by Thomas Moore
“Players are said to be an impracticable people. They are so; but I managed to steer clear of any disputes with them, and excepting one debate with the elder Byrne about Miss Smith’s pas de — (something — I forget the technicals,) — I do not remember any litigation of my own. I used to protect Miss Smith, because she was like Lady Jane Harley in the face, and likenesses go a great way with me. Indeed, in general, I left such things to my more bustling colleagues, who used to reprove me seriously for not being able to take such things in hand without buffooning with the histrions, or throwing things into confusion by treating light matters with levity.
“Then the Committee! — then the Sub-Committee! — we were but few, but never agreed. There was Peter Moore who contradicted Kinnaird, and Kinnaird who contradicted every body: then our two managers, Rae and Dibdin; and our secretary, Ward! and yet we were all very zealous and in earnest to do good and so forth. * * * * furnished us with prologues to our revived old English plays; but was not pleased with me for complimenting him as ‘the Upton’ of our theatre (Mr. Upton is or was the poet who writes the songs for Astley’s), and almost gave up prologuing in consequence.
“In the pantomime of 1815-16 there was a representation of the masquerade of 1814 given by ‘us youth’ of Watier’s Club to Wellington and Co. Douglas Kinnaird and one or two others, with myself, put on masks, and went on the stage with the ὁι πολλοι, to see the effect of a theatre from the stage: — it is very grand. Douglas danced among the figuranti too, and they were puzzled to find out who we were, as being more than their number. It was odd enough that Douglas Kinnaird and I should have been both at the real masquerade, and afterwards in the mimic one of the same, on the stage of Drury Lane theatre.”
LETTER 228. TO MR. MOORE.
“Terrace, Piccadilly, October 31. 1815.
“I have not been able to ascertain precisely the time of duration of the stock market; but I believe it is a good time for selling out, and I hope so. First, because I shall see you; and, next, because I shall receive certain monies on behalf of Lady B., the which will materially conduce to my comfort, — I wanting (as the duns say) ‘to make up a sum.’
“Yesterday, I dined out with a large-ish party, where were Sheridan and Colman, Harry Harris of C. G, and his brother, Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Ds. Kinnaird, and others, of note and notoriety. Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling; and to crown all, Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a d —— d corkscrew staircase, which had certainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. We deposited him safe at home, where his man, evidently used to the business, waited to receive him in the hall.
“Both he and Colman were, as usual, very good; but I carried away much wine, and the wine had previously carried away my memory; so that all was hiccup and happiness for the last hour or so, and I am not impregnated with any of the conversation. Perhaps you heard of a late answer of Sheridan to the watchman who found him bereft of that ‘divine particle of air,’ called reason, * * *. He, the watchman, who found Sherry in the street, fuddled and bewildered, and almost insensible. ‘Who are you, sir? ‘ — no answer. ‘What’s your name?’ — a hiccup. ‘What’s your name?’ — Answer, in a slow, deliberate and impassive tone— ‘Wilberforce!!!’ Is not that Sherry all over? — and, to my mind, excellent. Poor fellow, his very dregs are better than the ‘first sprightly runnings’ of others.
“My paper is full, and I have a grievous headach.
“P.S. Lady B. is in full progress. Next month will bring to light (with the aid of ‘Juno Lucina, fer opem,’ or rather opes, for the last are most wanted,) the tenth wonder of the world — Gil Blas being the eighth, and he (my son’s father) the ninth.”
LETTER 229. TO MR. MOORE.
“November 4. 1815.
“Had you not bewildered my head with the ‘stocks,’ your letter would have been answered directly. Hadn’t I to go to the city? and hadn’t I to remember what to ask when I got there? and hadn’t I forgotten it?
“I should be undoubtedly delighted to see you; but I don’t like to urge against your reasons my own inclinations. Come you must soon, for stay you won’t. I know you of old; — you have been too much leavened with London to keep long out of it.
“Lewis is going to Jamaica to suck his sugar canes. He sails in two days; I enclose you his farewell note. I saw him last night at D.L.T. for the last time previous to his voyage. Poor fellow! he is really a good man — an excellent man — he left me his walking-stick and a pot of preserved ginger. I shall never eat the last without tears in my eyes, it is so hot. We have had a devil of a row among our ballerinas. Miss Smith has been wronged about a hornpipe. The Committee have interfered; but Byrne, the d —— d ballet master, won’t budge a step, I am furious, so is George Lamb. Kinnaird is very glad, because — he don’t know why; and I am very sorry, for the same reason. To-day I dine with Kd. — we are to have Sheridan and Colman again; and to-morrow, once more, at Sir Gilbert Heathcote’s.
“Leigh Hunt has written a real good and very original Poem, which I think will be a great hit. You can have no notion how very well it is written, nor should I, had I not redde it. As to us, Tom — eh, when art thou out? If you think the verses worth it, I would rather they were embalmed in the Irish Melodies, than scattered abroad in a separate song — much rather. But when are thy great things out? I mean the Po of Pos — thy Shah Nameh. It is very kind in Jeffrey to like the Hebrew Melodies. Some of the fellows here preferred Sternhold and Hopkins, and said so;— ‘the fiend receive their souls therefor!’
“I must go and dress for dinner. Poor, dear Murat, what an end! You know, I suppose, that his white plume used to be a rallying point in battle, like Henry IV.’s. He refused a confessor and a bandage; so would neither suffer his soul or body to be bandaged. You shall have more to-morrow or next day.
“Ever,” &c.
LETTER 230. TO MR. MURRAY.
“November 4. 1815.
“When you have been enabled to form an opinion on Mr. Coleridge’s MS. you will oblige me by returning it, as, in fact, I have no authority to let it out of my hands. I think most highly of it, and feel anxious that you should be the publisher; but if you are not, I do not despair of finding those who will.
“I have written to Mr. Leigh Hunt, stating your willingness to treat with him, which, when I saw you, I understood you to be. Terms and time, I leave to his pleasure and your discernment; but this I will say, that I think it the safest thing you ever engaged in. I speak to you as a man of business; were I to talk to you as a reader or a critic, I should say it was a very wonderful and beautiful performance, with just enough of fault to make its beauties more remarked and remarkable.
“And now to the last — my own, which I feel ashamed of after the others: — publish or not as you like, I don’t care one damn. If you don’t, no one else shall, and I never thought or dreamed of it, except as one in the collection. If it is worth being in the fourth volume, put it there and nowhere else; and if not, put it in the fire. Yours, N.”
Those embarrassments which, from a review of his affairs previous to the marriage, he had clearly foreseen would, before long, overtake him, were not slow in realising his worst omens. The increased expenses induced by his new mode of life, with but very little increase of means to meet them, — the long arrears of early pecuniary obligations, as well as the claims which had been, gradually, since then, accumulating, all pressed upon him now with collected force, and reduced him to some of the worst humiliations of poverty. He had been even driven, by the necessity of encountering such demands, to the trying expedient of parting with his books, — which circumstance coming to Mr. Murray’s ears, that gentleman instantly forwarded to him 1500l., with an
assurance that another sum of the same amount should be at his service in a few weeks, and that if such assistance should not be sufficient, Mr. Murray was most ready to dispose of the copyrights of all his past works for his use.
This very liberal offer Lord Byron acknowledged in the following letter: —
LETTER 231. TO MR. MURRAY.
“November 14. 1815.
“I return you your bills not accepted, but certainly not unhonoured. Your present offer is a favour which I would accept from you, if I accepted such from any man. Had such been my intention, I can assure you I would have asked you fairly, and as freely as you would give; and I cannot say more of my confidence or your conduct.
“The circumstances which induce me to part with my books, though sufficiently, are not immediately, pressing. I have made up my mind to them, and there’s an end.
“Had I been disposed to trespass on your kindness in this way, it would have been before now; but I am not sorry to have an opportunity of declining it, as it sets my opinion of you, and indeed of human nature, in a different light from that in which I have been accustomed to consider it.
“Believe me very truly,” &c.
TO MR. MURRAY.
“December 25. 1815.
“I send some lines, written some time ago, and intended as an opening to ‘The Siege of Corinth.’ I had forgotten them, and am not sure that they had not better be left out now: — on that, you and your Synod can determine. Yours,” &c.
The following are the lines alluded to in this note. They are written in the loosest form of that rambling style of metre which his admiration of Mr. Coleridge’s “Christabel” led him, at this time, to adopt; and he judged rightly, perhaps, in omitting them as the opening of his poem. They are, however, too full of spirit and character to be lost. Though breathing the thick atmosphere of Piccadilly when he wrote them, it is plain that his fancy was far away, among the sunny hills and vales of Greece; and their contrast with the tame life he was leading at the moment, but gave to his recollections a fresher spring and force.
“In the year since Jesus died for men, Eighteen hundred years and ten, We were a gallant company, Riding o’er land, and sailing o’er sea. Oh! but we went merrily! We forded the river, and clomb the high hill, Never our steeds for a day stood still; Whether we lay in the cave or the shed, Our sleep fell soft on the hardest bed; Whether we couch’d in our rough capote, On the rougher plank of our gliding boat, Or stretch’d on the beach, or our saddles spread As a pillow beneath the resting head, Fresh we woke upon the morrow: All our thoughts and words had scope, We had health, and we had hope, Toil and travel, but no sorrow. We were of all tongues and creeds; — Some were those who counted beads, Some of mosque, and some of church, And some, or I mis-say, of neither; Yet through the wide world might ye search Nor find a mother crew nor blither.
“But some are dead, and some are gone, And some are scatter’d and alone, And some are rebels on the hills That look along Epirus’ valleys Where Freedom still at moments rallies, And pays in blood Oppression’s ills: And some are in a far countree, And some all restlessly at home; But never more, oh! never, we Shall meet to revel and to roam. But those hardy days flew cheerily; And when they now fall drearily, My thoughts, like swallows, skim the main And bear my spirit back again Over the earth, and through the air, A wild bird, and a wanderer. ’Tis this that ever wakes my strain, And oft, too oft, implores again The few who may endure my lay, To follow me so far away.
“Stranger — wilt thou follow now, And sit with me on Acro-Corinth’s brow?”
LETTER 232. TO MR. MOORE.
“January 5. 1816.
“I hope Mrs. M. is quite re-established. The little girl was born on the 10th of December last; her name is Augusta Ada (the second a very antique family name, — I believe not used since the reign of King John). She was, and is, very flourishing and fat, and reckoned very large for her days — squalls and sucks incessantly. Are you answered? Her mother is doing very well, and up again.
“I have now been married a year on the second of this month — heigh-ho! I have seen nobody lately much worth noting, except S * * and another general of the Gauls, once or twice at dinners out of doors. S * * is a fine, foreign, villanous-looking, intelligent, and very agreeable man; his compatriot is more of the petit-maître, and younger, but I should think not at all of the same intellectual calibre with the Corsican — which S * *, you know, is, and a cousin of Napoleon’s.
“Are you never to be expected in town again? To be sure, there is no one here of the 1500 fillers of hot-rooms, called the fashionable world. My approaching papa-ship detained us for advice, &c. &c. though I would as soon be here as any where else on this side of the Straits of Gibraltar.
“I would gladly — or, rather, sorrowfully — comply with your request of a dirge for the poor girl you mention. But how can I write on one I have never seen or known? Besides, you will do it much better yourself. I could not write upon any thing, without some personal experience and foundation; far less on a theme so peculiar. Now, you have both in this case; and, if you had neither, you have more imagination, and would never fail.
“This is but a dull scrawl, and I am but a dull fellow. Just at present, I am absorbed in 500 contradictory contemplations, though with but one object in view — which will probably end in nothing, as most things we wish do. But never mind, — as somebody says, ‘for the blue sky bends over all.’ I only could be glad, if it bent over me where it is a little bluer; like the ‘skyish top of blue Olympus,’ which, by the way, looked very white when I last saw it.
“Ever,” &c.
On reading over the foregoing letter, I was much struck by the tone of melancholy that pervaded it; and well knowing it to be the habit of the writer’s mind to seek relief, when under the pressure of any disquiet or disgust, in that sense of freedom which told him that there were homes for him elsewhere, I could perceive, I thought, in his recollections of the “blue Olympus,” some return of the restless and roving spirit, which unhappiness or impatience always called up in his mind. I had, indeed, at the time when he sent me those melancholy verses, “There’s not a joy this world can give,” &c. felt some vague apprehensions as to the mood into which his spirits then seemed to be sinking, and, in acknowledging the receipt of the verses, thus tried to banter him out of it:— “But why thus on your stool of melancholy again, Master Stephen? — This will never do — it plays the deuce with all the matter-of-fact duties of life, and you must bid adieu to it. Youth is the only time when one can be melancholy with impunity. As life itself grows sad and serious we have nothing for it but — to be as much as possible the contrary.”
My absence from London during the whole of this year had deprived me of all opportunities of judging for myself how far the appearances of his domestic state gave promise of happiness; nor had any rumours reached me which at all inclined me to suspect that the course of his married life hitherto exhibited less smoothness than such unions, — on the surface, at least, — generally wear. The strong and affectionate terms in which, soon after the marriage, he had, in some of the letters I have given, declared his own happiness — a declaration which his known frankness left me no room to question — had, in no small degree, tended to still those apprehensions which my first view of the lot he had chosen for himself awakened. I could not, however, but observe that these indications of a contented heart soon ceased. His mention of the partner of his home became more rare and formal, and there was observable, I thought, through some of his letters a feeling of unquiet and weariness that brought back all those gloomy anticipations with which I had, from the first, regarded his fate. This last letter of his, in particular, struck me as full of sad omen, and, in the course of my answer, I thus noticed to him the impression it had made on me:— “And so you are a whole year married! —
‘It was last year I vow’d to thee That fond impossibility.’
Do you know, my dear B., there was a something in your last letter — a sort of unquiet my
stery, as well as a want of your usual elasticity of spirits — which has hung upon my mind unpleasantly ever since. I long to be near you, that I might know how you really look and feel; for these letters tell nothing, and one word, a quattr’occhi, is worth whole reams of correspondence. But only do tell me you are happier than that letter has led me to fear, and I shall be satisfied.”
It was in a few weeks after this latter communication between us that Lady Byron adopted the resolution of parting from him. She had left London about the middle of January, on a visit to her father’s house, in Leicestershire, and Lord Byron was, in a short time after, to follow her. They had parted in the utmost kindness, — she wrote him a letter, full of playfulness and affection, on the road, and, immediately on her arrival at Kirkby Mallory, her father wrote to acquaint Lord Byron that she would return to him no more. At the time when he had to stand this unexpected shock, his pecuniary embarrassments, which had been fast gathering around him during the whole of the last year (there having been no less than eight or nine executions in his house within that period), had arrived at their utmost; and at a moment when, to use his own strong expressions, he was “standing alone on his hearth, with his household gods shivered around him,” he was also doomed to receive the startling intelligence that the wife who had just parted with him in kindness, had parted with him — for ever.
About this time the following note was written: —
TO MR. ROGERS.
“February 8. 1816.
“Do not mistake me — I really returned your book for the reason assigned, and no other. It is too good for so careless a fellow. I have parted with all my own books, and positively won’t deprive you of so valuable ‘a drop of that immortal man.’
