ÀҾ˹éÒ˹ѧÊ×Í
PDF
ePub

fought twice, or once, is undoubtedly untrue, and has been openly denied. But the statement is in the book before us, and we hope the captain will not think it beneath him to let the world know, whether we are indebted to his own fancy, or to Lord Byron's vapouring.

Then comes a detail of his lordship's life, which strikes us as not differing much from that of any other idler and voluptuary. Billiards, conversation, and reading, filled up the intervals till it was time to take an evening drive, and pistol practice. On their return his lordship met his mistress, and settled his interview for the evening. After dinner he drove to count Gamba's, the venerable patriot, philosopher, and father of his lordship's avowed mistress, with which lady he remained as long as he thought proper, then read, and drank gin and water till two or three o'clock in the morning, then went to bed, where he remained till two o'clock in the afternoon, when, on opening his eyes, he found the captain in strict attendance; called for breakfast, drank green tea, and ate raw eggs, sometimes in the captain's presence, and sometimes not; and then for billiards, pistol-practice, and the principessa again. Of such materials is the history of departed greatness made.

But the captain's pen, frosty enough where it has only man for its theme, absolutely glows and luxuriates where woman, and of all women the lovely and too fond countess, the Guiccioli, is to be pictured. He thus plunges into his palette.

"The countess Guiccioli is twenty-three years of age, though she appears no more than seventeen or eighteen. Her complexion is delicately fair. Her eyes, large, dark, and languishing, are shaded by the longest eye-lashes in the world; and her hair, which is ungathered on her head, plays over her falling shoulders in a profusion of natural ringlets of the darkest auburn."

The picture, however, now grows a little sullen.

"Her figure is perhaps too much embonpoint for her height;-her features want little of possessing a Grecian regularity of outline."

The captain then completes it with the sentimental touch which is essential to all foreign fascination.

"It is evident that the exile and poverty of her aged father sometimes affect her spirits, and throw a shade of melancholy on her countenance, which adds to the deep interest this lovely girl creates."

So much for gallantry; now for fact. This "lovely girl" of the captain's is, instead of being twenty-three, of the round

11

and respectable age of thirty-five; a little, fat, sallow personage, very sincerely attached to his lordship's purse, and very melancholy when its strings were not as easily relaxed as in the days of her early pensionnat. The virtuous and ancient exile, her father, allowed of lord Byron's intercourse with her under his own eye. The chivalric patriotic, and high-hearted brother of the lady, was his lordship's dependant and companion to the last; and the fund for supplying this generous and lofty liason, (as the volume phrases it,) was the fortune of his lordship's insulted and plundered English wife. So much for the Lord, the Countess, and the admiring biographer.

Of the Guiccioli his lordship gives the following ingenuous history, premising that the lady was married to an opulent man too old for her. Her father, the venerable patriot and sage, already mentioned,

"did not object to her availing herself of the custom of the country. An Italian (adulterer) would have reconciled him to the thing, indeed, for some time he winked at our intimacy, but at length made an exception against me, as a foreigner, a heretic, an Englishman, and what was worse than all, a liberal. He insisted, the Guiccioli was as obstinate, her family took her part."

This happy exemplification of Italian manners ended with his lordship's "smuggling the lady out of Ravenna."

In Ravenna he traded a little in revolution, and had nearly figured in one way or other as a conspirator.

[ocr errors]

"It is not a little to say I was popular with all the leaders of the constitutional party. They knew that I came from a land of liberty, and wished well to their cause."

His lordship, however, had that discretion, which is the better part of valour, and with all his zeal kept " o' the windy side of the law."

"I did not, however, take part in their intrigues, nor join in their political coteries. But I had a magazine of one hundred stand of arms in the house, when every thing was ripe for revolt! A curse on Carignan's imbecility."

Let us now hear no more of Austrian surveillance or Italian tyranny. We suspect that a foreigner in England storing up a hundred stand of arms in his house, in an insurrectionary time, would have speedily been a tenant of Newgate.

The virtuous and honest family of the Guiccioli were ba

nished, and his lordship left Ravenna. The memoirs then run on in a strange, rambling way, which the biographer calls 66 a sort of narrative."

"Almost all the friends of my youth are dead; either shot in duels, ruined, or in the galleys!

"I was not so young when my father died, but that I perfectly remember him; and had very early a horror of matrimony from the sight of domestic broils. This feeling came over me very strangely at my wedding. Something whispered me that I was sealing my own death-warrant. I am a great believer in presentiments. Socrates' demon was no fiction. Monk Lewis! had his monitor; and Napoleon many warnings."

We can scarcely imagine a more curious mixture of society.

"The phrenologists tell me that other lines besides that of thought (the middle of three horizontal lines on his forehead, on which he prided himself,) are strongly developed in the hinder part of my cranium."

His opinion of the fair sex is at once heartless and silly.

"Like Napoleon I have always had a great contempt for women. **** They are in an unnatural state of society. The Turks and eastern people manage these matters better than we do. They lock them up, and they are much happier. Give a woman a looking-glass and a few sugar-plums, and she will be satisfied."

Then comes the story of a Venetian drab, the Fornarina. The following anecdote in contempt of his publisher is divided between the captain and the peer.

[ocr errors]

"I have just got a letter,' said he, from Murray. What do you think he has enclosed me? A long dull extract from that long dull Epic of Petrarch's Africa, which he has the modesty to ask me to translate for Ugo Foscolo, who is writing some Memoirs of Petrarch, and has got Moore, Lady Dacre, &c. to contribute to it. What am I to do with the death of Mago? I wish Medwin you would take it home with you, and translate it, and I will send it to Murray. We will say nothing of its being yours or mine; and it will be curious to hear Foscolo's opinion upon it. Depend upon it, it will not be an unfavourable one.' In the course of the day I turned it into couplets, and lame enough they were, which he forwarded by the next post to England. Almost by return of post arrived a furiously complimentary epistle, in acknowledgment, which made us both laugh very heartily."

Lord Byron has already talked of himself, absurdly enough, as the Napoleon of verse; and the idea of his similarity to

that extraordinary person is ridiculously obvious throughout these Memoirs.

"Several extraordinary things have happened to me on my birthdays: so they did to Napoleon!"

Hotspur would have told him, 'so they would had his mother's cat but kittened.'

The following anecdote is to the credit of Mr. Hobhouse.

"Hobhouse has denounced CAIN as irreligious, and has penned me a most furious epistle, urging me not to publish, as I value my reputation or his friendship. He contends that it is a work I should not have ventured to put my name to in the days of Pope, Churchill, or Johnson. Hobhouse used to write good verses once himself, but he seems to have forgotten what poetry is in others, when he says my • Cain reminds him of the worst bombast of Dryden's.'

[ocr errors]

This was a formidable critique; but the wound was soon balmed by his trusty and unfailing assentator, on the spot, Shelley. His lordship thus pursues.

[ocr errors]

Shelley, who is no bad judge of the compositions of others, however he may fail in procuring success for his own, is most sensitive and indignant at this critique, and says (what is not the case,) that "Cain" is the finest thing I ever wrote; calls it worthy of Milton, (his lordship might here too have added his denying note,) and backs it against Hobhouse's poetical Trinity!"

A soother like Shelley was obviously invaluable, and he was accordingly suffered in his lordship's establishment until his end. His familiar denomination in the household was the not inappropriate one of the Snake. "The Snake's rage rage has prevented my crest from rising," says his lordship. "I shall write Hobhouse a very unimpassioned letter, but a firm one.The publication shall go on, whether Murray refuses to print it or not."

The Laureate is a constant object of his spleen.

"There are men who can forgive and forget,' said he ; 'the Laureate is not one of that disposition, and exults over the anticipated death-bed repentance of the objects of his hatred."

Every one has heard of Shelley's writing himself down ATHEIST! in the Album of Mont Anvert, (which his lordship admitted to have been "bad taste, to say the least of it;" and through which, and the word fool under it, he drew his pen.

This paltry and cheap bravado of Shelley's had been first recorded by Southey, who, for that, and the allusion to the suicide of Shelley's deserted wife, was of course marked out for vengeance by the whole tribe. However, in the midst of this avowed obloquy, there is one charge, which if true, will require some very potent expurgation on the Laureate's part.

"He, (Southey,) on being taxed with writing that article some years ago, had the audacity to admit that he had treasured up some opinions of Shelley's ten years before, when he was on a visit at Keswick, and had made a note of them at the time. But his bag of venom was not full: it is the nature of the reptile. Why has a viper a poison tooth, or the scorpion claws?"

The man who makes notes of a familiar conversation, to quote them against the incautious converser, ten years after, may be a first-rate Laureate and reviewer, but, we should think, rather a dangerous friend.

A fine theatrical instance of this aversion took place a few days after. Lord Byron handed his last drama, the "Deformed Transformed," to Shelley to read. Shelley, for once, liked it "least of any thing" of his lordship's. But the condemning clause, was, that there were "two entire lines of Southey's in it

"And water shall see thee,

And fear thee and flee thee."

Nothing could be more harmless than this transfer from the poetry of the Laureate, which he had transferred from the poetry of the nursery, the palpable plunder of "Goody two Shoes." But his lordship, "instantly changing colour, instantly threw the poem into the fire." This was a splendid sacrifice to his abhorrence of the luckless Laureate, or, as his biographer feelingly calls it, a suicide. Yet, splendid as it was, it was only for effect. It astonished the captain; and he had to be astonished a second time, by seeing the defunct drama published two years afterwards! But, as he observes, with simplicity enough, "His lordship must either have had another copy, or have re-written it." Either the one or the other undoubtedly; and the former infinitely the more probable. Are we to look upon this as a hint, or an omen, touching the burnt Memoirs?

The epitaph on the Laureate is the cleverest thing in the volume. It is stated to have been written from Paris.

« ¡è͹˹éÒ´Óà¹Ô¹¡ÒõèÍ
 »