CHAPTER VII

THE FIRST BOOK AND THE SECOND-1806 AND 1809

Byron's Egeria-The Fugitive Pieces-The Rev. John Becher, and the burning of the first quarto-Poems on Various Occasions - Bankes, and a Byron letter-Hours of Idleness-Success-Robert Charles Dallas -William Harness-The Edinburgh Review-English Bards and Scotch Reviewers-Fame-Remorse-"A kind of posthumous feel"

D

URING the early Southwell period of 1804, Byron and Elizabeth Pigot were one day studying Burns together in the parlour of her mother's house. She had been reading aloud, and had just finished the Farewell to Ayrshire :1

"Scenes of woe and scenes of pleasure,

Scenes that former thoughts renew,
Scenes of woe and scenes of pleasure,
Now a sad and last Adieu".

Her companion exclaimed "I like that metre: let me try it" and taking a pencil, he wrote on the instant those two stanzas, beginning,

"Hills of Annesley, bleak and barren"

—which, when they were published for the first time in Moore's Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, 1830,

1 "It may be noted" (says Mr. E. H. Coleridge) "that these verses were not written by Burns, though included until recently among his poems". They are by one Richard Gall, who died in 1801 (Poems, i. 211).

appeared with the legend: "Written shortly after the marriage of Miss Chaworth".1

The ice broken by this impromptu, Elizabeth heard of his long meditation of the muse. Ever since 1802 it had gone on. He was persuaded to inscribe for her one infant effort; and so she read (more respectfully no doubt than we have done) the lines to Lord Delawarr of February 1803:

"In thee I fondly hoped to clasp".

She must have encouraged him, for he then had the hardihood to recite another effusion. This too had been written in 1803, and in it he exclaimed:

"My epitaph shall be my name alone;

If that with honour fail to crown my clay,
Oh! may no other fame my deeds repay!
That, only that, shall single out the spot,
By that remembered, or with that forgot".

She might excusably kindle at this achievement for fifteen; and then, no doubt, she heard of the "first dash into poetry "-the forgotten verses to his exquisite cousin Margaret-in 1800; was perhaps regaled with a recital of the frigid elegiac stanzas of 1802, in memory of the same girl. But whatever reserves there may have been and whatever criticisms, the day marked an epoch for them both-and for the world; since from that moment "the desire to appear in print took possession of him".

His ambition went no further, at the time, than "a small volume for private circulation". He began to collect what he had scribbled, to scribble more and more; and by August 1806, his first book was in the

1 Mary Chaworth was not married until August 1805; so we have here a case for strong suspicion of Moore's ingenuousness. It was certainly more ingenious than ingenuous thus to head the stanzas; for Elizabeth Pigot, who copied them for him, can hardly have failed to tell him what in 1859-correctly or incorrectly-she stated "under her hand and seal" respecting the date of their composition (see Poems, i. 210-11).

press. Messrs. S. & J. Ridge, booksellers and printers of Newark, were the recipients of his MS., and he did not delay to adopt the sanctioned attitude of disdain for his typographer. Ridge figured instantly as "that blockhead"; but, daily flooded as he was with corrections, alterations, additions, and wholly fresh material, the blockhead managed to be ready by November. It was a quarto volume of sixty-six pages, and contained thirty-eight pieces. The first copy was presented to the Rev. John Becher, "Vicar of Rympton, Notts, and Midsomer Norton "-which evidently meant that he lived at Southwell, for he had long been an intimate friend, and now appeared as a judicious counsellor. We have seen that the summer of 1806 was the period of "Little"1 and Strangford as literary influences. Becher had from the first frowned on such readings (nothing in Moore is more engaging than the manner in which he records this condemnation of his early muse), and had recommended, as might be expected, the study of Shakespere, Milton, and the Bible, instead. He now opened his quarto, and among the harmless puerilities and the first adumbrations of that destined wonder of the world called Byronism, he found those verses To Mary which have become notorious by dint of resolute suppression. He read them, frowned again, and then sat down and wrote to the boy ("as the most gentle mode of conveying his opinion") some expostulatory couplets. Byron answered without delay, and doubly : first in a "copy of verses":

"The artless Helicon I boast is youth;

My Lyre, the Heart-my Muse, the simple Truth";

1 In a letter to Moore of June 9, 1820, Byron wrote: "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".

2 Life of Lord Byron (ed. 1838), p. 40.

then in a note, which promised that rather than allow the condemned poem to circulate, he would destroy the whole impression. That evening he kept his promise. Becher watched every copy of the quarto burn, except one which had already gone to John Pigot at Edinburgh-and his own. There is something irresistibly humorous in Becher's salvage of his own, but it was probably prompted by admiring pity for the generous boy who had been so proud of his first book-and now beheld it burn, unread, unseen, by all but two. Few of us could have done it, I think; and though the drama of the scene, and the vanity of stoicism, and, vaguely, that dear scorn for the "multitude", may have mingled into a mitigation of the sacrifice, it remained no less a sacrifice and an ordeal. Without straining at sentiment, we may surely see in imagination a dimming of the eye, a quivering of the lip, as eighteen-yeared Byron watched his "firstborn" sink into a squalid little heap of ashes.

But his enthusiasm survived, and no sooner was the burning over than he began to prepare an expurgated and enlarged edition. For the next six weeks he and Ridge (who was again employed) were wholly absorbed in this

1 A facsimile reprint of the quarto, limited to a hundred copies, was issued, for private circulation only, by the Chiswick Press in 1886. In it the suppressed verses of course appear; but Byron himself never allowed them to see the light after the destruction of the first edition.

2 These copies still survive. John Pigot's came into the possession of his sister Elizabeth, who bequeathed it, with other relics of the past, to Mrs. Webb of Newstead Abbey, where it is still preserved with watchful care. This copy is defective. Two of the leaves (pp. 17-20) wanting are those which contain the offending poem "to that naughty Mary" (as Elizabeth Pigot adds in a note attached to the copy). "which excited such a commotion in the state". The second copy was long preserved by the Becher family, and is now in the possession of Mr. H. Buxton Forman, C.B. Not a single biographer (including myself) who has seen the lines To Mary has anything but condemnation for them. "There is nothing", says Elze, "to compensate for their silly viciousness-not one felicity of thought or expression".

task; and by January 1807 the second volume "for private circulation" was ready. The quarto had been entitled Fugitive Pieces; this edition was in small octavo and was called Poems on Various Occasions. Both were anonymous.1 The octavo numbered one hundred and forty-four pages, and contained forty-eight pieces. Only a hundred copies were printed. John Pigot was again one of the earliest recipients, and was begged to destroy at once his copy of the quarto. Apparently he compromised by tearing out those leaves which held the "unlucky poem to my poor Mary". "This volume", adds the hero of the Burning, " is vastly correct, and miraculously chaste"-and then, as if to indemnify himself for the restraint shown in it, he goes on to say, Apropos, talking of love" . . . but we are not permitted to know the "à propos", for Moore flinched before it, and shook out asterisks with a lavish hand.

The publication of Poems on Various Occasions produced a letter from Cambridge. The writer was William Bankes, who came across the volume, and wrote to give his opinion. This did not happen till March, and on the same day Byron had a gratifying compliment from Henry Mackenzie, author of that rather foolish book, A Man of Feeling, but nevertheless a shrewd critic, and one whose praise was well worth having. Bankes, on the other hand, wrote in a spirit of severe criticism, and to me the answer from Byron is one of the most delightful displays of human nature which even his letters afford.

1 Two of the poems in the quarto were signed BYRON ; but the volume itself, which is without a title-page, was anonymous.

2 This Mary is not to be confounded with the heiress of Annesley, nor with Mary of Aberdeen. She was of humble, "if not equivocal", station in life; and had long fair hair, a lock of which, as well as her picture, Byron used to show among his friends. The early verses To Mary on receiving her Picture (Poems, i. 32) were also addressed to her.