Sotheby is a good man, rhymes well (if not wisely), but is a bore. He seizes you by the button. One night of a rout, at Mrs. Hope's, he had fastened upon me, notwithstanding my symptoms of manifest distress, (for I was in love, and had just nicked a minute when neither mothers, nor husbands, nor rivals, nor gossips, were near my then idol, who was beautiful as the statues of the gallery where we stood at the time,) - Sotheby, I say, had seized upon me by the button and the heart-strings, and spared neither. William Spencer, who likes fun, and don't dislike mischief, saw my case, and coming up to us both, took me by the hand, and pathetically bade me farewell; 'for,' said he, I see it is all over with you.' Sotheby then went away. Sic me servavit Apollo." "I remember seeing Blucher in the London assemblies, and never saw any thing of his age less venerable. With the voice and manners of a recruiting sergeant, he pretended to the honours of a hero, —just as if a stone could be worshipped because a man had stumbled over it." We now approach the close of this eventful period of his history. In a note to Mr. Rogers, written a short time before his departure for Ostend, he says, "My sister is now with me, and leaves town to-morrow: we shall not meet again for some time, at all if ever; and, under these circumstances, I trust to stand excused to you and Mr. Sheridan for being unable to wait upon him this evening." events This was his last interview with his sister, almost the only person from whom he now parted with regret; it being, as he said, doubtful which had given him most pain, the enemies who attacked or the friends who condoled with him. Those beautiful and most tender verses, Though the day of my destiny's over," were now his parting tribute to her who, through all this bitter trial, had been his sole consolation; and, though known to most readers, so expressive are they of his wounded feelings at this 66 ception. More shame to him! He was the most indolent great man that ever lived, and threw away in his talk more than he ever took pains to embalm in his writings. It is true that Boswell has in a great measure counteracted all this. But here is no defence. Few great men can expect to have a Boswell, and none ought to wish to have one, far less to trust to having one. A man should not keep fine clothes locked up in his chest, only that his valet may occasionally show off in them: no, nor yet strut about in them in his chamber but that his valet may puff him and his finery abroad. What might not he have done who wrote Rasselas in the evenings of eight days to get money enough for his mother's funeral ex crisis, that there are few, I think, who will object to seeing some stanzas of them here. Though the rock of my last hope is shiver'd, To pain- it shall not be its slave. They may crush, but they shall not contemn- It hath taught me that what I most cherish'd In the desert a fountain is springing, In the wide waste there still is a tree, Which speaks to my spirit of thee." On a scrap of paper, in his handwriting, dated April 14. 1816, I find the following list of his attendants, with an annexed outline of his projected tour:-"Servants, Berger, a Swiss, William Fletcher, and Robert Rushton John William Polidori, M. D.-Switzerland, Flanders, Italy, and (perhaps) France." The two English servants, it will be observed, were the same yeoman" and page" who had set out with him on his youthful travels in 1809; and now,- for the second and last time taking leave of his country, - on the 25th of April he sailed for Ostend. 66 The circumstances under which Lord Byron now took leave of England were such as, in the case of any ordinary person, could not be considered otherwise than disastrous and humiliating. He had, in the course of one short year, gone through every variety of domestic misery :- had seen his hearth eight or nine times profaned by the visitations of the law, and been only saved from a prison by the privileges of his rank. He had alienated, as far as they had ever been his, the affections of his wife; and now, rejected by her, and condemned by the world, was betaking himself to an exile which had not even the dignity of appearing voluntary, as the excommunicating voice of society seemed to leave him no other resource. Had he been of that class of unfeeling and self-satisfied natures from whose hard surface the reproaches of others fall pointless, he might have found in insensibility a sure refuge against reproach; but, on the contrary, the same sensitiveness that kept him so awake to the applauses of mankind rendered him, in a still more intense degree, alive to their censure. Even the strange, perverse pleasure which he felt in painting himself unamiably to the world did not prevent him from being both startled and pained when the world took him at his word; and, like a child in a mask before a lookingglass, the dark semblance which he had, half in sport, put on, when reflected back upon him from the mirror of public opinion, shocked even himself. Thus surrounded by vexations, and thus deeply feeling them, it is not too much to say, that any other spirit but his own would have sunk under the struggle, and lost, perhaps irrecoverably, that level of selfesteem which alone affords a stand against the shocks of fortune. But in him,-furnished as was his mind with reserves of strength, waiting to be called out, the very intensity of the pressure brought relief by the proportionate re-action which it produced. Had his transgressions and frailties been visited with no more than their due portion of punishment, there can be little doubt that a very different result would have ensued. Not only would such an excitement have been insufficient to waken up the new energies still dormant in him, but that consciousness of his own errors, which was for ever livelily present in his mind, would, under such circumstances, have been left, undisturbed by any unjust provocation, to work its usual softening and, perhaps, humbling influences on his spirit. But,-luckily, as it proved, for the further triumphs of his genius, -no such moderation was exercised. The storm of In one of his letters to Mr. Hunt, he declares it to be his own opinion that "an addiction to poetry is very generally the result of an uneasy mind in an uneasy body; ' disease or deformity," he adds, "have been the attendants of many of our best. Collins mad-Chatterton, I think, mad Cowper mad- Pope crooked - Milton blind," &c. &c. invective raised around him, so utterly out of proportion with his offences, and the base calumnies that were every where heaped upon his name, left to his wounded pride no other resource than in the same summoning up of strength, the same instinct of resistance to injustice, which had first forced out the energies of his youthful genius, and was now destined to give a still bolder and loftier range to its powers. It was, indeed, not without truth, said of him by Goethe, that he was inspired by the Genius of Pain; for, from the first to the last of his agitated career, every fresh recruitment of his faculties was imbibed from that bitter source. His chief incentive, when a boy, to distinction was, as we have seen, that mark of deformity on his person, by an acute sense of which he was first stung into the ambition of being great.' As, with an evident reference to his own fate, he himself describes the feeling,— "Deformity is daring. It is its essence to o'ertake mankind Then came the disappointment of his youthful passion,- the lassitude and remorse of premature excess,-the lone friendlessness of his entrance into life, and the ruthless assault upon his first literary efforts, all links in that chain of trials, errors, and sufferings, by which his great mind was gradually and painfully drawn out; -all bearing their respective shares in accomplishing that destiny which seems to have decreed that the triumphal march of his genius should be over the waste and ruins of his heart. He appeared, indeed, himself to have had an instinctive consciousness that it was out of such ordeals his strength and glory were to arise, as his whole life was passed in courting agitation and difficulties; and whenever the scenes around him were too tame to furnish such excitement, he flew to fancy or memory for "thorns" where on to "lean his breast." But the greatest of his trials, as well as triumphs, was yet to come. The last stage of this painful, though glorious, course, in which fresh power was, at every step, wrung| from out his soul, was that at which we are now arrived, his marriage and its results,— without which, dear as was the price paid by him in peace and character, his career would have been incomplete, and the world still left in ignorance of the full compass of his genius. It is, indeed, worthy of remark, that it was not till his domestic circumstances began to darken around him that his fancy, which had long been idle, again rose upon the wing,-both The Siege of Corinth and Parisina having been produced but a short time before the separation. How conscious he was, too, that the turmoil which followed was the true element of his restless spirit, may be collected from several passages of his letters at that period, in one of which he even mentions that his health had become all the better for the conflict. -"It is odd," he says, "but agitation or contest of any kind gives a rebound to my spirits, and sets me up for the time." This buoyancy it was,- this irrepressible spring of mind, that now enabled him to bear up not only against the assaults of others, but, what was still more difficult, against his own thoughts and feelings. The muster of all his mental resources to which, in selfdefence, he had been driven, but opened to him the yet undreamed extent and capacity of his powers, and inspired him with a proud confidence that he should yet shine down these calumnious mists, convert censure to wonder, and compel even those who could not approve to admire. The route which he now took, through Flanders and by the Rhine, is best traced in his own matchless verses, which leave a portion of their glory on all that they touch, and lend to scenes, already clothed with immortality by nature and by history, the no less durable associations of undying song. On his leaving Brussels, an incident occurred which would be hardly worth relating, were it not for the proof it affords of the malicious assiduity with which every thing to his disadvantage was now caught up and circulated in England. Mr. Pryce Gordon, a gentleman who appears to have seen a good deal of him during his short stay at Brussels, thus relates the anecdote : "Lord Byron travelled in a huge coach, copied from the celebrated one of Napoleon, taken at Genappe, with additions. Besides a lit de repos, it contained a library, a platechest, and every apparatus for dining in it. It was not, however, found sufficiently capacious for his baggage and suite; and he [Major Pryce Gordon, in 1831, published his " Personal Memoirs," in two volumes, 8vo.] purchased a calèche at Brussels for his servants. It broke down going to Waterloo, and I advised him to return it, as it seemed to be a crazy machine; but as he had made a deposit of forty Napoleons (certainly double its value), the honest Fleming would not consent to restore the cash, or take back his packing case, except under a forfeiture of thirty Napoleons. As his Lordship was to set out the following day, he begged me to make the best arrangement I could in the affair. He had no sooner taken his departure, than the worthy sellier inserted a paragraph in The Brussels Oracle,' stating that the noble milor Anglais had absconded with his calèche, value 1800 francs!"" i In the Courier of May 13., the Brussels account of this transaction is thus copied : "The following is an extract from the Dutch Mail, dated Brussels, May 8th :- In the Journal de Belgique, of this date, is a petition from a coachmaker at Brussels to the president of the Tribunal de Premier Instance, stating that he has sold to Lord Byron a carriage, &c. for 1882 francs, of which he has received 847 francs; but that his Lordship, who is going away the same day, refuses to pay him the remaining 1035 francs; he begs permission to seize the carriage, &c. This being granted, he put it into the hands of a proper officer, who went to signify the above to Lord Byron, and was informed by the landlord of the hotel that his Lordship was gone without having given him any thing to pay the debt, on which the officer seized a chaise belonging to his Lordship as security for the amount." It was not till the beginning of the following month that a contradiction of this falsehood, stating the real circumstances of the case, as above related, was communicated to the Morning Chronicle, in a letter from Brussels, signed Pryce L. Gordon." 66 me, and showed him the lines, requesting him to embellish them with an appropriate vignette to the following passage : "Here his last flight the haughty eagle flew, Then tore, with bloody beak, the fatal plain; Pierced with the shafts of banded nations through, Ambition's life, and labours, all were vain — He wears the shatter'd links of the worid's broken chain.' Mr. Reinagle sketched with a pencil a spirited chained eagle, grasping the earth with his talons. "I had occasion to write to his Lordship, and mentioned having got this clever artist to draw a vignette to his beautiful lines, and the liberty he had taken by altering the action of the eagle. In reply to this, he Reinagle is a better poet and a better ornothologist than I am; eagles, and all birds of prey, attack with their talons, and not with their beaks, and I have altered the line thus : wrote to me, From Brussels the noble traveller pursued his course along the Rhine, -a line of road which he has strewed over with all the riches of poesy; and, arriving at Geneva, took up his abode at the well-known hotel, Sécheron. After a stay of a few weeks at this place, he removed to a villa, in the neighbourhood, called Diodati, very beautifully situated on the high banks of the Lake, where he established his residence for the remainder of the summer. I shall now give the few letters in my possession written by him at this time, and then subjoin to them such anecdotes as I have been able to collect relative to the same period. ["It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the life of "Ouchy, near Lausanne, June 27. 1816. "I am thus far (kept by stress of weather) on my way back to Diodati (near Geneva) from a voyage in my boat round the Lake; and I enclose you a sprig of Gibbon's acacia and some rose-leaves from his garden, which, with part of his house, I have just seen. You will find honourable mention, in his Life, made of this acacia,' when he walked out on the night of concluding his history. 1 The garden and summer-house, where he composed, are neglected, and the last ut- || terly decayed; but they still show it as his cabinet,' and seem perfectly aware of his memory. My route through Flanders, and by the Rhine, to Switzerland, was all I expected, and more. I have traversed all Rousseau's ground, with the Héloise before me; and am struck, to a degree that I cannot express, with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and the beauty of their reality. 2 Meillerie, Clarens, and Vevay, and the Château de Chillon, are places of which I shall say little, because all I could say must fall short of the impressions they stamp. "Three days ago, we were most nearly to shore. I ran no risk, being so near the wrecked in a squall off Meillerie, and driven rocks, and a good swimmer; but our party were wet, and incommoded a good deal. The wind was strong enough to blow down some trees, as we found at landing: howthus far on our teturn. ever, all is righted and right, and we are "Dr. Polidori is not here, but at Diodati, left behind in hospital with a sprained ankle, which he acquired in tumbling from a wall - he can't jump. "I shall be glad to hear you are well, and have received for me certain helms and swords, sent from Waterloo, which I rode over with pain and pleasure. 66 I have finished a third canto of Childe Harold (consisting of one hundred and the historian must be short and precarious. I will add two facts, which have seldom occurred in the composition of six, or at least of five, quartos. 1. My first rough manuscript, without any intermediate copy, has been sent to the press. 2. Not a sheet has been seen by any human eyes, excepting those of the author and the printer: the faults and the merits are exclusively my own.”— Gibbon's Life, p. 255.] 2 ["The extreme freshness of the traditions, and the extraordinary beauty of the spot, gave a reality to the fiction of an extraordinary kind. It required great power of genius to make the associations of a fiction separately felt in this magnificent country."- SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH: Life, vol. ii. p. 298.] seventeen stanzas), longer than either of the two former, and in some parts, it may be, better; but of course on that I cannot determine. I shall send it by the first safelooking opportunity. Ever, &c." LETTER 243. TO MR. MURRAY. "Diodati, near Geneva, July 22. 1816. “I wrote to you a few weeks ago, and Dr. Polidori received your letter; but the packet has not made its appearance, nor the epistle, of which you gave notice therein. l'enclose you an advertisement, which was copied by Dr. Polidori, and which appears to be about the most impudent imposition that ever issued from Grub Street. I need hardly say that I know nothing of all this trash, nor whence it may spring, Odes to St. Helena,' — 'Farewells to England,' &c. &c.; and if it can be disavowed, or is worth disavowing, you have full authority to do so. I never wrote, nor conceived, a line on any thing of the kind, any more than of two other things with which I was saddled something about Gaul,' and another about Mrs. La Valette;' and as to the Lily of France,' I should as soon think of celebrating a turnip. On the Morning of my Daughter's Birth,' I had other things to think of than verses; and should never have dreamed of such an invention, till Mr. Johnston and his pamphlet's advertisement broke in upon me with a new light on the crafts and subtleties of the demon of printing, or rather publishing. 6 "I did hope that some succeeding lie would have superseded the thousand and one which were accumulated during last winter. I can forgive whatever may be said of or against me, but not what they make me say or sing for myself. It is enough to answer for what I have written; but it were too much for Job himself to bear what one has not. I suspect that when the Arab Patriarch wished that his 'enemy had written a book,' he did not anticipate his own name on the title-page. I feel quite as much bored with this foolery as it deserves, and more than I should be, if I had not a headach. "Of Glenarvon, Madame de Stael told me (ten days ago, at Copet) marvellous and The following was the advertisement enclosed: Neatly printed and hot-pressed, 2s. 6d. "Lord Byron's Farewell to England, with Three other Poems- Ode to St. Helena, to My Daughter on her Birthday, and to the Lily of France. "Printed by J. Johnston, Cheapside, 335.; Oxford, 9. "The above beautiful Poems will be read with the most lively interest, as it is probable they will be the last of the author's that will appear in England." TO MR. ROGERS. "Diodati, near Geneva, July 29. 1816. "Do you recollect a book, Mathieson's Letters, which you lent me, which I have still, and yet hope to return to your library? Well, I have encountered at Copet and elsewhere Gray's correspondent, that same Bonstetten, to whom I lent the translation of his correspondent's epistles, for a few days; but all he could remember of Gray amounts to little, except that he was the most melancholy and gentleman-like' of all possible poets. Bonstetten himself is a fine and very lively old man, and much esteemed by his compatriots; he is also a littérateur of good repute, and all his friends have a mania of addressing to him volumes of letters-Mathieson, Muller the historian, &c. &c. He is a good deal at Copet, where I have met him a few times. All there are well, except Rocca, who, I am sorry to say, looks in a very bad state of health. Schlegel is in high force, and Madame as brilliant as ever. "I came here by the Netherlands and the Rhine route, and Basle, Berne, Morat, and Lausanne. I have circumnavigated the Lake, and go to Chamouni with the first fair 2 [A novel by Lady Caroline Lamb. See BYRONIANA.] 3 The motto is from the Corsair "He left a name to all succeeding times, Link'd with one virtue and a thousand crimes." 4 ["Letters written from various Parts of the Continent, between the Years 1785 and 1794." M. Mathieson died at Worlitz, in Dessau, 1831.] |