NOTICES

OF THE

LIFE OF LORD BYRON.

LETTER 375.

TO MR. HOPPNER.

'Ravenna, May 25, 1820. A GERMAN named Ruppsecht has sent me, heaven 'knows why, several Deutsche Gazettes, of all which "I understand neither word nor letter. I have sent you the enclosed to beg you to translate to me some ' remarks, which appear to be Goethe's upon Manfred -and if I may judge by two notes of admiration (ge'nerally put after something ridiculous by us), and "the word "hypocondrisch," are any thing but favour'able. I shall regret this, for I should have been 'proud of Goethe's good word; but I sha'n't alter my 'opinion of him, even though he should be savage.

Will you excuse this trouble, and do me this 'favour?-Never mind-soften nothing-I am literary proof-having had good and evil said in most 'modern languages. Believe me, &c.'

LETTER 376.

TO MR. MOORE.

'Ravenna, June 1st, 1820.

'I have received a Parisian letter from W. W., 'which I prefer answering through you, if that 'worthy be still at Paris, and, as he says, an occasional

VOL. III.

B

'visiter of yours. In November last he wrote to me a 'well-meaning letter, stating, for some reasons of his own, his belief that a reunion might be effected 'between Lady B. and myself. To this I answered 'as usual; and he sent me a second letter, repeating 'his notions, which letter I have never answered, 'having had a thousand other things to think of. He ( now writes as if he believed that he had offended 'me by touching on the topic; and I wish you to assure him that I am not at all so,-but, on the contrary, obliged by his good-nature. At the same time acquaint him the thing is impossible.

'know this, as well as I,-and there let it end.

เ

You

I believe that I showed you his epistle in autumn 'last. He asks me if I have heard of my "laureat"

' at Paris*,-somebody who has written "a most san'guinary Epître" against me; but whether in French,

or Dutch, or on what score, I know not, and he don't say, except that (for my satisfaction) he says it is 'the best thing in the fellow's volume. If there is any thing of the kind that I ought to know, you will doubtless tell me. I suppose it to be something of 'the usual sort;-he says, he don't remember the 'author's name.

I wrote to you some ten days ago, and expect an answer at your leisure.

The separation business still continues, and all the 'world are implicated, including priests and cardinals. The public opinion is furious against him, 'because he ought to have cut the matter short at first, and not waited twelve months to begin. He has 'been trying at evidence, but can get none sufficient; for what would make fifty divorces in England

* M. Lamartine.

'won't do here-there must be the most decided proofs.

เ

It is the first cause of the kind attempted in Ravenna for these two hundred years; for, though they ' often separate, they assign a different motive. You 'know that the continental incontinent are more delicate than the English, and don't like proclaiming 'their coronation in a court, even when nobody ' doubts it.

All her relations are furious against him. The father has challenged him-a superfluous valour, for he don't fight, though suspected of two assassi'nations-one of the famous Monzoni of Forli. 'Warning was given me not to take such long rides

in the Pine Forest without being on my guard; so 'I take my stiletto and a pair of pistols in my pocket during my daily rides.

'I won't stir from this place till the matter is settled ' one way or the other. She is as femininely firm as 'possible; and the opinion is so much against him, 'that the advocates decline to undertake his cause,

because they say that he is either a fool or a rogue '-fool, if he did not discover the liaison till now; ' and rogue, if he did know it, and waited, for some 'bad end, to divulge it. In short, there has been ' nothing like it since the days of Guido di Polenta's family, in these parts.

The

'If the man has me taken off, like Polonius "say, he made a good end,"-for a melodrame. principal security is, that he has not the courage to spend twenty scudi-the average price of a clean'handed bravo-otherwise there is no want of opportunity, for I ride about the woods every evening, with one servant, and sometimes an acquaintance,

'who latterly looks a little queer in solitary bits of 'bushes.

LETTER 377.

'Good bye.-Write to yours ever, &c.'

TO MR. MURRAY.

• Ravenna, June 7th, 1820.

Enclosed is something which will interest you, to 'wit, the opinion of the greatest man of Germanyperhaps of Europe-upon one of the great men of your advertisements (all "famous hands," as Jacob 'Tonson used to say of his ragamuffins)—in short, a 'critique of Goethe's upon Manfred. There is the original, an English translation, and an Italian one : keep them all in your archives, for the opinions of 'such a man as Goethe, whether favourable or not, are always interesting-and this is more so, as 'favourable. His Faust I never read, for I don't 'know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, 'at Coligny, translated most of it to me viva voce, ' and I was naturally much struck with it; but it was 'the Steinbach and the Jungfrau, and something else, 'much more than Faustus, that made me write Man'fred. The first scene, however, and that of Faustus are very similar. Acknowledge this letter.

• Yours ever.

'P.S. I have received Ivanhoe ;-good. Pray send 'me some tooth-powder and tincture of myrrh, by Waite, &c. Ricciardetto should have been trans'lated literally, or not at all. As to puffing Whistle'craft, it won't do. I'll tell you why some day or 'other. Cornwall's a poet, but spoilt by the detes'table schools of the day. Mrs. Hemans is a poet also, but too stiltified and apostrophic,-and quite wrong. Men died calmly before the Christian era,

' and since, without Christianity: witness the Romans, and, lately, Thistlewood, Sandt, and Lovelmen who ought to have been weighed down with their crimes, even had they believed. A deathbed is a ' matter of nerves and constitution, and not of religion. Voltaire was frightened, Frederick of Prussia 'not: Christians the same, according to their strength ' rather than their creed. What does H** H** 'mean by his stanza? which is octave got drunk or gone mad. He ought to have his ears boxed with "Thor's hammer for rhyming so fantastically.'

The following is the article from Goethe's Kunst und Alterthum,' enclosed in this letter. The grave confidence with which the venerable critic traces the fancies of his brother poet to real persons and events, making no difficulty even of a double murder at Florence to furnish grounds for his theory, affords an amusing instance of the disposition so prevalent throughout Europe, to picture Byron as a man of marvels and mysteries, as well in his life as his poetry. To these exaggerated, or wholly false notions of him, the numerous fictions palmed upon the world of his romantic tours and wonderful adventures, in places he never saw, and with persons that never existed*, have, no doubt, considerably contributed; and the consequence is, so utterly out of truth and nature are the representations of his life and character long cur

* Of this kind are the accounts, filled with all sorts of circumstantial wonders, of his residence in the island of Mytilene ;-his voyages to Sicily, to Ithaca, with the Countess Guiccioli, &c. &c. But the most absurd, perhaps, of all these fabrications, are the stories told by Pouqueville, of the poet's religious conferences in the cell of Father Paul, at Athens; and the still more unconscionable fiction in which Rizo has indulged, in giving the details of a pretended theatrical scene, got up (according to this poetical historian) between Lord Byron and the Archbishop of Arta, at the tomb of Botzaris, in Missolonghi.