Chapter 13

JOURNAL: NOVEMBER 14, 1813--APRIL 19, 1814.

If this had been begun ten years ago, and faithfully kept!!!--heigho! there are too many things I wish never to have remembered, as it is. Well,--I have had my share of what are called the pleasures of this life, and have seen more of the European and Asiatic world than I have made a good use of. They say "Virtue is its own reward,"--it certainly should be paid well for its trouble. At five-and-twenty, when the better part of life is over, one should be _something_;--and what am I? nothing but five-and-twenty--and the odd months. What have I seen? the same man all over the world,--ay, and woman too. Give _me_ a Mussulman who never asks questions, and a she of the same race who saves one the trouble of putting them. But for this same plague--yellow fever--and Newstead delay, I should have been by this time a second time close to the Euxine. If I can overcome the last, I don't so much mind your pestilence; and, at any rate, the spring shall see me there,--provided I neither marry myself, nor unmarry any one else in the interval. I wish one was--I don't know what I wish. It is odd I never set myself seriously to wishing without attaining it--and repenting. I begin to believe with the good old Magi, that one should only pray for the nation, and not for the individual;--but, on my principle, this would not be very patriotic.

No more reflections.--Let me see--last night I finished "Zuleika," my second Turkish Tale. I believe the composition of it kept me alive--for it was written to drive my thoughts from the recollection of:

"Dear sacred name, rest ever unreveal'd." [1]

At least, even here, my hand would tremble to write it. This afternoon I have burnt the scenes of my commenced comedy. I have some idea of expectorating a romance, or rather a tale in prose;--but what romance could equal the events:

"quaeque ipse......vidi, Et quorum pars magna fui." [2]

To-day Henry Byron [3] called on me with my little cousin Eliza. She will grow up a beauty and a plague; but, in the mean time, it is the prettiest child! dark eyes and eyelashes, black and long as the wing of a raven. I think she is prettier even than my niece, Georgina,--yet I don't like to think so neither: and though older, she is not so clever.

Dallas called before I was up, so we did not meet. Lewis [4], too,--who seems out of humour with every thing.

What can be the matter? he is not married--has he lost his own mistress, or any other person's wife? Hodgson, too, came. He is going to be married, and he is the kind of man who will be the happier. He has talent, cheerfulness, every thing that can make him a pleasing companion; and his intended is handsome and young, and all that. But I never see any one much improved by matrimony. All my coupled contemporaries are bald and discontented. W[ordsworth] and S[outhey] have both lost their hair and good humour; and the last of the two had a good deal to lose. But it don't much signify what falls _off_ a man's temples in that state.

Mem. I must get a toy to-morrow for Eliza, and send the device for the seals of myself and----Mem. too, to call on the Stael and Lady Holland to-morrow, and on----, who has advised me (without seeing it, by the by) not to publish "Zuleika;" [5] I believe he is right, but experience might have taught him that not to print is _physically_ impossible. No one has seen it but Hodgson and Mr. Gifford. I never in my life _read_ a composition, save to Hodgson, as he pays me in kind. It is a horrible thing to do too frequently;--better print, and they who like may read, and if they don't like, you have the satisfaction of knowing that they have, at least, _purchased_ the right of saying so.

I have declined presenting the Debtors' Petition [6], being sick of parliamentary mummeries. I have spoken thrice; but I doubt my ever becoming an orator. My first was liked; the second and third--I don't know whether they succeeded or not. I have never yet set to it _con amore_;--one must have some excuse to one's self for laziness, or inability, or both, and this is mine. "Company, villanous company, hath been the spoil of me;" [7]--and then, I "have drunk medicines," not to make me love others, but certainly enough to hate myself.

Two nights ago I saw the tigers sup at Exeter 'Change. Except Veli Pacha's lion in the Morea,--who followed the Arab keeper like a dog,--the fondness of the hyaena for her keeper amused me most. Such a conversazione!--There was a "hippopotamus," like Lord Liverpool in the face; and the "Ursine Sloth" had the very voice and manner of my valet--but the tiger talked too much. The elephant took and gave me my money again--took off my hat--opened a door--_trunked_ a whip--and behaved so well, that I wish he was my butler. The handsomest animal on earth is one of the panthers; but the poor antelopes were dead. I should hate to see one _here:_--the sight of the _camel_ made me pine again for Asia Minor. _"Oh quando te aspiciam?_"

[Footnote 1:

"Dear fatal name! rest ever unrevealed, Nor pass these lips in holy silence sealed."

Pope's 'Eloisa to Abelard', lines 9, 10.]

[Footnote 2: Virgil, 'AEneid', ii. 5:

". ... quoeque ipse miserrima vidi Et quorum pars magna fui."]

[Footnote 3: The Rev. Henry Byron, second son of the Rev. and Hon. Richard Byron, and nephew of William, fifth Lord Byron, died in 1821. His daughter Eliza married, in 1830, George Rochford Clarke. Byron's "niece Georgina" was the daughter of Mrs. Leigh.]

[Footnote 4: Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), intended by his father for the diplomatic service, was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Weimar, and Paris. He soon showed his taste for literature. At the age of seventeen he had translated a play from the French, and written a farce, a comedy called 'The East Indian' (acted at Drury Lane, April 22, 1799), "two volumes of a novel, two of a romance, besides numerous poems" ('Life, etc., of M. G. Lewis', vol. i. p. 70). In 1794 he was attached to the British Embassy at the Hague. There, stimulated ('ibid'., vol. i. p. 123) by reading Mrs. Radcliffe's 'Mysteries of Udolpho', he wrote 'Ambrosio, or the Monk'. The book, published in 1795, made him famous in fashionable society, and decided his career. Though he sat in Parliament for Hindon from 1796 to 1802, he took no part in politics, but devoted himself to literature.

The moral and outline of 'The Monk' are taken, as Lewis says in a letter to his father ('Life, etc.', vol. i. pp. 154-158), and as was pointed out in the 'Monthly Review' for August, 1797, from Addison's "Santon Barsisa" in the 'Guardian' (No. 148). The book was severely criticized on the score of immorality. Mathias ('Pursuits of Literature', Dialogue iv.) attacks Lewis, whom he compares to John Cleland, whose 'Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure' came under the notice of the law courts:

"Another Cleland see in Lewis rise. Why sleep the ministers of truth and law?"

An injunction was, in fact, moved for against the book; but the proceedings dropped.

Lewis had a remarkable gift of catching the popular taste of the day, both in his tales of horror and mystery, and in his ballads. In the latter he was the precursor of Scott. Many of his songs were sung to music of his own composition. His 'Tales of Terror' (1799) were dedicated to Lady Charlotte Campbell, afterwards Bury, with whom he was in love. To his 'Tales of Wonder' (1801) Scott, Southey, and others contributed. His most successful plays were 'The Castle Spectre' (Drury Lane, December 14, 1797), and 'Timour the Tartar' (Covent Garden, April 29, 1811).

In 1812, by the death of his father, "the Monk" became a rich man, and the owner of plantations in the West Indies. He paid two visits to his property, in 1815-16 and 1817-18. On the voyage home from the last visit he died of yellow fever, and was buried at sea. His 'Journal of a West Indian Proprietor', published in 1834, is written in sterling English, with much quiet humour, and a graphic power of very high order.

Among his 'Detached Thoughts' Byron has the following notes on Lewis:

"Sheridan was one day offered a bet by M. G. Lewis: 'I will bet you, Mr. Sheridan, a very large sum--I will bet you what you owe me as Manager, for my 'Castle Spectre'.'

"'I never make _large bets_,' said Sheridan, 'but I will lay you a _very small_ one. I will bet you _what it is_ WORTH!'"

"Lewis, though a kind man, hated Sheridan, and we had some words upon that score when in Switzerland, in 1816. Lewis afterwards sent me the following epigram upon Sheridan from Saint Maurice:

"'For worst abuse of finest parts Was Misophil begotten; There might indeed be _blacker_ hearts, But none could be more _rotten_.'"

Lewis at Oatlands was observed one morning to have his eyes red, and his air sentimental; being asked why? he replied 'that when people said anything 'kind' to him, it affected him deeply, and just now the Duchess had said something so kind to him'--here tears began to flow again. 'Never mind, Lewis,' said Col. Armstrong to him, 'never mind--don't cry, she could not mean it'.'

"Lewis was a good man--a clever man, but a bore--a damned bore, one may say. My only revenge or consolation used to be setting him by the ears with some vivacious person who hated bores especially--Me. de Stael or Hobhouse, for example. But I liked Lewis; he was a Jewel of a Man had he been better set, I don't mean _personally_, but less _tiresome_, for he was tedious, as well as contradictory to everything and everybody. Being short-sighted, when we used to ride out together near the Brenta in the twilight in summer, he made me go _before_ to pilot him. I am absent at times, especially towards evening, and the consequence of this pilotage was some narrow escapes to the Monk on horseback. Once I led him into a ditch, over which I had passed as usual, forgetting to warn my convoy; once I led him nearly into the river instead of on the 'moveable' bridge which _in_commodes passengers; and twice did we both run against the diligence, which, being heavy and slow, did communicate less damage than it received in its leaders, who were 'terrassed' by the charge. Thrice did I lose him in the gray of the gloaming and was obliged to bring to, to his distant signals of distance and distress. All the time he went on talking without intermission, for he was a man of many words. Poor fellow, he died a martyr to his new riches--of a second visit to Jamaica.

"'I'd give the lands of Deloraine Dark Musgrave were alive again!' _that is_ 'I would give many a Sugar Cane Monk Lewis were alive again!'

"Lewis said to me, 'Why do you talk 'Venetian' (such as I could talk, not very fine to be sure) to the Venetians, and not the usual Italian?' I answered, partly from habit and partly to be understood, if possible. 'It may be so,' said Lewis, 'but it sounds to me like talking with a 'brogue' to an _Irishman_.'"

In a MS. note by Sir Walter Scott on these passages from Byron's 'Detached Thoughts', he says,

"Mat had queerish eyes; they projected like those of some insect, and were flattish in their orbit. His person was extremely small and boyish; he was, indeed, the least man I ever saw to be strictly well and neatly made. I remember a picture of him by Saunders being handed round at Dalkeith House. The artist had ungenerously flung a dark folding mantle round the form, under which was half hid a dagger, or dark lanthorn, or some such cut-throat appurtenance. With all this the features were preserved and ennobled. It passed from hand to hand into that of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, who, hearing the general voice affirm that it was very like, said aloud, 'Like Mat Lewis? Why, that picture is like a 'man'.' He looked, and lo! Mat Lewis's head was at his elbow. His boyishness went through life with him. He was a child, and a spoiled child, but a child of high imagination, so that he wasted himself in ghost stories and German nonsense. He had the finest ear for the rhythm of verse I ever heard--finer than Byron's.

"Lewis was fonder of great people than he ought to have been, either as a man of talent or a man of fortune. He had always dukes and duchesses in his mouth, and was particularly fond of any one who had a title. You would have sworn he had been a 'parvenu' of yesterday, yet he had been all his life in good society.

"He was one of the kindest and best creatures that ever lived. His father and mother lived separately. Mr. Lewis allowed his son a handsome income; but reduced it more than one half when he found that he gave his mother half of it. He restricted himself in all his expenses, and shared the diminished income with his mother as before. He did much good by stealth, and was a most generous creature.

"I had a good picture drawn me, I think by Thos. Thomson, of Fox, in his latter days, suffering the fatigue of an attack from Lewis. The great statesman was become bulky and lethargic, and lay like a fat ox which for sometime endures the persecution of a buzzing fly, rather than rise to get rid of it; and then at last he got up, and heavily plodded his way to the other side of the room."

Referring to Byron's story of Lewis near the Brenta, Scott adds,

"I had a worse adventure with Mat Lewis. I had been his guide from the cottage I then had at Laswade to the Chapel of Roslin. We were to go up one side of the river and come down the other. In the return he was dead tired, and, like the Israelites, he murmured against his guide for leading him into the wilderness. I was then as strong as a poney, and took him on my back, dressed as he was in his shooting array of a close sky-blue jacket, and the brightest 'red' pantaloons I ever saw on a human breech. He also had a kind of feather in his cap. At last I could not help laughing at the ridiculous figure we must both have made, at which my rider waxed wroth. It was an ill-chosen hour and place, for I could have served him as Wallace did Fawden--thrown him down and twisted his head off. We returned to the cottage weary wights, and it cost more than one glass of Noyau, which he liked in a decent way, to get Mat's temper on its legs again."]

[Footnote 5: 'The Bride of Abydos' was originally called 'Zuleika'. ]

[Footnote 6: The petition, directed against Lord Redesdale's Insolvent Debtors Act, was presented by Romilly in the House of Commons, November 11, 1813, and by Lord Holland in the House of Lords, November 15, 1813.]

[Footnote 7: Henry IV., Part I. act in. sc. 3.]

* * * * *

November 16.

Went last night with Lewis to see the first of 'Antony and Cleopatra' [1]. It was admirably got up, and well acted--a salad of Shakspeare and Dryden. Cleopatra strikes me as the epitome of her sex--fond, lively, sad, tender, teasing, humble, haughty, beautiful, the devil!--coquettish to the last, as well with the "asp" as with Antony. After doing all she can to persuade him that--but why do they abuse him for cutting off that poltroon Cicero's head? Did not Tully tell Brutus it was a pity to have spared Antony? and did he not speak the Philippics? and are not "_words things_?" [2] and such "_words_" very pestilent "_things_" too? If he had had a hundred heads, they deserved (from Antony) a rostrum (his was stuck up there) apiece--though, after all, he might as well have pardoned him, for the credit of the thing. But to resume--Cleopatra, after securing him, says, "yet go--it is your interest," etc.--how like the sex! and the questions about Octavia--it is woman all over.

To-day received Lord Jersey's invitation to Middleton--to travel sixty miles to meet Madame De Stael! I once travelled three thousand to get among silent people; and this same lady writes octavos, and _talks_ folios. I have read her books--like most of them, and delight in the last; so I won't hear it, as well as read.

Read Burns to-day. What would he have been, if a patrician? We should have had more polish--less force--just as much verse, but no immortality--a divorce and a duel or two, the which had he survived, as his potations must have been less spirituous, he might have lived as long as Sheridan, and outlived as much as poor Brinsley. What a wreck is that man! and all from bad pilotage; for no one had ever better gales, though now and then a little too squally. Poor dear Sherry! I shall never forget the day he and Rogers and Moore and I passed together; when _he_ talked, and _we_ listened, without one yawn, from six till one in the morning.

Got my seals----. Have again forgot a play-thing for _ma petite cousine_ Eliza; but I must send for it to-morrow. I hope Harry will bring her to me. I sent Lord Holland the proofs of the last "_Giaour_" and "_The Bride of Abydos_" He won't like the latter, and I don't think that I shall long. It was written in four nights to distract my dreams from----. Were it not thus, it had never been composed; and had I not done something at that time, I must have gone mad, by eating my own heart,--bitter diet;--Hodgson likes it better than "_The Giaour_" but nobody else will,--and he never liked the Fragment. I am sure, had it not been for Murray, _that_ would never have been published, though the circumstances which are the ground-work make it----heigh-ho!

To-night I saw both the sisters of----; my God! the youngest so like! I thought I should have sprung across the house, and am so glad no one was with me in Lady H.'s box. I hate those likenesses--the mock-bird, but not the nightingale--so like as to remind, so different as to be painful [3].

One quarrels equally with the points of resemblance and of distinction.

[Footnote 1: 'Antony and Cleopatra' was revived at Covent Garden, November 15, 1813, with additions from Dryden's 'All for Love, or the World Well Lost'(1678). "Cleopatra" was acted by Mrs. Fawcit; "Marc Antony" by Young. (See for the allusions, act v. se. 2, and act i. sc. 3.)]

[Footnote 2:

"But words are things; and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."

'Don Juan', Canto III. stanza lxxxviii.]

[Footnote 3:

"-----my weal, my woe, My hope on high--my all below; Earth holds no other like to thee, Or, if it doth, in vain for me: For worlds I dare not view the dame Resembling thee, yet not the same."

'The Giaour'.]

* * * * *

Nov. 17.

No letter from----; but I must not complain. The respectable Job says, "Why should a _living man_ complain?" [1] I really don't know, except it be that a _dead man_ can't; and he, the said patriarch, _did_ complain, nevertheless, till his friends were tired and his wife recommended that pious prologue,"Curse--and die;" the only time, I suppose, when but little relief is to be found in swearing. I have had a most kind letter from Lord Holland on "_The Bride of Abydos_," which he likes, and so does Lady H. This is very good-natured in both, from whom I don't deserve any quarter. Yet I _did_ think, at the time, that my cause of enmity proceeded from Holland House, and am glad I was wrong, and wish I had not been in such a hurry with that confounded satire, of which I would suppress even the memory;--but people, now they can't get it, make a fuss, I verily believe, out of contradiction.

George Ellis [2] and Murray have been talking something about Scott and me, George _pro Scoto_,--and very right too. If they want to depose him, I only wish they would not set me up as a competitor. Even if I had my choice, I would rather be the Earl of Warwick than all the _kings_ he ever made! Jeffrey and Gifford I take to be the monarch-makers in poetry and prose. The 'British Critic', in their Rokeby Review, have presupposed a comparison which I am sure my friends never thought of, and W. Scott's subjects are injudicious in descending to. I like the man--and admire his works to what Mr. Braham calls _Entusymusy_. All such stuff can only vex him, and do me no good. Many hate his politics--(I hate all politics); and, here, a man's politics are like the Greek _soul_--an [Greek: eidolon], besides God knows what _other soul_; but their estimate of the two generally go together.

Harry has not brought _ma petite cousine_. I want us to go to the play together;--she has been but once. Another short note from Jersey, inviting Rogers and me on the 23d. I must see my agent to-night. I wonder when that Newstead business will be finished. It cost me more than words to part with it--and to _have_ parted with it! What matters it what I do? or what becomes of me?--but let me remember Job's saying, and console myself with being "a living man."

I wish I could settle to reading again,--my life is monotonous, and yet desultory. I take up books, and fling them down again. I began a comedy, and burnt it because the scene ran into _reality_;--a novel, for the same reason. In rhyme, I can keep more away from facts; but the thought always runs through, through ... yes, yes, through. I have had a letter from Lady Melbourne--the best friend I ever had in my life, and the cleverest of women.

Not a word from----[Lady F. W. Webster], Have they set out from----? or has my last precious epistle fallen into the lion's jaws? If so--and this silence looks suspicious--I must clap on my "musty morion" and "hold out my iron." [3]

I am out of practice--but I won't begin again at Manton's now. Besides, I would not return his shot. I was once a famous wafer-splitter; but then the bullies of society made it necessary. Ever since I began to feel that I had a bad cause to support, I have left off the exercise.

What strange tidings from that Anakim of anarchy--Buonaparte [4]!

Ever since I defended my bust of him at Harrow against the rascally time-servers, when the war broke out in 1803, he has been a _Heros de Roman_ of mine--on the Continent; I don't want him here. But I don't like those same flights--leaving of armies, etc., etc. I am sure when I fought for his bust at school, I did not think he would run away from himself. But I should not wonder if he banged them yet. To be beat by men would be something; but by three stupid, legitimate-old-dynasty boobies of regular-bred sovereigns--O-hone-a-rie!--O-hone-a-rie! It must be, as Cobbett says, his marriage with the thick-lipped and thick-headed _Autrichienne_ brood. He had better have kept to her who was kept by Barras. I never knew any good come of your young wife, and legal espousals, to any but your "sober-blooded boy" who "eats fish" and drinketh "no sack." [5] Had he not the whole opera? all Paris? all France? But a mistress is just as perplexing--that is, _one_--two or more are manageable by division.

I have begun, or had begun, a song, and flung it into the fire. It was in remembrance of Mary Duff, [6] my first of flames, before most people begin to burn. I wonder what the devil is the matter with me! I can do nothing, and--fortunately there is nothing to do. It has lately been in my power to make two persons (and their connections) comfortable, _pro tempore_, and one happy, _ex tempore_,--I rejoice in the last particularly, as it is an excellent man. [7] I wish there had been more convenience and less gratification to my self-love in it, for then there had been more merit. We are all selfish--and I believe, ye gods of Epicurus! I believe in Rochefoucault about _men_, and in Lucretius (not Busby's translation) about yourselves. [8] Your bard has made you very _nonchalant_ and blest; but as he has excused _us_ from damnation, I don't envy you your blessedness much--a little, to be sure. I remember, last year,----[Lady Oxford] said to me, at----[Eywood], "Have we not passed our last month like the gods of Lucretius?" And so we had. She is an adept in the text of the original (which I like too); and when that booby Bus. sent his translating prospectus, she subscribed. But, the devil prompting him to add a specimen, she transmitted him a subsequent answer, saying, that "after perusing it, her conscience would not permit her to allow her name to remain on the list of subscribblers." Last night, at Lord H.'s--Mackintosh, the Ossulstones, Puysegur, [9] etc., there--I was trying to recollect a quotation (as _I_ think) of Stael's, from some Teutonic sophist about architecture. "Architecture," says this Macoronico Tedescho, "reminds me of frozen music." It is somewhere--but where?--the demon of perplexity must know and won't tell. I asked M., and he said it was not in her: but Puysegur said it must be _hers_, it was so _like_. H. laughed, as he does at all "_De l'Allemagne_"--in which, however, I think he goes a little too far. B., I hear, contemns it too. But there are fine passages;--and, after all, what is a work--any--or every work--but a desert with fountains, and, perhaps, a grove or two, every day's journey? To be sure, in Madame, what we often mistake, and "pant for," as the "cooling stream," turns out to be the "_mirage_" (critice _verbiage_); but we do, at last, get to something like the temple of Jove Ammon, and then the waste we have passed is only remembered to gladden the contrast.

Called on C--, to explain----. She is very beautiful, to my taste, at least; for on coming home from abroad, I recollect being unable to look at any woman but her--they were so fair, and unmeaning, and _blonde_. The darkness and regularity of her features reminded me of my "Jannat al Aden." But this impression wore off; and now I can look at a fair woman, without longing for a Houri. She was very good-tempered, and every thing was explained.

To-day, great news--"the Dutch have taken Holland,"--which, I suppose, will be succeeded by the actual explosion of the Thames. Five provinces have declared for young Stadt, and there will be inundation, conflagration, constupration, consternation, and every sort of nation and nations, fighting away, up to their knees, in the damnable quags of this will-o'-the-wisp abode of Boors. It is said Bernadotte is amongst them, too; and, as Orange will be there soon, they will have (Crown) Prince Stork and King Log in their Loggery at the same time. Two to one on the new dynasty!

Mr. Murray has offered me one thousand guineas for _The Giaour_ and _The Bride of Abydos_. I won't--it is too much, though I am strongly tempted, merely for the _say_ of it. No bad price for a fortnight's (a week each) what?--the gods know--it was intended to be called poetry.

I have dined regularly to-day, for the first time since Sunday last--this being Sabbath, too. All the rest, tea and dry biscuits--six _per diem_. I wish to God I had not dined now!--It kills me with heaviness, stupor, and horrible dreams; and yet it was but a pint of Bucellas, and fish.[10] Meat I never touch,--nor much vegetable diet. I wish I were in the country, to take exercise,--instead of being obliged to _cool_ by abstinence, in lieu of it. I should not so much mind a little accession of flesh,--my bones can well bear it. But the worst is, the devil always came with it,--till I starved him out,--and I will _not_ be the slave of _any_ appetite. If I do err, it shall be my heart, at least, that heralds the way. Oh, my head--how it aches?--the horrors of digestion! I wonder how Buonaparte's dinner agrees with him?

Mem. I must write to-morrow to "Master Shallow, who owes me a thousand pounds," [11] and seems, in his letter, afraid I should ask him for it; [12]--as if I would!--I don't want it (just now, at least,) to begin with; and though I have often wanted that sum, I never asked for the repayment of L10. in my life--from a friend. His bond is not due this year, and I told him when it was, I should not enforce it. How often must he make me say the same thing?

I am wrong--I did once ask----[13] to repay me. But it was under circumstances that excused me _to him_, and would to any one. I took no interest, nor required security. He paid me soon,--at least, his _padre_. My head! I believe it was given me to ache with. Good even.

[Footnote 1: "Wherefore doth a living man complain?" ('Lam'. iii. 39).]

[Footnote 2: George Ellis (1753-1815), a contributor to the 'Rolliad' and the 'Anti-Jacobin', and "the first converser" Walter Scott "ever knew."]

[Footnote 3:

"I dare not fight; but I will wink, and hold out mine iron."

'Henry V.', act ii. sc. I.]

[Footnote 4: Byron was not always, even at Harrow, attached to Buonaparte, for, if we may trust Harness, he "roared out" at a Buonapartist schoolfellow:

"Bold Robert Speer was Bony's bad precursor. Bob was a bloody dog, but Bonaparte a worser."

His feeling for him was probably that which is expressed in the following passage from an undated letter, written to him by Moore:

"We owe great gratitude to this thunderstorm of a fellow for clearing the air of all the old legitimate fogs that have settled upon us, and I sincerely trust his task is not yet over."

Ticknor ('Life', vol. i. p. 60) describes Byron's reception of the news of the battle of Waterloo:

"After an instant's pause, Lord Byron replied, 'I am damned sorry for it;' and then, after another slight pause, he added, 'I didn't know but I might live to see Lord Castlereagh's head on a pole. But I suppose I shan't now.'"

Byron's liking for Buonaparte was probably increased by his dislike of Wellington and Blucher. The following passages are taken from the 'Detached Thoughts'(1821):

"The vanity of Victories is considerable. Of all who fell at Waterloo or Trafalgar, ask any man in company to 'name you ten off hand'. They will stick at Nelson: the other will survive himself. 'Nelson was' a hero, the other is a mere Corporal, dividing with Prussians and Spaniards the luck which he never deserved. He even--but I hate the fool, and will be silent."

"The Miscreant Wellington is the Cub of Fortune, but she will never lick him into shape. If he lives, he will be beaten; that's certain. Victory was never before wasted upon such an unprofitable soil as this dunghill of Tyranny, whence nothing springs but Viper's eggs."

"I remember seeing Blucher in the London Assemblies, and never saw anything 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 stumbled over it."]

[Footnote 5: Henry IV., Part II. act iv. se. 3.]

[Footnote 6: Mary Duff, his distant cousin, who lived not far from the "Plain-Stanes" of Aberdeen, in Byron's childhood. She married Mr. Robert Cockburn, a wine-merchant in Edinburgh and London.]

[Footnote 7: The first is, perhaps, Dallas; the second probably is Francis Hodgson, to whom he gave, from first to last, L1500.]

[Footnote 8:

"L'interet est l'ame de l'amour-propre, de sorte que comme le corps, prive de son ame, est sans vue, sans ouie, sans connoissance, sans sentiment, et sans mouvement; de meme l'amour-propre, separe, s'il le faut dire ainsi, de son interet, ne voit, n'entend, ne sent, et ne se remue plus," etc., etc.

(Rochefoucault, Lettre a Madame Sable). The passage in Lucretius probably is 'De Rerum Natura', i. 57-62.]

[Footnote 9:

"Monsieur de Puysegur," says Lady H. Leveson Gower ('Letters of Harriet, Countess of Granville', vol. i. p. 23), "is really 'concentre' into one wrinkle. It is the oldest, gayest, thinnest, most withered, and most brilliant thing one can meet with. When there are so many young, fat fools going about the world, I wish for the transmigration of souls. Puysegur might animate a whole family."

The phrase, of which Byron was in search, is Goethe's, 'eine erstarrte Musik' (Stevens's 'Life of Madame de Stael', vol. ii. p. 195).]

[Footnote 10: That the poet sometimes dined seems evident from the annexed bill:

Lord Byron.

To M. Richold

1813-- L s. d. Ballance of last bill 0 13 10 Aug. 9. To dinner bill 1 6 0 10. To do. do. 4 13 6 11. To do. do. 1 4 0 14. To do. do. 1 6 0 15. To share of do. 4 4 6 16. To dinner bill 1 6 0 17. To do. do. 1 6 6 19. To do. do. 1 2 6 20. To share of do. 4 19 0 21. To dinner bill 1 1 6 22. To do. do. 1 2 0 23. To do. do. 1 2 0 25. To do. do. 1 9 0 Aug. 26. To dinner bill 1 1 6 27. To do. do. 1 8 6 Sept 2. To do. do. 1 4 0 3. To do. do. 1 2 0 4. To do. do. 1 11 0 5. To do. do. 1 6 6 7. To do. do. 5 7 0 9. To do. do. 1 6 6 26. To do. do. 1 9 0 Nov. 14. To do. do. 1 0 6 21. To do. do. 0 19 0 -- -- -- L44 11 10]

[Footnote 11: Henry IV., Part II. act v. sc. 5.]

[Footnote 12: James Wedderburn Webster (see p. 2, note 1 [Footnote 1 of