I will
undertake
to answer it with one double as long.
Selection of English Letters
, in the
banking-office: what! is there not from six to eleven p. m. six days
in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie, what a superfluity
of man's time, if you could think so! Enough for relaxation, mirth,
converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. O the corroding,
torturing, tormenting thoughts, that disturb the brain of the unlucky
wight who must draw upon it for daily sustenance! Henceforth I retract
all my fond complaints of mercantile employment; look upon them as
lover's quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome dead timber
of the desk, that makes me live. A little grumbling is a wholesome
medicine for the spleen, but in my inner heart do I approve and
embrace this our close, but unharassing way of life. I am quite
serious. If you can send me Fox, I will not keep it _six weeks_, and
will return it, with warm thanks to yourself and friend, without blot
or dog's-ear. You will much oblige me by this kindness.
TO THE SAME
_A cold_
9 _Jan_. 1824.
DEAR B. B. ,
Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable
day-mare,--'a whoreson lethargy', Falstaff calls it,--an indisposition
to do anything, or to be anything,--a total deadness and distaste,--a
suspension of vitality,--an indifference to locality,--a numb,
soporifical, good-for-nothingness,--an ossification all over,--an
oyster-like insensibility to the passing events,--a mind-stupor,--a
brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience? Did you
ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to
water-gruel processes? This has been for many weeks my lot, and my
excuse; my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it
is three-and-twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet.
I have not a thing to say; no thing is of more importance than
another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge
----'s wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when
the actors are off it; a cipher, an O! I acknowledge life at all, only
by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain
in the chest. I am weary of the world; life is weary of me. My day is
gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles.
My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it.
I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing
interests me. 'Tis twelve o'clock, and Thurtell is just now coming out
upon the New Drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves
to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or
a moral reflection. If you told me the world will be at an end
to-morrow, I should just say, 'Will it? ' I have not volition enough
left to dot my _i's_, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are
set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in
Moorflelds, and they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull
is a Grub Street attic to let--not so much as a joint stool left in
it; my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a
little, when their heads are off. O for a vigorous fit of gout, colic,
toothache,--an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs; pain
is life--the sharper, the more evidence of life; but this apathy, this
death! Did you ever have an obstinate cold,--a six or seven weeks'
unintermitting chill and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and
every thing? Yet do I try all I can to cure it; I try wine, and
spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities, but they all
only seem to make me worse instead of better. I sleep in a damp room,
but it does me no good; I come home late o' nights, but do not find
any visible amendment! . . .
It is just fifteen minutes after twelve; Thurtell is by this time
a good way on his journey, baiting at Scorpion perhaps; Ketch is
bargaining for his cast coat and waistcoat; the Jew demurs at first at
three half-crowns, but, on consideration that he may get somewhat by
showing 'em in the town, finally closes.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
1778-1830
To Miss Sarah Stoddart
_A love-letter_
Tuesday night [_Jan. _ 1808].
MY DEAR LOVE,
Above a week has passed, and I have received no letter--not one of
those letters 'in which I live, or have no life at all'. What is
become of you? Are you married, hearing that I was dead (for so it has
been reported)? Or are you gone into a nunnery? Or are you fallen in
love with some of the amorous heroes of Boccaccio? Which of them is
it? Is it with Chynon, who was transformed from a clown into a lover,
and learned to spell by the force of beauty? Or with Lorenzo, the
lover of Isabella, whom her three brethren hated (as your brother does
me), who was a merchant's clerk? Or with Federigo Alberigi, an honest
gentleman, who ran through his fortune, and won his mistress by
cooking a fair falcon for her dinner, though it was the only means he
had left of getting a dinner for himself? This last is the man; and
I am the more persuaded of it, because I think I won your good liking
myself by giving you an entertainment--of sausages, when I had no
money to buy them with. Nay now, never deny it! Did I not ask your
consent that very night after, and did you not give it? Well, I should
be confoundedly jealous of those fine gallants, if I did not know that
a living dog is better than a dead lion; though, now I think of it,
Boccaccio does not in general make much of his lovers: it is his women
who are so delicious. I almost wish I had lived in those times, and
had been a little _more amiable_. Now if a woman had written the book,
it would not have had this effect upon me: the men would have been
heroes and angels, and the women nothing at all. Isn't there some
truth in that? Talking of departed loves, I met my old flame the other
day in the street. I did dream of her _one_ night since, and only one:
every other night I have had the same dream I have had for these two
months past. Now, if you are at all reasonable, this will satisfy you.
_Thursday morning_. The book is come. When I saw it I thought you had
sent it back in a _huff_, tired out by my sauciness, and _coldness_,
and delays, and were going to keep an account of dimities and sayes,
or to salt pork and chronicle small beer as the dutiful wife of some
fresh-looking, rural swain; so that you cannot think how surprised
and pleased I was to find them all done. I liked your note as well or
better than the extracts; it is just such a note as such a nice rogue
as you ought to write after the _provocation_ you had received. I
would not give a pin for a girl 'whose cheeks never tingle', nor for
myself if I could not make them tingle sometimes. Now, though I am
always writing to you about 'lips and noses', and such sort of stuff,
yet as I sit by my fireside (which I do generally eight or ten hours a
day), I oftener think of you in a serious, sober light. For, indeed,
I never love you so well as when I think of sitting down with you to
dinner on a boiled scrag-end of mutton, and hot potatoes. You please
my fancy more then than when I think of you in--no, you would never
forgive me if I were to finish the sentence. Now I think of it, what
do you mean to be dressed in when we are married? But it does not much
matter! I wish you would let your hair grow; though perhaps nothing
will be better than 'the same air and look with which at first my
heart was took'. But now to business. I mean soon to call upon your
brother _in form_, namely, as soon as I get quite well, which I hope
to do in about another _fortnight_; and then I hope you will come up
by the coach as fast as the horses can carry you, for I long mightily
to be in your ladyship's presence--to vindicate my character. I think
you had better sell the small house, I mean that at 4. 10, and I will
borrow £100. So that we shall set off merrily in spite of all the
prudence of Edinburgh. Goodbye, little dear!
TO HIS SON
_Marriage, and the choice of a profession_
[1822. ]
. . . If you ever marry, I would wish you to marry the woman you like.
Do not be guided by the recommendations of friends. Nothing will
atone for or overcome an original distaste. It will only increase from
intimacy; and if you are to live separate, it is better not to come
together. There is no use in dragging a chain through life, unless
it binds one to the object we love. Choose a mistress from among your
equals. You will be able to understand her character better, and she
will be more likely to understand yours. Those in an inferior station
to yourself will doubt your good intentions, and misapprehend your
plainest expressions. All that you swear is to them a riddle or
downright nonsense. You cannot by any possibility translate your
thoughts into their dialect. They will be ignorant of the meaning of
half you say, and laugh at the rest. As mistresses, they will have no
sympathy with you; and as wives, you can have none with them.
Women care nothing about poets, or philosophers, or politicians. They
go by a man's looks and manner. Richardson calls them 'an eye-judging
sex'; and I am sure he knew more about them than I can pretend to do.
If you run away with a pedantic notion that they care a pin's point
about your head or your heart, you will repent it too late. . . .
If I were to name one pursuit rather than another, I should wish you
to be a good painter, if such a thing could be hoped. I have failed in
this myself, and should wish you to be able to do what I have not--to
paint like Claude, or Rembrandt, or Guido, or Vandyke, if it were
possible. Artists, I think, who have succeeded in their chief object,
live to be old, and are agreeable old men. Their minds keep alive
to the last. Cosway's spirits never flagged till after ninety; and
Nollekens, though nearly blind, passed all his mornings in giving
directions about some group or bust in his workshop. You have seen Mr.
Northcote, that delightful specimen of the last age. With what avidity
he takes up his pencil, or lays it down again to talk of numberless
things! His eye has not lost its lustre, nor 'paled its ineffectual
fire'. His body is but a shadow: he himself is a pure spirit. There is
a kind of immortality about this sort of ideal and visionary existence
that dallies with Fate and baffles the grim monster, Death. If I
thought you could make as clever an artist, and arrive at such an
agreeable old age as Mr. Northcote, I should declare at once for your
devoting yourself to this enchanting profession; and in that reliance,
should feel less regret at some of my own disappointments, and little
anxiety on your account!
To CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE
_The Life of Napoleon_
7 _Dec_. [1827].
DEAR SIR,
I thought all the world agreed with me at present that Buonaparte was
better than the Bourbons, or that a tyrant was better than tyranny.
In my opinion, no one of an understanding above the rank of a lady's
waiting-maid could ever have doubted this, though I alone said it ten
years ago. It might be impolicy then and now for what I know, for the
world stick to an opinion in appearance long after they have given it
up in reality. I should like to know whether the preface is thought
impolitic by some one who agrees with me in the main point, or by some
one who differs with me and makes this excuse not to have his opinion
contradicted? In Paris (_jubes regina renovare dolorem_) the preface
was thought a masterpiece, the best and only possible defence of
Buonaparte, and quite new _there_! It would be an impertinence in me
to write a Life of Buonaparte after Sir W. without some such object as
that expressed in the preface. After all, I do not care a _damn_ about
the preface. It will get me on four pages somewhere else. Shall I
retract my opinion altogether, and forswear my own book? Rayner is
right to cry out: I think I have tipped him fair and foul copy, a lean
rabbit and a fat one. The remainder of vol. ii will be ready to go on
with, but not the beginning of the third. The appendixes had better
be at the end of the second vol. Pray get them if you can: you have my
Sieyes, have you not? One of them is there. I have been nearly in the
other world. My regret was 'to die and leave the world "rough" copy'.
Otherwise I had thought of an epitaph and a good end. Hic jacent
reliquiae mortales Gulielmi Hazlitt, auctoris non intelligibilis:
natus Maidstoniae in comi [ta] tu Cantiae, Apr. 10, 1778. Obiit
Winterslowe, Dec. , 1827. I think of writing an epistle to C. Lamb,
Esq. , to say that I have passed near the shadowy world, and have had
new impressions of the vanity of this, with hopes of a better. Don't
you think this would be good policy? Don't mention it to the severe
author of the '_Press_', a poem, but me thinks the idea _arridet_
Hone. He would give sixpence to see me floating, upon a pair of
borrowed wings, half way between heaven and earth, and edifying
the good people at my departure, whom I shall only scandalize by
remaining. At present my study and contemplation is the leg of a
stewed fowl. I have behaved like a saint, and been obedient to orders.
_Non fit pugil_, &c. , I got a violent spasm by walking fifteen miles
in the mud, and getting into a coach with an old lady who would have
the window open. Delicacy, moderation, complaisance, the _suaviter in
modo_, whisper it about, my dear Clarke, these are my faults and have
been my ruin.
LEIGH HUNT
1784-1859
To JOSEPH SEVERN
_A belated letter_[1]
Vale of Health, Hampstead, 8 _March_, 1821
DEAR SEVERN,
You have concluded, of course, that I have sent no letters to Rome,
because I was aware of the effect they would have on Keats's mind; and
this is the principal cause; for, besides what I have been told about
letters in Italy, I remember his telling me upon one occasion that, in
his sick moments, he never wished to receive another letter, or ever
to see another face, however friendly. But still I should have written
to you, had I not been almost at death's door myself. You will imagine
how ill I have been, when you hear that I have but just begun writing
again for the _Examiner_ and _Indicator_, after an interval of
several months, during which my flesh wasted from me with sickness
and melancholy. Judge how often I thought of Keats, and with what
feelings. Mr. Brown tells me he is comparatively calm now, or rather
quite so. If he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it
already, and can put it in better language than any man. I hear that
he does not like to be told that he may get better; nor is it to
be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not
survive. He can only regard it as a puerile thing, and an insinuation
that he shall die. But if his persuasion should happen to be no longer
so strong, or if he can now put up with attempts to console him, of
what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour)
think always, that I have seen too many instances of recovery from
apparently desperate cases of consumption not to be in hope to the
very last. If he still cannot bear this, tell him--tell that great
poet and noble-hearted man--that we shall all bear his memory in the
most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their
heads to it, as our loves do. Or if this, again, will trouble his
spirit, tell him that we shall never cease to remember and love him;
and that, Christian or infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith
enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think
all who are of one accord in mind or heart are journeying to one and
the same place, and shall unite somewhere or other again, face to
face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted. Tell him he is only
before us on the road, as he is in everything else; or, whether you
tell him the latter or no, tell him the former, and add that we shall
never forget that he was so, and that we are coming after him. The
tears are again in my eyes, and I must not afford to shed them. The
next letter I write shall be more to yourself, and more refreshing to
your spirits, which we are very sensible must have been greatly taxed.
But whether your friend dies or not, it will not be among the least
lofty of your recollections by-and-by that you helped to smooth the
sick-bed of so fine a being. God bless you, dear Severn.
[Footnote 1: Keats died in February. ]
To PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
_Outpourings of gratitude_
Stonehouse, near Plymouth, 26 _March_, 1822.
MY DEAREST FRIEND,
Your letters always contain something delightful to me, whatever news
they bring.
Surgit _amici_ aliquid, quod in ipsis _nubibus_
_ardet_.
But I confess your latter ones have greatly relieved me on the subject
you speak of. They only make me long, with an extreme Homeric longing,
to be at Pisa,--I mean such an one as Achilles felt when he longed to
be with his father,--sharp in his very limbs. We have secured a ship,
the _David Walter_, which will call for us here, and sets sail
from London in a fortnight. I have written by to-day's post with
intelligence of it to Mrs. Fletcher, enclosing her the letter, and
giving her the option of going on board in London, or here. I need not
say we shall attend to her comforts in every respect. The same post
also carries a letter to Mr. Gisborne, stating your wishes, and
wonders respecting _Adonais_. If it is not published before I leave
England, I will publish my criticism upon the Pisa copy,--a criticism
which I think you will like. I take the opportunity of showing the
public why Gifford's review spoke so bitterly of _Prometheus_, and
why it pretends that the most metaphysical passage of your most
metaphysical poem is a specimen of the clearness of your general
style. The wretched priest-like cunning and undertoned malignity of
that review of _Prometheus_ is indeed a homage paid to qualities which
can so provoke it. The _Quarterly_ pretends now, that it never meddles
with you personally,--of course it never did! For this, _Blackwood_
cries out upon it, contrasting its behaviour in those delicate matters
with its own! This is better and better, and the public seem to think
so; for these things, depend upon it, are getting better understood
every day, and shall be better and better understood every day to
come. One circumstance which helps to reconcile me to having been
detained on this coast, is the opportunity it has given me to make
your works speak for themselves wherever I could; and you are in high
lustre, I assure you, with the most intelligent circles in Plymouth,
[Greek: astaer epsos]. I have, indeed, been astonished to find
how well prepared people of intelligence are to fall in with your
aspirations, and despise the mistakes and rascally instincts of your
calumniators. This place, for instance, abounds in _schoolmasters_,
who appear, to a man, to be liberal to an extreme and esoterical
degree. And such, there is reason to believe, is the case over the
greater part of the kingdom, greatly, no doubt, owing to political
causes. Think of the consequences of this with the rising generation.
I delight in _Adonais_. It is the most Delphic poetry I have seen
a long while; full of those embodyings of the most subtle and airy
imaginations,--those arrestings and explanations of the most shadowy
yearnings of our being--which are the most difficult of all things
to put into words, and the most delightful when put. I do not know
whether you are aware how fond I am of your song on the Skylark; but
you ought, if Ollier sent you a copy of the enlarged _Calendar_
_of Nature_, which he published separately under the title of the
_Months_. I tell you this, because I have not done half or a twentieth
part of what I ought to have done to make your writings properly
appreciated. But I intended to do more every day, and now that I am
coming to you, I shall be _totus_ in you and yours! For all good, and
healthy, and industrious things, I will do such wonders, that I shall
begin to believe I make some remote approach to something like a
return for your kindness. Yet how can that be? At all events, I hope
we shall all be the better for one another's society. Marianne, poor
dear girl, is still very ailing and weak, but stronger upon the whole,
she thinks, than when she first left London, and quite prepared and
happy to set off on her spring voyage. She sends you part of her best
love. I told her I supposed I must answer Marina's letter for her, but
she is quite grand on the occasion, and vows she will do it herself,
which, I assure you, will be the first time she has written a letter
for many months. Ask Marina if she will be charitable, and write one
to me.
I will undertake to answer it with one double as long. But what
am I talking about, when the captain speaks of sailing in a fortnight?
I was led astray by her delightful letter to Marianne about walks, and
duets, and violets, and ladies like violets. Am I indeed to see and
be in the midst of all these beautiful things, ladies like lilies not
excepted? And do the men in Italy really leave ladies to walk in those
very amiable dry ditches by themselves? Oh! for a few strides, like
those of Neptune, when he went from some place to some other place,
and 'did it in three! ' Dear Shelley, I am glad my letter to Lord B.
pleased you, though I do not know why you should so thank me for it.
But you are ingenious in inventing claims for me upon your affection.
To HORACE SMITH
_Shelley's death_
Pisa, 25 _July_, 1822.
Dear Horace,
I trust that the first news of the dreadful calamity which has
befallen us here will have been broken to you by report, otherwise I
shall come upon you with a most painful abruptness; but Shelley, my
divine-minded friend, your friend, the friend of the universe, he has
perished at sea. He was in a boat with his friend Captain Williams,
going from Leghorn to Lerici, when a storm arose, and it is supposed
the boat must have foundered. It was on the 8th instant, about four
or five in the evening, they guess. A fisherman says he saw the boat
a few minutes before it went down: he looked again and it was gone. He
saw the boy they had with them aloft furling one of the sails. We hope
his story is true, as their passage from life to death will then have
been short; and what adds to the hope is, that in S's pocket (for the
bodies were both thrown on shore some days afterwards,--conceive our
horrible certainty, after trying all we could to hope! ) a copy of
Keats's last volume, which he had borrowed of me to read on his
passage, was found _open_ and doubled back as if it had been thrust
in, in the hurry of a surprise. God bless him! I cannot help thinking
of him as if he were alive as much as ever, so unearthly he always
appeared to me, and so seraphical a thing of the elements; and this
is what all his friends say. But what we all feel, your own heart will
tell you. . . .
It has been often feared that Shelley and Captain Williams would meet
with some accident, they were so hazardous; but when they set out on
the 8th, in the morning it was fine. Our dear friend was passionately
fond of the sea, and has been heard to say he should like it to be his
death-bed. . . .
To MRS. PROCTER
_Accepting an invitation_
5 York Buildings, 13 _March_ [1831].
MY DEAR MRS. PROCTER (for Madam, somehow, is
not the thing),
I am most pleased to be reminded of my promise, which I must have made
if you say I did. I suppose I have been coming to keep it ever since;
but it is a long road from sorrow to joy, and one is apt to get
confused on the road. Do you know your letter brought the tears into
my eyes? I hardly know why, unless it was that I saw Procter had been
pouring his kind heart into yours, and you said:--'We must have him
here instead of the coffee-house, and plant him by the fire, and warm
him like a stray bird till he sings. ' But indeed a kind word affects
me where many a hard thump does not. Nevertheless, you must not tell
this, except to the very masculine or feminine; though if you do not
take it as a compliment to yourself,--I mean the confession of
my weakness,--why, you are not Procter's wife, nor Mrs. Montagu's
daughter, nor she who wrote the letter this morning to a poor battered
author.
PS. I eat any plain joint, of the plainer order, beef or mutton:--and
you know I care for nothing at dinner, so that it does not hurt me.
Friends' company is the thing.
To A FRIEND
_Offence and punishment_
Wimbledon, 11 and 12 _August_, 1846.
. . . I find I made a great confusion of my _portion_ of the legal
expenses incurred by the _Examiner_, with the _whole_ of them. That
portion only amounted to £750, the whole being £1500. Of this £750 out
of my pocket (which was quite enough), £250 went to pay for
expenses (counsel, &c. ) attendant on the _failure_ of two Government
prosecutions,--one for saying (_totidem verbis_) that 'of all monarchs
since the Revolution, the successor of George III would have the
finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular'; (think, nowadays,
of being prosecuted for _that_! ) and the other for copying from the
_Stamford News_ the paragraph against military flogging, alluded to
the other day in the _Daily News_. (Think, now, this moment, of being
prosecuted for _That_! ) The £500 fine and two years' imprisonment was
for ludicrously contrasting the _Morning Post's_ picture of the Regent
as an 'Adonis', &c. with the old and real fat state of the case, and
for adding that his Royal Highness had lived for 'upwards of half
a century without doing anything to deserve the admiration of his
contemporaries or the gratitude of posterity'. Words to that effect,
and I believe better,--but I do not quite remember them. They might be
easily ascertained by reference to Peel's Coffee-house, and the words
of the _Post_, too.
Besides the fine, my imprisonment cost me several hundred pounds (I
can't exactly say how many) in monstrous _douceurs_ to the gaoler
for _liberty to walk in the garden_, for help towards getting me
permission to fit up rooms in the sick hospital, and for fitting
up said rooms, or rather converting them from sorts of
washhouses, hitherto uninhabited and unfloored, into comfortable
apartments,--which I did too expensively,--at least as far as papering
the sitting-room with a trellis of roses went, and having my ceiling
painted to imitate an out-of-door sky. No notice, however, could
be taken, I suppose, of any of _this_ portion of the expenses,
governments having nothing to do with the secret corruptions of
gaolers or the pastorals of incarcerated poets: otherwise the
prosecutions cost me altogether a good bit beyond a thousand pounds.
But perhaps it might be mentioned that I went to prison from all but
a sick bed, having been just ordered by the physician _to go to the
seaside_, and _ride_ for the benefit of my health (pleasing dramatic
contrast to the _verdict_! ). I also declined, as I told you, to try
avoiding the imprisonment by the help of Perry's offer of the famous
secret 'Book'; and I further declined (as I think I also told you)
to avail myself of an offer on the part of a royal agent (made, of
course, in the guarded, though obvious manner in which such offers are
conveyed), to drop the prosecution, provided we would agree to
drop all future hostile mention of the Regent. But of this, too,
governments could not be expected to take notice--perhaps would regard
it as an addition to the offence. This, however, I must add, that the
whole attack on the Regent was owing, not merely to the nonsense of
the _Post_, but to his violation of those promises of conceding the
Catholic claims, to which his princely word stood pledged. The subject
of the article was the '_Dinner on St. Patrick's day_'. All the Whig
world was indignant at that violation; so were the Irish, of course,
_vehemently_; and it was on the spur of this publicly indignant
movement that I wrote what I did,--as angrily and as much in earnest
in the serious part of what I said as I was derisive in the rest.
I did not care for any factious object, nor was I what is called
anti-monarchical. I didn't know Cobbett, or Henry Hunt, or any
demagogue, _even by sight_, except Sir Francis Burdett, and him
by sight alone. Nor did I ever see, or speak a word with them,
afterwards. I knew nothing, in fact, of politics themselves, except in
some of those large and, as it appeared to me, obvious phases, which,
at all events, _have since become obvious to most people_, and in
fighting for which (if a man can be said to fight for a 'phase'! ) I
suffered all that Tories could inflict upon me,--by expenses in law
and calumnies in literature;--reform, Catholic claims, free
trade, abolition of flogging, right of free speech, as opposed by
attorneys-general. I was, in fact, all the while nothing but a poetic
student, appearing in politics once a week, but given up entirely to
letters almost all the rest of it, and loving nothing so much as a
book and a walk in the fields. I was precisely the sort of person, in
these respects, which I am at this moment. As to George the Fourth, I
aided, years afterwards, in publicly wishing him well--'years having
brought the philosophic mind'. I believe I even expressed regret at
not having given him the excuses due to all human beings (the passage,
I take it, is in the book which Colburn called _Lord Byron and his
Contemporaries_); _and when I consider that Moore has been pensioned,
not only in spite of all his libels on him, but perhaps by very reason
of their Whig partisanship, I should think it hard to be refused a
pension purely because I openly suffered for what I had earnestly
said_. I knew George the Fourth's physician, Sir William Knighton,
who had been mine before I was imprisoned (it was _not_ he who was the
royal agent alluded to); and, if my memory does not deceive me, Sir
William told me that George had been gratified by the book above
mentioned. Perhaps he had found out, by Sir William's help, that I was
not an ill-natured man, or one who could not outlive what was
mistaken in himself or resentful in others. As to my opinions about
Governments, the bad conduct of the Allies, and of Napoleon, and the
old Bourbons, certainly made them waver as to what might be ultimately
best, monarchy or republicanism; but they ended in favour of their
old predilections; and no man, for a long while, has been less a
republican than myself, monarchies and courts appearing to me salutary
for the good and graces of mankind, and Americanisms anything but
either. But nobody, I conceive, that knew my writings, or heard of me
truly from others, ever took me for a republican. William the Fourth
saw or heard nothing of me to hinder his letting Lord Melbourne give
me £200 out of the Royal Fund. Queen Victoria gave me another,
through the same kind friend. She also went twice to see my play; and
everybody knows how I praise and love her. _I do not think, therefore,
in reference to the pension, that the public would care twopence about
George the Fourth, one way or the other; or that if any remembered the
case at all, they would connect the pension in the least with anything
about him, but attribute it solely to the Queen's and Minister's
goodness, and the wants of a sincere and not undeserving man of
letters, distinguished for his loyal attachment_. I certainly think
the £500 fine ought not to have been taken out of my pocket, or the
other two £125 either; and I think also, that a liberal Whig minister
might reasonably and _privately_ think some compensation on those
accounts due to me. _I have been fighting his own fight from first to
last, and helping to prepare matters for his triumph_. But still the
above, in my opinion, is what the public would think of the matter,
_and my friends of the press could lay it entirely to the literary
account_.
GEORGE GORDON NOEL,
LORD BYRON
1788-1824
To MR. HODGSON
_Travel in Portugal_
Lisbon, 16 _July_, 1809.
Thus far have we pursued our route, and seen all sorts of marvellous
sights, palaces, convents, &c. ,--which, being to be heard in my friend
Hobhouse's forthcoming Book of Travels, I shall not anticipate by
smuggling any account whatsoever to you in a private and clandestine
manner. I must just observe, that the village of Cintra in Estremadura
is the most beautiful, perhaps, in the world.
I am very happy here, because I loves oranges, and talks bad Latin
to the monks, who understand it, as it is like their own,--and I goes
into society (with my pocket pistols), and I swims in the Tagus
all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears
Portuguese, and have got bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that?
Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a-pleasuring.
When the Portuguese are pertinacious, I say '_Carracho_! '--the
great oath of the grandees, that very well supplies the place of
'Damme! '--and when dissatisfied with my neighbour, I pronounce
him '_Ambra di merdo_'. With these two phrases, and a third,'_Avra
bouro_', which signifieth 'Get an ass', I am universally understood to
be a person of degree and a master of languages. How merrily we
lives that travellers be! --if we had food and raiment. But, in sober
sadness, anything is better than England, and I am infinitely amused
with my pilgrimage, as far as it has gone.
To-morrow we start to ride post near 400 miles as far as Gibraltar,
where we embark for Melita and Byzantium. A letter to Malta will find
me, or to be forwarded, if I am absent. Pray embrace the Drury and
Dwyer, and all the Ephesians you encounter. I am writing with Butler's
donative pencil, which makes my bad hand worse. Excuse illegibility.
Hodgson! send me the news, and the deaths and defeats and capital
crimes and the misfortunes of one's friends; and let us hear of
literary matters, and the controversies and the criticisms. All this
will be pleasant--'_Suave mari magno_, &c. ' Talking of that, I have
been sea-sick, and sick of the sea. Adieu.
TO THOMAS MOORE
_Announces his engagement_
Newstead Abbey, 20 _Sept. _ 1814.
Here's to her who long
Hath waked the poet's sigh!
The girl who gave to song
What gold could never buy.
MY DEAR MOORE,
I am going to be married--that is, I am accepted, and one usually
hopes the rest will follow. My mother of the Gracchi (that _are_ to
be), _you_ think too strait-laced for me, although the paragon of only
children, and invested with 'golden opinions of all sorts of men', and
full of 'most blest conditions' as Desdemona herself. Miss Milbanke
is the lady, and I have her father's invitation to proceed there in my
elect capacity,--which, however, I cannot do until I have settled some
business in London, and got a blue coat.
She is said to be an heiress, but of that I really know nothing
certainly, and shall not inquire. But I do know, that she has talents
and excellent qualities; and you will not deny her judgement, after
having refused six suitors and taken me.
Now, if you have anything to say against this, pray do; my mind's
made up, positively fixed, determined, and therefore I will listen to
reason, because now it can do no harm. Things may occur to break it
off, but I will hope not. In the meantime I tell you (a _secret_, by
the by,--at least till I know she wishes it to be public) that I have
proposed and am accepted. You need not be in a hurry to wish me joy,
for one mayn't be married for months. I am going to town to-morrow,
but expect to be here, on my way there, within a fortnight.
If this had not happened, I should have gone to Italy. In my way down,
perhaps you will meet me at Nottingham, and come over with me here.
I need not say that nothing will give me greater pleasure. I must, of
course, reform thoroughly; and, seriously, if I can contribute to
her happiness, I shall secure my own. She is so good a person
that--that--in short, I wish I was a better.
TO JOHN MURRAY
_No bid for sweet voices_
Venice, 6 _April_, 1819.
The second canto of Don Juan was sent, on Saturday last, by post, in
four packets, two of four, and two of three sheets each, containing
in all two hundred and seventeen stanzas, octave measure. But I will
permit no curtailments. . . . You shan't make _canticles_ of my cantos.
The poem will please, if it is lively; if it is stupid, it will fail;
but I will have none of your damned cutting and slashing. If you
please, you may publish _anonymously_; it will perhaps be better; but
I will battle my way against them all, like a porcupine.
So you and Mr. Foscolo, etc. , want me to undertake what you call a
'great work'? an Epic Poem, I suppose or some such pyramid. I'll try
no such thing; I hate tasks. And then 'seven or eight years'! God send
us all well this day three months, let alone years. If one's years
can't be better employed than in sweating poesy, a man had better be a
ditcher. And works, too! --is _Childe Harold_ nothing? You have so many
'_divine_' poems, is it nothing to have written a _human_ one? without
any of your worn-out machinery. Why, man, I could have spun the
thoughts of the four cantos of that poem into twenty, had I wanted to
book-make, and its passion into as many modern tragedies. Since you
want _length_, you shall have enough of _Juan_, for I'll make fifty
cantos. . . .
Besides, I mean to write my best work in _Italian_, and it will take
me nine years more thoroughly to master the language; and then if my
fancy exist, and I exist too, I will try what I _can_ do _really_. As
to the estimation of the English which you talk of, let them
calculate what it is worth, before they insult me with their insolent
condescension.
I have not written for their pleasure. If they are pleased, it is that
they chose to be so; I have never flattered their opinions, nor their
pride; nor will I. Neither will I make 'Ladies' books' '_al dilettar
le femine e la plebe_'. I have written from the fullness of my mind,
from passion, from impulse, from many motives, but not for their
'sweet voices'.
I know the precise worth of popular applause, for few scribblers have
had more of it; and if I chose to swerve into their paths, I could
retain it, or resume it. But I neither love ye, nor fear ye; and
though I buy with ye and sell with ye, and talk with ye, I will
neither eat with ye, drink with ye, nor pray with ye. They made me,
without my search, a species of popular idol; they, without reason or
judgement, beyond the caprice of their good pleasure, threw down the
image from its pedestal; it was not broken with the fall, and they
would, it seems, again replace it,--but they shall not.
You ask about my health: about the beginning of the year I was in a
state of great exhaustion . . . and I was obliged to reform my 'way of
life', which was conducting me from the 'yellow leaf' to the ground,
with all deliberate speed. I am better in health and morals, and very
much yours, &c. --
PS. I have read Hodgson's '_Friends_'. He is right in defending Pope
against the bastard pelicans of the poetical winter day, who add
insult to their parricide, by sucking the blood of the parent of
English _real_ poetry,--poetry without fault,--and then spurning the
bosom which fed them.
TO THE SAME
_The cemetery at Bologna_
Bologna, 7 _June_, 1819.
. . . I have been picture-gazing this morning at the famous Domenichino
and Guido, both of which are superlative. I afterwards went to the
beautiful cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls, and found, besides
the superb burial-ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded me
of the grave-digger in _Hamlet_. He has a collection of capuchins'
skulls, labelled on the forehead, and taking down one of them, said,
'This was Brother Desiderio Berro, who died at forty--one of my best
friends. I begged his head of his brethren after his decease, and they
gave it me. I put it in lime, and then boiled it. Here it is, teeth
and all, in excellent preservation. He was the merriest, cleverest
fellow I ever knew. Wherever he went, he brought joy; and whenever any
one was melancholy, the sight of him was enough to make him cheerful
again. He walked so actively, you might have taken him for a
dancer--he joked--he laughed--oh! he was such a Frate as I never saw
before, nor ever shall again! '
He told me that he had himself planted all the cypresses in the
cemetery; that he had the greatest attachment to them and to his dead
people; that since 1801 they had buried fifty-three thousand persons.
In showing some older monuments, there was that of a Roman girl of
twenty, with a bust by Bernini. She was a princess Bartorini, dead two
centuries ago: he said that, on opening her grave, they had found
her hair complete, and 'as yellow as gold'. Some of the epitaphs at
Ferrara pleased me more than the more splendid monuments at Bologna;
for instance:--
'_Martini Luigi
Implora pace. '
'Lucrezia Picini
Implora eterna quiete_. '
Can anything be more full of pathos? Those few words say all that can
be said or sought: the dead had had enough of life; all they wanted
was rest, and this they _implore_! There is all the helplessness,
and humble hope, and deathlike prayer, that can arise from the
grave--'_implora pace_'. I hope, whoever may survive me, and shall
see me put in the foreigners' burying-ground at the Lido, within the
fortress by the Adriatic, will see those two words, and no more, put
over me. I trust they won't think of 'pickling, and bringing me home
to Clod or Blunderbuss Hall'. I am sure my bones would not rest in
an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I
believe the thought would drive me mad on my deathbed, could I suppose
that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back
to your soil. I would not even feed your worms, if I could help it.
So, as Shakespeare says of Mowbray, the banished Duke of Norfolk, who
died at Venice (see _Richard II_), that he, after fighting
Against black Pagans, Turks, and Saracens,
And toiled with works of war, retired himself
To Italy, and there, at _Venice_, gave
His body to that _pleasant_ country's earth,
And his pure soul unto his captain, Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long.
banking-office: what! is there not from six to eleven p. m. six days
in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie, what a superfluity
of man's time, if you could think so! Enough for relaxation, mirth,
converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. O the corroding,
torturing, tormenting thoughts, that disturb the brain of the unlucky
wight who must draw upon it for daily sustenance! Henceforth I retract
all my fond complaints of mercantile employment; look upon them as
lover's quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome dead timber
of the desk, that makes me live. A little grumbling is a wholesome
medicine for the spleen, but in my inner heart do I approve and
embrace this our close, but unharassing way of life. I am quite
serious. If you can send me Fox, I will not keep it _six weeks_, and
will return it, with warm thanks to yourself and friend, without blot
or dog's-ear. You will much oblige me by this kindness.
TO THE SAME
_A cold_
9 _Jan_. 1824.
DEAR B. B. ,
Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable
day-mare,--'a whoreson lethargy', Falstaff calls it,--an indisposition
to do anything, or to be anything,--a total deadness and distaste,--a
suspension of vitality,--an indifference to locality,--a numb,
soporifical, good-for-nothingness,--an ossification all over,--an
oyster-like insensibility to the passing events,--a mind-stupor,--a
brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience? Did you
ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to
water-gruel processes? This has been for many weeks my lot, and my
excuse; my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it
is three-and-twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet.
I have not a thing to say; no thing is of more importance than
another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge
----'s wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when
the actors are off it; a cipher, an O! I acknowledge life at all, only
by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain
in the chest. I am weary of the world; life is weary of me. My day is
gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles.
My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it.
I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing
interests me. 'Tis twelve o'clock, and Thurtell is just now coming out
upon the New Drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves
to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or
a moral reflection. If you told me the world will be at an end
to-morrow, I should just say, 'Will it? ' I have not volition enough
left to dot my _i's_, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are
set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in
Moorflelds, and they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull
is a Grub Street attic to let--not so much as a joint stool left in
it; my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a
little, when their heads are off. O for a vigorous fit of gout, colic,
toothache,--an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs; pain
is life--the sharper, the more evidence of life; but this apathy, this
death! Did you ever have an obstinate cold,--a six or seven weeks'
unintermitting chill and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and
every thing? Yet do I try all I can to cure it; I try wine, and
spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities, but they all
only seem to make me worse instead of better. I sleep in a damp room,
but it does me no good; I come home late o' nights, but do not find
any visible amendment! . . .
It is just fifteen minutes after twelve; Thurtell is by this time
a good way on his journey, baiting at Scorpion perhaps; Ketch is
bargaining for his cast coat and waistcoat; the Jew demurs at first at
three half-crowns, but, on consideration that he may get somewhat by
showing 'em in the town, finally closes.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
1778-1830
To Miss Sarah Stoddart
_A love-letter_
Tuesday night [_Jan. _ 1808].
MY DEAR LOVE,
Above a week has passed, and I have received no letter--not one of
those letters 'in which I live, or have no life at all'. What is
become of you? Are you married, hearing that I was dead (for so it has
been reported)? Or are you gone into a nunnery? Or are you fallen in
love with some of the amorous heroes of Boccaccio? Which of them is
it? Is it with Chynon, who was transformed from a clown into a lover,
and learned to spell by the force of beauty? Or with Lorenzo, the
lover of Isabella, whom her three brethren hated (as your brother does
me), who was a merchant's clerk? Or with Federigo Alberigi, an honest
gentleman, who ran through his fortune, and won his mistress by
cooking a fair falcon for her dinner, though it was the only means he
had left of getting a dinner for himself? This last is the man; and
I am the more persuaded of it, because I think I won your good liking
myself by giving you an entertainment--of sausages, when I had no
money to buy them with. Nay now, never deny it! Did I not ask your
consent that very night after, and did you not give it? Well, I should
be confoundedly jealous of those fine gallants, if I did not know that
a living dog is better than a dead lion; though, now I think of it,
Boccaccio does not in general make much of his lovers: it is his women
who are so delicious. I almost wish I had lived in those times, and
had been a little _more amiable_. Now if a woman had written the book,
it would not have had this effect upon me: the men would have been
heroes and angels, and the women nothing at all. Isn't there some
truth in that? Talking of departed loves, I met my old flame the other
day in the street. I did dream of her _one_ night since, and only one:
every other night I have had the same dream I have had for these two
months past. Now, if you are at all reasonable, this will satisfy you.
_Thursday morning_. The book is come. When I saw it I thought you had
sent it back in a _huff_, tired out by my sauciness, and _coldness_,
and delays, and were going to keep an account of dimities and sayes,
or to salt pork and chronicle small beer as the dutiful wife of some
fresh-looking, rural swain; so that you cannot think how surprised
and pleased I was to find them all done. I liked your note as well or
better than the extracts; it is just such a note as such a nice rogue
as you ought to write after the _provocation_ you had received. I
would not give a pin for a girl 'whose cheeks never tingle', nor for
myself if I could not make them tingle sometimes. Now, though I am
always writing to you about 'lips and noses', and such sort of stuff,
yet as I sit by my fireside (which I do generally eight or ten hours a
day), I oftener think of you in a serious, sober light. For, indeed,
I never love you so well as when I think of sitting down with you to
dinner on a boiled scrag-end of mutton, and hot potatoes. You please
my fancy more then than when I think of you in--no, you would never
forgive me if I were to finish the sentence. Now I think of it, what
do you mean to be dressed in when we are married? But it does not much
matter! I wish you would let your hair grow; though perhaps nothing
will be better than 'the same air and look with which at first my
heart was took'. But now to business. I mean soon to call upon your
brother _in form_, namely, as soon as I get quite well, which I hope
to do in about another _fortnight_; and then I hope you will come up
by the coach as fast as the horses can carry you, for I long mightily
to be in your ladyship's presence--to vindicate my character. I think
you had better sell the small house, I mean that at 4. 10, and I will
borrow £100. So that we shall set off merrily in spite of all the
prudence of Edinburgh. Goodbye, little dear!
TO HIS SON
_Marriage, and the choice of a profession_
[1822. ]
. . . If you ever marry, I would wish you to marry the woman you like.
Do not be guided by the recommendations of friends. Nothing will
atone for or overcome an original distaste. It will only increase from
intimacy; and if you are to live separate, it is better not to come
together. There is no use in dragging a chain through life, unless
it binds one to the object we love. Choose a mistress from among your
equals. You will be able to understand her character better, and she
will be more likely to understand yours. Those in an inferior station
to yourself will doubt your good intentions, and misapprehend your
plainest expressions. All that you swear is to them a riddle or
downright nonsense. You cannot by any possibility translate your
thoughts into their dialect. They will be ignorant of the meaning of
half you say, and laugh at the rest. As mistresses, they will have no
sympathy with you; and as wives, you can have none with them.
Women care nothing about poets, or philosophers, or politicians. They
go by a man's looks and manner. Richardson calls them 'an eye-judging
sex'; and I am sure he knew more about them than I can pretend to do.
If you run away with a pedantic notion that they care a pin's point
about your head or your heart, you will repent it too late. . . .
If I were to name one pursuit rather than another, I should wish you
to be a good painter, if such a thing could be hoped. I have failed in
this myself, and should wish you to be able to do what I have not--to
paint like Claude, or Rembrandt, or Guido, or Vandyke, if it were
possible. Artists, I think, who have succeeded in their chief object,
live to be old, and are agreeable old men. Their minds keep alive
to the last. Cosway's spirits never flagged till after ninety; and
Nollekens, though nearly blind, passed all his mornings in giving
directions about some group or bust in his workshop. You have seen Mr.
Northcote, that delightful specimen of the last age. With what avidity
he takes up his pencil, or lays it down again to talk of numberless
things! His eye has not lost its lustre, nor 'paled its ineffectual
fire'. His body is but a shadow: he himself is a pure spirit. There is
a kind of immortality about this sort of ideal and visionary existence
that dallies with Fate and baffles the grim monster, Death. If I
thought you could make as clever an artist, and arrive at such an
agreeable old age as Mr. Northcote, I should declare at once for your
devoting yourself to this enchanting profession; and in that reliance,
should feel less regret at some of my own disappointments, and little
anxiety on your account!
To CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE
_The Life of Napoleon_
7 _Dec_. [1827].
DEAR SIR,
I thought all the world agreed with me at present that Buonaparte was
better than the Bourbons, or that a tyrant was better than tyranny.
In my opinion, no one of an understanding above the rank of a lady's
waiting-maid could ever have doubted this, though I alone said it ten
years ago. It might be impolicy then and now for what I know, for the
world stick to an opinion in appearance long after they have given it
up in reality. I should like to know whether the preface is thought
impolitic by some one who agrees with me in the main point, or by some
one who differs with me and makes this excuse not to have his opinion
contradicted? In Paris (_jubes regina renovare dolorem_) the preface
was thought a masterpiece, the best and only possible defence of
Buonaparte, and quite new _there_! It would be an impertinence in me
to write a Life of Buonaparte after Sir W. without some such object as
that expressed in the preface. After all, I do not care a _damn_ about
the preface. It will get me on four pages somewhere else. Shall I
retract my opinion altogether, and forswear my own book? Rayner is
right to cry out: I think I have tipped him fair and foul copy, a lean
rabbit and a fat one. The remainder of vol. ii will be ready to go on
with, but not the beginning of the third. The appendixes had better
be at the end of the second vol. Pray get them if you can: you have my
Sieyes, have you not? One of them is there. I have been nearly in the
other world. My regret was 'to die and leave the world "rough" copy'.
Otherwise I had thought of an epitaph and a good end. Hic jacent
reliquiae mortales Gulielmi Hazlitt, auctoris non intelligibilis:
natus Maidstoniae in comi [ta] tu Cantiae, Apr. 10, 1778. Obiit
Winterslowe, Dec. , 1827. I think of writing an epistle to C. Lamb,
Esq. , to say that I have passed near the shadowy world, and have had
new impressions of the vanity of this, with hopes of a better. Don't
you think this would be good policy? Don't mention it to the severe
author of the '_Press_', a poem, but me thinks the idea _arridet_
Hone. He would give sixpence to see me floating, upon a pair of
borrowed wings, half way between heaven and earth, and edifying
the good people at my departure, whom I shall only scandalize by
remaining. At present my study and contemplation is the leg of a
stewed fowl. I have behaved like a saint, and been obedient to orders.
_Non fit pugil_, &c. , I got a violent spasm by walking fifteen miles
in the mud, and getting into a coach with an old lady who would have
the window open. Delicacy, moderation, complaisance, the _suaviter in
modo_, whisper it about, my dear Clarke, these are my faults and have
been my ruin.
LEIGH HUNT
1784-1859
To JOSEPH SEVERN
_A belated letter_[1]
Vale of Health, Hampstead, 8 _March_, 1821
DEAR SEVERN,
You have concluded, of course, that I have sent no letters to Rome,
because I was aware of the effect they would have on Keats's mind; and
this is the principal cause; for, besides what I have been told about
letters in Italy, I remember his telling me upon one occasion that, in
his sick moments, he never wished to receive another letter, or ever
to see another face, however friendly. But still I should have written
to you, had I not been almost at death's door myself. You will imagine
how ill I have been, when you hear that I have but just begun writing
again for the _Examiner_ and _Indicator_, after an interval of
several months, during which my flesh wasted from me with sickness
and melancholy. Judge how often I thought of Keats, and with what
feelings. Mr. Brown tells me he is comparatively calm now, or rather
quite so. If he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it
already, and can put it in better language than any man. I hear that
he does not like to be told that he may get better; nor is it to
be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not
survive. He can only regard it as a puerile thing, and an insinuation
that he shall die. But if his persuasion should happen to be no longer
so strong, or if he can now put up with attempts to console him, of
what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour)
think always, that I have seen too many instances of recovery from
apparently desperate cases of consumption not to be in hope to the
very last. If he still cannot bear this, tell him--tell that great
poet and noble-hearted man--that we shall all bear his memory in the
most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their
heads to it, as our loves do. Or if this, again, will trouble his
spirit, tell him that we shall never cease to remember and love him;
and that, Christian or infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith
enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think
all who are of one accord in mind or heart are journeying to one and
the same place, and shall unite somewhere or other again, face to
face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted. Tell him he is only
before us on the road, as he is in everything else; or, whether you
tell him the latter or no, tell him the former, and add that we shall
never forget that he was so, and that we are coming after him. The
tears are again in my eyes, and I must not afford to shed them. The
next letter I write shall be more to yourself, and more refreshing to
your spirits, which we are very sensible must have been greatly taxed.
But whether your friend dies or not, it will not be among the least
lofty of your recollections by-and-by that you helped to smooth the
sick-bed of so fine a being. God bless you, dear Severn.
[Footnote 1: Keats died in February. ]
To PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
_Outpourings of gratitude_
Stonehouse, near Plymouth, 26 _March_, 1822.
MY DEAREST FRIEND,
Your letters always contain something delightful to me, whatever news
they bring.
Surgit _amici_ aliquid, quod in ipsis _nubibus_
_ardet_.
But I confess your latter ones have greatly relieved me on the subject
you speak of. They only make me long, with an extreme Homeric longing,
to be at Pisa,--I mean such an one as Achilles felt when he longed to
be with his father,--sharp in his very limbs. We have secured a ship,
the _David Walter_, which will call for us here, and sets sail
from London in a fortnight. I have written by to-day's post with
intelligence of it to Mrs. Fletcher, enclosing her the letter, and
giving her the option of going on board in London, or here. I need not
say we shall attend to her comforts in every respect. The same post
also carries a letter to Mr. Gisborne, stating your wishes, and
wonders respecting _Adonais_. If it is not published before I leave
England, I will publish my criticism upon the Pisa copy,--a criticism
which I think you will like. I take the opportunity of showing the
public why Gifford's review spoke so bitterly of _Prometheus_, and
why it pretends that the most metaphysical passage of your most
metaphysical poem is a specimen of the clearness of your general
style. The wretched priest-like cunning and undertoned malignity of
that review of _Prometheus_ is indeed a homage paid to qualities which
can so provoke it. The _Quarterly_ pretends now, that it never meddles
with you personally,--of course it never did! For this, _Blackwood_
cries out upon it, contrasting its behaviour in those delicate matters
with its own! This is better and better, and the public seem to think
so; for these things, depend upon it, are getting better understood
every day, and shall be better and better understood every day to
come. One circumstance which helps to reconcile me to having been
detained on this coast, is the opportunity it has given me to make
your works speak for themselves wherever I could; and you are in high
lustre, I assure you, with the most intelligent circles in Plymouth,
[Greek: astaer epsos]. I have, indeed, been astonished to find
how well prepared people of intelligence are to fall in with your
aspirations, and despise the mistakes and rascally instincts of your
calumniators. This place, for instance, abounds in _schoolmasters_,
who appear, to a man, to be liberal to an extreme and esoterical
degree. And such, there is reason to believe, is the case over the
greater part of the kingdom, greatly, no doubt, owing to political
causes. Think of the consequences of this with the rising generation.
I delight in _Adonais_. It is the most Delphic poetry I have seen
a long while; full of those embodyings of the most subtle and airy
imaginations,--those arrestings and explanations of the most shadowy
yearnings of our being--which are the most difficult of all things
to put into words, and the most delightful when put. I do not know
whether you are aware how fond I am of your song on the Skylark; but
you ought, if Ollier sent you a copy of the enlarged _Calendar_
_of Nature_, which he published separately under the title of the
_Months_. I tell you this, because I have not done half or a twentieth
part of what I ought to have done to make your writings properly
appreciated. But I intended to do more every day, and now that I am
coming to you, I shall be _totus_ in you and yours! For all good, and
healthy, and industrious things, I will do such wonders, that I shall
begin to believe I make some remote approach to something like a
return for your kindness. Yet how can that be? At all events, I hope
we shall all be the better for one another's society. Marianne, poor
dear girl, is still very ailing and weak, but stronger upon the whole,
she thinks, than when she first left London, and quite prepared and
happy to set off on her spring voyage. She sends you part of her best
love. I told her I supposed I must answer Marina's letter for her, but
she is quite grand on the occasion, and vows she will do it herself,
which, I assure you, will be the first time she has written a letter
for many months. Ask Marina if she will be charitable, and write one
to me.
I will undertake to answer it with one double as long. But what
am I talking about, when the captain speaks of sailing in a fortnight?
I was led astray by her delightful letter to Marianne about walks, and
duets, and violets, and ladies like violets. Am I indeed to see and
be in the midst of all these beautiful things, ladies like lilies not
excepted? And do the men in Italy really leave ladies to walk in those
very amiable dry ditches by themselves? Oh! for a few strides, like
those of Neptune, when he went from some place to some other place,
and 'did it in three! ' Dear Shelley, I am glad my letter to Lord B.
pleased you, though I do not know why you should so thank me for it.
But you are ingenious in inventing claims for me upon your affection.
To HORACE SMITH
_Shelley's death_
Pisa, 25 _July_, 1822.
Dear Horace,
I trust that the first news of the dreadful calamity which has
befallen us here will have been broken to you by report, otherwise I
shall come upon you with a most painful abruptness; but Shelley, my
divine-minded friend, your friend, the friend of the universe, he has
perished at sea. He was in a boat with his friend Captain Williams,
going from Leghorn to Lerici, when a storm arose, and it is supposed
the boat must have foundered. It was on the 8th instant, about four
or five in the evening, they guess. A fisherman says he saw the boat
a few minutes before it went down: he looked again and it was gone. He
saw the boy they had with them aloft furling one of the sails. We hope
his story is true, as their passage from life to death will then have
been short; and what adds to the hope is, that in S's pocket (for the
bodies were both thrown on shore some days afterwards,--conceive our
horrible certainty, after trying all we could to hope! ) a copy of
Keats's last volume, which he had borrowed of me to read on his
passage, was found _open_ and doubled back as if it had been thrust
in, in the hurry of a surprise. God bless him! I cannot help thinking
of him as if he were alive as much as ever, so unearthly he always
appeared to me, and so seraphical a thing of the elements; and this
is what all his friends say. But what we all feel, your own heart will
tell you. . . .
It has been often feared that Shelley and Captain Williams would meet
with some accident, they were so hazardous; but when they set out on
the 8th, in the morning it was fine. Our dear friend was passionately
fond of the sea, and has been heard to say he should like it to be his
death-bed. . . .
To MRS. PROCTER
_Accepting an invitation_
5 York Buildings, 13 _March_ [1831].
MY DEAR MRS. PROCTER (for Madam, somehow, is
not the thing),
I am most pleased to be reminded of my promise, which I must have made
if you say I did. I suppose I have been coming to keep it ever since;
but it is a long road from sorrow to joy, and one is apt to get
confused on the road. Do you know your letter brought the tears into
my eyes? I hardly know why, unless it was that I saw Procter had been
pouring his kind heart into yours, and you said:--'We must have him
here instead of the coffee-house, and plant him by the fire, and warm
him like a stray bird till he sings. ' But indeed a kind word affects
me where many a hard thump does not. Nevertheless, you must not tell
this, except to the very masculine or feminine; though if you do not
take it as a compliment to yourself,--I mean the confession of
my weakness,--why, you are not Procter's wife, nor Mrs. Montagu's
daughter, nor she who wrote the letter this morning to a poor battered
author.
PS. I eat any plain joint, of the plainer order, beef or mutton:--and
you know I care for nothing at dinner, so that it does not hurt me.
Friends' company is the thing.
To A FRIEND
_Offence and punishment_
Wimbledon, 11 and 12 _August_, 1846.
. . . I find I made a great confusion of my _portion_ of the legal
expenses incurred by the _Examiner_, with the _whole_ of them. That
portion only amounted to £750, the whole being £1500. Of this £750 out
of my pocket (which was quite enough), £250 went to pay for
expenses (counsel, &c. ) attendant on the _failure_ of two Government
prosecutions,--one for saying (_totidem verbis_) that 'of all monarchs
since the Revolution, the successor of George III would have the
finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular'; (think, nowadays,
of being prosecuted for _that_! ) and the other for copying from the
_Stamford News_ the paragraph against military flogging, alluded to
the other day in the _Daily News_. (Think, now, this moment, of being
prosecuted for _That_! ) The £500 fine and two years' imprisonment was
for ludicrously contrasting the _Morning Post's_ picture of the Regent
as an 'Adonis', &c. with the old and real fat state of the case, and
for adding that his Royal Highness had lived for 'upwards of half
a century without doing anything to deserve the admiration of his
contemporaries or the gratitude of posterity'. Words to that effect,
and I believe better,--but I do not quite remember them. They might be
easily ascertained by reference to Peel's Coffee-house, and the words
of the _Post_, too.
Besides the fine, my imprisonment cost me several hundred pounds (I
can't exactly say how many) in monstrous _douceurs_ to the gaoler
for _liberty to walk in the garden_, for help towards getting me
permission to fit up rooms in the sick hospital, and for fitting
up said rooms, or rather converting them from sorts of
washhouses, hitherto uninhabited and unfloored, into comfortable
apartments,--which I did too expensively,--at least as far as papering
the sitting-room with a trellis of roses went, and having my ceiling
painted to imitate an out-of-door sky. No notice, however, could
be taken, I suppose, of any of _this_ portion of the expenses,
governments having nothing to do with the secret corruptions of
gaolers or the pastorals of incarcerated poets: otherwise the
prosecutions cost me altogether a good bit beyond a thousand pounds.
But perhaps it might be mentioned that I went to prison from all but
a sick bed, having been just ordered by the physician _to go to the
seaside_, and _ride_ for the benefit of my health (pleasing dramatic
contrast to the _verdict_! ). I also declined, as I told you, to try
avoiding the imprisonment by the help of Perry's offer of the famous
secret 'Book'; and I further declined (as I think I also told you)
to avail myself of an offer on the part of a royal agent (made, of
course, in the guarded, though obvious manner in which such offers are
conveyed), to drop the prosecution, provided we would agree to
drop all future hostile mention of the Regent. But of this, too,
governments could not be expected to take notice--perhaps would regard
it as an addition to the offence. This, however, I must add, that the
whole attack on the Regent was owing, not merely to the nonsense of
the _Post_, but to his violation of those promises of conceding the
Catholic claims, to which his princely word stood pledged. The subject
of the article was the '_Dinner on St. Patrick's day_'. All the Whig
world was indignant at that violation; so were the Irish, of course,
_vehemently_; and it was on the spur of this publicly indignant
movement that I wrote what I did,--as angrily and as much in earnest
in the serious part of what I said as I was derisive in the rest.
I did not care for any factious object, nor was I what is called
anti-monarchical. I didn't know Cobbett, or Henry Hunt, or any
demagogue, _even by sight_, except Sir Francis Burdett, and him
by sight alone. Nor did I ever see, or speak a word with them,
afterwards. I knew nothing, in fact, of politics themselves, except in
some of those large and, as it appeared to me, obvious phases, which,
at all events, _have since become obvious to most people_, and in
fighting for which (if a man can be said to fight for a 'phase'! ) I
suffered all that Tories could inflict upon me,--by expenses in law
and calumnies in literature;--reform, Catholic claims, free
trade, abolition of flogging, right of free speech, as opposed by
attorneys-general. I was, in fact, all the while nothing but a poetic
student, appearing in politics once a week, but given up entirely to
letters almost all the rest of it, and loving nothing so much as a
book and a walk in the fields. I was precisely the sort of person, in
these respects, which I am at this moment. As to George the Fourth, I
aided, years afterwards, in publicly wishing him well--'years having
brought the philosophic mind'. I believe I even expressed regret at
not having given him the excuses due to all human beings (the passage,
I take it, is in the book which Colburn called _Lord Byron and his
Contemporaries_); _and when I consider that Moore has been pensioned,
not only in spite of all his libels on him, but perhaps by very reason
of their Whig partisanship, I should think it hard to be refused a
pension purely because I openly suffered for what I had earnestly
said_. I knew George the Fourth's physician, Sir William Knighton,
who had been mine before I was imprisoned (it was _not_ he who was the
royal agent alluded to); and, if my memory does not deceive me, Sir
William told me that George had been gratified by the book above
mentioned. Perhaps he had found out, by Sir William's help, that I was
not an ill-natured man, or one who could not outlive what was
mistaken in himself or resentful in others. As to my opinions about
Governments, the bad conduct of the Allies, and of Napoleon, and the
old Bourbons, certainly made them waver as to what might be ultimately
best, monarchy or republicanism; but they ended in favour of their
old predilections; and no man, for a long while, has been less a
republican than myself, monarchies and courts appearing to me salutary
for the good and graces of mankind, and Americanisms anything but
either. But nobody, I conceive, that knew my writings, or heard of me
truly from others, ever took me for a republican. William the Fourth
saw or heard nothing of me to hinder his letting Lord Melbourne give
me £200 out of the Royal Fund. Queen Victoria gave me another,
through the same kind friend. She also went twice to see my play; and
everybody knows how I praise and love her. _I do not think, therefore,
in reference to the pension, that the public would care twopence about
George the Fourth, one way or the other; or that if any remembered the
case at all, they would connect the pension in the least with anything
about him, but attribute it solely to the Queen's and Minister's
goodness, and the wants of a sincere and not undeserving man of
letters, distinguished for his loyal attachment_. I certainly think
the £500 fine ought not to have been taken out of my pocket, or the
other two £125 either; and I think also, that a liberal Whig minister
might reasonably and _privately_ think some compensation on those
accounts due to me. _I have been fighting his own fight from first to
last, and helping to prepare matters for his triumph_. But still the
above, in my opinion, is what the public would think of the matter,
_and my friends of the press could lay it entirely to the literary
account_.
GEORGE GORDON NOEL,
LORD BYRON
1788-1824
To MR. HODGSON
_Travel in Portugal_
Lisbon, 16 _July_, 1809.
Thus far have we pursued our route, and seen all sorts of marvellous
sights, palaces, convents, &c. ,--which, being to be heard in my friend
Hobhouse's forthcoming Book of Travels, I shall not anticipate by
smuggling any account whatsoever to you in a private and clandestine
manner. I must just observe, that the village of Cintra in Estremadura
is the most beautiful, perhaps, in the world.
I am very happy here, because I loves oranges, and talks bad Latin
to the monks, who understand it, as it is like their own,--and I goes
into society (with my pocket pistols), and I swims in the Tagus
all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears
Portuguese, and have got bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that?
Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a-pleasuring.
When the Portuguese are pertinacious, I say '_Carracho_! '--the
great oath of the grandees, that very well supplies the place of
'Damme! '--and when dissatisfied with my neighbour, I pronounce
him '_Ambra di merdo_'. With these two phrases, and a third,'_Avra
bouro_', which signifieth 'Get an ass', I am universally understood to
be a person of degree and a master of languages. How merrily we
lives that travellers be! --if we had food and raiment. But, in sober
sadness, anything is better than England, and I am infinitely amused
with my pilgrimage, as far as it has gone.
To-morrow we start to ride post near 400 miles as far as Gibraltar,
where we embark for Melita and Byzantium. A letter to Malta will find
me, or to be forwarded, if I am absent. Pray embrace the Drury and
Dwyer, and all the Ephesians you encounter. I am writing with Butler's
donative pencil, which makes my bad hand worse. Excuse illegibility.
Hodgson! send me the news, and the deaths and defeats and capital
crimes and the misfortunes of one's friends; and let us hear of
literary matters, and the controversies and the criticisms. All this
will be pleasant--'_Suave mari magno_, &c. ' Talking of that, I have
been sea-sick, and sick of the sea. Adieu.
TO THOMAS MOORE
_Announces his engagement_
Newstead Abbey, 20 _Sept. _ 1814.
Here's to her who long
Hath waked the poet's sigh!
The girl who gave to song
What gold could never buy.
MY DEAR MOORE,
I am going to be married--that is, I am accepted, and one usually
hopes the rest will follow. My mother of the Gracchi (that _are_ to
be), _you_ think too strait-laced for me, although the paragon of only
children, and invested with 'golden opinions of all sorts of men', and
full of 'most blest conditions' as Desdemona herself. Miss Milbanke
is the lady, and I have her father's invitation to proceed there in my
elect capacity,--which, however, I cannot do until I have settled some
business in London, and got a blue coat.
She is said to be an heiress, but of that I really know nothing
certainly, and shall not inquire. But I do know, that she has talents
and excellent qualities; and you will not deny her judgement, after
having refused six suitors and taken me.
Now, if you have anything to say against this, pray do; my mind's
made up, positively fixed, determined, and therefore I will listen to
reason, because now it can do no harm. Things may occur to break it
off, but I will hope not. In the meantime I tell you (a _secret_, by
the by,--at least till I know she wishes it to be public) that I have
proposed and am accepted. You need not be in a hurry to wish me joy,
for one mayn't be married for months. I am going to town to-morrow,
but expect to be here, on my way there, within a fortnight.
If this had not happened, I should have gone to Italy. In my way down,
perhaps you will meet me at Nottingham, and come over with me here.
I need not say that nothing will give me greater pleasure. I must, of
course, reform thoroughly; and, seriously, if I can contribute to
her happiness, I shall secure my own. She is so good a person
that--that--in short, I wish I was a better.
TO JOHN MURRAY
_No bid for sweet voices_
Venice, 6 _April_, 1819.
The second canto of Don Juan was sent, on Saturday last, by post, in
four packets, two of four, and two of three sheets each, containing
in all two hundred and seventeen stanzas, octave measure. But I will
permit no curtailments. . . . You shan't make _canticles_ of my cantos.
The poem will please, if it is lively; if it is stupid, it will fail;
but I will have none of your damned cutting and slashing. If you
please, you may publish _anonymously_; it will perhaps be better; but
I will battle my way against them all, like a porcupine.
So you and Mr. Foscolo, etc. , want me to undertake what you call a
'great work'? an Epic Poem, I suppose or some such pyramid. I'll try
no such thing; I hate tasks. And then 'seven or eight years'! God send
us all well this day three months, let alone years. If one's years
can't be better employed than in sweating poesy, a man had better be a
ditcher. And works, too! --is _Childe Harold_ nothing? You have so many
'_divine_' poems, is it nothing to have written a _human_ one? without
any of your worn-out machinery. Why, man, I could have spun the
thoughts of the four cantos of that poem into twenty, had I wanted to
book-make, and its passion into as many modern tragedies. Since you
want _length_, you shall have enough of _Juan_, for I'll make fifty
cantos. . . .
Besides, I mean to write my best work in _Italian_, and it will take
me nine years more thoroughly to master the language; and then if my
fancy exist, and I exist too, I will try what I _can_ do _really_. As
to the estimation of the English which you talk of, let them
calculate what it is worth, before they insult me with their insolent
condescension.
I have not written for their pleasure. If they are pleased, it is that
they chose to be so; I have never flattered their opinions, nor their
pride; nor will I. Neither will I make 'Ladies' books' '_al dilettar
le femine e la plebe_'. I have written from the fullness of my mind,
from passion, from impulse, from many motives, but not for their
'sweet voices'.
I know the precise worth of popular applause, for few scribblers have
had more of it; and if I chose to swerve into their paths, I could
retain it, or resume it. But I neither love ye, nor fear ye; and
though I buy with ye and sell with ye, and talk with ye, I will
neither eat with ye, drink with ye, nor pray with ye. They made me,
without my search, a species of popular idol; they, without reason or
judgement, beyond the caprice of their good pleasure, threw down the
image from its pedestal; it was not broken with the fall, and they
would, it seems, again replace it,--but they shall not.
You ask about my health: about the beginning of the year I was in a
state of great exhaustion . . . and I was obliged to reform my 'way of
life', which was conducting me from the 'yellow leaf' to the ground,
with all deliberate speed. I am better in health and morals, and very
much yours, &c. --
PS. I have read Hodgson's '_Friends_'. He is right in defending Pope
against the bastard pelicans of the poetical winter day, who add
insult to their parricide, by sucking the blood of the parent of
English _real_ poetry,--poetry without fault,--and then spurning the
bosom which fed them.
TO THE SAME
_The cemetery at Bologna_
Bologna, 7 _June_, 1819.
. . . I have been picture-gazing this morning at the famous Domenichino
and Guido, both of which are superlative. I afterwards went to the
beautiful cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls, and found, besides
the superb burial-ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded me
of the grave-digger in _Hamlet_. He has a collection of capuchins'
skulls, labelled on the forehead, and taking down one of them, said,
'This was Brother Desiderio Berro, who died at forty--one of my best
friends. I begged his head of his brethren after his decease, and they
gave it me. I put it in lime, and then boiled it. Here it is, teeth
and all, in excellent preservation. He was the merriest, cleverest
fellow I ever knew. Wherever he went, he brought joy; and whenever any
one was melancholy, the sight of him was enough to make him cheerful
again. He walked so actively, you might have taken him for a
dancer--he joked--he laughed--oh! he was such a Frate as I never saw
before, nor ever shall again! '
He told me that he had himself planted all the cypresses in the
cemetery; that he had the greatest attachment to them and to his dead
people; that since 1801 they had buried fifty-three thousand persons.
In showing some older monuments, there was that of a Roman girl of
twenty, with a bust by Bernini. She was a princess Bartorini, dead two
centuries ago: he said that, on opening her grave, they had found
her hair complete, and 'as yellow as gold'. Some of the epitaphs at
Ferrara pleased me more than the more splendid monuments at Bologna;
for instance:--
'_Martini Luigi
Implora pace. '
'Lucrezia Picini
Implora eterna quiete_. '
Can anything be more full of pathos? Those few words say all that can
be said or sought: the dead had had enough of life; all they wanted
was rest, and this they _implore_! There is all the helplessness,
and humble hope, and deathlike prayer, that can arise from the
grave--'_implora pace_'. I hope, whoever may survive me, and shall
see me put in the foreigners' burying-ground at the Lido, within the
fortress by the Adriatic, will see those two words, and no more, put
over me. I trust they won't think of 'pickling, and bringing me home
to Clod or Blunderbuss Hall'. I am sure my bones would not rest in
an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I
believe the thought would drive me mad on my deathbed, could I suppose
that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back
to your soil. I would not even feed your worms, if I could help it.
So, as Shakespeare says of Mowbray, the banished Duke of Norfolk, who
died at Venice (see _Richard II_), that he, after fighting
Against black Pagans, Turks, and Saracens,
And toiled with works of war, retired himself
To Italy, and there, at _Venice_, gave
His body to that _pleasant_ country's earth,
And his pure soul unto his captain, Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long.
