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Lord Byron and his Times: http://lordbyron.org
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If Surprised at
” I did not tell him that I had heard something me?Looks and Tones;
” and as he saw that Well, are we never to have the Rhymes?—the Looks and Tones?—
(We believe this is a line of But mind, you must not publish.
You know I’m his
” We do not remember him to
have praised friend.
On the other hand, he was never backward to let you see that he had a poor
notion of his serious poetry in general. He did not think that there shone much truth about
that, either of style or sentiment. He says in a letter to I leave it to others, to circumsize their Angels with their ‘bonnes
fortunes’ to the drawing room and clerical standard.
” In this passage, the
words others and theirs have been substituted
very plainly for the words Mr Moorehis:—so cautious was he of committing himself on paper, and yet so
desirous of saying all. His care in this respect was a circumstance worthy notice, considering
the incontinence of speech for which he was famous. He used to observe, with a look of gravity,
that “you could not deny what you had written.
” Yet this was the writer of
an autobiography said to have been committed to the flames; and enough remains both in
He! why he finds out your bill of fare, and his countenance falls if
it is not of the first order. You should have seen how distressed he looked one day at
Venice, because the dinner did not suit him.
”—“That then,
”
said the other, “accounts for an expression I once saw in his face when the covers
were taken off from some dishes. I had a suspicion of it, but could hardly believe it
possible.
”—“Do but give
” returned the noble poet, “and he is at the top of his
happiness.—Oh!
” added he, in the most emphatic manner, with a face full of glee
as above described, doubling himself up as he walked, lifting up his arm, and bringing it down
with a doubled fist upon the word in Italics, “loves a Lord!”
These are surely not the refinements and the just pride, any more than the
previous specimens of duplicity are the single-heartedness, which give low. Nor did High-life and Row-life.
” As to “vanity,” what is all this
but vanity? And as to being a dependant, the term belongs to the man who depends in any shape
for the comfort of his existence upon those of whom he might be independent: not to him, who
goes into another country to set up a joint speculation, and is forced to obtain fugitive aid
from the partner that deserts him.
With respect to
One anecdote also will suffice with regard to “vanity,” especially
* Tuft-hunter is a college term for one who seeks the company of men
of noble families, their caps being distinguished by a tuft of gold. Timesapostle and martyr of freedom, his exertions in the
cause of Greece were limited to a six months’ talk about an expedition to Lepanto,
and a loan of some thousands of pounds which were repaid to his executors.
”
His face turned of the
colour of scarlet; and he said no more.
We conclude these most disagreeable subjects for the present, and if not
compelled to take further notice of them, for ever, by laying before our readers, the promised
quotation from the ‘flail of gold:—
‘I was sorry to find, the other day, on coming to Vevay,
and looking into some English books at a library there, that
It’s an ill
bird,
” as the proverb says. This appears to me, I confess, to be pickthank work, as needless as it is ill-timed, and, considering
from whom it comes, particularly unpleasant. In conclusion, he thanks God, with the Levite,
that “he is not one of those,
” and would rather be anything—a worm, the
meanest thing that crawls—than numbered among those who give light and law to the world by
an excess of fancy and intellect.* Perhaps posterity may take him at his word, and no more
trace be found of his “
‘It might be some increasing consciousness of the frail
tenure by which he holds his rank among the great heirs of Fame, that urged our Bard to
pawn his reversion of immortality for an indulgent smile of Patrician approbation, as he
raised his puny arm against “
the mighty dead,
” to lower, by a flourish
of his pen, the aristocracy of letters nearer to the level of the aristocracy of rank—two
ideas that keep up a perpetual see-saw in
‘The mode in which our author proposes to correct the
extravagance of public opinion, and qualify the interest taken in such persons as
”So shall their anticipation prevent our
discovery!
“And doubtless ’mong the grave and good And gentle of their neighbourhood, If known at all, they were but known,As strange low people, low and bad; Madame herself to footmen prone. And her young Pauper, all but mad.”
‘This is one way of the reversing the judgment of
posterity, and setting aside the
ex-post-factoall that’s come and gone
yet
”—after the anxious doubts and misgivings of his mind as to his own
destiny—after all the the gaze and show of
the time,
” after having been read by all classes, criticized, condemned,
admired in every corner of Europe—after bequeathing a name that at the end of half a
century is never repeated but with emotion, as another name for genius and misfortune—after
having given us an interest in his feelings as in our own, and drawn the veil of lofty
imagination or of pensive regret over all that relates to his own being, so that we go a
Pilgrimage to the places where he lived, and recall the names he loved with tender
affection (worshipping at the Shrines where his fires were first kindled, and where the
purple light of love still lingers “Elysian beauty, melancholy
grace!
”)—after all this, and more, instead of taking the opinion which one half
of the world have formed of something asked to dine out, existing in the author’s own mind.
‘the pauper lad,
” namely, that “he was mad,
” because he was poor, and flings it to the passengers out of a landau
and four, as the true version of his character, by the fashionable and local authorities of
the time. He need not have gone out of his way to Charmettes merely to drag the reputations
of people low and bad,
” on the strength of
his enervated sympathy with the genteel conjectures of the day, as
to what and who they were. We have better and more authentic evidence. What would he say,
if this method of neutralizing the voice of the public were applied to himself, or to his
friend, tête-à-tête with a lord, because his
father stood behind a counter, or were to ask the sculptor’s customers, when he drove
a milk-cart, what we are so think of his bust of It will never do. It is the peculiar hardship
of genius, not to he recognized with the first breath it draws—often not to be admitted
even during its life-time—to make its way slow and late, through good report and evil
report, “through clouds of detraction, of envy and lies
”—to have to
contend with the injustice of fortune, with the prejudice of the world,
to be shamed by personal defects, to pine in obscurity, to be the butt of pride, the
jest of fools, the bye-word of ignorance and malice—to carry on a ceaseless warfare between
the consciousness of inward worth and the slights, and neglect of others, and to hope only
fair its reward in the grave and in the undying voice of fame:—and when, as in the present
instance, that end has been marvellously attained, and a final sentence has been passed,
would any one but
‘There is something more particularly offensive in the
cant about “
people
” applied to the intimacy between low and bad
‘What also makes the
’—dead set at
the Heroine of the ‘now in glimmer, and now in gloom
”—now basking in the warmth, now
writhing in the smart, now licking his lips at it, now making wry faces, but always
fidgetting and fluttering about the same gaudy luscious topic, either in flimsy raptures or
trumpery horrors? I hate for my own part, this alternation of meretricious rhapsodies and
methodistical cant, though the one generally ends in the other.Plain SpeakerOn the Spleen of Party
* “Out on the craft—I’d rather be One of those hinds that round me tread, With just enough of sense to see The noon-day sun that’s o’er may head, Than thus, with high-built genius curs’d, That hath no heart for its foundation; Be all at once that’s brightest—worst— Sublimest—meanest in creation.” . Rhymes on the Road