1817.]

THE MANFRINI PALACE.

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645.-To John Murray.

Venice, April 14, 1817.

DEAR SIR,-By the favour of Dr. Polidori, who is here on his way to England with the present Lord Guilford, (the late Earl having gone to England by another road, accompanied by his bowels in a separate coffer,) I remit to you, to deliver to Mrs. Leigh, two miniatures; but previously you will have the goodness to desire Mr. Love1 (as a peace-offering between him and me) to set them in plain gold, with my arms complete, and "Painted by Prepiani-Venice, 1817," on the back. I wish also that you would desire Holmes to make a copy of each-that is, both-for myself, and that you will retain the said copies till my return. One was done while I was very unwell; the other in my health, which may account for their dissimilitude. I trust that they will reach their destination in safety.

I recommend the Doctor to your good offices with your Government friends; and if you can be of any use to him in a literary point of view, pray be so.

To-day, or rather yesterday, for it is past midnight, I have been up to the battlements of the highest tower in Venice,2 and seen it and its view, in all the glory of a clear Italian sky. I also went over the Manfrini Palace,3

1. "Love," writes Murray to Byron (March 18, 1817), "has "called since, and told me that there was one box silver-plated, and "which he thinks you will recollect that he induced you to include "in the bargain," etc. The explanation (see p. 91) seems to have satisfied Byron.

2. "Where Galileo used to hold commerce with the skies. It "commands a fine panoramic view of Venice, and shows you all the "details of this wonderful town, which rises out of the waters, like "the ark of the deluge" (Diary of an Invalid, p. 262).

3. "Le palais Manfrin," writes Valery (Voyages en Italie (1835), Livre VI. chap. ix.), "est célèbre par sa riche galerie des diverses "écoles et ses curiosités." He mentions particularly "le portrait "de l'Arioste, vivant, poétique . . . le célèbre tableau dit les trois

famous for its pictures. Amongst them, there is a portrait of Ariosto by Titian, surpassing all my anticipation of the power of painting or human expression: it is the poetry of portrait, and the portrait of poetry. There was also one of some learned lady, centuries old, whose name I forget, but whose features must always be remembered. I never saw greater beauty, or sweetness, or wisdom :—it is the kind of face to go mad for, because it cannot walk out of its frame. There is also a famous dead Christ and live apostles, for which Buonaparte offered in vain five thousand Louis; and of which, though it is a capo d'opera of Titian, as I am no connoisseur, I say little, and thought less, except of one figure in it. There are ten thousand others, and some very fine Giorgiones amongst them, etc., etc. There is an original Laura and Petrarch, very hideous both. Petrarch has not only the dress, but the features and air of an old woman, and Laura looks by no means like a young one, or a pretty one. What struck me most in the general collection was the extreme resemblance of the style of the female faces in the mass of pictures, so many centuries or generations old, to those you see and meet every day "Portraits de Giorgione, qui semble là dans son triomphe. Ce "dernier chef-d'oeuvre avait inspiré à Byron plusieurs stances ad"miratives de son Histoire vénitienne de Beppo, dont deux vers "toutefois ne sont pas fort exacts, puisque, selon Vasari, Giorgione "ne fut point marié... le Portrait de Pétrarque, peu gracieux, "est de Jacques Bellini, le père de Jean." The portrait of Ariosto is now the property of the Earl of Rosebery. The Manfrini collection was partly dispersed in 1856; but some of the pictures are in the Accademia delle Belle Arti.

Moore (Memoirs, etc., vol. iii. p. 29) writes, in his Diary for October 11, 1819, "Went to the Manfrini Palace; a noble collec"tion of pictures; the Three Heads by Giorgione, and his Woman "playing a Guitar, very beautiful, particularly the female head in "the former picture. The Sibilla of Gennaro still more beautiful. "Two heads by Carlo Dolce very fine, and Guido's contest between "Apollo and Pan exquisite; the enthusiasm of Apollo's head, as he "plays, quite divine. The Lucretia of Guido beautiful."

1817.]

DISLIKE FOR PICTURES.

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amongst the existing Italians. The queen of Cyprus1 and Giorgione's wife, particularly the latter,2 are Venetians as it were of yesterday; the same eyes and expression, and, to my mind, there is none finer.

You must recollect, however, that I know nothing of painting; and that I detest it, unless it reminds me of something I have seen, or think it possible to see, for which [reason] I spit upon and abhor all the Saints and subjects of one half the impostures I see in the churches and palaces; and when in Flanders, I never was so disgusted in my life as with Rubens and his eternal wives and infernal glare of colours, as they appeared to me; and in Spain I did not think much of Murillo and Velasquez. Depend upon it, of all the arts, it is the most artificial and unnatural, and that by which the nonsense of mankind is the most imposed upon.3 I never yet saw the picture or the statue-which came within a league of my conception or expectation; but I have seen many mountains, and Seas, and Rivers, and views, and two or three women, who went as far beyond it,-besides some horses; and a lion (at Veli Pasha's) in the Morea; and a tiger at supper in Exeter 'Change.

1. Catharine Cornaro, on whose abdication, in 1489, the island of Cyprus was acquired by Venice.

2.

3.

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And when you to Manfrini's palace go,
That picture (howsoever fine the rest)
Is loveliest to my mind of all the show;
It may, perhaps, be also to your zest,
And that's the cause I rhyme upon it so :
'Tis but a portrait of his son, and wife,
And self; but such a woman! love in life!"

Beppo, stanza xii.

"I leave to learned fingers, and wise hands,
The artist and his ape, to teach and tell
How well his connoisseurship understands
The graceful bend, and the voluptuous swell:
Let these describe the undescribable."

Childe Harold, Canto IV. stanza liii.

4. See Letters, vol. ii. p. 319.

When you write, continue to address to me at Venice. Where do you suppose the books you sent to me are ? At Turin! This comes of "the foreign office," which is foreign enough, God knows, for any good it can be of to me, or any one else, and be damned to it, to its last Clerk and first Charlatan, Castlereagh.1

This makes my hundredth letter at least.

Yours ever and truly,

B.

1. Robert Stewart (1769-1822), Viscount Castlereagh (1796), succeeded his father as second Marquis of Londonderry in 1821. Leader successively of the Irish and of the British House of Commons, commanding an influence in the latter which Earl Russell, from his sixty years' experience, could only compare to that of Lord Althorp, for twenty years a minister of the first rank, the chosen representative of Great Britain at Congresses which settled the map of Europe,-Castlereagh's services and reputation have been comparatively forgotten. Yet he was the chief agent in crushing the Irish Rebellion and carrying the Union. As Minister for War (1805-6, and 1807-9), he consistently supported Wellington, and inspired the coalition of the Northern Powers; as Foreign Minister (1812-22), he settled the terms by which the Treaty of Vienna secured to Europe a durable peace.

Some of the reasons which have obscured his reputation are obvious. He had read little, and had had neither a public school nor a University education. A great executive minister, he was not a man of ideas. Without the personal magnetism which inspires a following, he despised public favour, and preferred unpopularity as being, in his own phrase, "more convenient and gentlemanlike." Though he always left his opponents much to answer, he was without oratorical power, and Moore does not exaggerate his extraordinary phraseology when he makes Phil Fudge (Fudge Family in Paris, Letter ii.) address Castlereagh thus—

"Where (still to use your Lordship's tropes)

The level of obedience slopes

Upward and downward, as the stream

Of hydra faction kicks the beam."

His handsome person, inherited from his mother, Lady Sarah Frances Seymour-Conway, and conciliatory manners might have won him friends, had they not been marred by the haughty reserve which always made him, as Bulwer Lytton says in St. Stephen's

"Stately in quiet high-bred self-esteem."

Byron's abhorrence of Castlereagh was purely political, and probably, in its origin, due to Moore. When Castlereagh entered

DEAR SIR,-The present proofs (of the whole) begin only at the 17th page; but as I had corrected and sent back the 1st act, it does not signify.

political life in 1790, he won County Down from Lord Downshire as a friend of reform; and Irishmen, looking to his conduct before and at the time of the Union, execrated him as a political apostate. O'Connell called him the Assassin of his country, and Moore (Fudge Family in Paris, Letter iv.), rejoicing in the detestation expressed abroad for England, exults—

"That 'twas an Irish head, an Irish heart,

Made thee the fallen and tarnished thing thou art ;
That, as the Centaur gave the infected vest

In which he died, to rack his conqueror's breast,
We sent thee C―gh."

Apart from Moore's influence, Byron attributed to Castlereagh, and the coalition of Northern Powers that he inspired, the downfall of Napoleon, which the poet professed to deplore. By Liberals and reformers like Hobhouse, Castlereagh was identified with the repressive policy of the Government in domestic affairs. Strong of will, and politically as well as personally fearless, he was known to dominate the Cabinet, and, though Foreign Minister, he had identified himself with such measures as the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act (February, 1817) and the Six Acts (November, 1819), which he introduced in the Lower House. It was his domestic measures which Shelley attacked in the Masque of Anarchy—

"I met Murder on his way,

He had a mask like Castlereagh."

Castlereagh also took a leading part in the divorce proceedings against the Queen, whose cause Byron advocated. Finally, by Byron's Italian friends, who, like the Gambas, were Liberals, Castlereagh was detested for his conduct to Genoa. In 1814 Lord W. Bentinck, contrary to Castlereagh's instructions, proclaimed the re-establishment of the Genoese Constitution. But Castlereagh, to secure Italy against French aggression, repudiated these pledges, and at the Congress of Vienna favoured the annexation of Genoa to Piedmont.

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These were the causes which moved Byron to write of Castlereagh as he does in his letters, to compose his epigrams alluding to his suicide, to speak of him in his "Irish Avatar" as a wretch never "named but with curses and jeers," or to attack him in the Dedication to Don Juan as "the intellectual eunuch Castlereagh," the "cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant," "the vulgarest "tool that Tyranny could want," "a bungler even in its disgusting "trade," "a tinkering slave-maker," "a second Eutropius."