up the Wengen Alp (by the Jungfrau) upon mules, some of them too old and others too young to be the least aware of what they saw. "By the way, I think the Jungfrau, and all that region of Alps, which I traversed in September going to the very top of the Wengen, which is not the highest (the Jungfrau itself is inaccessible) but the best point of view-much finer than Mont-Blanc and Chamouni, or the Simplon. I kept a journal of the whole for my sister Augusta, part of which she copied and let Murray see. "I wrote a sort of mad Drama, for the sake of introducing the Alpine scenery in description: and this I sent lately to Murray. Almost all the dram. pers. are spirits, ghosts, or magicians, and the scene is in the Alps and the other world, so you may suppose what a Bedlam tragedy it must be make him show it you. I sent him all three acts piecemeal, by the post, and suppose they have arrived. : I have now written to you at least six letters, or letterets, and all I have received in return is a note about the length you used to write from Bury Street to St. James's Street, when we used to dine with Rogers, and talk laxly, and go to parties, and hear poor Sheridan now and then. Do you remember one night he was so tipsy, that I was forced to put his cocked hat on for him, for he could not, — and I let him down at Brookes's, much as he must since have been let down into his grave. Heigh ho! I wish I was drunk- but I have nothing but this d-d barley-water before me. "I am still in love,-which is a dreadful drawback in quitting a place, and I can't stay at Venice much longer. What I shall do on this point I don't know. The girl means to go with me, but I do not like this for her own sake. I have had so many conflicts in my own mind on this subject, that I am not at all sure they did not help me to the fever I mentioned above. I am certainly very much attached to her, and I have cause to be so, if you knew all. But she has a child; and though, like all the 'children of the sun,' she consults nothing but passion, it is necessary I should think for both; and it is only the virtuous, like ****, who can afford to give up husband and child, and live happy ever after. "The Italian ethics are the most singular ever met with. The perversion, not only of action, but of reasoning, is singular in the women. It is not that they do not consider the thing itself as wrong, and very wrong, but love (the sentiment of love) is not merely an excuse for it, but makes it an actual virtue, LETTER 268. TO MR. MURRAY. "Venice, March 25. 1817. "Your letter and enclosure are safe; but English gentlemen' are very rare- at least in Venice. I doubt whether there are at present any, save the consul and vice-consul, with neither of whom I have the slightest acquaintance. The moment I can pounce upon a witness, I will send the deed properly signed: but must he necessarily be genteel? Venice is not a place where the English are gregarious; their pigeon-houses are Florence, Naples, Rome, &c.; and to tell you the truth, this was one reason why I stayed here till the season of the purgation of Rome from these people, which is infected with them at this time, should arrive. Besides, I abhor the nation, and the nation me; it is impossible for me to describe my own sensation on that point, but it may suffice to say, that, if I met with any of the race in the beautiful parts of Switzerland, the most distant glimpse or aspect of them poisoned the whole scene, and I do not choose to have the Pantheon, and St. Peter's, and the Capitol, spoiled for me too. This feeling may be probably owing to recent events'; but it does not exist the less, and while it exists, I shall conceal it as little as any other. I have been seriously ill with a fever, but it is gone. I believe or suppose it was the indigenous fever of the place, which comes every year at this time, and of which the physicians change the name annually, to despatch the people sooner. It is a kind of typhus, and kills occasionally. It was pretty smart, but nothing particular, and has left me some debility and a great appetite. There 1[" And the destruction with which my moral Clytemnestra hewed me down ; but," &c. — MS.] are a good many ill at present, I suppose, of I feel as anxious for Moore as I could do the same. "I feel sorry for Horner, if there was any thing in the world to make him like it; and still more sorry for his friends, as there was much to make them regret him. I had not heard of his death till by your letter. "Some weeks ago I wrote to you my acknowledgments of Walter Scott's article. Now I know it to be his, it cannot add to my good opinion of him, but it adds to that of myself. ́ He, and Gifford, and Moore, are the only regulars I ever knew who had nothing of the garrison about their manner: no nonsense, nor affectations, look you! As for the rest whom I have known, there was always more or less of the author about them the pen peeping from behind the ear, and the thumbs a little inky, or so. "Lalla Rookh' you must recollect that, in the way of title, the Giaour' has never been pronounced to this day; and both it and Childe Harold sounded very facetious to the blue-bottles of wit and humour about town, till they were taught and startled into a proper deportment; and therefore Lalla Rookh, which is very orthodox and oriental, is as good a title as need be, if not better. I could wish rather that he had not called it a Persian Tale;' firstly, because we have had Turkish Tales, and Hindoo Tales, and Assyrian Tales, already; and tale is a word of which it repents me to have nicknamed poesy. 'Fable' would be better; and, secondly, Persian Tale' reminds one of the lines of Pope on Ambrose Phillips; though no one can say, to be sure, that this tale has been turned for half-a-crown; still it is as well to avoid such clashings. Persian Story' — why not?- -or Romance? [Francis Horner, Esq., M.P. for St. Mawes, died at Pisa in February, 1817, in his thirty-ninth year, and was interred in the Protestant burying-ground at Leghorn. Sir James Mackintosh, in his diary of the 6th of March, gives the following interesting account of what took place in the House of Commons on the motion for a new writ for St. Mawes :-"Lord Morpeth (now Earl of Carlisle) opened it in a speech so perfect, that it might have been placed as a passage in the most elegant English writer: it was full of feeling; every topic was skilfully presented, and contained by a sort of prudence which is a part of taste, within safe limits; he slid over the thinnest ice without cracking it. Canning filled well what would have been the vacant place of a calm observer of Horner's public life and talents. Manners Sutton's most affecting speech was a tribute of affection from a private friend become a political enemy; Lord Lascelles, at the head of the country gentlemen of England, closing this affecting, improving, and most memorable scene by declaring, that if the sense of the House could have been taken on this occasion, it would have been unanimous.' 1 may say, without exaggeration, that never were so many words uttered without the least suspicion of exaggeration; and that never was so much honour paid in for myself, for the soul of me, and I would not have him succeed otherwise than splendidly, which I trust he will do. 66 With regard to the Witch Drama,' I sent all the three acts by post, weck after week, within this last month. I repeat that I have not an idea if it is good or bad. If bad, it must, on no account, be risked in publication; if good, it is at your service. I value it at three hundred guineas, or less, if you like it. Perhaps, if published, the best way will be to add it to your winter volume, and not publish separately. The price will show you I don't pique myself upon it; so speak out. You may put it in the fire, if you like, and Gifford don't like. "The Armenian Grammar is published that is, one; the other is still in MS. My illness has prevented me from moving this month past, and I have done nothing more with the Armenian. "Of Italian or rather Lombard manners, I could tell you little or nothing: I went two or three times to the governor's conversazione, (and if you go once, you are free to go always,) at which, as I only saw very plain women, a formal circle, in short a worse sort of rout, I did not go again. I went to Academie and to Madame Albrizzi's, where I saw pretty much the same thing, with the addition of some literati, who are the same blue, by -, all the world over. I fell in love the first week with Madame Segati, and I have continued so ever since, because she is very pretty and pleasing, and talks Venetian, which amuses me, and is naïve. Very truly, &c. "P. S.-Pray send the red tooth-powder by a safe hand, and speedily. 66 any age or nation to intrinsic claims alone. A Howard introduced, and an English House of Commons adopted, the proposition of thus honouring the memory of a man of thirty-eight, the son of a shopkeeper, who never filled an office, or had the power of obliging a living creature, and whose grand title to this distinction was the belief of his virtue. How honourable to the age and to the House! A country where such sentiments prevail is not ripe for destruction."- Life, vol. ii. p. 339.] 2 [" The bard whom pilfer'd pastorals renown, Who turns a Persian tale for half a crown, "Ambrose Phillips translated a book called the Persian Tales,' a book full of fancy and imagination."— POPE.] 3 Whenever a word or passage occurs (as in this instance) which Lord Byron would have pronounced emphatically in speaking, it appears, in his handwriting, as if written with something of the same vehemence. 4 Here follow the same rhymes (" I read the Christabel," &c.) which have already been given in one of his letters to myself. "To hook the reader, you, John Murray, Have publish'd' Anjou's Margaret,' Which won't be sold off in a hurry 66 (At least, it has not been as yet); These rhymes to Morning Post or Perry, And get me into such a scrape! For, firstly, I should have to sally, All in my little boat, against a Gally; You may show these matters to Moore and the select, but not to the profane; and tell Moore, that I wonder he don't write to one now and then." make me stir before my minute, while under the influence of that paramount delirium. Seriously speaking, there is a malady rife in the city a dangerous one, they say. However, mine did not appear so, though it was not pleasant. "This is Passion-week and twilight and all the world are at vespers. They have an eternal churching, as in all Catholic countries, but are not so bigoted as they seem to be in Spain. "I don't know whether to be glad or sorry that you are leaving Mayfield. Had I ever been at Newstead during your stay there, (except during the winter of 1813-14, when the roads were impracticable,) we should have been within hail, and I should like to know that country well, having been all over have made a giro of the Peak with you. I it when a boy. Was you ever in Dovedale? I can assure you there are things in Derbyshire as noble as Greece or Switzerland. But you had always a lingering after London, and I don't wonder at it. I liked it as well as any body, myself, now and then. 66 "You will begin to think my epistolary offerings (to whatever altar you please to Will you remember me to Rogers? devote them) rather prodigal. But until whom I presume to be flourishing, and whom you answer, I shall not abate, because you I regard as our poetical papa. You are his deserve no better. I know you are well, because I hear of your voyaging to London and the environs, which I rejoice to learn, because your note alarmed me by the purgation and phlebotomy therein prognosticated. I also hear of your being in the press; all which, methinks, might have furnished you with subject-matter for a middle-sized letter, considering that I am in foreign parts, and that the last month's advertisements and obituary would be absolute news to me from your Tramontane country. "I told you, in my last, I have had a smart fever. There is an epidemic in the place; but I suspect, from the symptoms, that mine was a fever of my own, and had nothing in common with the low, vulgar typhus, which is at this moment decimating Venice, and which has half unpeopled Milan, if the accounts be true. This malady has sorely discomfited my serving men, who want sadly to be gone away, and get me to remove. But, besides my natural perversity, I was seasoned in Turkey, by the continual whispers of the plague, against apprehensions of contagion. Besides which, apprehension would not prevent it; and then I am still in love, and forty thousand' fevers should not 1 The only plausible claim of these epistles to authenticity arises from the circumstance of St. Paul having (according to the opinion of Mosheim and others) written an epistle to the Corinthians, before that which we now call his first. They are, however, universally given up lawful son, and I the illegitimate. Has he begun yet upon Sheridan? If you see our republican friend, Leigh Hunt, pray present my remembrances. I saw about nine months ago that he was in a row (like my friend Hobhouse) with the Quarterly Reviewers. For my part, I never could understand these quarrels of authors with critics and with one another. 'For God's sake, gentlemen, what do they mean?' "What think you of your countryman, Maturin? I take some credit to myself for having done my best to bring out Bertram ; but I must say my colleagues were quite as ready and willing. Walter Scott, however, was the first who mentioned him, which he did to me, with great commendation, in 1815; and it is to this casualty, and two or three other accidents, that this very clever fellow owed his first and well-merited public success. What a chance is fame? "Did I tell you that I have translated two Epistles? -a correspondence between St. Paul and the Corinthians, not to be found in our version, but the Armenian - but which seems to me very orthodox, and I have done it into scriptural prose English. ' 66 Ever, &c." as spurious. Though frequently referred to as existing in the Armenian, by Primate Usher, Johan. Gregorius, and other learned men, they were for the first time, I believe, translated from that language by the two Whistons, who subjoined the correspondence, with a Greek and LETTER 270. 66 TO MR. MURRAY. "Venice, April 2. 1817. I sent you the whole of the Drama at three several times, act by act, in separate covers. I hope that you have, or will receive, some or the whole of it. "So Love has a conscience. By Diana! I shall make him take back the box, though it were Pandora's. The discovery of its intrinsic silver occurred on sending it to have the lid adapted to admit Marianna's portrait. Of course I had the box remitted in statu quo, and had the picture set in another, which suits it (the picture) very well. The defaulting box is not touched, hardly, and was not in the man's hands above an hour. “I am aware of what you say of Otway; and am a very great admirer of his, all except of that maudlin b-h of chaste lewdness and blubbering curiosity, Belvidera, whom I utterly despise, abhor, and detest. But the story of Marino Faliero is different, and, I think, so much finer, that I wish Otway had taken it instead: the head conspiring against the body for refusal of redress for a real injury, jealousy — treason, with the more fixed and inveterate passions (mixed with policy) of an old or elderly man- the devil himself could not have a finer subject, and he is your only tragic dramatist. "There is still, in the Doge's palace, the black veil painted over Faliero's picture, and the staircase whereon he was first crowned Doge, and subsequently decapitated. This was the thing that most struck my imagination in Venice -more than the Rialto, which I visited for the sake of Shylock; and more, too, than Schiller's Armenian,' a novel which took a great hold of me when a boy. It is also called the 'Ghost Seer,' and I never walked down St. Mark's by moonlight without thinking of it, and at nine o'clock he died!'-But I hate things all fiction; and therefore the Merchant and Othello have no great associations to me: but Pierre has. There should always be some foundation of Maturin's tragedy. By your account of him last year to me, he seemed a bit of a coxcomb, personally. Poor fellow! to be sure, he had had a long seasoning of adversity, which is not so hard to bear as t'other thing. I hope that this won't throw him back into the slough of Despond.'2 "You talk of marriage ;'-ever since my own funeral, the word makes me giddy, and throws me into a cold sweat. Pray, don't repeat it. 66 'You should close with Madame de Stael. This will be her best work, and permanently historical; it is on her father, the Revolution, and Buonaparte, &c. Bonstetten told me in Switzerland it was very great. I have not seen it myself, but the author often. She was very kind to me at Copet. "There have been two articles in the Venice papers, one a Review of Glenarvon, Caroline Lamb's, and the other a Review of Childe Harold, in which it proclaims me the most rebellious and contumacious admirer of Buonaparte now surviving in Europe. Both these articles are translations from the Literary Gazette of German Jena. "Tell me that Walter Scott is better. would not have him ill for the world. I suppose it was by sympathy that I had my fever at the same time. I "I joy in the success of your Quarterly, but I must still stick by the Edinburgh; Jeffery has done so by me, I must say, through every thing, and this is more than I deserved from him. I have more than once acknowledged to you by letter the Article' (and articles); say that you have received the said letters, as I do not otherwise know what letters arrive. Both Reviews came, but nothing more. M.'s play and the extract not yet come. "Write to say whether my Magician has arrived, with all his scenes, spells, &c. "Yours ever, &c. "It is useless to send to the Foreign Office: nothing arrives to me by that con Latin version, to their edition of the Armenian History[" Who answer'd me just now? Who, when I said of Moses of Chorene, published in 1736. The translation by Lord Byron is, as far as I can learn, the first that has ever been attempted in English; and as, proceeding from his pen, it must possess, of course, additional interest, the reader will not be displeased to find it in the Appendix. Annexed to the copy in my possession are the following words in his own handwriting:"Done into English by me, January, February, 1817, at the Convent of San Lazaro, with the aid and exposition of the Armenian text by the Father Paschal Aucher, Armenian friar. - BYRON. I had also (he adds) the Latin text, but it is in many places very corrupt, and with great omissions." 'Tis nine, turn'd round and said so solemnly 2 ["Let him take heart-whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.' This sentence, by the way, is a contrast to the other one of Quem Deus vult perdere prius demental,' which may be thus done into English: "God maddens him whom 'tis his will to love, veyance. I suppose some zealous clerk but expect to reperuse with great pleasure thinks it a Tory duty to prevent it.” LETTER 271. TO MR. ROGERS. 64 Venice, April 4. 1817. "It is a considerable time since I wrote to you last, and I hardly know why I should trouble you now, except that I think you will not be sorry to hear from me now and then. You and I were never correspondents, but always something better, which is, very good friends. "I saw your friend Sharp in Switzerland, or rather in the German territory (which is and is not Switzerland), and he gave Hobhouse and me a very good route for the Bernese Alps; however we took another from a German, and went by Clarens, the Dent de Jaman to Montbovon, and through Simmenthal to Thoun, and so on to Lauterbroun; except that from thence to the Grindlewald, instead of round about, we went right over the Wengen Alps' very summit, and being close under the Jungfrau, saw it, its glaciers, and heard the avalanches in all their glory, having famous weather therefor. We of course went from the Grindlewald over the Sheidech to Brientz and its lake; past the Reichenbach and all that mountain road, which reminded me of Albania and Etolia and Greece, except that the people here were more civilised and rascally. I do not think so very much of Chamouni (except the source of the Arveron, to which we went up to the teeth of the ice, so as to look into and touch the cavity, against the warning of the guides, only one of whom would go with us so close,) as of the Jungfrau, and the Pissevache, and Simplon, which are quite out of all mortal competition. "I was at Milan about a moon, and saw Monti and some other living curiosities, and thence on to Verona, where I did not forget your story of the assassination during your sojourn there, and brought away with me some fragments of Juliet's tomb, and a lively recollection of the amphitheatre. The Countess Goetz (the governor's wife here) told me that there is still a ruined castle of the Montecchi between Verona and Vicenza. I have been at Venice since November, but shall proceed to Rome shortly. For my deeds here, are they not written in my letters to the unreplying Thomas Moore? to him I refer you: he has received them all, and not answered one. "Will you remember me to Lord and Lady Holland? have to thank the former for a book which I have not yet received, on my return, viz. the second edition of Lope de Vega. I have heard of Moore's forthcoming poem: he cannot wish himself more success than I wish and augur for him. I have also heard great things of Tales of my Landlord,' but I have not yet received them; by all accounts they beat even Waverley, &c., and are by the same author. Maturin's second tragedy has, it seems, failed, for which I should think any body would be sorry. My health was very victorious till within the last month, when I had a fever. There is a typhus in these parts, but I don't think it was that. However, I got well without a physician or drugs. "I forgot to tell you that, last autumn, I furnished Lewis with bread and salt' for some days at Diodati, in reward for which (besides his conversation) he translated Goethe's Faust' to me by word of mouth, and I set him by the ears with Madame de Stael about the slave trade. I am indebted for many and kind courtesies to our Lady of Copet, and I now love her as much as I always did her works, of which I was and am a great admirer. When are you to begin with Sheridan? What are you doing, and how do you do? "Ever very truly, &c." |