Memoir of John Murray
John Hookham Frere to John Murray, 4 May 1818
I send you the concluding stanzas of the fourth canto. . . .
Lord Byron has paid me a great
compliment indeed. You will have thought it odd that I should persist in my
first impressions after your letter, but the expression was ambiguous, and I
fancied that it was intendedly so. In fact, I was only convinced by seeing it
in the printed list of his works. If I had been in the habit of laying wagers,
I might have been finely taken in; for the attack on Botherby* appeared fully to me to account for
its being attributed to Lord Byron, yet the expressions in
it are such as (between ourselves) I have heard from W. Rose. But this is something like old Chalmers showing that he was in the right in believing the
Ireland papers to be Shakespeare’s. By-the-bye, that
Shakespearian faculty of transforming himself was a quality which I did not
think belonged to Byron in so high a degree as
‘Beppo’ has shown
that it does. I am obliged to walk to the Wells, and remain,
Yours very sincerely,
George Chalmers (1742-1825)
Scottish antiquary ridiculed by Edmond Malone for defending Ireland's forgeries in
An Apology for the Believers in the Shakspear Papers (1797).
John Hookham Frere (1769-1846)
English diplomat and poet; educated at Eton and Cambridge, he was envoy to Lisbon
(1800-02) and Madrid (1802-04, 1808-09); with Canning conducted the
The
Anti-Jacobin (1797-98); author of
Prospectus and Specimen of an
intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft (1817, 1818).
William Henry Ireland (1775-1835)
Miscellaneous writer whose youthful Shakespeare forgeries (1796) took in many who should
have known better.
John Murray II (1778-1843)
The second John Murray began the
Quarterly Review in 1809 and
published works by Scott, Byron, Austen, Crabbe, and other literary notables.
William Stewart Rose (1775-1843)
Second son of George Rose, treasurer of the navy (1744-1818); he introduced Byron to
Frere's
Whistlecraft poems and translated Casti's
Animale parlante (1819).
William Sotheby (1757-1833)
English man of letters; after Harrow he joined the dragoons, married well, and published
Poems (1790) and became a prolific poet and translator,
prominent in literary society.
