on hand and the post going out to-morrow. Do you remember the epitaph on Voltaire ? "Ci-git l'enfant gâté,' &c. "Here lies the spoilt child Of the world which he spoil'd.' inThe original is in Grimm and Diderot, &c. Yours, &c." &c. &c." 66 'In the first place, your packets; then a letter from Kinnaird, on the most urgent business; another from Moore, about a communication to Lady Byron of importance; a fourth from the mother of Allegra; and, fifthly, at Ravenna, the Countess G. is on the eve of being separated. But the Italian public are on her side, particularly the women, and the men also, because they say that he had no business to take the business up now after a year of toleration. All her relations (who are numerous, high in rank, and powerful) are furious against him for his conduct. I am warned to be on my guard, as he is very capable of employing sicari this is Latin as well as Italian, so you can understand it; but I have arms, and don't mind them, thinking that I could pepper his ragamuffins if they don't come unawares, and that, if they do, one may as well end that way as another; and it would besides serve you as an advertisement : "Man may escape from rope or gun, &c. But he who takes woman, woman, woman, &c. "Yours. "P. S. — I have looked over the press, but heaven knows how. Think what I have had better borrow any thing (excepting money) than the thoughts of another- they are always sure to be reclaimed; but it is very hard, having been the lender, to be denounced as the debtor; as is the case of Anstey versus Smollett. As there is honour amongst thieves' let there be some amongst poets, and give each his due. None can afford to give it more than Mr. Campbell himself, who, with a high reputation for originality, and a fame which cannot be shaken, is the only poet of the times (except Rogers) who can be reproached (and in him it is indeed a reproach) with having written too little." See Works, p. 809.] "Ravenna, May 24. 1820. "I wrote to you a few days ago. There is also a letter of January last for you at Murray's, which will explain to you why I am here. Murray ought to have forwarded it long ago. I enclose you an epistle from a countrywoman of yours at Paris, which has moved my entrails. You will have the goodness, perhaps, to enquire into the truth of her story, and I will help her as far as I can,though not in the useless way she proposes. Her letter is evidently unstudied, and so natural, that the orthography is also in a state of nature. Here is a poor creature, ill and solitary, who thinks, as a last resource, of translating you or me into French! Was there ever such a notion? It seems to me the consummation of despair. Pray enquire, and let me know, and, if you could draw a bill on me here for a few hundred francs, at your banker's, I will duly honour it,-that is, if she is not an impostor. If not, let me know, that I may get something remitted by my banker Longhi, of Bologna, for I have no correspondence myself, at Paris: but tell her she must not translate;-if she does, it will be the height of ingratitude. "I had a letter (not of the same kind, but in French and flattery) from a Madame Sophie Gail, of Paris, whom I take to be the spouse of a Gallo-Greek of that name. Who is she? and what is she? and how came she to take an interest in my poeshie or its author? If you know her, tell her, with my compliments, that, as I only read French, I have not answered her letter; but would have done so in Italian, if I had not thought it would look like an affectation. I have just 1["Ci-git l'enfant gâté du monde qu'il gâta."] 2 According to his desire, I waited upon this young lady, having provided myself with a rouleau of fifteen or twenty Napoleons to present to her from his Lordship; but, with a very creditable spirit, my young countrywoman declined the gift, saying that Lord Byron had mistaken the object of her application to him, which was to request that, by allowing her to have the sheets of some of his works before publication, he would enable her to prepare early translations for the French booksellers, and thus afford her the means of acquiring something towards a livelihood. # been scolding my monkey for tearing the seal of her letter, and spoiling a mock book, in which I put rose leaves. I had a civetcat the other day, too; but it ran away, after scratching my monkey's cheek, and I am in search of it still. It was the fiercest beast I ever saw, and like✶✶ in the face and manner. "I have a world of things to say; but, as they are not come to a dénouement, I don't care to begin their history till it is wound up. After you went, I had a fever, but got well again without bark. Sir Humphry Davy was here the other day, and liked Ravenna very much. He will tell you any thing you may wish to know about the place and your humble servitor. "Your apprehensions (arising from Scott's) were unfounded. There are no damages in this country, but there will probably be a separation between them, as her family, which is a principal one, by its connections, are very much against him, for the whole of his conduct; - and he is old and obstinate, and she is young and a woman, determined to sacrifice every thing to her affections. I have given her the best advice, viz. to stay with him,-pointing out the state of a separated woman, (for the priests won't let lovers live openly together, unless the husband sanctions it,) and making the most exquisite moral reflections, but to no purpose. She says, 'I will stay with him, if he will let you remain with me. It is hard that I should be the only woman in Romagna who is not to have her Amico; but, if not, I will not live with him; and as for the consequences, love, &c. &c. &c.'-you know how females reason on such occasions. Her "He says he has let it go on till he can do so no longer. But he wants her to stay, and dismiss me; for he doesn't like to pay back her dowry and to make an alimony. relations are rather for the separation, as they detest him, indeed, so does every body. The populace and the women are, as usual, all for those who are in the wrong, viz. the lady and her lover. I should have retreated, but honour, and an erysipelas which has attacked her, prevent me, say nothing of love, for I love her most entirely, though not enough to persuade her to sacrifice every thing to a frenzy. I see how it will end; she will be the sixteenth Mrs. Shuffleton.' -to B. "My paper is finished, and so must this letter. Yours ever, you have not comPray, how come Murray has four hand-the new - I regret that pleted the Italian Fudges. you to be still in Paris? or five things of mine in -a Don Juan, which his back-shop synod don't admire ;· -a translation of the first canto of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore, excellent; short ditto from Dante, not so much approved; the Prophecy of Dante, very grand and worthy, &c. &c. &c. : a furious prose answer to Blackwood's Observations on Don Juan, with a savage Defence of Popelikely to make a row. The opinions above I quote from Murray and his Utican senate; you will form your own, when you see the things. "You will have no great chance of seeing me, for I begin to think I must finish in Italy. But, if you come my way, you shall have a tureen of macaroni. Pray tell me about yourself, and your intents. "My trustees are going to lend Earl Blessington sixty thousand pounds (at six per cent.) on a Dublin mortgage. Only think of my becoming an Irish absentee!" LETTER 375. TO MR. HOPPNER. "Ravenna, May 25. 1820. "A German named Ruppsecht has sent me, heaven knows why, several Deutsche Gazettes, of all which I understand neither word nor letter. I have sent you the enclosed to beg you to translate to me some remarks, which appear to be Goethe's upon Manfred, — and if I may judge by two notes of admiration (generally put after something ridiculous by us) and the word 'hypocondrisch,' are any thing but favourable. I shall regret this, for I should have been proud-of Goethe's good word; but I shan't alter my opinion of him, even though he should be savage. LETTER 376. TO MR. MOORE. "Ravenna, June 1. 1820. "I have received a Parisian letter from W. W., which I prefer answering through you, if that worthy be still at Paris, and, as he says, an occasional visitor of yours. In November last he wrote to me a well-meaning letter, stating, for some reasons of his own, his belief that a re-union might be effected between Lady B. and myself. To this I answered as usual; and he sent me a second letter, repeating his notions, which letter I 1 [Mr. Wedderburn Webster; now Sir James Webster Wedderburn, 1838.]. 1 have never answered, having had a thousand other things to think of. He now writes as if he believed that he had offended me by touching on the topic; and I wish you to assure him that I am not at all so,- -but, on the contrary, obliged by his good nature. At the same time acquaint him the thing is impossible. You know this, as well as I,– and there let it end. "I believe that I showed you his epistle in autumn last. He asks me if I have heard of my laureat' at Paris, - somebody who has written a most sanguinary Epître' against me; but whether in French, or Dutch, or on what score, I know not, and he don't say, except that (for my satisfaction) he says it is the best thing in the fellow's volume. If there is any thing of the kind that I ought to know, you will doubtless tell me. I suppose it to be something of the usual sort; he says, he don't remember the author's name. "I wrote to you some ten days ago, and expect an answer at your leisure. "The separation business still continues, and all the world are implicated, including priests and cardinals. The public opinion is furious against him, because he ought to have cut the matter short at first, and not waited twelve months to begin. He has been trying at evidence, but can get none sufficient; for what would make fifty divorces in England won't do here there must be the most decided proofs. It is the first cause of the kind attempted in Ravenna for these two hundred years; for, though they often separate, they assign a different motive. You know that the continental incontinent are more delicate than the English, and don't like proclaiming their coronation in a court, even when nobody doubts it. "All her relations are furious against him. The father has challenged him -a superfluous valour, for he don't fight, though suspected of two assassinations - one of the famous Monzoni of Forli. Warning was given me not to take such long rides in the Pine Forest without being on my guard; so I take my stiletto and a pair of pistols in my pocket during my daily rides. "I won't stir from this place till the matter is settled one way or the other. She is as femininely firm as possible; and the opinion 1 M. Lamartine. [See antè, p. 413.] ["Perhaps I should be much better pleased, if I were told you called me your little friend, than if you complimented me with the title of a great genius,' or an ' eminent hand,' as Jacob does all his authors." - Pope to Steele.] is so much against him, that the advocates decline to undertake his cause, because they say that he is either a fool or a rogue-fool, if he did not discover the liaison till now; and rogue, if he did know it, and waited for some bad end, to divulge it. In short, there has been nothing like it since the days of Guido di Polenta's family, in these parts. If the man has me taken off, like Polonius say, he made a good end,'- for a melodrame. The principal security is, that he has not the courage to spend twenty scudi - the average price of a clean-handed bravo 66 - otherwise there is no want of opportunity, for I ride about the woods every evening, with one servant, and sometimes an quaintance, who latterly looks a little queer in solitary bits of bushes. 66 ac Good bye.Write to yours ever, &c." LETTER 377. TO MR. MURRAY. "Ravenna, June 7. 1820. "Enclosed is something which will interest you, to wit, the opinion of the greatest man of Germany-perhaps of Europe upon one of the great men of your advertisements, (all 'famous hands,' as Jacob Tonson 2 used to say of his ragamuffins,)—in short, a critique of Goethe's upon Manfred. There is the original, an English translation, and an Italian one; keep them all in your archives, for the opinions of such a man as Goethe, whether favourable or not, are always interesting and this is more so, as favourable. His Faust I never read, for I don't know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it to me vivá voce, and I was naturally much struck with it; but it was the Staubach and the Jungfrau, and something else, much more than Faustus, that made me write Manfred. The first scene, however, and that this letter. of Faustus are very similar. Acknowledge also, but too stiltified and apostrophic, - and quite wrong. Men died calmly before the Christian era, and since, without Christianity; witness the Romans, and, lately, Thistlewood, Sandt, and Louvel 3 -men who ought to have been weighed down with their crimes, even had they believed. A deathbed is a matter of nerves and constitution, and not of religion. Voltaire was frightened, Frederick of Prussia not: Christians the same, according to their strength rather than their creed. What does Helga Herbert + mean by his stanza? which is octave got drunk or gone mad. He ought to have his ears boxed with Thor's hammer for rhyming so fantastically."5 "GOETHE ON MANFRED. [1820.] "Byron's tragedy, Manfred, was to me a wonderful phenomenon, and one that closely touched me. This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strongest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius. The whole is in this way so completely formed anew, that it would be an interesting task for the critic to point out not only the alterations he has made, but their degree of resemblance with, or dissimilarity to, the original; in the course of which I cannot deny that the gloomy heat of an unbounded and exuberant despair becomes at last oppressive to us. Yet is the i dissatisfaction we feel always connected with esteem and admiration. "We find thus in this tragedy the quintessence of the most astonishing talent born to be its own tormentor. The character of Lord Byron's life and poetry hardly permits a just and equitable appreciation. He has often enough confessed what it is that torments him. He has repeatedly pourtrayed it; and scarcely any one feels compassion for this intolerable suffering, over which he is ever laboriously ruminating. There are, properly speaking, two females whose phantoms for ever haunt him, and which, in this piece also, perform principal The following is the article from Goethe's “Kunst und Älterthum," enclosed in this letter. The grave confidence with which the venerable critic traces the fancies of his brother poet to real persons and events, making no difficulty even of a double murder at Florence to furnish grounds for his theory, affords an amusing instance of the disposition so prevalent throughout Europe, to picture Byron as a man of marvels and mysteries, as well in his life as his poetry. To these exaggerated, or wholly false notions of him, the numerous fictions palmed upon the world of his romantic tours and wonderful adventures in places he never saw, and with persons that never existed 6, have, no doubt, considerably contributed; and the consequence is, so utterly out of truth and nature are the representations of his life and character long current upon the Conti-parts-one under the name of Astarte, the nent, that it may be questioned whether the real "flesh and blood" hero of these pages, the social, practical-minded, and, with all his faults and eccentricities, English Lord Byron, may not, to the over-exalted imaginations of most of his foreign admirers, appear but an ordinary, unromantic, and prosaic personage. 1 [Arthur Thistlewood, executed at the Old Bailey, May 1. 1820, for High Treason.] [Charles Sandt, the assassin of Kotzebue, at Manheim, in March 1819. After the murder he exclaimed "God, I thank thee, for having permitted me to accomplish this act !" and plunged the bloody poniard in his own breast. He went to the place of execution as to a fète, and his last words were, that he " died for his country."] 9 [The murderer of the Duc de Berri, in February 1820.] other without form or actual presence, and merely a voice. Of the horrid occurrence which took place with the former the following is related :-When a bold and enterprising young man, he won the affections of a Florentine lady. Her husband discovered the amour, and murdered his wife; but the murderer was the same night found dead in the street, and there was no one on whom any suspicion could be attached. Lord 5 ["Herbert shall wield Thor's hammer, and sometimes, In gratitude, thoul't praise his rugged rhymes." English Bards, &c.] Of this kind are the accounts, filled with all sorts of circumstantial wonders, of his residence in the island of Mytilene; his voyages to Sicily,—to Ithaca, with the Countess Guiccioli, &c. &c. But the most absurd, perhaps, of all these fabrications, are the stories told by Pouqueville, of the poet's religious conferences in the cell of Father Paul, at Athens; and the still more unconscionable fiction in which Rizo has indulged, in giving the details of a pretended theatrical scene, got up (according to this poetical historian) between Lord Byron and the Archbishop of Arta, at the tomb of Betzaris, in Missolonghi. Byron removed from Florence, and these spirits haunted him all his life after. "This romantic incident is rendered highly probable by innumerable allusions to it in his poems. As, for instance, when turning his sad contemplations inwards, he applies to himself the fatal history of the king of Sparta. It is as follows: -Pausanias, a Lacedemonian general, acquires glory by the important victory at Platæa, but afterwards forfeits the confidence of his countrymen through his arrogance, obstinacy, and secret intrigues with the enemies of his country. This man draws upon himself the heavy guilt of innocent blood, which attends him to his end; for, while commanding the fleet of the allied Greeks, in the Black Sea, he is inflamed with a violent passion for a Byzantine maiden. After long resistance, he at length obtains her from her parents, and she is to be delivered up to him at night. She modestly desires the servant to put out the lamp, and, while groping her way in the dark, she overturns it. Pausanias is awakened from his sleep apprehensive of an attack from murderers, he seizes his sword, and destroys his mistress. The horrid sight never leaves him. Her shade pursues him unceasingly, and he implores for aid in vain from the gods and the exorcising priests. "That poet must have a lacerated heart who selects such a scene from antiquity, appropriates it to himself, and burdens his tragic image with it. The following soliloquy, which is overladen with gloom and a weariness of life, is, by this remark, rendered intelligible. We recommend it as an exercise to all friends of declamation. Hamlet's soliloquy appears improved upon here." LETTER 378. TO MR. MOORE. 66 "Ravenna, June 9. 1820. when heard. And thus I was glad to see the words without their borrowed robes; to my mind they look none the worse for their nudity. The biographer has made a botch of your life-calling your father a venerable old gentleman,' and prattling of Addison,' and dowager countesses.' If that damned fellow was to write my life, I would certainly take his. And then, at the Dublin dinner, you have made a speech' (do you recollect, at Douglas K.'s, Sir, he made me a speech?') too complimentary to the living poets,' and somewhat redolent of universal praise. I am but too well off in it, but * "You have not sent me any poetical or personal news of yourself. Why don't you complete an Italian Tour of the Fudges? I have just been turning over Little, which I knew by heart in 1803, being then in my fifteenth summer. Heigho! I believe all the mischief I have ever done, or sung, has been owing to that confounded book of yours. "In my last I told you of a cargo of Poeshie,' which I had sent to M. at his own impatient desire; and, now he has got it, he don't like it, and demurs. Perhaps he is right. I have no great opinion of any of my last shipment, except a translation from Pulci, which is word for word, and verse for verse. "I am in the third act of a Tragedy; but whether it will be finished or not, I know not: I have, at this present, too many passions of my own on hand to do justice to those of the dead. Besides the vexations mentioned in my last, I have incurred a quarrel with the Pope's carabiniers, or gens d'armerie, who have petitioned the Cardinal against my liveries, as resembling too nearly their own lousy uniform. They particularly object to the epaulettes, which all the world with us have on upon gala days. My liveries are of the colours conforming to my arms, and have been the family hue since the year 1066. Galignani has just sent me the Paris edition of your works (which I wrote to "I have sent a tranchant reply, as you order), and I am glad to see my old friends with a French face. I have been skimming that, if any soldados of that respectable corps may suppose; and have given to understand and dipping, in and over them, like a swal- insult my servants, I will do likewise by their low, and as pleased as one. It is the first time that I had seen the Melodies without gallant commanders; and I have directed my music; and, I don't know how, but I can't ragamuffins, six in number, who are tolerably read in a music-book-the crotchets con-gression; and, on holidays and gaudy days, savage, to defend themselves, in case of agfound the words in my head, though I recollect them perfectly when sung. Music assists my memory through the ear, not through the eye; I mean, that her perplex me upon paper, but they are a help quavers The critic here subjoins the soliloquy from Manfred, beginning "We are the fools of time and terror,' ," in which the allusion to Pausanias occurs. I shall arm the whole set, including myself, in case of accidents or treachery. I used to play pretty well at the broad-sword, once upon a time, at Angelo's; but I should like the pistol, our national buccaneer weapon, better, though I am out of practice at present. However, I can wink and hold out mine iron.' It makes me think (the whole G g |