THE CORSAIR:

A TALE.

"I suoi pensieri in lui dormir non ponno." TASSO, Gerusalemme Liberata, Canto X. [stanza lxxviii. line 8].

INTRODUCTION TO THE CORSAIR.

A SEVENTH edition of the Giaour, including the final additions, and the first edition of the Bride of Abydos, were published on the twenty-ninth of November, 1813. In less than three weeks (December 18) Byron began the Corsair, and completed the fair copy of the first draft by the last day of the year. The Corsair in all but its final shape, together with the sixth edition of the Bride of Abydos, the seventh of Childe Harold, and the ninth of the Giaour, was issued on the first of February, 1814.

A letter from John Murray to Lord Byron, dated February 3, 1814 (Memoir of John Murray, 1891, i. 223), presents a vivid picture of a great literary triumph

"MY LORD, I have been unwilling to write until I had something to say. . . I am most happy to tell you that your last poem is—what Mr. Southey's is called-a Carmen Triumphale. Never in my recollection has any work . . excited such a ferment. I sold on the day of publication -a thing perfectly unprecedented-10,000 copies. . . . Mr. Moore says it is masterly-a wonderful performance. Mr. Hammond, Mr. Heber, D'Israeli, every one who comes . . . declare their unlimited approbation. Mr. Ward was here with Mr. Gifford yesterday, and mingled his admiration with the rest. . . and Gifford did, what I never knew him do before he repeated several stanzas from memory, particularly the closing stanza

"""His death yet dubious, deeds too widely known.'

66 I have the highest encomiums in letters from Croker and Mr. Hay; but I rest most upon the warm feeling it has created in Gifford's critic heart. You have no notion of

the sensation which the publication has occasioned; and my only regret is that you were not present to witness it."

For some time before and after the poem appeared, Byron was, as he told Leigh Hunt (February 9, 1814; Letters, 1899, iii. 27), “snow-bound and thaw-swamped in 'the valley of the shadow' of Newstead Abbey,” and it was not till he had returned to town that he resumed his journal, and bethought him of placing on record some dark sayings with regard to the story of the Corsair and the personality of Conrad. Under date February 18, 1814, he writes

"The Corsair has been conceived, written, published, etc., since I last took up this journal [? last day but one]. They tell me it has great success; it was written con amore [i.e. during the reign of Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster], and much from existence."

And again, Journal, March 10 (Letters, 1898, ii. 399), "He [Hobhouse] told me an odd report,—that I am the actual Conrad, the veritable Corsair, and that part of my travels are supposed to have passed in privacy [sic; ? piracy]. Um! people sometimes hit near the truth; but never the whole truth. H. don't know what I was about the year after he left the Levant; nor does any one-nor-nor-nor -however, it is a lie-but, 'I doubt the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth.""

Very little weight can be attached to these "I could an I would" pronouncements, deliberately framed to provoke curiosity, and destined, no doubt, sooner or later to see the light; but the fact remains that Conrad is not a mere presentation of Byron in a fresh disguise, or "The Pirate's Tale" altogether a "painting of the imagination."

That the Corsair is founded upon fact is argued at some length by the author (an “English Gentleman in the Greek Military Service") of the Life, Writings, Opinions, and Times of the R. H. George Gordon Noel Byron, which was published in 1825. The point of the story (i. 197-201), which need not be repeated at length, is that Byron, on leaving Constantinople and reaching the island of Zea (July, 1810), visited ["strolled about "] the islands of the Archipelago, in company with a Venetian gentleman who had turned buccaneer malgré lui, and whose history and adventures,