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MARTIAL, LIB. I. EPIG. I.

"Hic est, quem legis, ille, quem requiris,
Toto notus in orbe Martialis," etc.

HE, unto whom thou art so partial,
Oh, reader is the well-known Martial,
The Epigrammatist: while living,
Give him the fame thou would'st be giving;

So shall he hear, and feel, and know it—

Post-obits rarely reach a poet.

[N.D.? 1821.]

[First published, Lord Byron's Works, 1833, xvii. 245.1

BOWLES AND CAMPBELL.

To the air of "How now, Madam Flirt," in the Beggar's Opera.1

BOWLES.

"WHY, how now, saucy Tom?

If you thus must ramble,

but I don't regret them so much for what I have done, as for what I might have done."-Extracts from a Diary, January 21, 1821, Letters, 1901, v. 182.

In a letter to Moore, dated January 22, 1821, he gives another version

"Through Life's road, so dim and dirty,
I have dragged to three-and-thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing-except thirty-three."

1. [Compare the Beggar's Opera, act ii. sc. 2—

Air, "Good morrow, Gossip Joan."
"Polly. Why, how now, Madam Flirt?
If you thus must chatter,

Ibid., p. 229.]

I will publish some

Remarks on Mister Campbell.

CAMPBELL.

Saucy Tom!"

"WHY, how now, Billy Bowles?

Sure the priest is maudlin!

(To the public) How can you, d-n your souls!

Listen to his twaddling?

Billy Bowles!”

February 22, 1821.

[First published, The Liberal, 1823, No. II. p. 398.]

ELEGY.

BEHOLD the blessings of a lucky lot!

My play is damned, and Lady Noel not.

May 25, 1821.

[First published, Medwin's Conversations, 1824, p. 121.]

And are for flinging dirt,

Let's try who best can spatler,

Madam Flirt!

"Lucy. Why, how now, saucy jade?

Sure the wench is tipsy!
How can you see me made

The scoff of such a gipsy?

[To him.]

Saucy jade!" [To her.]

Bowles replied to Campbell's Introductory Essay to his Specimens of the English Poets, 7 vols., 1819, by The Invariable Principles of Poetry, in a letter addressed to Thomas Campbell. For Byron's two essays, the "Letter to [John Murray]" and "Observations upon Observations," see Letters, 1901, v. Appendix III. PP. 536-592.]

JOHN KEATS.1

WHO killed John Keats?
"I," says the Quarterly,
So savage and Tartarly;
"'T was one of my feats."

Who shot the arrow?

"The poet-priest Milman
(So ready to kill man)
"Or Southey, or Barrow."

July 30, 1821.

[First published, Letters and Journals, 1830, ii. 506.]

FROM THE FRENCH.

ÆGLE, beauty and poet, has two little crimes;

She makes her own face, and does not make her rhymes.

Aug. 2, 1821.

[First published, The Liberal, 1823, No. II. p. 396.]

TO MR. MURRAY.

I.

FOR Orford 2 and for Waldegrave 3

You give much more than me you gave;
Which is not fairly to behave,

My Murray!

1. [For Croker's "article" on Keats's Endymion (Quarterly Review, April, 1818, vol. xix. pp. 204-208), see Don Juan, Canto XI. stanza lx. line 1, Poetical Works, 1902, vi. 445, note 4.]

2. [Horace Walpole's Memoirs of the Last Nine Years of the Reign of George II.]

3. [Memoirs by James Earl Waldegrave, Governor of George III. when Prince of Wales.]

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And if, as the opinion goes,

Verse hath a better sale than prose,—
Certes, I should have more than those,
My Murray!

4.

But now this sheet is nearly crammed,
So, if you will, I shan't be shammed,
And if you won't, you may be damned,

My Murray!1

August 23, 1821.

[First published, Letters and Journals, 1830, ii. 517.]

[NAPOLEON'S SNUFF-BOX.]'

LADY, accept the box a hero wore,

In spite of all this elegiac stuff:

Let not seven stanzas written by a bore,

Prevent your Ladyship from taking snuff!

1821.

[First published, Conversations of Lord Byron, 1824, p. 235.]

1. ["Can't accept your courteous offer [i.e. £2000 for three cantos of Don Juan, Sardanapalus, and The Two Foscari]. These matters must be arranged with Mr. Douglas Kinnaird. He is my trustee, and a man of honour. To him you can state all your mercantile reasons, which you might not like to state to me personally, such as 'heavy season'-'flat public'-'don't go off'lordship writes too much'-' won't take advice '-' declining popu. larity'' deductions for the trade'-'make very little'-'generally lose by him'-'pirated edition '-'foreign edition '—' severe criticisms,' etc., with other hints and howls for an oration, which I leave Douglas, who is an orator, to answer."-Letter to Murray, August 23, 1821, Letters, 1901, v. 348.]

2. [Napoleon bequeathed to Lady Holland a snuff-box which had

THE NEW VICAR OF BRAY.

I.

Do you know Doctor Nott?1

With "a crook in his lot,"

Who seven years since tried to dish up

A neat Codicil

To the Princess's Will,2

Which made Dr. Nott not a bishop.

been given to him by the Pope for his clemency in sparing Rome. Lord Carlisle wrote eight (not seven) stanzas, urging her, as Byron told Medwin, to decline the gift, "for fear that horror and murder should jump out of the lid every time it is opened."—Conversations, 1824, p. 362. The first stanza of Lord Carlyle's verses, which teste Medwin, Byron parodied, runs thus

"Lady, reject the gift! 'tis tinged with gore!

Those crimson spots a dreadful tale relate;

It has been grasp'd by an infernal Power;

And by that hand which seal'd young Enghien's fate."

The snuff-box is now in the jewel-room in the British Museum.] 1. [George Frederick Nott (1767-1841), critic and divine, was Rector of Harrietsham and Woodchurch, a Prebendary of Winchester and of Salisbury. He was Bampton Lecturer in 1802, and, soon afterwards, was appointed sub-preceptor to the Princess Charlotte of Wales. He was a connoisseur of architecture and painting, and passed much of his time in Italy and at Rome. When he was at Pisa he preached in a private room in the basement story of the house in Pisa where Shelley was living, and fell under Byron's displeasure for attacking the Satanic school, and denouncing Cain as a blasphemous production. "The parsons," he told Moore (letter, February 20, 1820), "preached at it [Cain] from Kentish Town to Pisa." Hence the apostrophe to Dr. Nott. (See Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, by E. T. Trelawny, 1887, pp. 302, 303.)Í

2. [According to Lady Anne Hamilton (Secret History of the Court of England, 1832, i. 198-207), the Princess Charlotte incurred the suspicion and displeasure of her uncles and her grandmother, the Queen, by displaying an ardent and undue interest in her sub-preceptor. On being reproved by the Queen for "condescending to favour persons in low life with confidence or particular respect, persons likely to take advantage of your simplicity and innocence,' and having learnt that "persons" meant Mr. Nott, she replied by threatening to sign a will in favour of her sub-preceptor, and by actually making over to him by a deed her library, jewels, and all

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