In his mention here of other " purposes," he refers to an intention which he had of dividing the residue of the sum between two other gentlemen of literary celebrity, equally in want of such aid, Mr. Maturin and Mr. ** [Coleridge]. The whole design, however, though entered into with the utmost sincerity on the part of the noble poet, ultimately failed. Mr. Murray, who was well acquainted with the straits to which Lord Byron himself had been reduced, and foresaw that a time might come when even money thus gained would be welcome to him, on learning the uses to which the sum was to be applied, demurred in advancing it, -alleging that, though bound not only by his word but his will to pay the amount to Lord Byron, he did not conceive himself called upon to part with it to others. How earnestly the noble poet himself, though with executions, at the time, impending over his head, endeavoured to urge the point, will appear from the following letter:

LETTER 239. TO MR. MURRAY.

'February 22. 1816. "When the sum offered by you, and even pressed by you, was declined, it was with reference to a separate publication, as you know and I know. That it was large, I admitted and admit; and that made part of my consideration in refusing it, till I knew better what you were likely to make of it. With regard to what has passed or is to pass, about Mr. Maturin, the case is in no respect different from the transfer of former copyrights to Mr. Dallas. Had I taken you at your word, that is, taken your money, I might have used it as I pleased; and it could be in no respect different to you whether I paid it to a w-, or a hospital, or assisted a man of talent in distress. The truth of the matter seems this: you offered more than the poems are worth. I said so, and I think so; but you know, or at least

1 The sale of these books took place the following month, and they were described in the catalogue as the property of "a Nobleman about to leave England on a Tour."

From a note to Mr. Murray, it would appear that he had been first announced as going to the Morea : —

"I hope that the catalogue of the books, &c., has not been published without my seeing it. I must reserve

The letter that follows will give some idea of those embarrassments in his own affairs, under the pressure of which he could be thus considerate of the wants of others.

LETTER 239. TO MR. MURRAY.

"March 6. 1816.

"I have received the enclosed, and beg you to send the writer immediately any thing of mine, coming under the description of his (which I disown, as stolen and published in request-except the Curse of Minerva' the miserable and villanous copy in the Magazine)-it was not, and is not, meant for publication.

"I sent to you to-day for this reason the books you purchased are again seized, and, as matters stand, had much better be sold at once by public auction. I wish to see you to-morrow to return your bill for them, which, thank heaven, is neither due nor paid. That part, as far as you are concerned, being settled, (which it can be, and shall be, when I see you to-morrow,) I have no further delicacy about the matter. is about the tenth execution in as many months; so I am pretty well hardened; but it is fit I should pay the forfeit of my forefathers' extravagances and my own; and, whatever my faults may be, I suppose they will be pretty well expiated in time-or eternity. "Ever, &c.

This

I

"P. S. - I need hardly say that I knew nothing till this day of the new seizure. had released them from former ones, and thought, when you took them, that they

printers, and about the end of the latter month made their appearance. The following letters are the only ones I find connected with their publication.

LETTER 240. TO MR. MURRAY.

"February 3. 1816.

"I sent for 'Marmion' (which I return), because it occurred to me there might be a resemblance between part of 'Parisina' and a similar scene in Canto 2d of Marmion.' I fear there is, though I never thought of it before, and could hardly wish to imitate that which is inimitable. I wish you would ask Mr. Gifford whether I ought to say any thing upon it; I had completed the story on the passage from Gibbon, which in fact leads to a like scene naturally, without a thought of the kind; but it comes upon me not very comfortably.

"There are a few words and phrases I

want to alter in the MS., and should like to do it before you print, and will return it in an hour. 66 Yours ever.

LETTER 241. TO MR. MURRAY.

"BN."

"February 20. 1816.

"To return to our business-your epistles are vastly agreeable. With regard to the observations on carelessness, &c. I think, with all humility, that the gentle reader has considered a rather uncommon, and designedly irregular, versification for haste and negligence. The measure is not that of any of the other poems, which (I believe) were allowed to be tolerably correct, according to Byshe and the fingers- -or ears-by which bards write, and readers reckon. Great part of The Siege' is in (I think) what the learned call Anapests, (though I am not sure, being heinously forgetful of my metres and my Gradus,') and many of the lines intentionally longer or shorter than its rhyming companion; and rhyme also occurring at

greater or less intervals of caprice or convenience.

"I mean not to say that this is right or good, but merely that I could have been smoother, had it appeared to me of advantage; and that I was not otherwise without being aware of the deviation, though I now rather please than not. My wish has been feel sorry for it, as I would undoubtedly to try at something different from my former fer from each other. efforts; as I endeavoured to make them difThe versification of

The Corsair' is not that of Lara;' nor 'The Giaour' that of The Bride;' Childe strove to vary the last somewhat from all of Harold is again varied from these; and I

the others.

"P. S.-You need not be in any apprehension or grief on my account: were I to be beaten down by the world and its inheritors, I should have succumbed to many things years ago. You must not mistake my not bullying for dejection; nor imagine that because I feel, I am to faint :- but enough for the present.

66

What

"I am sorry for Sotheby's row. the devil is it about? I thought it all settled; and if I can do any thing about him or Ivan still, I am ready and willing. I do not think it proper for me just now to be much behind the scenes, but I will see the committee and move upon it, if Sotheby likes.

"If you see Mr. Sotheby, will you tell him that I wrote to Mr. Coleridge, on getting Mr. Sotheby's note, and have, I hope, done what Mr. S. wished on that subject?"

"Her look composed, and steady eye,
Bespoke a matchless constancy;
And there she stood so calm and pale,
That, but her breathing did not fail,
And motion slight of eye and head,
And of her bosom, warranted

That neither sense nor pulse she lacks.
You must have thought a form of wax,
Wrought to the very life, was there-
So still she was, so pale, so fair."

Marmion.

:

66

It was about the middle of April that his two celebrated copies of verses, Fare thee well," and "A Sketch," made their appearance in the newspapers :- - and while the latter poem was generally, and, it must be owned, justly condemned, as a sort of literary assault on an obscure female, whose situation ought to have placed her as much beneath his satire as the undignified mode of his attack certainly raised her above it 2, with regard to the other poem, opinions were a good deal more divided. To many it appeared a strain of true conjugal tenderness, a kind of appeal, which no woman with a heart could resist while by others, on the contrary, it was considered to be a mere showy effusion of sentiment, as difficult for real feeling to have produced as it was easy for fancy and art, and altogether unworthy of the deep interests involved in the subject. To this latter opinion, I confess my own to have, at first, strongly inclined; and suspicious as I could not help regarding the sentiment that could, at such a moment, indulge in such verses, the taste that prompted or sanctioned their publication appeared to me even still more questionable. On reading, however, his own account of all the circumstances in the Memoranda, I found that on both points I had, in common with a large portion of the public, done him injustice. He there described, and in a manner whose sincerity there was no doubting, the swell of

1 [See Works, p. 469.]

["Was this obscure female innocent, or was she guilty? If innocent, then was there an unhappy mistake, and, no matter what her rank, reparation was due. If guilty, the rank to which she had been raised put her on a level with Lord Byron. Her situation, therefore, if it was what he says it was, and he must have known that better than any one, ought not to have placed her beneath his satire. And as for an undignified attack rais.

tender recollections under the influence of which, as he sat one night musing in his study, these stanzas were produced, — the tears, as he said, falling fast over the paper as he wrote them.3 Neither, from that account, did it appear to have been from any wish or intention of his own, but through the injudicious zeal of a friend whom he had suffered to take a copy, that the verses met the public eye.

66

The appearance of these poems gave additional violence to the angry and inquisitorial feeling now abroad against him; and the title under which both pieces were immediately announced by various publishers, as Poems by Lord Byron on his Domestic Circumstances," carried with it a sufficient exposure of the utter unfitness of such themes for rhyme. It is, indeed, only in those emotions and passions of which imagination forms a predominant ingredient, such as love, in its first dreams, before reality has come to embody or dispel them, or sorrow, in its wane, when beginning to pass away from the heart into the fancy,- that poetry ought ever to be employed as an interpreter of feeling. For the expression of all those immediate affections and disquietudes that have their root in the actual realities of life, the art of the poet, from the very circumstance of its being an art, as well as from the coloured form in which it is accustomed to transmit impressions, cannot be otherwise than a medium as false as it is feeble.

To so very low an ebb had the industry of his assailants now succeeded in reducing his private character, that it required no small degree of courage, even among that class who are supposed to be the most tolerant of domestic irregularities, to invite him into their society. One distinguished lady of fashion, however, ventured so far as, on the eve of his departure from England, to make a party for him expressly; and nothing short, perhaps, of that high station in society which a life as blameless as it is brilliant has secured to her, could have placed beyond all reach of misrepresentation, at that moment, such a compliment to one marked with the world's censure so deeply. At this assembly of Lady Jersey's he made his last appearance, publicly, in England; and the amusing account given of some of the company in his Memo

ing the object of it above it - that is a mistake; for the object of an attack sinks under and rises above it, not according as the attack is dignified or undignified, but according as it is merited or unmerited—the charge true or false."-WILSON, 1830.]

3 [The appearance of the MS. confirms this account of the circumstances under which it was written. It is tlotted all over with the marks of tears.]

randa,of the various and characteristic ways in which the temperature of their manner towards him was affected by the cloud under which he now appeared, -was one of the passages of that Memoir it would have been most desirable, perhaps, to have preserved; though, from being a gallery of sketches, all personal and many satirical, but a small portion of it, if any, could have been presented to the public till a time when the originals had long left the scene, and any interest they might once have excited was gone with themselves. Besides the noble hostess herself, whose kindness to him, on this occasion, he never forgot, there was also one other person (then Miss Mercer, now Lady Keith), whose frank and fearless cordiality to him on that evening he most gratefully commemorated,—adding, in acknowledgment of a still more generous service, "She is a high-minded woman, and showed me more friendship than I deserved from her. I heard also of her having defended me in a large company, which at that time required more courage and firmness than most women possess."

As we are now approaching so near the close of his London life, I shall here throw together the few remaining recollections of that period with which the gleanings of his Memorandum-book, so often referred to, furnish me.

suaded Madame de Stael that Alvanley had a hundred thousand a year, &c. &c., till she praised him to his face for his beauty! and made a set at him for Albertine2, and a hundred fooleries besides. The truth is, that, though I gave up the business early, I had a tinge of dandyism 3 in my minority, and probably retained enough of it to conciliate the great ones at five-and-twenty. I had gamed, and drunk, and taken my degrees in most dissipations; and having no pedantry, and not being overbearing, we ran quietly together. I knew them all more or less, and they made me a member of Watier's (a superb club at that time), being, I take it, the only literary man (except two others, both men of the world, Moore and Spenser) in it. Our masquerade was a grand one; so was the dandy-ball too, at the Argyle, but that (the latter) was given by the four chiefs, Brummel, Mildmay, Alvanley, and Pierrepoint, if I err not.

4

I belonged, or belong, to the following clubs or societies:-to the Alfred; to the Cocoa Tree; to Watier's; to the Union; to Racket's (at Brighton); to the Pugilistic; to the Owls, or "Fly-by-night;" to the Cambridge Whig Club; to the Harrow Club, Cambridge; and to one or two private clubs;

ciety. A boar, or bore, is always remarkable for something respectable; such as wealth, character, high birth, acknowledged talent- or, in short, for something that forbids people to turn him out by the shoulders, or in other words to cut him dead. Much of this respectability is supplied by the mere circumstance of belonging to a society of clubbists within whose districts the boar obtains free warren and may wallow or grunt at pleasure. Old stagers in the club know and avoid the fated corner and arm chair which he haunts; but he often rushes from his lair on the unexperienced."- WALTER SCOTT: MS.]

6 [In St. James's Street; one of the oldest clubs in London. It is thus described by Gibbon, in 1762:"This respectable body, of which I have the honour of being a member, affords every evening a sight truly English. Twenty or thirty, perhaps, of the first men in the kingdom, in point of fortune and fashion, supping at little tables covered with a napkin, in the middle of a coffee-room, upon a bit of cold meat, or a sandwich, and drinking a glass of punch. At present we are full of king's counsellors and lords of the bed-chamber; who, having jumped into the ministry, make a very singular medley of their old principles and language with their modern ones."- Misc. Works, vol. i. p. 154.]

to the Hampden (political) Club; and to the Italian Carbonari, &c. &c., though last, not least.' I got into all these, and never stood for any other—at least to my own knowledge. I declined being proposed to several others, though pressed to stand candidate."

"When I met H ** L** (Hudson Lowe], the gaoler, at Lord Holland's, before he sailed for St. Helena, the discourse turned

upon the battle of Waterloo. I asked him whether the dispositions of Napoleon were those of a great general? He answered, disparagingly, that they were very simple.' I had always thought that a degree of simplicity was an ingredient of greatness."

"I was much struck with the simplicity of Grattan's manners in private life; they were odd, but they were natural. 1 Curran used to take him off, bowing to the very ground, and thanking God that he had no peculiarities of gesture or appearance,' in a way irresistibly ludicrous; and ** [Rogers] used to call him a Sentimental Harlequin.'

"Curran ! Curran's the man who struck me most. Such imagination! there never was any thing like it that I ever saw or heard of. His published life-his published speeches, give you no idea of the man none at all.

He was a machine of imagination, as some one said of Piron that he was an epigrammatic machine.

1[" There is nobody so odd, so gentle, and so admirable; his sayings are not to be separated from his manner. Plunket never addresses Grattan without Sir,' with a respectful voice. This mark of respect, or almost reverence, is common amongst the Irish, and certainly most amply due to this amiable and venerable person."- SIR J. MACKINTOSH, 1818.]

2 In his Memoranda there were equally enthusiastic praises of Curran "The riches," said he, "of his Irish imagination were exhaustless. I have heard that man speak more poetry than I have ever seen written,-though I saw him seldom and but occasionally. I saw him presented to Madame de Stael at Mackintosh's; - it was the grand confluence between the Rhone and the Saone, and and they were both so d-d ugly, that I could not help wondering how the best intellects of France and Ireland could have taken up respectively such residences."

In another part, however, he was somewhat more fair to Madame de Stael's personal appearance :-" Her figure was not bad; her legs tolerable; her arms good. Altogether, I can conceive her having been a desirable woman, allowing a little imagination for her soul, and so forth. She would have made a great man."

3[ When Charles Mathews first began to imitate Curran in Dublin - in society I mean Curran sent for him, and said, the moment he entered the room, "Mr. Mathews, you are a first-rate artist; and since you are to do my picture, pray allow me to give you a sitting." Every one knows how admirably Mathews succeeded in

Mathews

finishing the portraiture begun under these circumstances. No one was more aware of the truth of the representation than Curran himself. In his latter and feeble days he was riding in Hyde Park one morning, bowed down over the saddle and utterly dejected in his air. happened to observe and saluted him. Curran stopped his horse for a moment, squeezed Charles by the hand, and said, in that deep whisper which the comedian so exquisitely mimicked, "Don't speak to me, my dear you are the only Curran now."— LOCKHART.]

4 [" Crush'd was Napoleon by the northern Thor,
Who knock'd his army down with icy hammer,
Stopp'd by the clements, like a whaler, or

A blundering novice in his new French grammar."
Works, p. 150.]

["Byron occasionally said what are called good things, but never studied for them. They came naturally and easily, and mixed with the comic or the serious as it happened. A professed wit is of all earthly companions the most intolerable. He is like a schoolboy with his pockets stuffed with crackers."- WALTER SCOTT : MS.

"No first-rate author was ever what one understands by a great conversational wit. Swift's wit in common society was either the strong sense of a wonderful man unconsciously exerting his powers; or that of the same being wilfully unbending, wilfully in fact degrading himself. Who ever heard of any fame for conversational wit lingering over the memory of a Shakspeare, a Milton, even of a Dryden or Pope? Johnson is, perhaps, a solitary ex