been called _philosophy_ or metaphysics in England and France, since the era of the commencing predominance of the mechanical system at the restoration of our second Charles, and with this the present fashionable views, not only of religion, morals, and politics but even of the modern physics and physiology. You will not blame the earnestness of my expressions, nor the high importance which I attach to this work: for how, with less noble objects, and less faith in their attainment, could I stand acquitted of folly, and abuse of time, talents, and learning in a labour of three-fourths of my intellectual life? Of this work, something more than a volume has been dictated by me, so as to exist fit for the press, to my friend and enlightened pupil, Mr. Green; and more than as much again would have been evolved and delivered to paper, but that, for the last six or eight months, I have been compelled to break off our weekly meeting, from the necessity of writing (alas! alas! of attempting to write) for purposes, and on the subjects, of the passing day. Of my poetic works I would fain finish the _Christabel_! Alas! for the proud time when I planned, when I had present to my mind, the materials, as well as the scheme, of the Hymns entitled _Spirit_, _Sun_, _Earth_, _Air_, _Water_, _Fire_ and _Man_; and the Epic Poem on what still appears to me the one only fit subject remaining for an epic poem–Jerusalem besieged and destroyed by Titus.
TO THE SAME
_Reminiscences_
4 March, 1822.
My Dearest Friend,
I have been much more than ordinarily unwell for more than a week past–my sleeps worse than my vigils, my nights than my days;
–The night’s dismay
Sadden’d and stunned the intervening day;
but last night I had not only a calmer night, without roaming in my dreams through any of Swedenborg’s Hells _moderes_; but arose this morning lighter and with a sense of _relief_….
I shall make you smile, as I did dear Mary Lamb, when I say that you sometimes mistake my position. As individual to individual, from my childhood, I do not remember feeling myself either superior or inferior to any human being; except by an act of my own will in cases of real or imagined moral or intellectual superiority. In regard to worldly rank, from eight years old to nineteen, I was habituated, nay, naturalised, to look up to men circumstanced as you are, as my superiors–a large number of our governors, and almost _all_ of those whom we regarded as greater men still, and whom we saw most of, _viz._ our committee governors, were such–and as neither awake nor asleep have I any other feelings than what I had at Christ’s Hospital, I distinctly remember that I felt a little flush of pride and consequence–just like what we used to feel at school when the boys came running to us–‘Coleridge! here’s your friends want you–they are quite _grand_,’ or ‘It is quite a _lady_’–when I first heard who you were, and laughed at myself for it with that pleasurable sensation that, spite of my sufferings at that school, still accompanies any sudden reawakening of our school-boy feelings and notions. And oh, from sixteen to nineteen what hours of Paradise had Allen and I in escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a milliner’s whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such a nice lady;–and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay. To be feminine, kind, and genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were the only things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and what I was then, I still am.
God bless you and yours.
ROBERT SOUTHEY
1774-1843
TO JOSEPH COTTLE
_Question of copyrights_
Greta Hall, 20 _April_, 1808.
My dear Cottle,…
What you say of my copyrights affected me very much. Dear Cottle, set your heart at rest on that subject. It ought to be at rest. These were yours, fairly bought, and fairly sold. You bought them on the chance of their success, which no London bookseller would have done; and had they not been bought, they could not have been published at all. Nay, if you had not purchased _Joan of Arc_, the poem never would have existed, nor should I, in all probability, ever have obtained that reputation which is the capital on which I subsist, nor that power which enables me to support it.
But this is not all. Do you suppose, Cottle, that I have forgotten those true and most essential acts of friendship which you showed me when I stood most in need of them? Your house was my house when I had no other. The very money with which I bought my wedding-ring, and paid my marriage fees, was supplied by you. It was with your sisters I left Edith during my six months’ absence, and for the six months after my return it was from you that I received, week by week, the little on which we lived, till I was enabled to live by other means. It is not the settling of a cash account that can cancel obligations like these. You are in the habit of preserving your letters, and if you were not, I would entreat you to preserve _this_, that it might be seen hereafter. Sure I am, there never was a more generous or a kinder heart than yours; and you will believe me when I add, that there does not live that man upon earth, whom I remember with more gratitude and more affection. My heart throbs and my eyes burn with these recollections. Good night! my dear old friend and benefactor.
TO JOHN MAY
_Waterloo_
Liege, 6 _Oct._ 1815. Six p.m.
My dear friend,
I have a happy habit of making the best of all things; and being just at this time as uncomfortable as the dust and bustle, and all the disagreeables of an inn in a large filthy manufacturing city can make me, I have called for pen, ink, and paper, and am actually writing in the bar, the door open to the yard opposite to this unwiped table, the doors open to the public room, where two men are dining, and talking French, and a woman servant at my elbow is lighting a fire for our party. Presently the folding-doors are to be shut, the ladies are to descend from their chambers, the bar will be kept appropriated to our house, the male part of the company will get into good humour, dinner will be ready, and then I must lay aside the grey goose-quill. As a preliminary to these promised comforts, the servant is mopping the hearth, which is composed (like a tesselated pavement) of little bricks about two inches long by half an inch wide, set within a broad black stone frame. The fuel is of fire-balls, a mixture of pulverized coal and clay. I have seen a great deal and heard a great deal,–more, indeed, than I can keep pace with in my journal, though I strive hard to do it; but I minute down short notes in my pencil-book with all possible care, and hope, in the end, to lose nothing….
Flanders is a most interesting country. Bruges, the most striking city I have ever seen, an old city in perfect preservation. It seems as if not a house had been built during the last two centuries, and not a house suffered to pass to decay. The poorest people seem to be well lodged, and there is a general air of sufficiency, cleanliness, industry, and comfort, which I have never seen in any other place. The cities have grown worse as we advanced. At Namur we reached a dirty city, situated in a romantic country; the Meuse there reminded me of the Thames from your delightful house, an island in size and shape resembling that upon which I have often wished for a grove of poplars, coming just in the same position. From thence along the river to this abominable place, the country is, for the greater part, as lovely as can be imagined….
Our weather hitherto has been delightful. This was especially fortunate at Waterloo and at Ligny, where we had much ground to walk over. It would surprise you to see how soon nature has recovered from the injuries of war. The ground is ploughed and sown, and grain and flowers and seeds already growing over the field of battle, which is still strewn with vestiges of the slaughter, caps, cartridges, boxes, hats, &c. We picked up some French cards and some bullets, and we purchased a French pistol and two of the eagles which the infantry wear upon their caps. What I felt upon this ground, it would be difficult to say; what I saw, and still more what I heard, there is no time at present for saying. In prose and in verse you shall some day hear the whole. At Les Quatre Bras, I saw two graves, which probably the dogs or the swine had opened. In the one were the ribs of a human body, projecting through the mould; in the other, the whole skeleton exposed. Some of our party told me of a third, in which the worms were at work, but I shrunk from the sight. You will rejoice to hear that the English are as well spoken of for their deportment in peace as in war. It is far otherwise with the Prussians. Concerning them there is but one opinion; their brutality is said to exceed that of the French, and of their intolerable insolence I have heard but too many proofs. That abominable old Frederic made them a military nation, and this is the inevitable consequence. This very day we passed a party on their way towards France–some hundred or two. Two gentlemen and two ladies of the country, in a carriage, had come up with them; and these ruffians would not allow them to pass, but compelled them to wait and follow the slow pace of foot soldiers! This we ourselves saw. Next to the English, the Belgians have the best character for discipline….
I bought at Bruges a French History of Brazil, just published by M. Alphonse de Beauchamp, in 3 vols. 8vo. He says, in his Preface, that having finished the first two volumes, he thought it advisable to see if any new light had been thrown upon the subject by modern authors. Meantime, a compilation upon this history had appeared in England, but the English author, Mr. Southey, had brought no new lights; he had promised much for his second volume, but the hope of literary Europe had been again deceived, for this second volume, so emphatically promised, had not appeared. I dare say no person regrets this delay so much as M. Beauchamp, he having stolen the whole of his two first volumes, and about the third part of the other, from the very Mr. Southey whom he abuses. He has copied my references as the list of his own authorities (MSS. and all), and he has committed blunders which prove, beyond all doubt, that he does not understand Portuguese. I have been much diverted by this fellow’s impudence.
The table is laid, and the knives and forks rattling a pleasant note of preparation, as the woman waiter arranges them.
God bless you! I have hurried through the sheet, and thus pleasantly beguiled what would have been a very unpleasant hour. We are all well, and your god-daughter has seen a live emperor at Brussels. I feel the disadvantage of speaking French ill, and understanding it by the ear worse. Nevertheless, I speak it without remorse, make myself somehow or other understood, and get at what I want to know. Once more, God bless you, my dear friend.
To HENRY TAYLOR
_Anastasius Hope_
Keswick, 15 _July_, 1831.
… Have you seen the strange book which Anastasius Hope left for publication, and which his representatives, in spite of all dissuasion, have published? His notion of immortality and heaven is, that at the consummation of all things he, and you, and I, and John Murray, and Nebuchadnezzar, and Lambert the fat man, and the living skeleton, and Queen Elizabeth, and the Hottentot Venus, and Thurtell, and Probert, and the twelve Apostles, and the noble army of martyrs, and Genghis Khan, and all his armies, and Noah with all his ancestors and all his posterity–yea, all men and all women, and all children that have ever been or ever shall be, saints and sinners alike–are all to be put together, and made into one great celestial eternal human being. He does not seem to have known how nearly this approaches to Swedenborg’s fancy. I do not like the scheme. I don’t like the notion of being mixed up with Hume, and Hunt, and Whittle Harvey, and Philpotts, and Lord Althorpe, and the Huns, and the Hottentots, and the Jews, and the Philistines, and the Scotch, and the Irish. God forbid! I hope to be I myself; I, in an English heaven, with you yourself–you, and some others, without whom heaven would be no heaven to me. God bless you!
TO EDWARD MOXON
_Recollections of the Lambs_
Keswick, 2 _Feb._ 1836.
My dear sir,
I have been too closely engaged in clearing off the second volume of Cowper to reply to your inquiries concerning poor Lamb sooner. His acquaintance with Coleridge began at Christ’s Hospital; Lamb was some two years, I think, his junior. Whether he was ever one of the _Grecians_ there, might be ascertained, I suppose, by inquiring. My own impression is, that he was not. Coleridge introduced me to him in the winter of 1794-5, and to George Dyer also, from whom, if his memory has not failed, you might probably learn more of Lamb’s early history than from any other person. Lloyd, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt became known to him through their connexion with Coleridge.
When I saw the family (one evening only, and at that time), they were lodging somewhere near Lincoln’s Inn, on the western side (I forget the street), and were evidently in uncomfortable circumstances. The father and mother were both living; and I have some dim recollection of the latter’s invalid appearance. The father’s senses had failed him before that time. He published some poems in quarto. Lamb showed me once an imperfect copy: the _Sparrow’s Wedding_ was the title of the longest piece, and this was the author’s favourite; he liked, in his dotage, to hear Charles read it.
His most familiar friend, when I first saw him, was White, who held some office at Christ’s Hospital, and continued intimate with him as long as he lived. You know what Elia says of him. He and Lamb were joint authors of the _Original Letters of Falstaff_. Lamb, I believe, first appeared as an author in the second edition of Coleridge’s _Poems_ (Bristol, 1797), and, secondly, in the little volume of blank verse with Lloyd (1798). Lamb, Lloyd, and White were inseparable in 1798; the two latter at one time lodged together, though no two men could be imagined more unlike each other. Lloyd had no drollery in his nature; White seemed to have nothing else. You will easily understand how Lamb could sympathize with both.
Lloyd, who used to form sudden friendships, was all but a stranger to me, when unexpectedly he brought Lamb down to visit me at a little village (Burton) near Christchurch, in Hampshire, where I was lodging in a very humble cottage. This was in the summer of 1797, and then, or in the following year, my correspondence with Lamb began. I saw more of him in 1802 than at any other time, for I was then six months resident in London. His visit to this county was before I came to it; it must have been either in that or in the following year: it was to Lloyd and to Coleridge.
I had forgotten one of his schoolfellows, who is still living–C.V. Le Grice, a clergyman at or near Penzance. From him you might learn something of his boyhood.
Cottle has a good likeness of Lamb, in chalk, taken by an artist named Robert Hancock, about the year 1798. It looks older than Lamb was at that time; but he was old-looking.
Coleridge introduced him to Godwin, shortly after the first number of the _Anti-Jacobin Magazine and Review_ was published, with a caricature of Gillray’s, in which Coleridge and I were introduced with asses’ heads, and Lloyd and Lamb as toad and frog. Lamb got warmed with whatever was on the table, became disputatious, and said things to Godwin which made him quietly say, ‘Pray, Mr. Lamb, are you toad or frog?’ Mrs. Coleridge will remember the scene, which was to her sufficiently uncomfortable. But the next morning S.T.C. called on Lamb, and found Godwin breakfasting with him, from which time their intimacy began.
His angry letter to me in the _Magazine_ arose out of a notion that an expression of mine in the _Quarterly Review_ would hurt the sale of _Elia_; some one, no doubt, had said that it would. I meant to serve the book, and very well remember how the offence happened. I had written that it wanted nothing to render it altogether delightful but a _saner_ religious feeling. _This_ would have been the proper word if any other person had written the book. Feeling its extreme unfitness as soon as it was written, I altered it immediately for the first word which came into my head, intending to remodel the sentence when it should come to me in the proof; and that proof never came. There can be no objection to your printing all that passed upon the occasion, beginning with the passage in the _Quarterly Review_, and giving his letter.
I have heard Coleridge say that, in a fit of derangement, Lamb fancied himself to be young Norval. He told me this in relation to one of his poems.
If you will print my lines to him upon his _Album Verses_, I will send you a corrected copy. You received his letters, I trust, which Cuthbert took with him to town in October. I wish they had been more, and wish, also, that I had more to tell you concerning him, and what I have told were of more value. But it is from such fragments of recollection, and such imperfect notices, that the materials for biography must, for the most part, be collected.
=CHARLES LAMB=
1775-1834
TO SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
_Temporary frenzy_
27 _May_, 1796.
… Coleridge! I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don’t bite anyone. But mad I was! And many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were told. My sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw you, and will some day communicate to you. I am beginning a poem in blank verse, which, if I finish, I publish…. Coleridge! it may convince you of my regards for you when I tell you my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.
TO THE SAME
_A friend in need_
_Thursday, 11 June_, 1796.
… After all, you cannot, nor ever will, write anything with which I shall be so delighted as what I have heard yourself repeat. You came to town, and I saw you at a time when your heart was yet bleeding with recent wounds. Like yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed hope. You had
–many an holy lay
That, mourning, soothed the mourner on his way;
I had ears of sympathy to drink them in, and they yet vibrate pleasant on the sense. When I read in your little volume your nineteenth effusion, or the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, or what you call the _Sigh_, I think I hear _you_ again. I image to myself the little smoky room at the _Salutation and Cat_, where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with Poesy. When you left London, I felt a dismal void in my heart. I found myself cut off, at one and the same time, from two most dear to me. ‘How blest with ye the path could I have trod of quiet life!’ In your conversation you had blended so many pleasant fancies that they cheated me of my grief. But in your absence the tide of melancholy rushed in again, and did its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason. I have recovered, but feel a stupor that makes me indifferent to the hopes and fears of this life. I sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind, but habits are strong things, and my religious fervours are confined, alas! to some fleeting moments of occasional solitary devotion. A correspondence, opening with you, has roused me a little from my lethargy, and made me conscious of existence. Indulge me in it: I will not be very troublesome! At some future time I will amuse you with an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turn my frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy: for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so.
TO THE SAME
_The tragedy_
27 _Sept_. 1796.
MY DEAREST FRIEND,
White, or some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of our own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses; I eat, and drink, and sleep, and have my judgement, I believe, very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt. Mr. Norris, of the Bluecoat School, has been very kind to us, and we have no other friend; but, thank God, I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do. Write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with. With me ‘the former things are passed away’, and I have something more to do than to feel.
God Almighty have us in His keeping!
Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish mine (I give free leave) without name or initial, and never send me a book, I charge you.
Your own judgement will convince you not to take any notice of this yet to your dear wife. You look after your family; I have reason and strength left to take care of mine. I charge you, don’t think of coming to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God Almighty love you and all of us!
TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
_The delights of London_
30 _Jan_. 1801.
I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles;–life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the printshops, the old book-stalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes–London itself a pantomime and a masquerade–all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me often into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?
My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book-case which has followed me about like a faithful dog, (only exceeding him in knowledge,) wherever I have moved, old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school,–these are my mistresses,–have I not enough, without your mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies, and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind: and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.
Give my kindest love, and my sister’s, to D. and yourself; and a kiss from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my play!
TO THOMAS MANNING
_At the Lakes_
London, 24 _Sept_. 1802.
My dear Manning,
Since the date of my last letter I have been a traveller. A strong desire seized me of visiting remote regions. My first impulse was to go and see Paris. It was a trivial objection to my aspiring mind, that I did not understand a word of the language, since I certainly intend some time in my life to see Paris, and equally certainly intend never to learn the language; therefore that could be no objection. However, I am very glad I did not go, because you had left Paris (I see) before I could have set out. I believe Stoddart promising to go with me another year prevented that plan. My next scheme (for to my restless, ambitious mind London was become a bed of thorns) was to visit the far-famed peak in Derbyshire, where the Devil sits, they say, without breeches. _This_ my purer mind rejected as indelicate. And my final resolve was a tour to the Lakes. I set out with Mary to Keswick, without giving Coleridge any notice, for my time, being precious, did not admit of it. He received us with all the hospitality in the world, and gave up his time to show us all the wonders of the country. He dwells upon a small hill by the side of Keswick, in a comfortable house, quite enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains: great floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all couchant and asleep. We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the mountains into colours, purple, &c., &c. We thought we had got into fairy-land. But that went off (as it never came again; while we stayed we had no more fine sunsets); and we entered Coleridge’s comfortable study just in the dusk, when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their heads. Such an impression I never received from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again. Glorious creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, &c. I shall never forget ye, how ye lay about that night, like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed for the night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing fire in his study; which is a large, antique, ill-shaped room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an Aeolian harp, and an old sofa, half bed, &c. And all looking out upon the last fading view of Skiddaw, and his broad-breasted brethren: what a night! Here we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth’s cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the Clarksons (good people, and most hospitable, at whose house we tarried one day and night), and saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone to Calais. They have since been in London, and passed much time with us: he is now gone into Yorkshire to be married. So we have seen Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater (where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater; I forget the name; to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw, and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call _romantic_, which I very much suspected before: they make such a spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them, till they give as dim a light as at four o’clock next morning the lamps do after an illumination. Mary was excessively tired when she got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we came to a cold rill (than which nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones), and with the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted it most manfully. Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with a prospect of mountains all about and about, making you giddy; and then Scotland afar off, and the border countries so famous in song and ballad! It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am sure, in my life. But I am returned (I have now been come home near three weeks; I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degradation I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controlled by any one, to come home and _work_. I felt very _little_. I had been dreaming I was a very great man. But that is going off, and I find I shall conform in time to that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me. Besides, after all, Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw. Still, I turn back to those great places where I wandered about, participating in their greatness. After all, I could not _live_ in Skiddaw. I could spend a year, two, three years among them, but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine away, I know. Still, Skiddaw is a fine creature.
My habits are changing, I think, i.e. from drunk to sober. Whether I shall be happier or not remains to be proved. I shall certainly be more happy in a morning; but whether I shall not sacrifice the fat, and the marrow, and the kidneys, i.e. the night, glorious, care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to bright and brilliant!–O Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any spirituous liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such shame-worthy terms? Is life, with such limitations, worth trying? The truth is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about my house, who consume me. This is a pitiful tale to be read at St. Gothard, but it is just now nearest my heart. Fenwick is a ruined man. He is hiding himself from his creditors, and has sent his wife and children into the country. Fell, my other drunken companion (that has been: _nam hic caestus artemque repono_), is turned editor of a Naval Chronicle. Godwin continues a steady friend, though the same facility does not remain of visiting him often. X. has detached Marshall from his house; Marshall, the man who went to sleep when the _Ancient Mariner_ was reading; the old, steady, unalterable friend of the Professor. Holcraft is not yet come to town. I expect to see him, and will deliver your message. Things come crowding in to say, and no room for ’em. Some things are too little to be told, i.e. to have a preference; some are too big and circumstantial. Thanks for yours, which was most delicious. Would I had been with you, benighted, &c.! I fear my head is turned with wandering. I shall never be the same acquiescent being. Farewell. Write again quickly, for I shall not like to hazard a letter, not knowing where the fates have carried you. Farewell, my dear fellow.
TO THE SAME
_Dissuasion from Tartary_
19 _Feb_. 1803.
MY DEAR MANNING,
The general scope of your letter afforded no indications of insanity, but some particular points raised a scruple. For God’s sake don’t think any more of ‘Independent Tartary’. What are you to do among such Ethiopians? Is there no _lineal descendant_ of Prester John? Is the chair empty? Is the sword unswayed?–depend upon it they’ll never make you their king, as long as any branch of that great stock is remaining. I tremble for your Christianity…. Read Sir John Mandeville’s Travels to cure you, or come over to England. There is a Tartar-man now exhibiting at Exeter Change. Come and talk with him, and hear what he says first. Indeed, he is no very favourable specimen of his countrymen! But perhaps the best thing you can do, is to _try_ to get the idea out of your head. For this purpose repeat to yourself every night, after you have said your prayers, the words, Independent Tartary, Independent Tartary, two or three times, and associate with them the _idea_ of _oblivion_ (’tis Hartley’s method with obstinate memories), or say, Independent, Independent, have I not already got an _independence_? That was a clever way of the old Puritans, pun-divinity. My dear friend, think what a sad pity it would be to bury such _parts_ in heathen countries, among nasty, unconversable, horse-belching, Tartar-people! Some say they are Cannibals; and then, conceive a Tartar-fellow _eating_ my friend, and adding the _cool malignity_ of mustard and vinegar! I am afraid ’tis the reading of Chaucer has misled you; his foolish stories about Cambuscan, and the ring, and the horse of brass. Believe me, there are no such things, ’tis all the poet’s _invention_; but if there were such darling things as old Chaucer sings, I would _up_ behind you on the horse of brass, and frisk off for Prester John’s country. But these are all tales; a horse of brass never flew, and a king’s daughter never talked with birds! The Tartars, really, are a cold, insipid, smouchy set. You’ll be sadly moped (if you are not eaten) among them. Pray _try_ and cure yourself. Take hellebore (the counsel is Horace’s, ’twas none of my thought _originally_). Shave yourself oftener. Eat no saffron, for saffron-eaters contract a terrible Tartar-like yellow. Pray, to avoid the fiend. Eat nothing that gives the heart-burn. _Shave the upper_ _lip_. Go about like an European. Read no books of voyages (they are nothing but lies), only now and then a romance, to keep the fancy _under_. Above all, don’t go to any sights of _wild beasts. That has been your ruin_. Accustom yourself to write familiar letters, on common subjects, to your friends in England, such as are of a moderate understanding. And think about common things more…. I supped last night with Rickman, and met a merry _natural_ captain, who pleases himself vastly with once having made a pun at Otaheite in the O. language. ‘Tis the same man who said Shakespeare he liked, because he was so _much of the gentleman_. Rickman is a man ‘absolute in all numbers’. I think I may one day bring you acquainted, if you do not go to Tartary first; for you’ll never come back. Have a care, my dear friend, of Anthropophagi! their stomachs are always craving. ‘Tis terrible to be weighed out at five pence a-pound. To sit at table (the reverse of fishes in Holland), not as a guest, but as a meat.
God bless you: do come to England. Air and exercise may do great things. Talk with some minister. Why not your father?
God dispose all for the best. I have discharged my duty.
To MRS. WORDSWORTH
_Friends’ importunities_
East India House, 18 _Feb_. 1818.
MY DEAR MRS. WORDSWORTH,
I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia, cardemoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home, is, that I am never alone. Plato’s–(I write to W.W. now)–Plato’s double-animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in the system of its first creation, than I sometimes do to be but for a moment single and separate. Except my morning’s walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so. I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or compare sum with sum, and write ‘paid’ against this, and ‘unpaid’ against t’other, and yet reserve in some corner of my mind ‘some darling thoughts all my own’,–faint memory of some passage in a book, or the tone of an absent friend’s voice–a snatch of Miss Burrell’s singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly’s divine plain face. The two operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as the sun’s two motions (earth’s, I mean), or, as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while my sister is walking longitudinally in the front; or, as the shoulder of veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney. But there are a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres–the gay science–who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, &c.–what Coleridge said at the lecture last night–who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as well have been Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they should find it. These pests worrit me at business, and in all its intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures, which had come to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one of them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for a moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go, mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door, in comes Mr. —-, or Mr. —-, or Demi-gorgon, or my brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone–a process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O, the pleasure of eating alone!–eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange–for my meat turns into stone when anyone dines with me, if I have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then _that_ wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters–(God bless ’em! I love some of ’em dearly), and with the hatred, a still greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on, if they go before bed-time. Come never, I would say to these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (_divine_ forsooth!) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should covet to be in company, but I assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to myself. I am never C.L., but always C.L. & Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time, but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week, generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the hour I ought always to be a-bed; just close to my bed-room window is the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers, I take them to be chorus singers of the two theatres (it must be _both of them_), begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I conceive) who, being limited by their talents to the burthen of the song at the play-houses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop, or some cheap composer, arranged for choruses, that is, to be sung all in chorus. At least, I never can catch any of the text of the plain song, nothing but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on’t. ‘That fury being quench’d’–the howl I mean–a burden succeeds of shouts and clapping, and knocking of the table. At length overtasked nature drops under it, and escapes for a few hours into the society of the sweet silent creatures of dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at cockcrow. And then I think of the words Christabel’s father used (bless me, I have dipt in the wrong ink!) to say every morning by way of variety when he awoke:
Every knell, the Baron saith,
Wakes us up to a world of death–
or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale, is, that by my central situation I am a little over-companied. Not that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are so anxious to drive away the harpy solitude from me. I like ’em, and cards, and a cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea between office confinement and after-office society, how little time I can call my own. I mean only to draw a picture, not to make an inference. I would not that I know of have it otherwise. I only wish sometimes I could exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces and voices which a late visitation brought most welcome, and carried away, leaving regret, but more pleasure, even a kind of gratitude, at being so often favoured with that kind northern visitation. My London faces and noises don’t hear me–I mean no disrespect, or I should explain myself, that instead of their return 220 times a year, and the return of W.W., &c., seven times in 104 weeks, some more equal distribution might be found. I have scarce room to put in Mary’s kind love, and my poor name …–goes on lecturing…. I mean to hear some of the course, but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be. If _read_, they are dismal flat, and you can’t think why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you could read so much better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore, I am always in pain, lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honour of me at the London Tavern. ‘Gentlemen,’ said I, and there I stopped; the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying. Mrs. Wordsworth _will_ go on, kindly haunting us with visions of seeing the lakes once more, which never can be realised. Between us there is a great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies and distances, I hope, as there seemed to be between me and that gentleman concerned in the Stamp Office, that I so strangely recoiled from at Haydon’s. I think I had an instinct that he was the head of an office. I hate all such people–accountants’ deputy accountants. The dear abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by the persons of such beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all our red-letter days, they had done their worst; but I was deceived in the length to which heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go. They are the tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor Nero. By a decree passed this week, they have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going at one o’clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us. Dear W.W., be thankful for liberty.
To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
_The famous pigling_
9 _March_, 1822.
DEAR COLERIDGE,
It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so well: they are such interesting creatures at a certain age. What a pity such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You had all some of the crackling and brain sauce. Did you remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly with no Oedipean avulsion? Was the crackling the colour of the ripe pomegranate? Had you no complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of delicate desire? Did you flesh maiden teeth in it? Not that _I_ sent the pig, or can form the remotest guess what part Owen could play in the business. I never knew him give anything away in my life. He would not begin with strangers. I suspect the pig, after all, was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of time being absent, the present somehow went round to Highgate. To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things which I could never think of sending away. Teal, widgeon, snipes, barn-door fowls, ducks, geese–your tame villatic things–Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled, your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are but self extended, but pardon me if I stop somewhere. Where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity, there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child–when my kind old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough I met a venerable old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts; a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught charity I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me; the sum it was to her; the pleasure she had a right to expect that I–not the old impostor–should take in eating her cake; the ingratitude by which, under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like; and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and it proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper. But when Providence, who is better to us than all our aunts, gives me a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act towards it more in the spirit of the donor’s purpose.
Yours (short of pig) to command in every thing.
To BERNARD BARTON
_A blessing in disguise_
9 _Jan_. 1823.
‘Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support, beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you’!!!
Throw yourself rather, my dear sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock, slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes. If you have but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers. They are Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors at their beck. Hitherto you have been at arm’s length from them. Come not within their grasp. I have known many authors want for bread, some repining, others envying the blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing they had rather have been tailors, weavers–what not? rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some to go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious, dishonest set these booksellers are. Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) has made a fortune by book-drudgery, what he has found them. Oh, you know not, may you never know, the miseries of subsisting by authorship! ‘Tis a pretty appendage to a situation like yours or mine; but a slavery, worse than all slavery, to be a bookseller’s dependant, to drudge your brains for pots of ale, and breasts of mutton, _to change your_ FREE THOUGHTS _and_ VOLUNTARY NUMBERS _for ungracious_ TASK-WORK. Those fellows hate _us_. The reason I take to be, that contrary to other trades, in which the master gets all the credit (a jeweller or silversmith for instance,) and the journeyman, who really does the fine work, is in the background: in _our_ work the world gives all the credit to us, whom _they_ consider as _their_ journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and cheat us, and oppress us, and would wring the blood of us out, to put another sixpence in their mechanic pouches!…
Keep to your bank, and the bank will keep you. Trust not to the public; you may hang, starve, drown yourself, for anything that worthy _personage_ cares. I bless every star, that Providence, not seeing good to make me independent, has seen it next good to settle me upon the stable foundation of Leadenhall. Sit down, good B.B., 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 L100. 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 L750, the whole being L1500. Of this L750 out of my pocket (which was quite enough), L250 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 L500 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 L200 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 L500 fine ought not to have been taken out of my pocket, or the other two L125 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.
Before I left Venice, I had returned to you your late, and Mr. Hobhouse’s sheets of _Juan_. Don’t wait for further answers from me, but address yours to Venice, as usual. I know nothing of my own movements; I may return there in a few days, or not for some time. All this depends on circumstances. I left Mr. Hoppner very well…. My daughter Allegra was well too, and is growing pretty; her hair is growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and her ways, Mr. Hoppner says, are like mine, as well as her features: she will make, in that case, a manageable young lady.
I have never heard anything of Ada, the little Electra of my Mycenae…. But there will come a day of reckoning, even if I should not live to see it…. What a long letter I have scribbled!
PS. Here, as in Greece, they strew flowers on the tombs. I saw a quantity of rose-leaves, and entire roses, scattered over the graves at Ferrara. It has the most pleasing effect you can imagine.
TO THE SAME
_In rebellious mood_
Bologna, 24 _Aug_. 1819.
I wrote to you by last post, enclosing a buffooning letter for publication, addressed to the buffoon Roberts, who has thought proper to tie a canister to his own tail. It was written off-hand, and in the midst of circumstances not very favourable to facetiousness, so that there may, perhaps, be more bitterness than enough for that sort of small acid punch:–you will tell me. Keep the _anonymous_, in any case: it helps what fun there may be. But if the matter grow serious about _Don Juan_, and you feel _yourself_ in a scrape, or _me_ either, _own that I am the author. I_ will never _shrink_, and if _you_ do, I can always answer you in the question of Guatimozin to his minister–each being on his own coals.
I wish that I had been in better spirits; but I am out of sorts, out of nerves, and now and then (I begin to fear) out of my senses. All this Italy has done for me, and not England: I defy all you, and your climate to boot, to make me mad. But if ever I do really become a Bedlamite, and wear a strait waistcoat, let me be brought back among you: your people will then be proper company.
I assure you what I here say and feel has nothing to do with England, either in a literary or personal point of view. All my present pleasures or plagues are as Italian as the opera. And, after all, they are but trifles; for all this arises from my ‘Dama’s’ being in the country for three days (at Capofiume). But as I could never live but for one human being at a time (and, I assure you, _that one_ has never been _myself_, as you may know by the consequences, for the _selfish_ are _successful_ in life), I feel alone and unhappy.
I have sent for my daughter from Venice, and I ride daily, and walk in a garden, under a purple canopy of grapes, and sit by a fountain, and talk with the gardener of his tools, which seem greater than Adam’s, and with his wife, and with his son’s wife, who is the youngest of the party, and, I think, talks best of the three. Then I revisit the Campo Santo, and my old friend, the sexton, has two–but _one_ the prettiest daughter imaginable; and I amuse myself with contrasting her beautiful and innocent face of fifteen with the skulls with which he has peopled several cells, and particularly with that of one skull, dated 1766, which was once covered (the tradition goes) by the most lovely features of Bologna–noble and rich. When I look at these, and at this girl–when I think of what _they were_, and what she must be–why then, my dear Murray, I won’t shock you by saying what I think. It is little matter what becomes of us ‘bearded men’, but I don’t like the notion of a beautiful woman’s lasting less than a beautiful tree–than her own picture–her own shadow, which won’t change so to the sun as her face to the mirror. I must leave off, for my head aches consumedly. I have never been quite well since the night of the representation of Alfieri’s _Mirra_, a fortnight ago.
To PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
_A trio of poets_
Ravenna, 26 _April_, 1821.
The child continues doing well, and the accounts are regular and favourable. It is gratifying to me that you and Mrs. Shelley do not disapprove of the step which I have taken, which is merely temporary.
I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats–is it _actually_ true? I did not think criticism had been so killing. Though I differ from you essentially in your estimate of his performances, I so much abhor all unnecessary pain, that I would rather he had been seated on the highest peak of Parnassus than have perished in such a manner. Poor fellow! though with such inordinate self-love he would probably have not been very happy. I read the review of _Endymion_ in the _Quarterly_. It was severe,–but surely not so severe as many reviews in that and other journals upon others.
I recollect the effect on me of the _Edinburgh_ on my first poem; it was rage, and resistance, and redress–but not despondency nor despair. I grant that those are not amiable feelings; but, in this world of bustle and broil, and especially in the career of writing, a man should calculate upon his powers of _resistance_ before he goes into the arena.
Expect not life from pain nor danger free, Nor deem the doom of man reserved for thee.
You know my opinion of _that second-hand_ school of poetry. You also know my high opinion of your own poetry,–because it is of _no_ school. I read _Cenci_–but, besides that I think the _subject_ essentially _un_ dramatic, I am not an admirer of our old dramatists, _as models_. I deny that the English have hitherto had a drama at all. Your _Cenci_, however, was a work of power, and poetry. As to _my_ drama, pray revenge yourself upon it, by being as free as I have been with yours.
I have not yet got your _Prometheus_, which I long to see. I have heard nothing of mine, and do not know that it is yet published. I have published a pamphlet on the Pope controversy, which you will not like. Had I known that Keats was dead–or that he was alive and so sensitive–I should have omitted some remarks upon his poetry, to which I was provoked by his _attack_ upon _Pope_, and my disapprobation of _his own_ style of writing.
You want me to undertake a great poem–I have not the inclination nor the power. As I grow older, the indifference–_not_ to life, for we love it by instinct–but to the stimuli of life, increases. Besides, this late failure of the Italians has latterly disappointed me for many reasons,–some public, some personal. My respects to Mrs. S.
PS. Could not you and I contrive to meet this summer? Could not you take a run here _alone_?
To LADY BYRON
_A plain statement of facts_
Pisa, 17 _Nov_. 1821,
I have to acknowledge the receipt of ‘Ada’s hair’, which is very soft and pretty, and nearly as dark already as mine was at twelve years old, if I may judge from what I recollect of some in Augusta’s possession, taken at that age. But it don’t curl,–perhaps from its being let grow.
I also thank you for the inscription of the date and name, and I will tell you why;–I believe that they are the only two or three words of your handwriting in my possession. For your letters I returned; and except the two words, or rather the one word, ‘Household’, written twice in an old account book, I have no other. I burnt your last note, for two reasons:–firstly, it was written in a style not very agreeable; and, secondly, I wished to take your word without documents, which are the worldly resources of suspicious people.
I suppose that this note will reach you somewhere about Ada’s birthday–the 10th of December, I believe. She will then be six, so that in about twelve more I shall have some chance of meeting her;–perhaps sooner, if I am obliged to go to England by business or otherwise. Recollect, however, one thing, either in distance or nearness;–every day which keeps us asunder should, after so long a period, rather soften our mutual feelings, which must always have one rallying-point as long as our child exists, which I presume we both hope will be long after either of her parents.
The time which has elapsed since the separation has been considerably more than the whole brief period of our union, and the not much longer one of our prior acquaintance. We both made a bitter mistake; but now it is over, and irrevocably so. For, at thirty-three on my part, and a few years less on yours, though it is no very extended period of life, still it is one when the habits and thought are generally so formed as to admit of no modification; and as we could not agree when younger, we should with difficulty do so now.
I say all this, because I own to you, that, notwithstanding everything, I considered our reunion as not impossible for more than a year after the separation;–but then I gave up the hope entirely and for ever. But this very impossibility of reunion seems to me at least a reason why, on all the few points of discussion which can arise between us, we should preserve the courtesies of life, and as much of its kindness as people who are never to meet may preserve perhaps more easily than nearer connexions. For my own part, I am violent, but not malignant; for only fresh provocations can awaken my resentments. To you, who are colder and more concentrated, I would just hint, that you may sometimes mistake the depth of a cold anger for dignity, and a worse feeling for duty. I assure you that I bear you _now_ (whatever I may have done) no resentment whatever. Remember, that _if you have injured me_ in aught, this forgiveness is something; and that, if I have _injured you_, it is something more still, if it be true, as the moralists say, that the most offending are the least forgiving.
Whether the offence has been solely on my side, or reciprocal, or on yours chiefly, I have ceased to reflect upon any but two things,–viz. that you are the mother of my child, and that we shall never meet again. I think if you also consider the two corresponding points with reference to myself, it will be better for all three.
To MR. BARFF
_Sympathy with the Greeks_
10 _March_, 1824.
Enclosed is an answer to Mr. Parruca’s letter, and I hope that you will assure him from me, that I have done and am doing all I can to reunite the Greeks with the Greeks.
I am extremely obliged by your offer of your country-house (as for all other kindness) in case that my health should require my removal; but I cannot quit Greece while there is a chance of my being of any (even supposed) utility:–there is a stake worth millions such as I am, and while I can stand at all, I must stand by the cause. When I say this, I am at the same time aware of the difficulties and dissensions and defects of the Greeks themselves; but allowance must be made for them by all reasonable people.
My chief, indeed _nine-tenths_ of my expenses here are solely in advances to or on behalf of the Greeks, and objects connected with their independence.
[_Enclosure, translated_]
To S.R. PARRUCA
10 _March_, 1824.
_Sir_,–I have the honour of answering your letter. My first wish has always been to bring the Greeks to agree among themselves. I came here by the invitation of the Greek Government, and I do not think that I ought to abandon Roumelia for the Peloponnesus until that Government shall desire it; and the more so, as this part is exposed in a greater