longer the brilliant and engaging Whig of the Dedication prefixed to Moore's Anacreon (1800). He was shaping fast to be that Tory of Tories to whom Sir Walter was presently to dedicate the Waverley Novels, and for that reason he was the cockshy of Whiggish wits and an outcast from Whig society. Still, if Dallas be credible, Byron is here a trifle disingenuous :-'I called on him' (thus Dallas) ' on the morning for which the levee had been appointed, and found him in a full-dress court suit of clothes, with his fine black hair in powder, which by no means suited his countenance. I was surprised, as he had not told me that he should go to court; and it seemed to me as if he thought it necessary to apologise for his intention, by his observing that he could not in decency but do it, as the Regent had done him the honour to say that he hoped to see him soon at Carlton House.' LETTER cxlv. p. 204. Send me Rokeby.' Who the deuce is he?-Rokeby (published this year) was named after the historic house of Scott's friend, James Morritt, to whom the poem was dedicated. Hence the lines in Letter vii. of The Twopenny Post-Bag (1813): Should feel any touch of poetical glow, you We've a scheme to suggest-Mr. Sc―TT, you must know Is coming, by long Quarto stages, to Town; And beginning with Rokeby (the job's sure to pay) Now, the Scheme is (though none of our hackneys can beat him) To start a fresh Poet through Highgate to meet him; Who, by means of quick proofs-no revises-long coaches May do a few Villas before SC-TT approaches. Indeed, if our Pegasus be not curst shabby, He'll reach, without found'ring, at least Woburn Abbey. This is good enough banter, to be sure. But in the general opinion Scott was not the poet he had been; and what Moore really thought of the new quarto is expressed to better purpose in a question to Power, publisher of the Melodies:-'Did you ever see any songs so bad as the songs in Rokeby?' Yet among the songs in Rokeby is Brignall Banks, one of the triumphs of the Romantic Muse! What will you give me or mine for a poem :-As we have seen, Byron declined to receive a penny for the Harold. And it was Dallas who got the five hundred guineas Murray gave for The Giaour. VOL. I. 417 2 D Like Jeremy Diddler :-Kenney's farce, Raising the Wind, was produced in 1803. Adair on Diet and Regimen:-This is the Essay on Diet and Regimen as Indispensable to the Recovery and Preservation of Firm Health to Indolent, Studious, Delicate, and Invalid (1804) of James M. Adair. LETTER cxlvi. p. 204. The lines which I sketched off on your hint:-No doubt, a potential Address for the opening night at the new Drury Lane. Mr Betty:-William Henry West Betty (1791-1874), the 'Young Roscius' for whom the Town took such a craze that in 1805 Mr. Pitt adjourned the House that members might see his Hamlet. Three years later, after a round of such unwarrantable triumphs as justly scandalised Kean and the gifted Siddons, he left the stage, and went to Cambridge, but reappeared in 1812, and failed as, a few lines later, Byron says fail he must. So, poor dear Rogers:-Rogers had started that summer on a tour in the North. He did not return till the end of the year. LETTER cxlvii. p. 206. The books were presents of a convertible kind also :—Both Christian Knowledge and The Bioscope; or, Dial of Life explained (1812) were the work of Granville Penn (1761-1844); 'a gentleman,' says Moore, 'descended from the family of Penn of Pennsylvania, and much distinguished for his learning and piety.' Byron's was ever a soul too precious for perdition. Here is the first attempt to save it. The Duke of Wellington's was exposed to visitations of the same solicitude. So you are Lucien's publisher:—Lucien Bonaparte (1775-1840), Prince of Canino, had come to England in 1810, bought an estate in Shropshire, and written an epic there in four-and-twenty cantos called Charlemagne, ou l'Église delivrée. A translation, Charlemagne, or the Church Delivered, the work of Hodgson and Butler, was published (1815) in two volumes quarto: which, it is thought, no living man has read. ་ The Anti-Jacobin' Review is all very well:-See the review of Childe Harold (Third Edition) in the August issue (1812) of that print. The pleasure,' it says, 'which we derived from the perusal of Lord Byron's former productions made us sit down with avidity to the pilgrimage of his favourite Childe. We cannot say, however, that our expectations of gratification have been fulfilled. From the form and nature of the 'Romaunt,' as it is whimsically, and improperly, denominated, we were led to look for all the characteristics of a regular poem. We were not a little surprised, therefore, to find the piece destitute of plot or even of plan, its hero a personage not only wandering over the world, without any fixed object, but wholly unnecessary to forward any purpose of the poem,' etc. etc. Not a bit worse than the Quarterly':-The Quarterly (March 1812) censures Childe Harold for the 'Childe,' the 'staunch Yeoman,' and 'the little Page,' and asks :-'Why is this group of antiques sent on a journey through Portugal and Spain during the interval' between Cintra and Talavera? Such inconsistencies are 'by no means innocent, if they have led Lord Byron (as we suspect) to adopt that motley mixture of obsolete and modern phraseology by which the ease and elegance of his verses are often injured, and to degrade the character of his work by the insertion of some passages which will probably give offence to a considerable portion of his readers.' In blaming his use of such words as 'moe, feere, ne, losel, eld,' and the like, the Reviewer notes that the Author is not always correct in his use of them, and cites (C. 1. St. lxvii.), Devices quaint, etc. :-'It must be supposed that he did not mean to personify devices and frolics for the purpose of afflicting them with chilblains. Again, on C. II. St. lxii. :-'It is plain that the noble lord must have considered ruth as synonymous, not with pity, but with cruelty,' and 'in a third instance, where we are told that "Childe Harold had a mother," the vocal meaning of the first word has evidently a ludicrous effect, which could not have escaped the attention of our author whilst writing in the language of his own day.' At the same time' we do not mean to lay any stress on the accidental heedlessness which originates such errors, we complain only of the habitual negligence, of the frequent laxity of expression-of the feeble or dissonant rhymes which almost always disfigure a too close imitation of the language of our early poets, and of which we think that the work before us offers too many examples.' Then we quote 'Even gods must yield,' etc. (C. 11. St. iii.-vii.), which has this effect on us :-The common courtesy of society has, we think, very justly proscribed the intrusive introduction of such topics as these into conversation, and as no reader probably will open Childe Harold with the view of inquiring into the religious tenets of the author, or of endeavouring to settle his own, we cannot but disapprove, in point of taste, these protracted meditations, as well as the disgusting objects by which some of them are suggested. We object to them, also, because they have the effect of producing some little traces of resemblance between the author and the hero of the piece, a resemblance which Lord Byron has most sedulously and properly disclaimed in his preface.' . . . On the whole, however, 'the applause which he has received has been very general, and in our opinion, well deserved. We think that the poem exhibits some marks of carelessness, many of caprice, but many also of sterling genius. On the latter we have forborne to expatiate, because we apprehend that our readers are quite as well qualified as ourselves to estimate the merits of pleasing versification, of lively conception, and of accurate expression.' Further, the poet 'has shown that his confidence in his own powers is not to be subdued by illiberal and unmerited censure; and we are sure that it will not be diminished by our animadversions: we are not sure that we should have better consulted his future fame, or our own character for candour, if we had expressed our sense of his talents in terms of more unqualified panegyric.' P.S.-Gave up the idea of contending against all Grub Street :— This is true, but the Address was written by him after all. Lord Holland asked him to write it, and, as we have seen (Letter clxxix. ), he declined to do so on the same grounds as these he here sets forth to Murray. Meanwhile, Grub Street had entered (near a hundred strong), and had been cast out utterly; and Lord Holland, returning to the charge, succeeded where he had failed before, and persuaded his young friend to give the Committee of Management its desire: though in doing so Byron did actually, as he expected, 'offend a hundred scribblers and a discerning public.' LETTER Cxlix. p. 209. I think Elliston should be the man:-Robert William Elliston (1774-1831): Lamb's 'brightest of embodied spirits'; to Leigh Hunt's mind 'the best lover on the stage, both in tragedy and comedy'; more than interesting as Romeo and Hamlet, and unequalled as Mercutio and Benedick and Hotspur, as Farquhar's Mirabel and Archer, Cibber's Lord Townley, Rowe's Lothario, the Duke Aranza of The Honeymoon, the Rover of Wild Oats, the Ranger of The Suspicious Husband, the Falkland of The Rivals, and (till Kean had played the part) the Sir Edward Mortimer of The Iron Chest: was a member of the Drury Lane Company from 1804 until the fire in 1809, and again in 1812-15. He lives as fully as dead actor can in some delightful pages by Charles Lamb. See, too, the capital sketch of him by Mr. William Archer in Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States. Or Pope:-Alexander Pope (1762-1835) 'had a handsome face, good person, genteel figure, and graceful action'; his voice, too, 'possessed a firmness, and in the softer tones called the soul-moving Barry to the recollection'; but 'his countenance was scarcely sufficiently expressive to give full effect to the passions of joy, grief, or disdain.' Leigh Hunt disliked him, and criticised him very sharply for the sameness of his gesture, the flatness of his conceptions, and the inexpressiveness of his face; while Elia described him ('On Some of the Old Actors') as 'the abdicated monarch of comedy and tragedy,' with peculiar reference to his Henry VIII. and his Lord Townley. He appeared at Covent Garden in 1784-5, and retired in 1827. He was a fine glutton, and could never forgive 'that monster Catalani' because she took a knife to a fricandeau. Again, to Incledon, who told him that the Yankees took no oil to their salads, 'No oil to their salads!' said the outraged feeder: 'Why did we make peace with them?' Not Raymond, I implore you, by the love of Rhythmus:-Raymond, 'from Dublin,' appeared at Drury Lane, 26th September 1799, as Osmond in Mat Lewis's Castle Spectres. Leigh Hunt preferred him vastly before Pope; and says Hazlitt, in his account of Kean's Hamlet (1814), 'We cannot speak too highly of Mr. Raymond's representation of the Ghost. It glided across the stage with the preternatural grandeur of a spirit.' But, for 'his manner of speaking the part, there is not so much to say: a spirit should not whine or shed tears.' In 1814, when Kean electrified the Town, Raymond appears to have been stage-manager at the new Drury Lane; but when Bluebeard's elephants were burned (see ante, p. 357, Note to Letter lxxii.) in 1809, he 'condescended to be the magician of an Eastern tale' and 'assisted pantomime' (the phrases are Leigh Hunt's; and the phrases will serve, though the date will not). Associated with him in Bluebeard were Bannister, Matthews, Mrs. Mountain, and Mrs. Bland: a cast which would beggar the existing stage. LETTER cl. p. 209. I send a recast:-Thus the four lines are printed. LETTER cli. p. 210. Dryden in his 'Annus Mirabilis': A quay of fire ran all along the shore, And lightened all the river with a blaze; |