Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets Part 33

Last, and not least, Sir Robert Peel was his cotemporary, and it is now with very odd feelings that we read the anecdote in Byron's life, that when a great fellow of a boy-tyrant, who claimed little Peel as a f.a.g, was giving him a castigation, Byron came and proposed to share it.

"While the stripes were succeeding each other, and poor Peel writhing under them, Byron saw and felt for the misery of his friend; and although he knew that he was not strong enough to fight ****** with any hope of success, and that it was dangerous even to approach him, he advanced to the scene of action, and with a blush of rage, tears in his eyes, and a voice trembling between terror and indignation, asked very humbly if ****** would be pleased to tell him 'how many stripes he meant to inflict.' 'Why,' returned the executioner, 'you little rascal, what is that to you?' 'Because, if you please,' said Byron, holding out his arm, 'I would take half.'"

With Harrow, we take leave of the years of innocent boyhood. His removal to Cambridge, and his now long residences in London, led him into those dissipations and sensualities which continued to cast a sad foil on the greater part of his after life. To Cambridge he never appeared much attached, and rather _resided_ there occasionally as a necessity for taking his degree than from any pleasure he had in the place. His rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, are nearly the sole locality which will there attract the attention of the admirers of the poet, except the Commoners' hall, in which now the long tossed about statue of him by Thorwaldsen is about to be erected.

It was during his being a student of Cambridge that Newstead Abbey fell into his hands by the expiration of Lord Grey de Ruthyn's lease, and that he went thither, and repaired it to a certain extent, and furnished it at an expense far beyond his resources at the time. Here, with half a dozen of his fellow-collegians, among whom was the very clever and early-lost Charles Skinner Matthews, he spent a rackety time. He had got a set of monks' dresses from a masquerade warehouse in London, and in these they used to sit up all night, drinking and full of uproarious merriment. "Our hour of rising," says Mr. Matthews himself, "was one. It was frequently past two before the breakfast party broke up. Then, for the amus.e.m.e.nts of the morning, there was reading, fencing, single-stick, or shuttle-c.o.c.k, in the great room; practicing with pistols in the hall; walking, riding, cricket, sailing on the lake, playing with the bear, or teasing the wolf. Between seven and eight we dined; and our evening lasted from that time till one, two, or three in the morning. The evening's diversions may easily be conceived. I must not omit the custom of handing round, after dinner, on the removal of the cloth, a human skull filled with Burgundy. After reveling on choice viands and the finest wines of France, we adjourned to tea, where we amused ourselves with reading or improving conversation, each according to his fancy; and after sandwiches, &c., retired to rest."

It may well be imagined what a scandal this occasioned in the neighborhood. During this time there were still work-people employed in the repairs of the house; and I recollect a master-plasterer, who, at the same time, was doing work for my father a dozen miles off, relating, to our astonishment, the goings on of these gay roisterers. Byron himself says, that

"Where Superst.i.tion once had made her den, Now Paphian girls were known to sing and smile."

And the person here referred to particularly mentioned one young damsel, dressed in boy's clothes, that Byron had there, no doubt the same who about the same time lived with him at Brompton, and used to ride about on horseback with him at Brighton. Here, at this time, his dog Boatswain died, and had the well-known tomb raised for him in the garden where the poet himself proposed to lie. Here he employed himself with writing his scarifying English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which appeared about the time that he came of age, and so amply avenged him of the Edinburgh reviewers. Being, as he informs us, about ten thousand pounds in debt, he left his mother in possession of Newstead, and set out on his foreign tour. In two years he returned to England, not only triumphant, by the great popularity of his satire, over all his enemies, but having in his portfolio the first two cantos of his inimitable Childe Harold. From this moment he was the most celebrated man of his age, and that at the age of twenty-four. At one spring he ascended above Sir Walter Scott with all his well-earned honors. From the most solitary and friendless, because unconnected, man of his rank, living about town in clubs and lodgings, for his few college friends were scattered abroad in the world, he became at once the great lion of all circles. Lord Holland, Rogers, Moore, &c., were his friends. He was besieged on all sides by aristocratic blue-stockings and givers of great parties. His life was, for four or five years, that of the most perfect Circean intoxication of worship and dissipation; yet during this period he poured out the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair and Lara, poems of great vigor and beauty, and new in scene and spirit, but by no means reaching that height of poetical wealth and glory which he afterward mounted to. Then came his ill-starred marriage, and in one short year his utter and lasting separation from his wife. This unfortunate marriage, against which he was strenuously warned by his most experienced friends, became the blight of his whole life. To the last he persisted in protesting that he never knew the cause of his wife's withdrawal from him; but Lady Byron, in a paper addressed to his biographer since his decease, has a.s.signed as the reason that she believed him insane, or, if not insane, not safe to live with. No wonder that his excitable temperament was lashed to a pitch of phrensy little short of madness, when such were his pecuniary embarra.s.sments that, in the one year of his living with his wife, nine executions were levied on his goods, his rank only saving him from a prison. It is easy to perceive the effect of this on the proud and sensitive mind of Lord Byron; and when the hand that should have soothed him was coolly withdrawn from him on the occasion, the finish was put to mortal endurance. Banished, as it were, by the abhorrence of his country--of that country which, from worshiping him, turned as suddenly to denounce him--believing that in the abandonment by a wife there must be some hideous cause, he went forth never to return.

The limits of this work will necessarily confine any minute account of the homes and haunts of our poets to those only which lie within the British isles; I shall, therefore, only summarily trace the progress of Byron's wanderings and abodes from this period; and before doing this, I will point out in a few lines the residences which he occupied during the five years of his London life. Before he went abroad, Gordon's Hotel, Durant's Hotel, both in Albemarle-street, and 8 St.

James's-street, were his homes. On his return from his first tour, he took on a lease for seven years a suite of rooms in the Albany, of Lord Althorpe. The year of his married life was chiefly spent at 13 Piccadilly Terrace. The clubs which he frequented were the Alfred, the Cocoa Tree, Watier's, and the Union.

In his first tour he traversed Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey, tracking his way in light by the composition of Childe Harold. Now, abandoned by the one heart that he had chosen to be his domestic stay and solace through life, a.s.sailed bitterly by that public which had so recently devoured with avidity his splendid poems, regarded as an infidel and a desperado, he went from the field of Waterloo across Belgium, along the Rhine, through Switzerland into Italy, which became his second country, retaining him till a few months before his death.

Every step of his progress was ill.u.s.trated by triumphs of genius still more brilliant than before. From the moment that at Waterloo he exclaimed

"Stop, for thy tread is on an empire's dust,"

till that in which he concludes with his sublime apostrophe to the Ocean, he advances from Alp to Alp in the regions of genius. Every one that traces the banks of the Rhine is made to feel what additional charms he has scattered along them; and how infinitely inferior are all, even the most enthusiastic and elaborate descriptions of its scenery from other pens.

"The castled crag of Drachenfels Frowns o'er the wild and winding Rhine, Whose breast of waters broadly swells Beneath the banks which bear the vine, And hills all rich with blossomed trees, And fields which promise corn and wine, And scattered cities crowning these, Whose fair white walls along them shine.

"And peasant girls, with deep blue eyes, And hands which offer early flowers, Walk smiling o'er this paradise; Above, the frequent feudal towers Through green leaves lift their walls of gray, And many a rock which steeply lowers, And n.o.ble arch in proud decay, Look o'er this vale of vintage bowers."

Volumes of description could not give you so vivid a feeling of the characteristic features of the Valley of the Rhine as these lines. And thus through the Alps, "The palaces of Nature," Byron advanced into Italy, the land of ancient art, heroic deeds, and elysian nature. At Geneva he fell in with Sh.e.l.ley for the first time, and henceforth these two great poets became friends. At Diodati, on the Lake of Geneva, he spent the autumn, then advanced to Italy, and took up his abode in Venice, where, in the Palace Mocenigo, on the Ca.n.a.l Grande, he lived till December, 1819, _i. e._, about three years. His next remove was to Ravenna, where he had splendid apartments in the Guiccioli Palace. In the autumn of 1821 he quitted Ravenna, having resided there not two years, and took up his residence in the Lanfranchi Palace on the Arno, which he describes as large enough for a garrison. In the autumn of 1822 he quitted Pisa for Genoa, having resided at Pisa a year. At Genoa he inhabited the Villa Saluzzo at Albaro, one of the suburbs of that city, where he continued to live till the July of 1823, not quite a year, when he set sail for Greece, where in a few months his existence terminated.

Of Lord Byron's abodes and modes of life we have some graphic glimpses in Moore's life, in Sh.e.l.ley's and Captain Medwin's notices. Every where he remained true to his schoolboy habits of riding on horseback, swimming, firing with pistols; to his love of bull and Newfoundland dogs. Moore describes his house in Venice as a damp-looking mansion, on a dismal ca.n.a.l. "As we groped our way after him," he says, "through the dark hall, he cried out, 'Keep clear of the dog;' and before we had proceeded many paces further, 'Take care, or that monkey will fly at you:' a curious proof of his fidelity to all the tastes of his youth, out of the sort of menagerie which visitors at Newstead had to encounter in their progress through his hall." Soon after he adds, "The door burst open, and at once we entered an apartment not only s.p.a.cious and elegant, but wearing an aspect of comfort and habitableness which, to a traveler's eye, is as welcome as rare." Captain Medwin somewhere mentions meeting Lord Byron, traveling from one of his places of abode to another, with a train of carriages, monkeys, and whiskered servants, a strange procession; and Sh.e.l.ley, visiting him at Ravenna, says, "Lord Byron has here splendid apartments in the palace of his mistress's husband, who is one of the richest men in Italy. There are two monkeys, five cats, eight dogs, and ten horses, all of whom, except the horses, walk about the house like the masters of it. t.i.ta, the Venetian, is here, and operates as my valet--a fine fellow, with a prodigious black beard, who has stabbed two or three people, and is the most good-natured fellow I ever saw."

Of his house at Pisa, Byron himself says: "I have got here a famous old feudal palazzo, on the Arno, large enough for a garrison, with dungeons below and cells in the walls; and so full of _ghosts_, that the learned Fletcher, my valet, has begged leave to change his room, and then refused to occupy his _new_ room because there were more ghosts there than in the other. It is quite true that there are most extraordinary noises, as in all old buildings, which have terrified the servants so as to incommode me extremely. There is one place where people were evidently _walled up_; for there is but one possible pa.s.sage, broken through the wall, and then meant to be closed again upon the inmate. The house once belonged to the Lanfranchi family, the same mentioned by Ugolina in his dream, as his persecutor with Sismondi, and has had a fierce owner or two in its time."

The mode of spending his time appears by all accounts to have been pretty much the same every where. Rising about one o'clock at noon, taking a hasty breakfast, often standing. "At three or four," says the Guiccioli, "at Ravenna and Pisa, those who used to ride out with him agreed to call, and after a game at billiards they mounted and rode out." At the two latter places his resort was generally the forests adjoining the towns. At Ravenna, that forest rendered so famous by Dante and Boccaccio, especially for the story of the specter huntsman in the Decamerone; and at Pisa the old pine forest stretching down to the sea.

Latterly he used to proceed to the outside of the city, to avoid the staring of the people, especially English people, then mounted his horse, and rode on at a great rate. In the forest they used to fire with pistols at a mark. The forest rides of Byron near Pisa and Ravenna will always be scenes visited with deep interest by Englishmen, and Sh.e.l.ley's description of themselves, the two great poets, in Julian and Maddalo, as they rode

"Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow Of Adria toward Venice, a bare strand Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,"

is one of everlasting value. Returning to dinner at six or seven, he conversed with his friends till midnight, and then sat down to write.

Thus we have traced this great and singular man from the mountains of the Scottish Highlands, where he roamed as a boy, from land to land, till he stood as a liberator on the sh.o.r.es of Greece, and was seen for a few months riding forth with his long train of Suliote guards, and then was at once lost to Greece and the world. In no short life was there ever more to applaud and to condemn, to wonder at and to deplore. From those hereditary and other causes which we have already noticed, the temperament of Byron was pa.s.sionate to the excess; but this extreme sensibility, which was the food and foundation of his splendid genius, was at the same time the torture of his existence. Misunderstood where he ought to have been soothed with the deepest tenderness, attacked by the public where he should have been most closely sympathized with, he went forth, as it were, reckless of peace or of character. A series of adulterous connections darkened his glorious reputation, and served to justify in the eyes of the public the accusations of those who had goaded him to these very excesses. But spite of the censures of the world, and reproaches of his own conscience, the powers of his genius continually grew till they even forced into the silence of astonishment the most heartless of his detractors. To say nothing of those grand and somber metaphysical dramas, Manfred, Cain, and the rest which he wrote in Italy, the poem alone of Childe Harold, ever ascending in magnificent strength, richness, and beauty, as it advanced, was sufficient to give him an immortality second to no other. The wide and superb field of its action--that of all the finest countries of Europe; the great events--those of the most stirring and momentous age of the whole world; and the ill.u.s.trious names which it wove into its living ma.s.s; the glorious remains of art, and the still more glorious features of nature in Italy and Greece, all combined to render Childe Harold the great poem of his own, and the favorite of every after age. Totally different as he was under different impressions, Childe Harold had the transcendent advantage of being the product of that mood which was inspired only by the contemplation of every object calculated to draw him away from the seductions of society, and the lower tones of his mind; the mood inspired by the most august objects of heaven and of earth--the midnight skies, the Alpine mountains, the sublimities of mighty rivers and oceans, the basking beauties of southern nature, and the crumbling but unrivaled works of man. Filled with all these images of n.o.bility and greatness, he gave them back to his page with a tone so philosophically profound, with a music so thrilling, with a dignity so graceful and yet so tender, that nothing in poetry can be conceived more fascinating and perfect. Every thought is so clearly and fully developed, every image is so substantial and so strongly defined, and the very skepticism which here and there betrays itself comes forth so accompanied by a pensive, earnest, and intense longing after life, that it resembles the melancholy tone which pervades the book of Job, and some of the prophets, more than that of any other human, much less modern composition. We may safely a.s.sert that there are a hundred combining causes, in the subjects and the spirit of Childe Harold, to render it to every future age the most lovely and endearing gift from this. Don Juan, the reflex of Byron's ordinary, as this was of his solitary and higher life--his life alone with Nature and with G.o.d--has its wonderful and inimitable pa.s.sages; but Childe Harold is one woven ma.s.s of beauty and intellectual gold from end to end.

In judging the errors of Lord Byron, there is one consideration calculated to disarm severity perhaps more than all others. The excesses in which he had indulged were made by Providence the means of the severest punishment that could befall him. The cause of Greece aroused his spirit, at that period of life when life should have been in its prime, and a new scene of most glorious ambition was spread to him, that of adding to the unrivaled renown of the poet the still more grateful renown of becoming the savior of a country and a people, whom the triumphs of ancient art, science, liberty, and literature had made, as it were, kindred to the whole world. This august prospect was unveiled to him, and he rushed forward to secure it; but his const.i.tution, sapped by vicious indulgence, gave way; the brilliant promise of new and loftiest glories was s.n.a.t.c.hed from him; he sunk and perished. Reflecting on this, the hardest moralist could not desire a sadder retribution; and they who love rather to seek in the corrupt ma.s.s of humanity for the original germs of the divine nature, will turn with Mr. Moore to the fair side, and acquiesce most cordially in the concluding words of his biography. "It would not be in the power, indeed, of the most poetical friend to allege any thing more convincingly favorable of his character than is contained in the few simple facts, that, through life, with all his faults, he never lost a friend; that those about him in his youth, whether as companions, teachers, or servants, remained attached to him to the last; that the woman to whom he gave the love of his maturer years idolizes his name; and that, with a single unhappy exception, scarce an instance is to be found of any one once brought, however briefly, into relations of amity with him, that did not feel toward him a kind regard in life, and retain a fondness for his memory."

END OF VOL. I.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Vinegar.

[2] Ireland, when, in 1793, he collected his "Views on the Avon," was much struck with the likeness of this bust in Thomas Hart, one of this family who then lived in Shakspeare's house.

[3] Visits to Remarkable Places, vol. i., pp. 98-103.

[4] Matthew, xxv., 43-45.

[5] Such are Southey's words.

[6] Colloquies, vol. ii., p. 312.

[7] This word "lost," with a little l in the inscription.

[8] _Mercurius Rusticus._ London. 1638.

[9] Of a scene supposed to occur in this lumber-room, a beautiful mezzotint engraving has been just published by Mr. Mitch.e.l.l, of Bristol, from a painting by Mr. Lewis, of that city.

[10] G. c.u.mberland, Esq., in Dix's Life.

[11] Grow.

[12] Water-flags.

[13] Freeze.

[14] Arose.

[15] Robe.

[16] Beggar.

[17] Grave.

[18] Ghastliness.

[19] A small round hat, not unlike the chapournette of heraldry, formerly worn by ecclesiastics and lawyers.--CHATTERTON.

[20] Coif.

[21] The sign of a horse-milliner was till lately, if not still to be seen, in Bristol.

[22] Crucifix.

[23] Begging friar.

[24] Short under cloak.

[25] Glory.