Life of Lord Byron Volume I Part 16

"To mark a friend's remains these stones arise; I never knew but one, and here he lies."[98]

Melancholy, indeed, seems to have been gaining fast upon his mind at this period. In another letter to Mr. Hodgson, he says,--"You know laughing is the sign of a rational animal--so says Dr. Smollet. I think so too, but unluckily my spirits don't always keep pace with my opinions."

Old Murray, the servant whom he mentions, in a preceding extract, as the only faithful follower now remaining to him, had long been in the service of the former lord, and was regarded by the young poet with a fondness of affection which it has seldom been the lot of age and dependence to inspire. "I have more than once," says a gentleman who was at this time a constant visiter at Newstead, "seen Lord Byron at the dinner-table fill out a tumbler of Madeira, and hand it over his shoulder to Joe Murray, who stood behind his chair, saying, with a cordiality that brightened his whole countenance, 'Here, my old fellow.'"

The unconcern with which he could sometimes allude to the defect in his foot is manifest from another pa.s.sage in one of these letters to Mr. Hodgson. That gentleman having said jestingly that some of the verses in the "Hours of Idleness" were calculated to make schoolboys rebellious, Lord Byron answers--"If my songs have produced the glorious effects you mention, I shall be a complete Tyrtaeus;--though I am sorry to say I resemble that interesting harper more in his person than in his poesy." Sometimes, too, even an allusion to this infirmity by others, when he could perceive that it was not offensively intended, was borne by him with the most perfect good humour. "I was once present," says the friend I have just mentioned, "in a large and mixed company, when a vulgar person asked him aloud--'Pray, my Lord, how is that foot of yours?'--'Thank you, sir,'

answered Lord Byron, with the utmost mildness--'much the same as usual.'"

The following extract, relating to a reverend friend of his Lords.h.i.+p, is from another of his letters to Mr. Hodgson, this year:--

"A few weeks ago I wrote to ----, to request he would receive the son of a citizen of London, well known to me, as a pupil; the family having been particularly polite during the short time I was with them induced me to this application. Now, mark what follows, as somebody sublimely saith. On this day arrives an epistle signed ----, containing not the smallest reference to tuition or _in_tuition, but a _pe_t.i.tion for Robert Gregson, of pugilistic notoriety, now in bondage for certain paltry pounds sterling, and liable to take up his everlasting abode in Banco Regis. Had the letter been from any of my _lay_ acquaintance, or, in short, from any person but the gentleman whose signature it bears, I should have marvelled not. If ---- is serious, I congratulate pugilism on the acquisition of such a patron, and shall be most happy to advance any sum necessary for the liberation of the captive Gregson. But I certainly hope to be certified from you, or some respectable housekeeper, of the fact, before I write to ---- on the subject. When I say the _fact_, I mean of the letter being written by ----, not having any doubt as to the authenticity of the statement. The letter is now before me, and I keep it for your perusal."

His time at Newstead during this autumn was princ.i.p.ally occupied in enlarging and preparing his Satire for the press; and with the view, perhaps, of mellowing his own judgment of its merits, by keeping it some time before his eyes in a printed form,[99] he had proofs taken off from the ma.n.u.script by his former publisher at Newark. It is somewhat remarkable, that, excited as he was by the attack of the reviewers, and possessing, at all times, such rapid powers of composition, he should have allowed so long an interval to elapse between the aggression and the revenge. But the importance of his next move in literature seems to have been fully appreciated by him. He saw that his chances of future eminence now depended upon the effort he was about to make, and therefore deliberately collected all his energies for the spring. Among the preparatives by which he disciplined his talent to the task was a deep study of the writings of Pope; and I have no doubt that from this period may be dated the enthusiastic admiration which he ever after cherished for this great poet,--an admiration which at last extinguished in him, after one or two trials, all hope of pre-eminence in the same track, and drove him thenceforth to seek renown in fields more open to compet.i.tion.

The misanthropic mood of mind into which he had fallen at this time, from disappointed affections and thwarted hopes, made the office of satirist but too congenial and welcome to his spirit. Yet it is evident that this bitterness existed far more in his fancy than his heart; and that the sort of relief he now found in making war upon the world arose much less from the indiscriminate wounds he dealt around, than from the new sense of power he became conscious of in dealing them, and by which he more than recovered his former station in his own esteem. In truth, the versatility and ease with which, as shall presently be shown, he could, on the briefest consideration, s.h.i.+ft from praise to censure, and, sometimes, almost as rapidly, from censure to praise, shows how fanciful and transient were the impressions under which he, in many instances, p.r.o.nounced his judgments; and though it may in some degree deduct from the weight of his eulogy, absolves him also from any great depth of malice in his Satire.

His coming of age, in 1809, was celebrated at Newstead by such festivities as his narrow means and society could furnish. Besides the ritual roasting of an ox, there was a ball, it seems, given on the occasion,--of which the only particular I could collect, from the old domestic who mentioned it, was, that Mr. Hanson, the agent of her lord, was among the dancers. Of Lord Byron's own method of commemorating the day, I find the following curious record in a letter written from Genoa in 1822:--"Did I ever tell you that the day I came of age I dined on eggs and bacon and a bottle of ale?--For once in a way they are my favourite dish and drinkable; but as neither of them agree with me, I never use them but on great jubilees,--in four or five years or so." The pecuniary supplies necessary towards his outset, at this epoch, were procured from money-lenders at an enormously usurious interest, the payment of which for a long time continued to be a burden to him.

It was not till the beginning of this year that he took his Satire,--in a state ready, as he thought, for publication,--to London.

Before, however, he had put the work to press, new food was unluckily furnished to his spleen by the neglect with which he conceived himself to have been treated by his guardian, Lord Carlisle. The relations between this n.o.bleman and his ward had, at no time, been of such a nature as to afford opportunities for the cultivation of much friendliness on either side; and to the temper and influence of Mrs.

Byron must mainly be attributed the blame of widening, if not of producing, this estrangement between them. The coldness with which Lord Carlisle had received the dedication of the young poet's first volume was, as we have seen from one of the letters of the latter, felt by him most deeply. He, however, allowed himself to be so far governed by prudential considerations as not only to stifle this displeasure, but even to introduce into his Satire, as originally intended for the press, the following compliment to his guardian:--

"On one alone Apollo deigns to smile, And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle."

The crown, however, thus generously awarded, did not long remain where it had been placed. In the interval between the inditing of this couplet and the delivery of the ma.n.u.script to the press, Lord Byron, under the impression that it was customary for a young peer, on first taking his seat, to have some friend to introduce him, wrote to remind Lord Carlisle that he should be of age at the commencement of the session. Instead, however, of the sort of answer which he expected, a mere formal, and, as it appeared to him, cold reply, acquainting him with the technical mode of proceeding on such occasions, was all that, in return to this application, he received. Disposed as he had been, by preceding circ.u.mstances, to suspect his n.o.ble guardian of no very friendly inclinations towards him, this backwardness in proposing to introduce him to the House (a ceremony, however, as it appears, by no means necessary or even usual) was sufficient to rouse in his sensitive mind a strong feeling of resentment. The indignation, thus excited, found a vent, but too temptingly, at hand;--the laudatory couplet I have just cited was instantly expunged, and his Satire went forth charged with those vituperative verses against Lord Carlisle, of which, gratifying as they must have been to his revenge at the moment, he, not long after, with the placability so inherent in his generous nature, repented.[100]

During the progress of his poem through the press, he increased its length by more than a hundred lines; and made several alterations, one or two of which may be mentioned, as ill.u.s.trative of that prompt susceptibility of new impressions and influences which rendered both his judgment and feelings so variable. In the Satire, as it originally stood, was the following couplet:--

"Though printers condescend the press to soil With odes by Smythe, and epic songs by Hoyle."

Of the injustice of these lines (unjust, it is but fair to say, to both the writers mentioned,) he, on the brink of publication, repented; and,--as far, at least, as regarded one of the intended victims,--adopted a tone directly opposite in his printed Satire, where the name of Professor Smythe is mentioned honourably, as it deserved, in conjunction with that of Mr. Hodgson, one of the poet's most valued friends:--

"Oh dark asylum of a Vandal race!

At once the boast of learning and disgrace; So sunk in dulness, and so lost in shame, That Smythe and Hodgson scarce redeem thy fame."

In another instance we find him "changing his hand" with equal facility and suddenness. The original ma.n.u.script of the Satire contained this line,--

"I leave topography to c.o.xcomb Gell;"

but having, while the work was printing, become acquainted with Sir William Gell, he, without difficulty, by the change of a single epithet, converted satire into eulogy, and the line now descends to posterity thus:--

"I leave topography to _cla.s.sic_ Gell."[101]

Among the pa.s.sages added to the poem during its progress through the press were those lines denouncing the licentiousness of the Opera.

"Then let Ausonia," &c. which the young satirist wrote one night, after returning, brimful of morality, from the Opera, and sent them early next morning to Mr. Dallas for insertion. The just and animated tribute to Mr. Crabbe was also among the after-thoughts with which his poem was adorned; nor can we doubt that both this, and the equally merited eulogy on Mr. Rogers, were the disinterested and deliberate result of the young poet's judgment, as he had never at that period seen either of these distinguished persons, and the opinion he then expressed of their genius remained unchanged through life. With the author of the Pleasures of Memory he afterwards became intimate, but with him, whom he had so well designated as "Nature's sternest painter, yet the best," he was never lucky enough to form any acquaintance;--though, as my venerated friend and neighbour, Mr.

Crabbe himself, tells me, they were once, without being aware of it, in the same inn together for a day or two, and must have frequently met, as they went in and out of the house, during the time.

Almost every second day, while the Satire was printing, Mr. Dallas, who had undertaken to superintend it through the press, received fresh matter, for the enrichment of its pages, from the author, whose mind, once excited on any subject, knew no end to the outpourings of its wealth. In one of his short notes to Mr. Dallas, he says, "Print soon, or I shall overflow with rhyme;" and it was, in the same manner, in all his subsequent publications,--as long, at least, as he remained within reach of the printer,--that he continued thus to feed the press, to the very last moment, with new and "thick-coming fancies,"

which the re-perusal of what he had already written suggested to him.

It would almost seem, indeed, from the extreme facility and rapidity with which he produced some of his brightest pa.s.sages during the progress of his works through the press, that there was in the very act of printing an excitement to his fancy, and that the rush of his thoughts towards this outlet gave increased life and freshness to their flow.

Among the pa.s.sing events from which he now caught ill.u.s.trations for his poem was the melancholy death of Lord Falkland,--a gallant, but dissipated naval officer, with whom the habits of his town life had brought him acquainted, and who, about the beginning of March, was killed in a duel by Mr. Powell. That this event affected Lord Byron very deeply, the few touching sentences devoted to it in his Satire prove. "On Sunday night (he says) I beheld Lord Falkland presiding at his own table in all the honest pride of hospitality; on Wednesday morning at three o'clock I saw stretched before me all that remained of courage, feeling, and a host of pa.s.sions." But it was not by words only that he gave proof of sympathy on this occasion. The family of the unfortunate n.o.bleman were left behind in circ.u.mstances which needed something more than the mere expression of compa.s.sion to alleviate them; and Lord Byron, notwithstanding the pressure of his own difficulties at the time, found means, seasonably and delicately, to a.s.sist the widow and children of his friend. In the following letter to Mrs. Byron, he mentions this among other matters of interest,--and in a tone of unostentatious sensibility highly honourable to him.

LETTER 32.

TO MRS. BYRON.

"8. St. James's Street, March 6. 1809.

"Dear Mother,

"My last letter was written under great depression of spirits from poor Falkland's death, who has left without a s.h.i.+lling four children and his wife. I have been endeavouring to a.s.sist them, which, G.o.d knows, I cannot do as I could wish, from my own embarra.s.sments and the many claims upon me from other quarters.

"What you say is all very true: come what may, _Newstead_ and I _stand_ or fall together. I have now lived on the spot, I have fixed my heart upon it, and no pressure, present or future, shall induce me to barter the last vestige of our inheritance. I have that pride within me which will enable me to support difficulties. I can endure privations; but could I obtain in exchange for Newstead Abbey the first fortune in the country I would reject the proposition. Set your mind at ease on that score; Mr. H---- talks like a man of business on the subject,--I feel like a man of honour, and I will not sell Newstead.

"I shall get my seat on the return of the affidavits from Carhais, in Cornwall, and will do something in the House soon: I must dash, or it is all over. My Satire must be kept secret for a month; after that you may say what you please on the subject. Lord C. has used me infamously, and refused to state any particulars of my family to the Chancellor. I have _lashed_ him in my rhymes, and perhaps his Lords.h.i.+p may regret not being more conciliatory. They tell me it will have a sale; I hope so, for the bookseller has behaved well, as far as publis.h.i.+ng well goes.

"Believe me, &c.

"P.S.--You shall have a mortgage on one of the farms."

The affidavits which he here mentions, as expected from Cornwall, were those required in proof of the marriage of Admiral Byron with Miss Trevanion, the solemnisation of which having taken place, as it appears, in a private chapel at Carhais, no regular certificate of the ceremony could be produced. The delay in procuring other evidence, coupled with the refusal of Lord Carlisle to afford any explanations respecting his family, interposed those difficulties which he alludes to in the way of his taking his seat. At length, all the necessary proofs having been obtained, he, on the 13th of March, presented himself in the House of Lords, in a state more lone and unfriended, perhaps, than any youth of his high station had ever before been reduced to on such an occasion,--not having a single individual of his own cla.s.s either to take him by the hand as friend or acknowledge him as acquaintance. To chance alone was he even indebted for being accompanied as far as the bar of the House by a very distant relative, who had been, little more than a year before, an utter stranger to him. This relative was Mr. Dallas; and the account which he has given of the whole scene is too striking in all its details to be related in any other words than his own:--

"The Satire was published about the middle of March, previous to which he took his seat in the House of Lords, on the 13th of the same month.

On that day, pa.s.sing down St. James's Street, but with no intention of calling, I saw his chariot at his door, and went in. His countenance, paler than usual, showed that his mind was agitated, and that he was thinking of the n.o.bleman to whom he had once looked for a hand and countenance in his introduction to the House. He said to me--'I am glad you happened to come in; I am going to take my seat, perhaps you will go with me.' I expressed my readiness to attend him; while, at the same time, I concealed the shock I felt on thinking that this young man, who, by birth, fortune, and talent, stood high in life, should have lived so unconnected and neglected by persons of his own rank, that there was not a single member of the senate to which he belonged, to whom he could or would apply to introduce him in a manner becoming his birth. I saw that he felt the situation, and I fully partook his indignation.

"After some talk about the Satire, the last sheets of which were in the press, I accompanied Lord Byron to the House. He was received in one of the ante-chambers by some of the officers in attendance, with whom he settled respecting the fees he had to pay. One of them went to apprise the Lord Chancellor of his being there, and soon returned for him. There were very few persons in the House. Lord Eldon was going through some ordinary business. When Lord Byron entered, I thought he looked still paler than before; and he certainly wore a countenance in which mortification was mingled with, but subdued by, indignation. He pa.s.sed the woolsack without looking round, and advanced to the table where the proper officer was attending to administer the oaths. When he had gone through them, the Chancellor quitted his seat, and went towards him with a smile, putting out his hand warmly to welcome him; and, though I did not catch his words, I saw that he paid him some compliment. This was all thrown away upon Lord Byron, who made a stiff bow, and put the tips of his fingers into the Chancellor's hand. The Chancellor did not press a welcome so received, but resumed his seat; while Lord Byron carelessly seated himself for a few minutes on one of the empty benches to the left of the throne, usually occupied by the lords in opposition. When, on his joining me, I expressed what I had felt, he said--'If I had shaken hands heartily, he would have set me down for one of his party--but I will have nothing to do with any of them, on either side; I have taken my seat, and now I will go abroad.'

We returned to St. James's Street, but he did not recover his spirits."

To this account of a ceremonial so trying to the proud spirit engaged in it, and so little likely to abate the bitter feeling of misanthropy now growing upon him, I am enabled to add, from his own report in one of his note-books, the particulars of the short conversation which he held with the Lord Chancellor on the occasion:--

"When I came of age, some delays, on account of some birth and marriage certificates from Cornwall, occasioned me not to take my seat for several weeks. When these were over, and I had taken the oaths, the Chancellor apologised to me for the delay, observing 'that these forms were a part of his _duty_.' I begged him to make no apology, and added (as he certainly had shown no violent hurry), 'Your Lords.h.i.+p was exactly like Tom Thumb' (which was then being acted)--'you did your _duty_, and you did _no more_.'"

In a few days after, the Satire made its appearance; and one of the first copies was sent, with the following letter, to his friend Mr.

Harness.

LETTER 33.

TO MR. HARNESS.

"8. St. James's Street, March 18. 1809.

"There was no necessity for your excuses: if you have time and inclination to write, 'for what we receive, the Lord make us thankful,'--if I do not hear from you I console myself with the idea that you are much more agreeably employed.