecil Tatersal, a Harrow schoolmate, who took orders, and died (of consumption) at twenty-four.

And so on':-Francis Calvert, Seventh Earl of Baltimore (17311771), married Diana Egerton, daughter of the Duke of Bridgewater, and was tried at Kingston Assize (26th March 1767) 'for a Rape on the Body of Sarah Woodcock,' together with Elizabeth Griffinburg and Ann Harvey, otherwise Darby, as accessories before the fact, for procuring, aiding, and abetting him in the said Rape.' He pleaded Sarah's consent, and was acquitted. He was author of A Tour in the East in the Years 1763 and 1764 ... ; of Select Pieces of Oriental Wit, Poetry, and Wisdom (London, 1767); Gaudia Poetica Latina Anglica et Gallica Lingua Composita (Augustae, 1770); and of Celestes et Inferi (Venice, 1771). Also, he was the hero of a very scandalous romance 'with eight beautiful Plates,' Injured Innocence, or The Rape of Sarah Woodcock. A Tale 'by S- J— Esq., of Magdalen College, Oxford. New York: Printed for the Booksellers.' (n. d.).

LETTER XXV. p. 34.

་

To Mr. Dallas:-Robert Charles Dallas (1754-1824), 'author' (Moore says) 'of some novels, popular, I believe, in their day,' was the son of a doctor, was born at Dallas Castle, and was educated at Musselburgh and at Kingston (under James Elphinstone). He read law at the Inner Temple; but, on attaining his majority, he went to Jamaica, where he had property, and for some time lived there and in the U.S.A. Returning to England, he turned author, and published Miscellaneous Writings (1797: 'Consisting of Poems; Lucretia, a Tragedy; and Moral Essays, with a Vocabulary of the Passions'); Percival, or Nature Vindicated (1801), a novel; Elements of Self-Knowledge (1802); Aubrey (1804); Tales Illustrative of the Simple and the Surprising (1805); and much else. He was a sort of connexion ('Captain George Anson Byron of the Royal Navy, father of the present Lord Byron, had married a sister of Mr. Dallas.'-MOORE); and at this time he introduced himself to Byron's notice in a solemn letter about Hours

of Idleness: a letter in which he cited, being aggressively, and even ponderously, moral, the good Lord Lyttelton as an example and the wicked Lord Lyttelton as the other thing, and wrote himself down generally the well-meaning, officious, wordy, pompous, and extremely self-satisfied person he was. Byron replied-delighted to be taken seriously, yet with his tongue most plainly in his cheek; and Dallas was presently privileged to assist in the publication of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Four years after, on Byron's return from the East, Dallas was still further privileged, and assisted in the publication of Childe Harold, which Byron gave him, and on which he received the profits (800), as he presently received, in the same way, the profits on The Corsair (1813). Then the pair drifted apart; and after Missolonghi Dallas produced an account of Byron against which Hanson and Hobhouse, the poet's executors, procured an injunction, on the strength of certain letters to the Hon. Mrs. Byron which were set forth in its pages. This was just before Dallas's death, when the book was republished in Paris (1824), as Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron from the Year 1808 to the end of 1814. It was edited by the Rev. A. R. C. Dallas (the writer's son); contains an account of the dispute with Hobhouse, together with a Memoir; and has been of service in the preparation of this Volume.

A furious Philippic:-See The Eclectic Review for November 1807. Here is a sample of the rubbish :-'The notice we take of this publication regards the author rather than the book; the book is a collection of juvenile pieces, some of very moderate merit, and others of very questionable morality; but the author is a nobleman! It is natural that, as commoners, we should feel a solemn reverence for hereditary rank; and then as critics, we should hail the slightest indication of poetical talent that gleams from beneath a coronet. Powerfully as we are actuated by these sentiments, we shall not suffer this superior dignity, or these unnatural symptoms of intellect to overwhelm us with astonishment; but duly estimating that authority which our hoary age and important function intitle us to assume, and reflecting on the juvenility of this adventurous lord, we shall furnish him with a few admonitions,' etc. etc.

An excellent compound of a 'Brainless' and a 'Stanhope': These, says Moore, are 'characters in the novel called Percival.

LETTER XXVI. p. 36.

I did study The Spirit of Laws' and The Laws of Nations':—

The Spirit of Laws appears to be Nugent's translation (London, 1748) of Montesquieu's l'Esprit des Lois. The Laws of Nations may be the second discourse of Matthew Tindal (1657-1733), Of the Laws of Nations and the Rights of Kings (London, 1694).

Moore has noted, in connexion with this letter, that Byron's sentiment for his University was precisely that of Milton, Dryden, and Gray before him, and was paralleled by that of Locke and Gibbon for Oxford.

LETTER Xxvii. p. 38.

My dear Harness:-William Harness (1790-1869) was Byron's junior at Harrow. Harness was weak and lame when he entered the school; and Byron fought his battles for him. They fell out, but were reconciled: so that Byron was moved to dedicate the First and Second Harold to him, but did not for fear it should injure him in his profession.' Writing some years after Harrow, Byron speaks thus of both the estrangement and the friendship :'We both seem perfectly to recollect, with a mixture of pleasure and regret, the hours we once passed together, and I assure you, most sincerely, they are numbered among the happiest of my brief chronicle of enjoyment. I am now getting into years, that is to say, I was twenty a month ago, and another year will send me into the world to run my career of folly with the rest. I was then just fourteen,-you were almost the first of my Harrow friends, certainly the first in my esteem, if not in date; but an absence from Harrow for some time, shortly after, and new connexions on your side, and the difference in our conduct (an advantage decidedly in your favour) from that turbulent and riotous disposition of mine, which impelled me into every species of mischief,-all these circumstances combined to destroy an intimacy, which affection urged me to continue, and memory compels me to regret. But there is not a circumstance attending that period, hardly a sentence we exchanged, which is not impressed on my mind at this moment. I need not say more,—this assurance alone must convince you, had I considered them as trivial, they would have been less indelible. How well I recollect the perusal of your "first flights"! There is another circumstance you do not know ;-the first lines I ever attempted at Harrow were addressed to you. You were to have seen them; but Sinclair had the copy in his possession when we went home; and, on our return, we were strangers. They were destroyed, and certainly no great loss; but you will perceive from this circumstance my opinions at an age when we cannot be hypo