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THE CONFESSIONS OF LORD BYRON

A COLLECTION OF HIS PRIVATE OPINIONS
OF MEN AND OF MATTERS, TAKEN FROM
THE NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION OF
HIS LETTERS AND JOURNALS

ARRANGED BY

W. A. LEWIS BETTANY

EDITOR OF "JOHNSON'S TABLE TALK"

LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1905

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INTRODUCTION

ON BYRON'S OBLIGATION TO JOHNSON

To arrive at the real Byron in the most expeditious fashion, you must go by way of his Letters and Journals. You may get to your destination by another route, by the line that has Galt, Medwin, Scott, Moore, and Lady Blessington for stopping-places; but this latter track makes so many deviations and takes so long a time, that the wonder is it ever reaches home. Or, to vary the metaphor, by dint of reading Galt, Medwin, etc., you may obtain a composite picture which yields a recognisable portrait of Byron; but, if you would get a speaking likeness of his lordship, you must go to his correspondence, to those letters in which he reproduces his own lineaments on every page. Here you find the pungent humour which expresses itself in caustic epigrams or pasquinades, in good stories, and in apt quotations; the allied quality of pugnacity and love of controversy which makes the poet always look as if he were "spoiling for a fight"; the pride and haughtiness of temper which resents any diminution of his dues whether they be those of rank, of money, or of friendship; and, overshadowing and colouring everything, that taint of the histrionic spirit

-the natural birthright, be it remembered, of a man of aristocratic race and temper that taint, with its accompanying love of emulation and of mystifying, which is for ever provoking Byron to make Italy the centre of his stage and to let the lime-light play quite impartially on all his qualities-good, bad, or indifferent. As a consequence, Byron never seems quite able to explain himself; he rarely manages to utter a definitive opinion of men and of matters; he seldom succeeds in formulating a reasoned philosophy of religion or of life. He is always beset by the uneasy recollection of his Harold or of his Manfred mask; and this reluctant pose, this ineradicable self-consciousness, this self-imposed isolation, this revolt for mere revolt's sake, are among the causes that help to make Byron's Letters and Journals the most pathetic, as they are undoubtedly the most entertaining, of "human documents." Apart, however, from their revelations of Byron the peer and poet, apart from their interesting display of some of the raw material that their writer subsequently worked up into "Don Juan," these Letters-which in the present volume are digested into their main topics are chiefly noteworthy for the extent and variety of the literary allusions which they contain. Of all the famous letter-writers-Walpole, Chesterfield, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lamb, Stevenson, and the restByron is by far the most lavish of quotations.* His

* Needless to say, Byron, generally remote from England and therefore remote from books of reference, often fails to offer the ipsissima verba of his author. More than once he gives the wrong words of the "Vanity of Human Wishes," and of Prior's epigram, "To John I ow'd great obligation." But the two most interesting

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