INTRODUCTION TO BEPPO.

BEPPO was written in the autumn (September 6-October 12, Letters, 1900, iv. 172) of 1817, whilst Byron was still engaged on the additional stanzas of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold. His new poem, as he admitted from the first, was after the excellent manner" of John Hookham Frere's jeu d'esprit, known as Whistlecraft (Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work by William and Robert Whistlecraft, London, 18181), which must have ["I've often wish'd that I could write a book,

I.

Such as all English people might peruse;

I never shall regret the pains it took,

That's just the sort of fame that I should choose:

To sail about the world like Captain Cook,

I'd sling a cot up for my favourite Muse,

And we'd take verses out to Demerara,
To New South Wales, and up to Niagara.

"Poets consume exciseable commodities,

They raise the nation's spirit when victorious,
They drive an export trade in whims and oddities,
Making our commerce and revenue glorious;
As an industrious and pains-taking body 'tis

That Poets should be reckoned meritorious:
And therefore I submissively propose

To erect one Board for Verse and one for Prose.

"Princes protecting Sciences and Art

I've often seen in copper-plate and print;
I never saw them elsewhere, for my part,
And therefore I conclude there's nothing in't:
But every body knows the Regent's heart;

I trust he won't reject a well-meant hint ;
Each Board to have twelve members, with a seat
To bring them in per ann. five hundred neat :-

"From Princes I descend to the Nobility:

In former times all persons of high stations,
Lords, Baronets, and Persons of gentility,
Paid twenty guineas for the dedications;

INTRODUCTION TO BEPPO.

BEPPO was written in the autumn (September 6-October 12, Letters, 1900, iv. 172) of 1817, whilst Byron was still engaged on the additional stanzas of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold. His new poem, as he admitted from the first, was after the excellent manner " of John Hookham Frere's jeu d'esprit, known as Whistlecraft (Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work by William and Robert Whistlecraft, London, 18181), which must have

I.

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["I've often wish'd that I could write a book,

Such as all English people might peruse;

I never shall regret the pains it took,

That's just the sort of fame that I should choose:

To sail about the world like Captain Cook,

I'd sling a cot up for my favourite Muse,

And we'd take verses out to Demerara,
To New South Wales, and up to Niagara.

"Poets consume exciseable commodities,

They raise the nation's spirit when victorious,
They drive an export trade in whims and oddities,
Making our commerce and revenue glorious;
As an industrious and pains-taking body 'tis

That Poets should be reckoned meritorious:
And therefore I submissively propose

To erect one Board for Verse and one for Prose.

"Princes protecting Sciences and Art

I've often seen in copper-plate and print;
I never saw them elsewhere, for my part,
And therefore I conclude there's nothing in't:
But every body knows the Regent's heart;

I trust he won't reject a well-meant hint;
Each Board to have twelve members, with a seat
To bring them in per ann. five hundred neat :-

"From Princes I descend to the Nobility:

In former times all persons of high stations,
Lords, Baronets, and Persons of gentility,
Paid twenty guineas for the dedications;

reached him in the summer of 1817. Whether he divined the identity of "Whistlecraft" from the first, or whether his guess was an after-thought, he did not hesitate to take the water and shoot ahead of his unsuspecting rival. It was a case of plagiarism in excelsis, and the superiority of the imitation to the original must be set down to the genius of the plagiary, unaided by any profound study of Italian literature, or an acquaintance at first hand with the parents and inspirers of Whistlecraft.

It is possible that he had read and forgotten some specimens of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore, which J. H. Merivale had printed in the Monthly Magazine for 1806-1807, vol. xxi. pp. 304, 510, etc., and it is certain that he was familiar with his Orlando in Roncesvalles, published in 1814. He distinctly states that he had not seen W. S. Rose's1 translation of Casti's Animali Parlanti (first edition [anonymous], 1816), but, according to Pryse Gordon (Personal Memoirs, ii. 328), he had read the original. If we may trust Ugo Foscolo (see "Narrative and Romantic Poems of the Italians" in the Quart. Rev., April, 1819, vol. xxi. pp. 486526), there is some evidence that Byron had read Forteguerri's Ricciardetto (translated in 1819 by Sylvester (Douglas) Lord Glenbervie, and again, by John Herman Merivale, under the title of The Two First Cantos of

This practice was attended with utility;

The patrons lived to future generations,

The poets lived by their industrious earning,-
So men alive and dead could live by Learning.

"Then twenty guineas was a little fortune;

Now, we must starve unless the times should mend:
Our poets now-a-days are deemed importune

If their addresses are diffusely penned ;

Most fashionable authors make a short one

To their own wife, or child, or private friend,
To show their independence, I suppose;
And that may do for Gentlemen like those.

"Lastly, the common people I beseech

Dear People! if you think my verses clever,
Preserve with care your noble parts of speech,
And take it as a maxim to endeavour
To talk as your good mothers used to teach,
And then these lines of mine may last for ever;
And don't confound the language of the nation
With long-tailed words in osity and ation."

Canto I. stanzas i.-vi.]

1. [For some admirable stanzas in the metre and style of Beppo, by W. S. Rose, who passed the winter of 1817-18 in Venice, and who

Richardetto, 1820), but the parallel which he adduces (vide post, p. 166) is not very striking or convincing.

On the other hand, after the poem was completed (March 25, 1818), he was under the impression that "Berni was the original of all . . . the father of that kind [i.e. the mockheroic] of writing;" but there is nothing to show whether he had or had not read the rifacimento of Orlando's Innamorato, or the more distinctively Bernesque Capitoli. Two years later (see Letter to Murray, February 21, 1820, Letters, 1900, iv. 407; and "Advertisement" to Morgante Maggiore) he had discovered that "Pulci was the parent of Whistlecraft, and the precursor and model of Berni," but, in 1817, he was only at the commencement of his studies. A time came long before the " year or two" of his promise (March 25, 1818) when he had learned to simulate the vera imago of the Italian Muse, and was able not only to surpass his "immediate model," but to rival his model's forerunners and inspirers. In the meanwhile a tale based on a "Venetian anecdote " (perhaps an "episode" in the history of Colonel Fitzgerald and the Marchesa Castiglione,-see Letter to Moore, December 26, 1816, Letters, 1900, iv. 26) lent itself to "the excellent manner of Mr. Whistlecraft," and would show "the knowing ones," that is, Murray's advisers, Gifford, Croker, Frere, etc., that "he could write cheerfully," and "would repel the charge of monotony and mannerism."

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Eckermann, mindful of Goethe's hint that Byron had too much empeiria (an excess of mondanité-a this-worldliness), found it hard to read Beppo after Macbeth. "I felt," he says, the predominance of a nefarious, empirical world, with which the mind which introduced it to us has in a certain measure associated itself" (Conversations of Goethe, etc., 1874, p. 175). But Beppo must be taken at its own valuation. It is A Venetian Story, and the action takes place behind the scenes of "a comedy of Goldoni." A less subtle but a more apposite criticism may be borrowed from "Lord Byron's Combolio" (sic), Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1822, xi. 162-165.

"The story that's in it

May be told in a minute;
But par parenthèse chatting,
On this thing and that thing,
Keeps the shuttlecock flying,
And attention from dying."

Beppo, a Venetian Story (xcv. stanzas) was published

sent them to Byron from Albaro in the spring of 1818, see Letters, 1900, iv. 211-214, note 1.]