going to Pisa in a few weeks, and have sent and am sending off my chattels. It regretted me that, my books and every thing being packed, I could not send you a few things I meant for you; but they were all sealed and baggaged, so as to have made it a month's work to get at them again. I gave him an envelope, with the Italian scrap in it, alluded to in my Gilchrist defence. Hobhouse will make it out for you, and it will make you laugh, and him too, the spelling particularly. The Mericani,' of whom they call me the Capo' (or Chief), mean 'Americans,' which is the name given in Romagna to a part of the Carbonari; that is to say, to the popular part, the troops of the Carbonari. They were originally a society of hunters in the forest, who took the name of Americans, but at present comprise some thousands, &c.; but I sha'n't let you further into the secret, which may be participated with the postmasters. Why they thought me their Chief, I know not: their Chiefs are like 'Legion, being many.' However, it is a post of more honour than profit, for, now that they are persecuted, it is fit that I should aid them; and so I have done, as far as my means would permit. They will rise again some day, for these fools of the government are blundering they actually seem to know nothing; for they have arrested and banished many of their own party, and let others escape who are not their friends.

:

"What think'st thou of Greece? "Address to me here as usual, till you hear further from me.

may.

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lime, and occupied, that one would think, instead of publishing for the Board of Longitude,' that you were trying to discover it. "Let me hear that Gifford is better. He can't be spared either by you or me.

LETTER 451. TO MR. MURRAY.

"Ravenna, September 12. 1821. "By Tuesday's post, I forwarded, in three packets, the drama of Cain, in three acts, of which I request the acknowledgment when arrived. To the last speech of Eve, in the last act (i. e. where she curses Cain), add these three lines to the concluding one

"May the grass wither from thy foot ! the woods Deny thee shelter ! earth a home! the dust

A grave! the sun his light! and Heaven her God!

'There's as pretty a piece of imprecation for you, when joined to the lines already sent, as you may wish to meet with in the course of your business. But don't forget the addition of the above three lines, which are clinchers to Eve's speech.

"Let me know what Gifford thinks (if the play arrives in safety); for I have a good opinion of the piece, as poetry; it is in my gay metaphysical style, and in the Manfred line.

"You must at least commend my facility and variety, when you consider what I have done within the last fifteen months, with my head, too, full of other and of mundane matters. But no doubt you will avoid saying any good of it, for fear I should raise the price upon you: that's right: stick to business. Let me know what your other ragamuffins are writing, for I suppose you don't like starting too many of your vagabonds at once. You may give them the start, for any thing I care.

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It will be observed, from this and a few other instances, that notwithstanding the wonderful purity of English he was able to preserve in his writings, while living constantly with persons speaking a different language, he had already begun so far to feel the influence of this habit as to fall occasionally into Italianisms in his familiar letters. "I am in the case to know"-" I have caused write"-"It regrets me," &c.

2 An anonymous letter which he had received, threatening him with assassination.

3 In this note, so highly honourable to the fair writer, she says, "Remember, my Byron, the promise you have made me. Never shall I be able to tell you the satis

faction I feel from it, so great are the sentiments of pleasure and confidence with which the sacrifice you have made has inspired me." In a postscript to the note she adds, "I am only sorry that Don Juan was not left in the infernal regions."-" Ricordati, mio Byron, della promessa che mi hai fatta. Non potrei mai dirti la satisfazione ch' io ne provo!-sono tanti i sentimenti di piacere e di confidenza che il tuo sacrificio m'inspira.”—“Mi_reveresce solo che Don Giovanni non resti all' Inferno."

In enclosing the lady's note to Mr. Murray, July 4th, Lord B. says, "This is the note of acknowledgment for the promise not to continue Don Juan. She says, in the postscript, that she is only sorry that D. J. does not remain in Hell (or go there)."

though,) I will write a poem to which 'English Bards,' &c. shall be new milk, in comparison. Your present literary world of mountebanks stands in need of such an Avatar. But I am not yet quite bilious enough a season or two more, and a provocation or two, will wind me up to the point, and then have at the whole set!

"I have no patience with the sort of trash you send me out by way of books; except Scott's novels, and three or four other things, I never saw such work or works. Campbell is lecturing-Moore idling - Southey twaddling Wordsworth drivelling - Coleridge muddling - Joanna Baillie piddling Bowles quibbling, squabbling, and snivelling. Milman will do, if he don't cant too much, nor imitate Southey; the fellow has poesy in him; but he is envious, and unhappy, as all the envious are. Still he is among the best of the day. Barry Cornwall will do better by-and-by, I dare say, if he don't get spoiled by green tea, and the praises of Pentonville and Paradise Row. The pity of these men is, that they never lived in high life, nor in solitude: there is no medium for the knowledge of the busy or the still world. If admitted into high life for a season, it is merely as spectators · they form no part of the mechanism thereof. Now Moore and I, the one by circumstances, and the other by birth, happened to be free of the corporation, and to have entered into its pulses and passions, quarum partes fuimus. Both of us have learnt by this much which nothing else could have taught us,

"Yours.

-I saw one of your brethren, another of the allied sovereigns of Grub Street, the other day, Mawman the Great, by whom I sent due homage to your imperial self. To-morrow's post may perhaps bring a letter from you, but you are the most ungrateful and ungracious of correspondents. But there is some excuse for you, with your perpetual levee of politicians, parsons, scribblers, and loungers. Some day I will give you a poetical catalogue of them."

LETTER 452. TO MR. MOORE.

"Ravenna, September 17. 1821.

"The enclosed lines, as you will directly perceive, are written by the Rev. W. L.B**.

"The Irish Avatar." In this copy the following sentence (taken from a letter of Curran, in the able Life of that true Irishman, by his son) is prefixed as a motto to the Poem," And Ireland, like a bastinadoed elephant,

"Ravenna, September 19. 1821. "I am in all the sweat, dust, and blasphemy of an universal packing of all my things, furniture, &c. for Pisa, whither I go for the winter. The cause has been the exile of all my fellow Carbonics, and, amongst them, of the whole family of Madame G.; who, you know, was divorced from her husband last week, on account of P. P. clerk of this parish,' and who is obliged to join her father and relatives, now in exile there, to avoid being shut up in a monastery, because the Pope's decree of separation required her to reside in casa paterna, or else, for decorum's sake, in a convent. As I could not say with Hamlet, Get thee to a nunnery,' I am preparing to follow them.

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It is awful work, this love, and prevents all a man's projects of good or glory. I wanted to go to Greece lately (as every thing seems up here) with her brother, who is a very fine, brave fellow (I have seen him put to the proof), and wild about liberty. But the tears of a woman who has left her husband for a man, and the weakness of one's own heart, are paramount to these projects, and I can hardly indulge them.

"We were divided in choice between Switzerland and Tuscany, and I gave my vote for Pisa, as nearer the Mediterranean, which I love for the sake of the shores which it washes, and for my young recollections of 1809. Switzerland is a curst selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants, and still less their English visitors; for which reason, after writing

kneeling to receive the paltry rider."—Letter of Curran, Life, vol. ii. p. 336. At the end of the verses are these words:" (Signed) W. L. B, M.A., and written with a view to a Bishopric."

M m

for some information about houses, upon hearing that there was a colony of English all over the cantons of Geneva, &c., I immediately gave up the thought, and persuaded the Gambas to do the same.

"By the last post I sent you The Irish Avatar,' what think you? The last line -'a name never spoke but with curses or jeers'- must run either a name only uttered with curses or jeers,' or, a wretch never named but with curses or jeers.' Becase as how, spoke' is not grammar, except in the House of Commons; and I doubt whether we can say 'a name spoken,' for mentioned. I have some doubts, too, about repay,' and for murder repay with a shout and a smile.' Should it not be,' and for murder repay him with shouts and a smile,' or ' reward him with shouts and a smile?' "So, pray put your poetical pen through the MS. and take the least bad of the emendations. Also, if there be any further breaking of Priscian's head, will you apply a plaster? I wrote in the greatest hurry and fury, and sent it to you the day after; so, doubtless, there will be some awful constructions, and a rather lawless conscription of rhythmus.

"With respect to what Anna Seward calls the liberty of transcript,'- when complaining of Miss Matilda Muggleton, the accomplished daughter of a choral vicar of Worcester Cathedral, who had abused the said 'liberty of transcript,' by inserting in the Malvern Mercury Miss Seward's Elegy on the South Pole,' as her own production, with her own signature, two years after having taken a copy, by permission of the authoress

with regard, I say, to the 'liberty of transcript,' I by no means oppose an occasional copy to the benevolent few, provided it does not degenerate into such licentiousness of Verb and Noun as may tend to disparage my parts of speech' by the carelessness of the transcribblers.

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I do not think that there is much danger of the King's Press being abused' upon the occasion, if the publishers of journals have any regard for their remaining liberty of person. It is as a pretty piece of invective as ever put publisher in the way to 'Botany.' Therefore, if they meddle with it, it is at their peril. As for myself, I will answer any jontleman though I by no means recognise a 'right of search' into an unpublished production and unavowed poem. The same applies to things published sans consent. I hope you like, at least, the concluding lines of the Pome?

"What are you doing, and where are you? in England? Nail Murray-nail him to his

own counter, till he shells out the thirteens. Since I wrote to you, I have sent him another tragedy-Cain' by name-making three in MS. now in his hands, or in the printer's. It is in the Manfred metaphysical style, and full of some Titanic declamation;-Lucifer being one of the dram. pers., who takes Cain a voyage among the stars, and afterwards to Hades,' where he shows him the phantoms of a former world, and its inhabitants. I have gone upon the notion of Cuvier, that the world has been destroyed three or four times, and was inhabited by mammoths, behemoths, and what not; but not by man till the Mosaic period, as, indeed, is proved by the strata of bones found;

those of all unknown animals, and known, being dug out, but none of mankind. I have, therefore, supposed Cain to be shown, in the rational Preadamites, beings endowed with a higher intelligence than man, but totally unlike him in form, and with much greater strength of mind and person. You may suppose the small talk which takes place between him and Lucifer upon these matters is not quite canonical.

"The consequence is, that Cain comes back and kills Abel in a fit of dissatisfaction, partly with the politics of Paradise, which had driven them all out of it, and partly because (as it is written in Genesis) Abel's sacrifice was the more acceptable to the Deity. I trust that the Rhapsody has arrived-it is in three acts, and entitled 'A Mystery,' according to the former Christian custom, and in honour of what it probably will remain to the reader.

"After the stanza on Grattan, concluding with His soul o'er the freedom implored and denied,' will it please you to cause insert the following' Addenda,' which I dreamed of during to-day's Siesta :

"Ever glorious Grattan ! &c. &c. &c.

I will tell you what to do. Get me twenty copies of the whole carefully and privately printed off, as your lines were on the Naples affair. Send me sir, and distribute the rest according to your own pleasure.

"I am in a fine vein, so full of pastime and prodigality!' — So here's to your health in a glass of grog. Pray write, that I may know by return of post- address to me at Pisa. The Gods give you joy!

"Where are you? in Paris? Let us hear. You will take care that there be no printer's

LETTER 455. TO MR. MURRAY.

"Ravenna, September 20. 1821. "You need not send 'The Blues,' which is a mere buffoonery, never meant for publication.1

"The papers to which I allude, in case of survivorship, are collections of letters, &c. since I was sixteen years old, contained in the trunks in the care of Mr. Hobhouse. This collection is at least doubled by those I have now here, all received since my last ostracism. To these I should wish the editor to have access, not for the purpose of abusing confidences, nor of hurting the feelings of correspondents living, nor the memories of the dead; but there are things which would do neither, that I have left unnoticed or unexplained, and which (like all such things) time only can permit to be noticed or explained, though some are to my credit. The task will, of course, require delicacy; but that will not be wanting, if Moore and Hobhouse survive me, and, I may add, yourself; and that you may all three do so, is, I assure you, my very sincere wish. I am not sure that long life is desirable for one of my temper and constitutional depression of spirits, which of course I suppress in society; but which breaks out when alone, and in my writings, in spite of myself. It has been deepened, perhaps, by some long-past events (I do not allude to my marriage, &c.the contrary, that raised them by the persecution giving a fillip to my spirits); but I call it constitutional, as I have reason to think it. You know, or you do not know, that my maternal grandfather (a very clever man, and amiable, I am told) was strongly suspected of suicide (he was found drowned in the Avon at Bath), and that another very near relative of the same branch took poison, and was merely saved by antidotes. For the first of these events there was no apparent cause, as he was rich, respected, and of considerable intellectual resources, hardly forty years of age, and not at all addicted to any unhinging vice. It was, however, but a strong suspicion, owing to the manner of his death and his melancholy temper. The second had a cause, but it does not become me to touch upon it; it happened when I was far too young to be aware of it, and I never heard of it till after the death of that relative,

-on

1 This short satire, which is wholly unworthy of his pen, appeared afterwards in the Liberal. [See Works, p. 507.]

I may call this dejection constitutional. I had always been told that I resembled more my maternal grandfather than any of my father's family- that is, in the gloomier part of his temper, for he was what you call a good-natured man, and I am not.

The Journal here I sent to Moore the other day; but as it is a mere diary, only parts of it would ever do for publication. The other Journal, of the Tour in 1816, I should think Augusta might let you have a copy of.

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"I am much mortified that Gifford don't take to my new dramas. To be sure, they are as opposite to the English drama as one thing can be to another; but I have a notion that, if understood, they will in time find favour (though not on the stage) with the reader. The simplicity of plot is intentional, and the avoidance of rant also, as also the compression of the speeches in the more severe situations. What I seek to show in The Foscaris' is the suppressed passions, rather than the rant of the present day. For that matter

"Nay, if thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou

would not be difficult, as I think I have shown in my younger productions — not dramatic ones, to be sure. But, as I said before, I am mortified that Gifford don't like them; but I see no remedy, our notions on that subject being so different. How is he? well, I hope? let me know. I regret his demur the more that he has been always my grand patron, and I know no praise which would compensate me in my own mind for his censure. I do not mind Reviews, as I can work them at their own weapons. "Yours, &c.

"Address to me at Pisa, whither I am going. The reason is, that all my Italian friends here have been exiled, and are met there for the present, and I go to join them, as agreed upon, for the winter."