Life of Lord Byron Volume I Part 29

[Footnote 87: See his Letter to Anthony Collins, 1703-4, where he speaks of "those sharp heads, which were for d.a.m.ning his book, because of its discouraging the staple commodity of the place, which in his time was called _hogs' shearing_."]

[Footnote 88: Hard, "Discourses on Poetical Imitation."]

[Footnote 89: Prologue to the University of Oxford.]

[Footnote 90: "'Tis a quality very observable in human nature, that any opposition which does not entirely discourage and intimidate us, has rather a contrary effect, and inspires us with a more than ordinary grandeur and magnanimity. In collecting our force to overcome the opposition, we invigorate the soul, and give it an elevation with which otherwise it would never have been acquainted."--Hume, _Treatise of Human Nature._]

[Footnote 91: "The colour of our whole life is generally such as the three or four first years in which we are our own masters make it."--Cowper.]

[Footnote 92: "I refer to my old friend and corporeal pastor and master, John Jackson, Esq., Professor of Pugilism, who I trust still retains the strength and symmetry of his model of a form, together with his good humour and athletic, as well as mental, accomplishments."--_Note on Don Juan, Canto II_.]

[Footnote 93: Thus addressed always by Lord Byron, but without any right to the distinction.]

[Footnote 94: The Journal ent.i.tled by himself "Detached Thoughts."]

[Footnote 95: Few philosophers, however, have been so indulgent to the pride of birth as Rousseau.--"S'il est un orgueil pardonnable (he says) apres celui qui se tire du merite personnel, c'est celui qui se tire de la naissance."--_Confess._]

[Footnote 96: This gentleman, who took orders in the year 1814, is the author of a spirited translation of Juvenal, and of other works of distinguished merit. He was long in correspondence with Lord Byron, and to him I am indebted for some interesting letters of his n.o.ble friend, which will be given in the course of the following pages.]

[Footnote 97: He had also, at one time, as appears from an anecdote preserved by Spence, some thoughts of burying this dog in his garden, and placing a monument over him, with the inscription, "Oh, rare Bounce!"

In speaking of the members of Rousseau's domestic establishment, Hume says, "She (Therese) governs him as absolutely as a nurse does a child. In her absence, his dog has acquired that ascendant. His affection for that creature is beyond all expression or conception."--_Private Correspondence._ See an instance which he gives of this dog's influence over the philosopher, p. 143.

In Burns's elegy on the death of his favourite Mailie, we find the friendship even of a sheep set on a level with that of man:--

"Wi' kindly bleat, when she did spy him, She ran wi' speed: A friend mair faithful ne'er came nigh him, Than Mailie dead."

In speaking of the favourite dogs of great poets, we must not forget Cowper's little spaniel "Beau;" nor will posterity fail to add to the list the name of Sir Walter Scott's "Maida."]

[Footnote 98: In the epitaph, as first printed in his friend's Miscellany, this line runs thus:--

"I knew but one unchanged--and here he lies."

[Footnote 99: We are told that Wieland used to have his works printed thus for the purpose of correction, and said that he found great advantage in it. The practice is, it appears, not unusual in Germany.]

[Footnote 100: See his lines on Major Howard, the son of Lord Carlisle, who was killed at Waterloo:--

"Their praise is hymn'd by loftier harps than mine; Yet one I would select from that proud throng, Partly because they blend me with his line, And _partly that I did his sire some wrong_."

CHILDE HAROLD, CANTO III.]

[Footnote 101: In the fifth edition of the Satire (suppressed by him in 1812) he again changed his mind respecting this gentleman, and altered the line to

"I leave topography to _rapid_ Gell;"

explaining his reasons for the change in the following note:--"'Rapid,' indeed;--he topographised and typographised King Priam's dominions in three days. I called him 'cla.s.sic' before I saw the Troad, but since have learned better than to tack to his name what don't belong to it."

He is not, however, the only satirist who has been thus capricious and changeable in his judgments. The variations of this nature in Pope's Dunciad are well known; and the Abbe Cotin, it is said, owed the "painful pre-eminence" of his station in Boileau's Satires to the unlucky convenience of his name as a rhyme. Of the generous change from censure to praise, the poet Dante had already set an example; having, in his "Convito," lauded some of those persons whom, in his Commedia, he had most severely lashed.]

[Footnote 102: In another letter to Mr. Harness, dated February, 1809, he says, "I do not know how you and Alma Mater agree. I was but an untoward child myself, and I believe the good lady and her brat were equally rejoiced when I was weaned; and if I obtained her benediction at parting, it was, at best, equivocal."]

[Footnote 103: The poem, in the first edition, began at the line,

"Time was ere yet, in these degenerate days."

[Footnote 104: Lady Byron, then Miss Milbank.]

[Footnote 105: In the MS. remarks on his Satire, to which I have already referred, he says, on this pa.s.sage--"Yea, and a pretty dance they have led me."]

[Footnote 106: "Fool then, and but little wiser now."--_MS. ibid_.]

[Footnote 107: Dated, in his original copy, Nov. 2. 1808.]

[Footnote 108: Ent.i.tled, in his original ma.n.u.script, "To Mrs. ----, on being asked my reason for quitting England in the spring." The date subjoined is Dec. 2. 1808.]

[Footnote 109: In his first copy, "Thus, Mary."]

[Footnote 110: Thus corrected by himself in a copy of the Miscellany now in my possession;--the two last lines being, originally, as follows:--

"Though wheresoe'er my bark may run, I love but thee, I love but one."

[Footnote 111: I give the words as Johnson has reported them;--in Swift's own letter they are, if I recollect right, rather different.]

[Footnote 112: There is, at least, one striking point of similarity between their characters in the disposition which Johnson has thus attributed to Swift:--"The suspicions of Swift's irreligion," he says, "proceeded, in a great measure, from his dread of hypocrisy; _instead of wishing to seem better, he delighted in seeming worse than he was_."]

[Footnote 113: Another use to which he appropriated one of the skulls found in digging at Newstead was the having it mounted in silver, and converted into a drinking-cup. This whim has been commemorated in some well-known verses of his own; and the cup itself, which, apart from any revolting ideas it may excite, forms by no means an inelegant object to the eye, is, with many other interesting relics of Lord Byron, in the possession of the present proprietor of Newstead Abbey, Colonel Wildman.]

[Footnote 114: Rousseau appears to have been conscious of a similar sort of change in his own nature:--"They have laboured without intermission," he says, in a letter to Madame de Boufflers, "to give to my heart, and, perhaps, at the same time to my genius, a spring and stimulus of action, which they have not inherited from nature. I was born weak,--ill treatment has made me strong."--Hume's _Private Correspondence_.]

[Footnote 115: "It was bitterness that they mistook for frolic."--Johnson's account of himself at the university, in Boswell.]

[Footnote 116: The poet Cowper, it is well known, produced that masterpiece of humour, John Gilpin, during one of his fits of morbid dejection; and he himself says, "Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all."]

[Footnote 117: The reconciliation which took place between him and Dr.

Butler, before his departure, is one of those instances of placability and pliableness with which his life abounded. We have seen, too, from the manner in which he mentions the circ.u.mstance in one of his note-books, that the reconcilement was of that generously retrospective kind, in which not only the feeling of hostility is renounced in future, but a strong regret expressed that it had been ever entertained.

Not content with this private atonement to Dr. Butler, it was his intention, had he published another edition of the Hours of Idleness, to subst.i.tute for the offensive verses against that gentleman, a frank avowal of the wrong he had been guilty of in giving vent to them. This fact, so creditable to the candour of his nature, I learn from a loose sheet in his handwriting, containing the following corrections. In place of the pa.s.sage beginning "Or if my Muse a pedant's portrait drew," he meant to insert--

"If once my Muse a harsher portrait drew, Warm with her wrongs, and deem'd the likeness true, By cooler judgment taught, her fault she owns,-- With n.o.ble minds a fault, confess'd, atones."

And to the pa.s.sage immediately succeeding his warm praise of Dr.

Drury--"Pomposus fills his magisterial chair," it was his intention to give the following turn:--

"Another fills his magisterial chair; Reluctant Ida owns a stranger's care; Oh may like honours crown his future name,-- If such his virtues, such shall be his fame."