by Thomas Moore
In the letter which, on his arrival in the Downs, June 29th, this gentleman addressed to Lord Byron’s executors, there is the following passage:— “With respect to the funeral ceremony, I am of opinion that his Lordship’s family should be immediately consulted, and that sanction should be obtained for the public burial of his body either in the great Abbey or Cathedral of London.” It has been asserted, and I fear too truly, that on some intimation of the wish suggested in this last sentence being conveyed to one of those Reverend persons who have the honours of the Abbey at their disposal, such an answer was returned as left but little doubt that a refusal would be the result of any more regular application.
[Footnote 1: A former Dean of Westminster went so far, we know, in his scruples as to exclude an epitaph from the Abbey, because it contained the name of Milton:— “a name, in his opinion,” says Johnson, “too detestable to be read on the wall of a building dedicated to devotion.” — Life of MILTON.]
There is an anecdote told of the poet Hafiz, in Sir William Jones’s Life, which, in reporting this instance of illiberality, recurs naturally to the memory. After the death of the great Persian bard, some of the religious among his countrymen protested strongly against allowing to him the right of sepulture, alleging, as their objection, the licentiousness of his poetry. After much controversy, it was agreed to leave the decision of the question to a mode of divination, not uncommon among the Persians, which consisted in opening the poet’s book at random and taking the first verses that occurred. They happened to be these: —
“Oh turn not coldly from the poet’s bier,
Nor check the sacred drops by Pity given;
For though in sin his body slumbereth here,
His soul, absolved, already wings to heaven.”
222These lines, says the legend, were looked upon as a divine decree; the religionists no longer enforced their objections, and the remains of the bard were left to take their quiet sleep by that “sweet bower of Mosellay” which he had so often celebrated in his verses.
Were our Byron’s right of sepulture to be decided in the same manner, how few are there of his pages, thus taken at hazard, that would not, by some genial touch of sympathy with virtue, some glowing tribute to the bright works of God, or some gush of natural devotion more affecting than any homily, give him a title to admission into the purest temple of which Christian Charity ever held the guardianship.
Let the decision, however, of these Reverend authorities have been, finally, what it might, it was the wish, as is understood, of Lord Byron’s dearest relative to have his remains laid in the family vault at Hucknall, near Newstead. On being landed from the Florida, the body had, under the direction of his Lordship’s executors, Mr. Hobhouse and Mr. Hanson, been removed to the house of Sir Edward Knatchbull in Great George Street, Westminster, where it lay in state during Friday and Saturday, the 9th and 10th of July, and on the following Monday the funeral procession took place. Leaving Westminster at eleven o’clock in the morning, attended by most of his Lordship’s personal friends and by the carriages of several persons of rank, it proceeded through various streets of the metropolis towards the North Road. At Pancras Church, the ceremonial of the procession being at an end, the carriages returned; and the hearse continued its way, by slow stages, to Nottingham.
It was on Friday the 16th of July that, in the small village church of Hucknall, the last duties were paid to the remains of Byron, by depositing them, close to those of his mother, in the family vault. Exactly on the same day of the same month in the preceding year, he had said, it will be recollected, despondingly, to Count Gamba, “Where shall we be in another year?” The gentleman to whom this foreboding speech was addressed paid a visit, some months after the interment, to Hucknall, and was much struck, as I have heard, on approaching the village, by the strong likeness it seemed to him to bear to his lost friend’s melancholy deathplace, Missolonghi.
On a tablet of white marble in the chancel of the Church of Hucknall is the following inscription: —
IN THE VAULT BENEATH,
WHERE MANY OF HIS ANCESTORS AND HIS MOTHER ARE
BURIED,
LIE THE REMAINS OF
GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON,
LORD BYRON, OF ROCHDALE,
IN THE COUNTY OF LANCASTER,
THE AUTHOR OF “CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE.”
HE WAS BORN IN LONDON ON THE
22D OF JANUARY, 1788.
HE DIED AT MISSOLONGHI, IN WESTERN GREECE, ON THE
19TH OF APRIL, 1824,
ENGAGED IN THE GLORIOUS ATTEMPT TO RESTORE THAT
COUNTRY TO HER ANCIENT FREEDOM AND RENOWN.
HIS SISTER, THE HONOURABLE
AUGUSTA MARIA LEIGH,
PLACED THIS TABLET TO HIS MEMORY.
224From among the tributes that have been offered, in prose and verse, and in almost every language of Europe, to his memory, I shall select two which appear to me worthy of peculiar notice, as being, one of them, — so far as my limited scholarship will allow me to judge, — a simple and happy imitation of those laudatory inscriptions with which the Greece of other times honoured the tombs of her heroes; and the other as being the production of a pen, once engaged controversially against Byron, but not the less ready, as these affecting verses prove, to offer the homage of a manly sorrow and admiration at his grave.
[Greek:
Eis
Ton en tê Helladi têleutêsanta
Poiêtên
Ou to zên tanaon biou euklees oud’ enarithmein
Arxaiax progonôn eunxneôn aretas
Ton d’ eudaimonias moir’ amphepei, hosper apantôn
Aien aristeuôn gignetai athanatos. —
Eudeis oun su, teknon, xaritôn ear? ouk eti thallei
Akmaios meleôn hêdupnoôn stephanos? —
Alla teon, tripophête, moron penphousin Aphênê,
Mousai, patris, Arês, Ellas, eleupheria.]
[Footnote 1: By John Williams, Esq. — The following translation of this inscription will not be unacceptable to my readers: —
“Not length of life — not an illustrious birth,
Rich with the noblest blood of all the earth; —
Nought can avail, save deeds of high emprize,
Our mortal being to immortalise.
“Sweet child of song, thou deepest! — ne’er again
Shall swell the notes of thy melodious strain:
Yet, with thy country wailing o’er thy urn,
Pallas, the Muse, Mars, Greece, and Freedom mourn.”
H.H. JOY.]
“CHILDE HAROLD’S LAST PILGRIMAGE.
“BY THE REV. W.L. BOWLES.
“SO ENDS CHILDE HAROLD HIS LAST PILGRIMAGE! —
Upon the shores of Greece he stood, and cried
‘LIBERTY!’ and those shores, from age to age
Renown’d, and Sparta’s woods and rocks replied
‘Liberty!’ But a Spectre, at his side,
Stood mocking; — and its dart, uplifting high,
Smote him; — he sank to earth in life’s fair pride:
SPARTA! thy rocks then heard another cry,
And old Ilissus sigh’d— ‘Die, generous exile, die!’
“I will not ask sad Pity to deplore
His wayward errors, who thus early died;
Still less, CHILDE HAROLD, now thou art no more,
Will I say aught of genius misapplied;
Of the past shadows of thy spleen or pride: —
But I will bid th’ Arcadian cypress wave,
Pluck the green laurel from Peneus’ side,
And pray thy spirit may such quiet have,
That not one thought unkind be murmur’d o’er thy grave.
“SO HAROLD ENDS, IN GREECE, HIS PILGRIMAGE! —
There fitly ending, — in that land renown’d,
Whose mighty genius lives in Glory’s page, —
He, on the Muses’ consecrated ground,
Sinking to rest, while his young bro
ws are bound
With their unfading wreath! — To bands of mirth,
No more in TEMPE let the pipe resound!
HAROLD, I follow to thy place of birth
The slow hearse — and thy LAST sad PILGRIMAGE on earth.
“Slow moves the plumed hearse, the mourning train, —
I mark the sad procession with a sigh,
Silently passing to that village fane,
Where, HAROLD, thy forefathers mouldering lie; —
There sleeps THAT MOTHER, who with tearful eye,
Pondering the fortunes of thy early road,
Hung o’er the slumbers of thine infancy;
Her son, released from mortal labour’s load,
Now comes to rest, with her, in the same still abode.
“Bursting Death’s silence — could that mother speak —
(Speak when the earth was heap’d upon his head) —
In thrilling, but with hollow accent weak,
She thus might give the welcome of the dead: —
‘Here rest, my son, with me; — the dream is fled; —
The motley mask and the great stir is o’er:
Welcome to me, and to this silent bed,
Where deep forgetfulness succeeds the roar
Of life, and fretting passions waste the heart no more.’”
By his Lordship’s Will, a copy of which will be found in the Appendix, he bequeathed to his executors in trust for the benefit of his sister, Mrs. Leigh, the monies arising from the sale of all his real estates at Rochdale and elsewhere, together with such part of his other property as was not settled upon Lady Byron and his daughter Ada, to be by Mrs. Leigh enjoyed, free from her husband’s control, during her life, and, after her decease, to be inherited by her children.
We have now followed to its close a life which, brief as was its span, may be said, perhaps, to have comprised within itself a greater variety of those excitements and interest which spring out of the deep workings of passion and of intellect than any that the pen of biography has ever before commemorated. As there still remain among the papers of my friend some curious gleanings which, though in the abundance of our materials I have not hitherto found a place for them, are too valuable towards the illustration of his character to be lost, I shall here, in selecting them for the reader, avail myself of the opportunity of trespassing, for the last time, on his patience with a few general remarks.
It must have been observed, throughout these pages, and by some, perhaps, with disappointment, that into the character of Lord Byron, as a poet, there has been little, if any, critical examination; but that, content with expressing generally the delight which, in common with all, I derive from his poetry, I have left the task of analysing the sources from which this delight springs to others. In thus evading, if it must be so considered, one of my duties as a biographer, I have been influenced no less by a sense of my own inaptitude for the office of critic than by recollecting with what assiduity, throughout the whole of the poet’s career, every new rising of his genius was watched from the great observatories of Criticism, and the ever changing varieties of its course and splendour tracked out and recorded with a degree of skill and minuteness which has left but little for succeeding observers to discover. It is, moreover, into the character and conduct of Lord Byron, as a man, not distinct from, but forming, on the contrary, the best illustration of his character, as a writer, that it has been the more immediate purpose of these volumes to enquire; and if, in the course of them, any satisfactory clue has been afforded to those anomalies, moral and intellectual, which his life exhibited, — still more, should it have been the effect of my humble labours to clear away some of those mists that hung round my friend, and show him, in most respects, as worthy of love as he was, in all, of admiration, then will the chief and sole aim of this work have been accomplished.
[Footnote 1: It may be making too light of criticism to say with Gray that “even a bad verse is as good a thing or better than the best observation that ever was made upon it;” but there are surely few tasks that appear more thankless and superfluous than that of following, as Criticism sometimes does, in the rear of victorious genius (like the commentators on a field of Blenheim or of Waterloo), and either labouring to point out to us why it has triumphed, or still more unprofitably contending that it ought to have failed. The well-known passage of La Bruyère, which even Voltaire’s adulatory application of it to some work of the King of Prussia has not spoiled for use, puts, perhaps, in its true point of view the very subordinate rank which Criticism must be content to occupy in the train of successful Genius:— “Quand une lecture vous élève l’esprit et qu’elle vous inspire des sentimens nobles, ne cherehez pas une autre règle pour juger de l’ouvrage; il est bon et fait de main de l’ouvrier: La Critique, après ça, peut s’exercer sur les petites choses, relever quelques expressions, corriger des phrases, parler de syntaxe,” &c. &c.]
Having devoted to this object so large a portion of my own share of these pages, and, yet more fairly, enabled the world to form a judgment for itself, by placing the man, in his own person, and without disguise, before all eyes, there would seem to remain now but an easy duty in summing up the various points of his character, and, out of the features, already separately described, combining one complete portrait. The task, however, is by no means so easy as it may appear. There are few characters in which a near acquaintance does not enable us to discover some one leading principle or passion consistent enough in its operations to be taken confidently into account in any estimate of the disposition in which they are found. Like those points in the human face, or figure, to which all its other proportions are referable, there is in most minds some one governing influence, from which chiefly, — though, of course, biassed on some occasions by others, — all its various impulses and tendencies will be found to radiate. In Lord Byron, however, this sort of pivot of character was almost wholly wanting. Governed as he was at different moments by totally different passions, and impelled sometimes, as during his short access of parsimony in Italy, by springs of action never before developed in his nature, in him this simple mode of tracing character to its sources must be often wholly at fault; and if, as is not impossible, in trying to solve the strange variances of his mind, I should myself be found to have fallen into contradictions and inconsistencies, the extreme difficulty of analysing, without dazzle or bewilderment, such an unexampled complication of qualities must be admitted as my excuse.
So various, indeed, and contradictory, were his attributes, both moral and intellectual, that he may be pronounced to have been not one, but many: nor would it be any great exaggeration of the truth to say, that out of the mere partition of the properties of his single mind a plurality of characters, all different and all vigorous, might have been furnished. It was this multiform aspect exhibited by him that led the world, during his short wondrous career, to compare him with that medley host of personages, almost all differing from each other, which he thus playfully enumerates in one of his Journals: —
“I have been thinking over, the other day, on the various comparisons, good or evil, which I have seen published of myself in different journals, English and foreign. This was suggested to me by accidentally turning over a foreign one lately, — for I have made it a rule latterly never to search for any thing of the kind, but not to avoid the perusal, if presented by chance.
“To begin, then: I have seen myself compared, personally or poetically, in English, French, German (as interpreted to me), Italian, and Portuguese, within these nine years, to Rousseau, Goethe, Young, Aretine, Timon of Athens, Dante, Petrarch, ‘an alabaster vase, lighted up within,’ Satan, Shakspeare, Buonaparte, Tiberius, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Harlequin, the Clown, Sternhold and Hopkins, to the phantasmagoria, to Henry the Eighth, to Chenier, to Mirabeau, to young R. Dallas (the schoolboy), to Michael Angelo, to Raphael, to a petit-maître, to Diogenes, to Childe Harold, to Lara, to the Count in Beppo, to Milton, to Pope, to Dryden, to Burns, to Sava
ge, to Chatterton, to ‘oft have I heard of thee, my Lord Biron,’ in Shakspeare, to Churchill the poet, to Kean the actor, to Alfieri, &c. &c. &c.
“The likeness to Alfieri was asserted very seriously by an Italian who had known him in his younger days. It of course related merely to our apparent personal dispositions. He did not assert it to me (for we were not then good friends), but in society.
“The object of so many contradictory comparisons must probably be like something different from them all; but what that is, is more than I know, or any body else.”
It would not be uninteresting, were there either space or time for such a task, to take a review of the names of note in the preceding list, and show in how many points, though differing so materially among themselves, it might be found that each presented a striking resemblance to Lord Byron. We have seen, for instance, that wrongs and sufferings were, through life, the main sources of Byron’s inspiration. Where the hoof of the critic struck, the fountain was first disclosed; and all the tramplings of the world afterwards but forced out the stream stronger and brighter. The same obligations to misfortune, the same debt to the “oppressor’s wrong,” for having wrung out from bitter thoughts the pure essence of his genius, was due no less deeply by Dante!— “quum illam sub amarâ cogitatione excitatam, occulti divinique ingenii vim exacuerit et inflammarit.”
[Footnote 1: Paulus Jovius. — Bayle, too, says of him, “Il fit entrer plus de feu et plus de force dans ses livres qu’il n’y en eût mis s’il avoit joui d’une condition plus tranquille.”]
In that contempt for the world’s opinion, which led Dante to exclaim, “Lascia dir le genti,” Lord Byron also bore a strong resemblance to that poet, — though far more, it must be confessed, in profession than reality. For, while scorn for the public voice was on his lips, the keenest sensitiveness to its every breath was in his heart; and, as if every feeling of his nature was to have some painful mixture in it, together with the pride of Dante which led him to disdain public opinion, he combined the susceptibility of Petrarch which placed him shrinkingly at its mercy.
