by Thomas Moore
“My mother, before I was twenty, would have it that I was like Rousseau, and Madame de Staël used to say so too in 1813, and the Edinburgh Review has something of the sort in its critique on the fourth Canto of Childe Harold. I can’t see any point of resemblance: — he wrote prose, I verse: he was of the people; I of the aristocracy: he was a philosopher; I am none: he published his first work at forty; I mine at eighteen: his first essay brought him universal applause; mine the contrary: he married his housekeeper; I could not keep house with my wife: he thought all the world in a plot against him; my little world seems to think me in a plot against it, if I may judge by their abuse in print and coterie: he liked botany; I like flowers, herbs, and trees, but know nothing of their pedigrees: he wrote music; I limit my knowledge of it to what I catch by ear — I never could learn any thing by study, not even a language — it was all by rote, and ear, and memory: he had a bad memory; I had, at least, an excellent one (ask Hodgson the poet — a good judge, for he has an astonishing one): he wrote with hesitation and care; I with rapidity, and rarely with pains: he could never ride, nor swim, nor ‘was cunning of fence;’ I am an excellent swimmer, a decent, though not at all a dashing, rider, (having staved in a rib at eighteen, in the course of scampering), and was sufficient of fence, particularly of the Highland broadsword, — not a bad boxer, when I could keep my temper, which was difficult, but which I strove to do ever since I knocked down Mr. Purling, and put his knee-pan out (with the gloves on), in Angelo’s and Jackson’s rooms in 1806, during the sparring, — and I was, besides, a very fair cricketer, — one of the Harrow eleven, when we played against Eton in 1805. Besides, Rousseau’s way of life, his country, his manners, his whole character, were so very different, that I am at a loss to conceive how such a comparison could have arisen, as it has done three several times, and all in rather a remarkable manner. I forgot to say that he was also short-sighted, and that hitherto my eyes have been the contrary, to such a degree that, in the largest theatre of Bologna, I distinguished and read some busts and inscriptions, painted near the stage, from a box so distant and so darkly lighted, that none of the company (composed of young and very bright-eyed people, some of them in the same box,) could make out a letter, and thought it was a trick, though I had never been in that theatre before.
“Altogether, I think myself justified in thinking the comparison not well founded. I don’t say this out of pique, for Rousseau was a great man; and the thing, if true, were flattering enough; — but I have no idea of being pleased with the chimera.”
In another letter to his mother, dated some weeks after the preceding one, he explains further his plans both with respect to Newstead and his projected travels.
LETTER 31. TO MRS. BYRON.
“Newstead Abbey, November 2. 1808.
“Dear Mother,
“If you please, we will forget the things you mention. I have no desire to remember them. When my rooms are finished, I shall be happy to see you; as I tell but the truth, you will not suspect me of evasion. I am furnishing the house more for you than myself, and I shall establish you in it before I sail for India, which I expect to do in March, if nothing particularly obstructive occurs. I am now fitting up the green drawing-room; the red for a bed-room, and the rooms over as sleeping-rooms. They will be soon completed; — at least I hope so.
“I wish you would enquire of Major Watson (who is an old Indian) what things will be necessary to provide for my voyage. I have already procured a friend to write to the Arabic Professor at Cambridge, for some information I am anxious to procure. I can easily get letters from government to the ambassadors, consuls, &c., and also to the governors at Calcutta and Madras. I shall place my property and my will in the hands of trustees till my return, and I mean to appoint you one. From H —— I have heard nothing — when I do, you shall have the particulars.
“After all, you must own my project is not a bad one. If I do not travel now, I never shall, and all men should one day or other. I have at present no connections to keep me at home; no wife, or unprovided sisters, brothers, &c. I shall take care of you, and when I return I may possibly become a politician. A few years’ knowledge of other countries than our own will not incapacitate me for that part. If we see no nation but our own, we do not give mankind a fair chance: — it is from experience, not books, we ought to judge of them. There is nothing like inspection, and trusting to our own senses.
“Yours,” &c.
In the November of this year he lost his favourite dog, Boatswain, — the poor animal having been seized with a fit of madness, at the commencement of which so little aware was Lord Byron of the nature of the malady, that he more than once, with his bare hand, wiped away the slaver from the dog’s lips during the paroxysms. In a letter to his friend, Mr. Hodgson, he thus announces this event:— “Boatswain is dead! — he expired in a state of madness on the 18th, after suffering much, yet retaining all the gentleness of his nature to the last, never attempting to do the least injury to any one near him. I have now lost every thing except old Murray.”
The monument raised by him to this dog, — the most memorable tribute of the kind, since the Dog’s Grave, of old, at Salamis, — is still a conspicuous ornament of the gardens of Newstead. The misanthropic verses engraved upon it may be found among his poems, and the following is the inscription by which they are introduced: —
“Near this spot
Are deposited the Remains of one
Who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
And all the Virtues of Man without his Vices.
This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery
If inscribed over human ashes,
Is but a just tribute to the Memory of
Boatswain, a Dog,
Who was born at Newfoundland, May, 1803,
And died at Newstead Abbey, November 18. 1808.”
The poet, Pope, when about the same age as the writer of this inscription, passed a similar eulogy on his dog, at the expense of human nature; adding, that “Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.” In a still sadder and bitterer spirit, Lord Byron writes of his favourite,
“To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one, and here he lies.”
Melancholy, indeed, seems to have been gaining fast upon his mind at this period. In another letter to Mr. Hodgson, he says,— “You know laughing is the sign of a rational animal — so says Dr. Smollet. I think so too, but unluckily my spirits don’t always keep pace with my opinions.”
Old Murray, the servant whom he mentions, in a preceding extract, as the only faithful follower now remaining to him, had long been in the service of the former lord, and was regarded by the young poet with a fondness of affection which it has seldom been the lot of age and dependence to inspire. “I have more than once,” says a gentleman who was at this time a constant visiter at Newstead, “seen Lord Byron at the dinner-table fill out a tumbler of Madeira, and hand it over his shoulder to Joe Murray, who stood behind his chair, saying, with a cordiality that brightened his whole countenance, ‘Here, my old fellow.’”
The unconcern with which he could sometimes allude to the defect in his foot is manifest from another passage in one of these letters to Mr. Hodgson. That gentleman having said jestingly that some of the verses in the “Hours of Idleness” were calculated to make schoolboys rebellious, Lord Byron answers— “If my songs have produced the glorious effects you mention, I shall be a complete Tyrtæus; — though I am sorry to say I resemble that interesting harper more in his person than in his poesy.” Sometimes, too, even an allusion to this infirmity by others, when he could perceive that it was not offensively intended, was borne by him with the most perfect good humour. “I was once present,” says the friend I have just mentioned, “in a large and mixed company, when a vulgar person asked him aloud— ‘Pray, my Lord, how is that foot of yours?’�
� ‘Thank you, sir,’ answered Lord Byron, with the utmost mildness— ‘much the same as usual.’”
The following extract, relating to a reverend friend of his Lordship, is from another of his letters to Mr. Hodgson, this year: —
“A few weeks ago I wrote to —— , to request he would receive the son of a citizen of London, well known to me, as a pupil; the family having been particularly polite during the short time I was with them induced me to this application. Now, mark what follows, as somebody sublimely saith. On this day arrives an epistle signed —— , containing not the smallest reference to tuition or intuition, but a petition for Robert Gregson, of pugilistic notoriety, now in bondage for certain paltry pounds sterling, and liable to take up his everlasting abode in Banco Regis. Had the letter been from any of my lay acquaintance, or, in short, from any person but the gentleman whose signature it bears, I should have marvelled not. If —— is serious, I congratulate pugilism on the acquisition of such a patron, and shall be most happy to advance any sum necessary for the liberation of the captive Gregson. But I certainly hope to be certified from you, or some respectable housekeeper, of the fact, before I write to —— on the subject. When I say the fact, I mean of the letter being written by —— , not having any doubt as to the authenticity of the statement. The letter is now before me, and I keep it for your perusal.”
His time at Newstead during this autumn was principally occupied in enlarging and preparing his Satire for the press; and with the view, perhaps, of mellowing his own judgment of its merits, by keeping it some time before his eyes in a printed form, he had proofs taken off from the manuscript by his former publisher at Newark. It is somewhat remarkable, that, excited as he was by the attack of the reviewers, and possessing, at all times, such rapid powers of composition, he should have allowed so long an interval to elapse between the aggression and the revenge. But the importance of his next move in literature seems to have been fully appreciated by him. He saw that his chances of future eminence now depended upon the effort he was about to make, and therefore deliberately collected all his energies for the spring. Among the preparatives by which he disciplined his talent to the task was a deep study of the writings of Pope; and I have no doubt that from this period may be dated the enthusiastic admiration which he ever after cherished for this great poet, — an admiration which at last extinguished in him, after one or two trials, all hope of pre-eminence in the same track, and drove him thenceforth to seek renown in fields more open to competition.
The misanthropic mood of mind into which he had fallen at this time, from disappointed affections and thwarted hopes, made the office of satirist but too congenial and welcome to his spirit. Yet it is evident that this bitterness existed far more in his fancy than his heart; and that the sort of relief he now found in making war upon the world arose much less from the indiscriminate wounds he dealt around, than from the new sense of power he became conscious of in dealing them, and by which he more than recovered his former station in his own esteem. In truth, the versatility and ease with which, as shall presently be shown, he could, on the briefest consideration, shift from praise to censure, and, sometimes, almost as rapidly, from censure to praise, shows how fanciful and transient were the impressions under which he, in many instances, pronounced his judgments; and though it may in some degree deduct from the weight of his eulogy, absolves him also from any great depth of malice in his Satire.
His coming of age, in 1809, was celebrated at Newstead by such festivities as his narrow means and society could furnish. Besides the ritual roasting of an ox, there was a ball, it seems, given on the occasion, — of which the only particular I could collect, from the old domestic who mentioned it, was, that Mr. Hanson, the agent of her lord, was among the dancers. Of Lord Byron’s own method of commemorating the day, I find the following curious record in a letter written from Genoa in 1822:— “Did I ever tell you that the day I came of age I dined on eggs and bacon and a bottle of ale? — For once in a way they are my favourite dish and drinkable; but as neither of them agree with me, I never use them but on great jubilees, — in four or five years or so.” The pecuniary supplies necessary towards his outset, at this epoch, were procured from money-lenders at an enormously usurious interest, the payment of which for a long time continued to be a burden to him.
It was not till the beginning of this year that he took his Satire, — in a state ready, as he thought, for publication, — to London. Before, however, he had put the work to press, new food was unluckily furnished to his spleen by the neglect with which he conceived himself to have been treated by his guardian, Lord Carlisle. The relations between this nobleman and his ward had, at no time, been of such a nature as to afford opportunities for the cultivation of much friendliness on either side; and to the temper and influence of Mrs. Byron must mainly be attributed the blame of widening, if not of producing, this estrangement between them. The coldness with which Lord Carlisle had received the dedication of the young poet’s first volume was, as we have seen from one of the letters of the latter, felt by him most deeply. He, however, allowed himself to be so far governed by prudential considerations as not only to stifle this displeasure, but even to introduce into his Satire, as originally intended for the press, the following compliment to his guardian: —
“On one alone Apollo deigns to smile, And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle.”
The crown, however, thus generously awarded, did not long remain where it had been placed. In the interval between the inditing of this couplet and the delivery of the manuscript to the press, Lord Byron, under the impression that it was customary for a young peer, on first taking his seat, to have some friend to introduce him, wrote to remind Lord Carlisle that he should be of age at the commencement of the session. Instead, however, of the sort of answer which he expected, a mere formal, and, as it appeared to him, cold reply, acquainting him with the technical mode of proceeding on such occasions, was all that, in return to this application, he received. Disposed as he had been, by preceding circumstances, to suspect his noble guardian of no very friendly inclinations towards him, this backwardness in proposing to introduce him to the House (a ceremony, however, as it appears, by no means necessary or even usual) was sufficient to rouse in his sensitive mind a strong feeling of resentment. The indignation, thus excited, found a vent, but too temptingly, at hand; — the laudatory couplet I have just cited was instantly expunged, and his Satire went forth charged with those vituperative verses against Lord Carlisle, of which, gratifying as they must have been to his revenge at the moment, he, not long after, with the placability so inherent in his generous nature, repented.
During the progress of his poem through the press, he increased its length by more than a hundred lines; and made several alterations, one or two of which may be mentioned, as illustrative of that prompt susceptibility of new impressions and influences which rendered both his judgment and feelings so variable. In the Satire, as it originally stood, was the following couplet: —
“Though printers condescend the press to soil With odes by Smythe, and epic songs by Hoyle.”
Of the injustice of these lines (unjust, it is but fair to say, to both the writers mentioned,) he, on the brink of publication, repented; and, — as far, at least, as regarded one of the intended victims, — adopted a tone directly opposite in his printed Satire, where the name of Professor Smythe is mentioned honourably, as it deserved, in conjunction with that of Mr. Hodgson, one of the poet’s most valued friends: —
“Oh dark asylum of a Vandal race! At once the boast of learning and disgrace; So sunk in dulness, and so lost in shame, That Smythe and Hodgson scarce redeem thy fame.”
In another instance we find him “changing his hand” with equal facility and suddenness. The original manuscript of the Satire contained this line, —
“I leave topography to coxcomb Gell;”
but having, while the work was printing, become acquainted with Sir William Gell, he, without difficulty, by the change of a si
ngle epithet, converted satire into eulogy, and the line now descends to posterity thus: —
“I leave topography to classic Gell.”
Among the passages added to the poem during its progress through the press were those lines denouncing the licentiousness of the Opera. “Then let Ausonia,” &c. which the young satirist wrote one night, after returning, brimful of morality, from the Opera, and sent them early next morning to Mr. Dallas for insertion. The just and animated tribute to Mr. Crabbe was also among the after-thoughts with which his poem was adorned; nor can we doubt that both this, and the equally merited eulogy on Mr. Rogers, were the disinterested and deliberate result of the young poet’s judgment, as he had never at that period seen either of these distinguished persons, and the opinion he then expressed of their genius remained unchanged through life. With the author of the Pleasures of Memory he afterwards became intimate, but with him, whom he had so well designated as “Nature’s sternest painter, yet the best,” he was never lucky enough to form any acquaintance; — though, as my venerated friend and neighbour, Mr. Crabbe himself, tells me, they were once, without being aware of it, in the same inn together for a day or two, and must have frequently met, as they went in and out of the house, during the time.
Almost every second day, while the Satire was printing, Mr. Dallas, who had undertaken to superintend it through the press, received fresh matter, for the enrichment of its pages, from the author, whose mind, once excited on any subject, knew no end to the outpourings of its wealth. In one of his short notes to Mr. Dallas, he says, “Print soon, or I shall overflow with rhyme;” and it was, in the same manner, in all his subsequent publications, — as long, at least, as he remained within reach of the printer, — that he continued thus to feed the press, to the very last moment, with new and “thick-coming fancies,” which the re-perusal of what he had already written suggested to him. It would almost seem, indeed, from the extreme facility and rapidity with which he produced some of his brightest passages during the progress of his works through the press, that there was in the very act of printing an excitement to his fancy, and that the rush of his thoughts towards this outlet gave increased life and freshness to their flow.
