208.-To Francis Hodgson. 8, St. James's Street, November 17, 1811. DEAR HODGSON,-I have been waiting for the letter,1 which was to have been sent by you immediately, and must again jog your memory on the subject. I believe I wrote you a full and true account of poor "He is now at rest; And praise and blame fall on his ear alike, They in thy train-ah, little did they think, Thou art gone; Could say he had not erred as much, and more?" 1. On November 17, 1811, Hodgson writes to Byron: "I "enclose you the long-delayed letter, which, from the similarity of "hands alone, Davies and I will go shares in a bet of ten to one is "the cartel in question." 1811.] OLD AT TWENTY-THREE. 71 proceedings. Since his reunion to, I have heard nothing further from him. What a pity! a man of talent, past the heyday of life, and a clergyman, to fall into such imbecility. I have heard from Hobhouse, who has at last sent more copy to Cawthorn for his Travels. I franked an enormous cover for you yesterday, seemingly to convey at least twelve cantos on any given subject. I fear the aspect of it was too epic for the post. From this and other coincidences I augur a publication on your part, but what, or when, or how much, you must disclose immediately. I don't know what to say about coming down to Cambridge at present, but live in hopes. I am so completely superannuated there, and besides feel it something brazen in me to wear my magisterial habit, after all my buffooneries, that I hardly think I shall venture again. And being now an ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ disciple I won't come within wine-shot of such determined topers as your collegiates. I have not yet subscribed to Bowen. I mean to cut Harrow "enim unquam” as somebody classically said for a farewell sentence. I am superannuated there too, and, in short, as old at twenty-three as many men at seventy. Do write and send this letter that hath been so long in your custody. It is important that Moore should be certain that I never received it, if it be his. Are you Idrowned in a bottle of Port? or a Kilderkin of Ale? that I have never heard from you, or are you fallen into a fit of perplexity? Cawthorn has declined, and the MS. is returned to him. This is all at present from yours in the faith, Μπαιρῶν. 1. The names are carefully erased by Hodgson. 209.-To Francis Hodgson. 8, St. James's Street, December 4, 1811. MY DEAR HODGSON,-I have seen Miller,1 who will see Bland, but I have no great hopes of his obtaining the translation from the crowd of candidates. Yesterday I wrote to Harness, who will probably tell you what I said on the subject. Hobhouse has sent me my Romaic MS., and I shall require your aid in correcting the press, as your Greek eye is more correct than mine. But these will not come to type this month, I dare say. I have put some soft lines on y° Scotch in the Curse of Minerva; take them; "Yet Caledonia claims some native worth," etc.3 If you are not content now, I must say with the Irish drummer to the deserter who called out, "Flog high, flog low"-"The de'il burn ye, there's no pleasing you, "flog where one will." Have you given up wine, even British wine? I have read Watson to Gibbon. He proves nothing, so I am where I was, verging towards Spinoza; and yet 1. See Letters, vol. i. p. 319, note 2. 2. Byron was endeavouring to secure for Bland (see Letters, vol. i. p. 271, note 1), the work of translating Lucien Buonaparte's poem of Charlemagne. He did not succeed. The poem, translated by Dr. Butler, Head-master of Shrewsbury, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield, and Francis Hodgson, was published in 1815. 3. Lines 149-156. 4. An Apology for Christianity, in a Series of Letters to Edward Gibbon, Esq., by Richard Watson, D.D. (1776). Gibbon had a great respect for Watson, at this time Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, afterwards Bishop of Llandaff, whom he describes as "a prelate of a large mind and liberal spirit." In a letter to Holroyd (November 4, 1776), he speaks of the Apology as “feeble,” but "uncommonly genteel.' To his stepmother he writes, November 29, 1776, that Watson's answer is "civil" and "too dull to deserve your notice." 66 1811.] SOMETHING PAGAN IN BYRON. 73 it is a gloomy Creed, and I want a better, but there is something Pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything. The post brings me to a conclusion. Bland has just been here. Yours ever, 210.-To William Harness.1 BN. 8, St. James's Street, Dec. 6, 1811. MY DEAR HARNESS,-I write again, but don't suppose I mean to lay such a tax on your pen and patience as to expect regular replies. When you are inclined, write: when silent, I shall have the consolation of knowing that you are much better employed. Yesterday, Bland and I called on Mr. Miller, who, being then out, will call on Bland to-day or to-morrow. I shall certainly endeavour to bring them together.-You are censorious, child; when you are a little older, you will learn to dislike every body, but abuse nobody. With regard to the person of whom you speak, your own good sense must direct you. I never pretend to advise, being an implicit believer in the old proverb. This present frost is detestable. It is the first I have felt for these three years, though I longed for one in the oriental summer, when no such thing is to be had, unless I had gone to the top of Hymettus for it. I thank you most truly for the concluding part of your letter. I have been of late not much accustomed to kindness from any quarter, and am not the less pleased to meet with it again from one where I had known it earliest. I have not changed in all my ramblings,— Harrow, and, of course, yourself, never left me, and the "Dulces reminiscitur Argos" 1. See Letters, vol. i. p. 177, note 1. attended me to the very spot to which that sentence alludes in the mind of the fallen Argive.-Our intimacy began before we began to date at all, and it rests with you to continue it till the hour which must number it and me with the things that were. Do read mathematics.—I should think X plus Y at least as amusing as the Curse of Kehama,1 and much 1. Robert Southey (1774-1843) published his Curse of Kehama in 1810. It formed a part of a series of heroic poems in which he intended to embody the chief mythologies of the world. In spite of Byron's adverse opinion, it contains magnificent passages, and disputes with Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814), the claim to be the finest of his longer poems. Southey's literary activity was immense. He had already produced Joan of Arc (1796), Thalaba (1801), Madoc (1805), and many other works in prose and verse. At this time he was personally unknown to Byron, who had ridiculed his "annual strains." They met for the first time at Holland House, in September, 1813. (See Byron's letter to Moore, September 27, 1813, and Journal, p. 331.) The animosity between the two men belongs to a later date, and in its origin was partly political, partly personal. Southey, in early life, had been a republican and a unitarian, if not a deist. He collaborated with Coleridge in the Fall of Robespierre (1794), wrote a portion of the Conciones ad Populum (1795), which the Government considered seditious; and, according to Poole (Thomas Poole and his Friends, vol. i. chap. vi.), wavered "between Deism and Atheism." He became a champion of monarchical principles and of religious orthodoxy, and attacked the views, which he had once held and expressed in Wat Tyler (written in 1794, and piratically published in 1817), with the bitterness of a reactionary. He had also, as Byron believed, circulated, if not invented, a report that Byron and Shelley had formed "a league of incest" at Geneva, in 1816-17, with "two girls," Mary Godwin (Mrs. Shelley) and Jane Clairmont. Byron not only denied the charge, but retorted upon him, in his "Observations upon an Article in Blackwood's Magazine" (March 15, 1820), as the author of Wat Tyler and poet laureate, the man who "wrote treason and serves the King," the ex-pantisocrat who advocated "all things, including women, in common.' Southey's Vision of Judgment, an apotheosis of George III., published in 1821, gave Byron a second provocation and a second opportunity, by speaking in the preface of his "Satanic spirit of pride and audacious "impiety." Byron again replied in prose; and Southey (January 5, 1820), in a letter to the London Courier, invited him to attack him in rhyme. In Byron's Vision of Judgment he found his invitation accepted, and himself pilloried in that tremendous satire. Southey overvalued his own narrative poetry. It is as a man, a prominent |