The poems and dramas of Lord Byron. Reprinted from the original editions, with explanatory notes, etc

Front matter

Qass.

Book.

SO

Preface To The First Edition

In submitting to the public eye the following collection, I have not only to combat the difficulties thatwriters of verse generally encounter, l)ut may incur the charge of presumption for obtruding myself on the world, when, without doubt, I might be, at my age, more usefully employed.

These productions are the fruits of the lighter hours of a young man who has lately completed his nineteenth year. As they bear the internal evidence of a boyish mind, this is perhaps unnecessary information. Some few were written during the disadvantages of illness and depression of spirits: under the former influence, " Childish Recollections," in particular, were composed. This consideration, though it cannot excite the voice of jiraise, may at least arrest the arm of censure. A considerable portion of these poems has been privately printed, at llic request and for the perusal of my friends. I am sensible that the partial and frequently injudicious admiration of a social circle is not the criterion by which poetical genius is to be estimated: yet, " to do greatly," we must " dare greatly;" and I have hazarded my reputation and feelings in publishing this volume. " I have passed the Rubicon," and must stand or fall by the " cast of the die." In the latter event, I shall submit without a murmur; for, though not without solicitude for the fate of these effusions, my expectations are by no means sanguine. It is probable that I may have dared much and done little; for, in the words of Cowper, "it is one thing to write what may please our friends, who, because they are such, are apt to be a little biased in our favor, and another to write what may please everybody; because they who have no connection, or even knowledge of the autlj^or, will be sure to find fault if they can." To the truth of this, however, I do not wholly subscribe; on the contrary, I feel convinced that these trifles will not be treated with injustice. Their merit, if they possess any, will be liberally allowed; their numerous faults, on the other hand, cannot expect that favor v.liich has been denied to others of maturer years, decided character, and far greater ability.

I have not aimed at exclusive originality, still less have I studied any particular model

HOURS OF IDLENESS.

for imitation: some translations are given, of which many are paraphrastic. In the original pieces there may appear a casual coincidence with authors whose works I have been accustomed to read; but I have not been guilty of intentional plagiarism. To produce anything entirely new, in an age so fertile in rhyme, would be a Herculean task, as every subject has already been treated to its utmost extent. Poetry, however, is not my primary vocation; to divert the dull moments of indisposition, or the monotony of a vacant hour, urged me "to this sin;" little can be expected from so unpromising a muse. My wreath, scanty as it must be, is all I shall derive from these productions; and I shall never attempt to replace its fading leaves, or pluck a single additional sprig from groves where I am, at best, an intruder. Though accustomed, in my younger days, to rove a careless mountaineer on the liighlands of Scotland, I have not of late years had the benefit of such pure air, or so elevated a residence, as might enable me to enter the lists with genuine bards who have enjoyed l)oth these advantages. But they derive considerable fame, and a few not less profit, from their productions: while I shall expiate my rashness as an interloper, certainly without the latter, and in all probability with a very slight share of the former. I leave to others ^' virtim voliiare per ora.'' I look to the few who will hear with patience " diilce est desipere in loco." To the former worthies I resign, without repining, the hope of immortality, and content myself with the not very magnificent prospect of ranking amongst " the mob of gentlemen who write" — my readers must determine whether I dare say "with ease" — or the honor of a posthumous page in T/ie Calalogite of Royal and Xohle Authors — a work to which the Peerage is under infinite obligations, inasmuch as many names of considerable length, sound and antiquity are thereby rescued from the obscurity which unluckily overshadows several voluminous productions of their illustrious bearers.

With slight hopes, and some fears, I publish this first and last attempt. To the dictates of young ambition may be ascribed many actions more criminal and equally absurd. To a few of my own age, the contents may afford amusement: I trust they will, at least, be found harmless. It is highly improbable, from my situation and pursuits hereafter, that I should ever obtrude myself a second time on the public; nor, even in the very doubtful event of present indulgence, shall I be tempted to commit a future trespass of the same nature. The opinion of Dr. Johnson on the Poems of a noble relation of mine,-== " that when a man of rank appeared in the character of an author, he deserved to have his merit liandsomely allowed," can have little weight with verbal, and still less with periodical censors; but were it otherwise, I should be loth to avail myself of the privilege, and would rather incur the bitterest censure of anonymous criticism, than triumph in honors granted solely to a title.

* Frederick Iloward, fifth Earl of Carlisle, author of fugitive pieces and two tragedies, was born 1743, and died in 1S26.

PUBLISHER'S PREFACE.

In offering- a new edition of the works of an accepted standard and classic like Byron, any prefatory remarks will probably seem superfluous; but the publisher feels justified in inviting- attention briefly to a few points in which the present "Arundel Edition " possesses a very marked and decided superiority over any other that has at any time been issued in a similarly compact and convenient shape.

1. //is Complete. — The importance of this claim will be conceded when we mention the fact, which can be proved by any reader for himself, that scarcely any of the so called " complete editions" (even among those designed for scholars) are really complete and unabridged. One edition, professing to be complete, actually omits Childe Harold imd Don Juan j but while this is an extreme (and we hope solitary) case, it may be affirmed without qualification that all the cheaper editions are incomplete, only differing from each other in respect to the particular pieces omitted. For example, the well known Nimmo (or Edinburgh) edition omits more than half the "Occasional Pieces" (63 out of 123); it omits The Island, The Prophecy of Dante and Francesca^of Rimini ; and it omits from the dramas (of which there are only eight in all), Sardanapalus^ The Tiuo Foscari, Werner and The Deformed 7ransformed~-\\vo, at least, being among the best. The present edition contains every piece that has ever been included in the best standard editions.

2. Its Text is Pure. — Not only are entire poems omitted from most of the editions (as pointed out above), but even of these supposed to be included the text is frequentl)- altered, or rather mutilatetl, to suit the tastes of what Charles Reade happily calls the " prurient prudes." The publisher feels that to issue a mutilated version of ai established classic, is to offer an insult to both author and reader ; and particular care has been taken to have the text of the present edition correspond with what Byron actually wrote and published.

iv FUBLISIIEK'S PREFACE.

3. It is fully Equipped ivith No'tes. — Most of the one volume editions omit the notes entirely, and very few indeed reprint them in their original form and fulness. Yet many of the poems are absolutely unintelligible without the notes, and nearly all of them profit greatly by the aid which is thus afforded in elucidating obscure, difficult or interesting points. Moreover, Byron's prose is only less picturesque and vivid than his poetry ; and he himself declared to Moore that some of the best work^ he ever did was put into the notes to his several poems. The whole of these Original Notes appear in the present edition, and others have been added by the editor where they seemed necessary to a full understanding of the text.

4. Its Illustrations are Appropriate. — The most cursory examination of the ordinary editions of Byron will suffice to convince the reader of the grotesque inappropriateness of the illustrations. There is a coldness about them which, contrasted with the warm imagery, the picturesque descriptions, and the glowing language of the text, is almost repulsive. The scene of most of Byron's poems is laid in the East, where human passions have free play, and where the aspects of nature and the habits of life correspond to the warm imagination and swift circUng blood. For the

pi time an attempt is made in a popular edition of Byron to reproduce pictorially these fierce passions, this rich imagery, these flowing draperies and graceful attitudes ; and to do so most effectively we have employed the graphic pencils of Sir John Gilbert, R. A., Birket Foster, Henry Dalziel, Kenny Meadows, Hablot K. Browne and W. J. Linton.

5. Its Typography is Good. — This is almost too technical a point to insist upon, but it is worth while for the reader to observe, that while most of the current editions are printed from old, blurred and battered plates, the present is from new, clear cut type, large enough to \\^ read with ease and pleasure.

4^

LORD BYRON'S LIFE AND LITERARY LABORS.

The portrait of George Noel Gordon Byron, the most remarkable figure in the literature of thi' rentury, is still too often made up on the principle of putting in all the shadows and lea%'ing out all the lights^. Even the records and traditions of his ancestry are partially selected in this way. It is true, no doubt, that Byron's immediate ancestors were far from being quiet, respectable people. His father. Captain Byron, was a profligate ofiicer, whose first wife was a divorced lady with whom he had eloped to France, who married a second time only to find the means for paying his debts, and who left his wi(e_as soaa-as her .fortune was exhausted. His mother, Catherine Gordon, heiress of Giglit in Aberdeenshire, was a fitful and passionate woman, who knew no stable halting^pjace between the extremes of indulgent fondness and vindictive disfavor. His grand-uncle, whom he ■■ucceedcd in die title, had killed his neighbor and relative, Mr. Chaworth, in a drunken brawl, had been tried before the House of Lords on the charge of murder and acquitted, but had been so wrought upon by remorse and the sense of public opprobrium, that he shut himself up at Newstead, let the place go to ruin, and acquired such a bad repute by his solitary excesses that he was known as the " wicked Lord Byron." In other parts of the family line the nobler elements are seen running clear and pure. The poet's grandfather. Admiral Byron, " Foul Weather Jack," who had as little rest on sea as the poet on the land, had the virtues without the vices of his r.ace. Farther down the family tree we find the Byrons distinguishing themselves in the field. Seven brothers fought in the battle of Mgehill, but none of the family would seem to have been stirred by the poetic impulse in the brightest period of English song.

The poverty into which Byron was born had much to do in determining his future career. If he had been born in affluence, we may be certain that, with his impressionable disposition, he would never have been the poet of the Revolution — the most powerful exponent of the modern spirit. By the time of his birth (at Holies street, London, January 22, i/So) his father had " squandered the lands o' Gight awa'," and his mother was on her way back from the Continent with a small remnant of her wrecked fortune. Mrs. Byron took up her residence at Aberdeen ; and her " lame brat," as she called him in her fits, was sent for a year to a private school at 5s. a quarter, and afterwards to the grammar school of the town. Many little stories are told of the boy's affectionate gratitude and venturesome chivalry, as well of his exacting and passionate temper. The sisters Gray, who were his successive nurses, found him tractable enough under kind treatment. His mother, whose notion of discipline consisted in hurling things at him when he was disobedient, had no atithflcity over him ; he met her violence sometimes with sullen resistance, sometimes with defiant mockery ; and once, he tel's us, they had to wrench from him a knife which he was raising to /..s breast. At school he passed from the first to the fourth class, but with all his ambition he w.as toOjSglf; willed to take kindly to prescribed taiks, too emotional for dry intellectual work ; and he probably learned more from MarjKJray, who taught him the Psalms and the Bible, than he did from his schoolmaster. Before he left Aberdeen, which he did on the death of his grand-uncle, and his acccssioo to the peerage in May, 1798, he gave a remarkable proof of the precocious intensity of his affections by falling in love with his cousin Mary Duff. So strong a hold did this passion take of him, that six years afterwards to.' nearly went intoxonvul.sioiis an hearirig of her marriage.

Soon after, ByrorTs mother, who had frequently taken advice for the cure of his lame foot, went with him ta Nottingham, and placed him under the cure of an empiric, who tortured him to no purpose. The torture \f; renewed, under the advice of a Lcndon physician, at Dr. Glennie's school at Dulwich, at which he was enterCin the summer of 1799 ; and at last the foot, as he wrote his Scotch nurse, was so far restored that he was able * put on a common boot. He was two years with Dr. Glennic, and, though he made but little progress in hi classical studicsThe had the run of his mxster's library, and added greatly to his general information. Before ht left for Harrow he had contracted another passion for his cousin Margaret Parker, so intense that he could not eat or sleep when he was looking forward to meeting her. He went to Harrow in 1801, "a wild northern colt,"

y

LORD BYRON'S LIFE as the head-master said of him, very much behind his age in Latin and Greek. This deficiency he never quite overcame. Many anecdotes are told of the warmth of his friendships at Harrow, and liis chivalry in defending his juniors. In the vacation of 1003 he again fell in love — this time more seriously — with Mks Chaworth, whose grandfather the "wicked Lord Byron" had killed. In the melancholy moods of his after life her rejection of him was often a subject of passionate regret.

Byron's residence at Cambridge (Trinity College, 1805 to 180S, with interval of a year) added little to his knowledge of academical learning. The arts in which he qualified himself to graduate were swimming, riding, fencing, boxing, drinking, gaming, and the other occupations of idle undergraduates. When he went up to Cambridge he was wretched, he tells us, partly from leaving Harrow, chiefly, it may be presumed, from the want of money. His friend, Scrope Davies, lent him large sums, and he lived with a certain degree of reckless happiness.

* Much more important than his residence in Cambridge, as bearing on his mental development, was hii year's residence at Southwell. From that happy period, which saw the serious dawn of his genius, M. Taine has picked out only the unhappy violent quarrel with his mother, which was the cause of its termination. His intimacy with the Pigotts, and the expansion of his poetic genius under their genial encouragement, are much more v.-orthy of notice than this culmination of miserable bickerings, which he was now strong enough to laugh at when the domestic storm was over. He had scribbled many verses at Harrow, but had been too shy to show them to his roistering friends ; and now, finding for the first time an admiring audience, he put forth his po\rer3 i.i earnest, as was only possible to him when under the influence of love or defiance. The result came before the public in the Hours of Idleness, published by Ridge, of Newark, in March 1S07. The poems in that collection have something of the insipidity of the circumstances that gave them birth, but the fact of publication bound him to his vocation to a degree of which he was not at all aware. Hitherto his ambition had pointed toward politics as his natural field, and he said as much in the somewhat disdainful preface to his poems. Putting his ambition into verse, he characteristically compared himself to a slumbering volcano, and longed to burst on the world as a Fox or a Chatham. But the Hours of Idleness decided his career for him. When he went back to Trinity College he could not help eagerly watching their effect. Again and again he wrote to the friendly Miss Pigott to hear how they were succeeding. He was prepared for defeat, he said, and he promised to take vengeance on adverse critics. He was made a new man by the publication ; he had tasted public applause and longed for more of it. It was then th.at he carefully examined himself and took stock of his acquirements in the very remarkable document dated November 30, 1G07, to which wc are indebted for our knowledge of the extent of his studies. In the midst of his rollicking set at Cambridge he was secretly girding up his lo;us and collecting his powers to make a grand struggle for fame. Perhaps no poet was ever drawn out so directly by the thirst for public honor. He launched himself bodily before the world, almost ravenous for sympathy and homage.

It is generally said that but for the savage attack of the Edinburgh Revic-w in the spring of 1808 Byron might never have returned to poetry. But the fact is that the review did not appear till a year after the publication of Hours 0/ Idleness, and, in the interval, Byron, for all his farewell to poetry, was "scribbling," as he called it, more furiously than ever. " I have written," he wrote to Miss Pigott, si.\ months before the Edinburgh attack, " 214 pages of a novel ; one poem of 330 lines to be published (without my name) in a few weeks with notes; 560 lines ol Bosvjorth Field, awA 250 lines of another poem in rhyme, besides half a dozen smaller pieces. The poem to be published is a satire." Th3 satire was the poem which he afterwards converted into a reply to the y?c;?/«i5«rf/i Review. He anticipated censure and forearmed himself — always as eager to defy reproof as he was to win applause. Apparently he put off publishing his satire till all his critics had had their say, and he should know exactly where to hit. When the attack came it wounded him bitterlj' ; a friend who called on him at the time thought from the fierce light in his eye that he had received a challenge. He was in no hurry, however, to publish ; he worked at leisure, resting confident in the consciousness of his powers, and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers did not make its appearance till the spring of 1809. When it did appear the authorship was soon discovered, and it was the talkof the town. To us who look back upon it dispassionately, and compare its somewhat heavy and mechanical couplets with the exquisite lightness and telling point of its antitype the Dunciad, the satire appears to possess no great force ; but the personalities told at a time when there was a vague unrest in the literary world at the outspoken severity and sometimes truculent malice of the Scotch review, and the injured poet had his revenge in a general acknowledgment that the objects of his wrath deserved castigation, and that the lash was well laid on.

Soon after the publication of his satire, Byron, in June, 1809, left for hLs travels on the Continent ; and one

would have expected that the young lord, with the wreath of triumph still fresh on his head after his first literary battle, would have gone on his journey with satisfaction and with hopeful curiosity. He sailed in deep dejection,

with the bitterness of a man who feels himself friendless and solitary, and he returned after two years' wander-

AND LITERARY LABORS. vii

ing in Spain, Albania, Greece, Turkey and Asia Minor, sadder tlian before. Why was this ? Those who identify l-.im with his own Childe Harold are ready with the answer that he had lived a life of dissolute pleasure, and was already at the age of twenty-one, experiencing the pains of satiety and exhaustion. But this is not borne out by such scanty light as he and his friends have thrown upon his life at this period. He himself always protested, both in public and in private, against being identified with Childe Harold. Childe Harold's manor was an old monastic residence ; he left his country in bitter sadness ; in the original MS. his name was Childe Burun ; he left behind him a mother and a sister ; and he passed through the scenes of Byron's travels. But there the resemblance, which is really confined, as the author alleged, to local details, ends. There is no reason to disbelieve the author's affirmation that Childe Harold was a purely fictitious character " introduced for the sake of giving some connection to the piece." To make him what he intended — "a modern Timon, perhaps a poetical Zeluco " — the poet drew, no doubt, upon his own gloomier moods ; he felt occasionally as he makes Harold feel habitually, but the process was much more dramatic than the world in spite of his protests took for granted. Byron, with all his bitter moods of forlorn despondencj', was too susceptible a spirit to stalk "in joyless reverie " through the south of Europe, as his letters home testify.

And we know that his fiction of the Bacchanalian feasts in tlie monaslcry, with " Paphian girls " and " flatterers and parasites," is not at all like what actually occurred at Newstead Abbey. There were no laughing dames there except the domestics, and the flatterers and parasites were his bosom friends whom he loved with a romantic ardor. They held " high jinks" there as any young men might have done, masqueraded about in monkish habits to be in whimsical conformity v/ilh the place, practiced pistol shooting in the old hall, had a wolf and a bear chained at the entrance, had the garden dug up in search of concealed treasure, found a skull there, had it made into a cup, and passed the cup round after dinner with the conceit that their mouths did it less harm than the worms, and that when its wit had ceased to sparkle, it had better be filled witli Burgundy to make other wits sparkle than lie rotting in the earth. Byron himself was too poor, as Moore has remarked, to keep a harem, had such been his wish. He is known to have had a romantic passion for a girl who used to travel with him in England in boy's clothes; but whoever thinks he was satiated with the poor creature's devotion to him, should read the concluding stanzas of the second canto of Childe Harold, where the poet speaks in his own person and laments her death in language utterly out of keeping with the dark, unfeeling mood of his " Modern Timon." One can then understand why he should have said he would not for worlds be a man like his hero. There is really very little of the personage Childe Harold in the poem ; the poet si.Tiply had him by his side as a connecting link while he described the scenes through which he passed. In the last two cantos indeed, Bj'ron, seeing that the public had identified hini with Childe Harold, and then more defiant of public opinion, hardly cared to keep up the separaUon between his own character and the pilgrim's ; and in the last canto he avowedly makes them coalesce.

To look for the causes of moodiness and melancholy in material circumstances is a very foolish quest, but we may be certain that insufficiency of this world's money and the daily vexations and insults to which his rank was t'.iereby exposed, had much more to do with Byron's youthful gloom than satiety of this world's pleasures. His embarrassed finances, and the impossibility of securing the respect due to his title, formed a constant source of annoyance, and put his whole system into a morbid condition, in which every little slight and repulse festered and rankled with exaggerated virulence. From the daily humiliations and impertinences to which his fake position subjected him, aggravated by his jealous and suspicious irritability, he may have turned sometimes to Childe Harold's consolations — " the harlot and the bowl," but his nature prompted him rather to forget his vexations in purer and worthier objects. Unfortunately for him, such impetuous and passionate affections as his could rarely find the response for which he craved. In those few cases where devotion was repaid by adoration, the warmth of his gratitude was unbounded ; he loaded poor Thyrza's memory with caresses, careless of what the world might say, remembering only that the poor girl clung to him with unselfish love.

Nothing ever racked him with sharper anguish than the death of her whom he mourned under the name of Thyrza. To know the bitterness of his struggle with this sorrow we have only to look at what he wrote on the day that the news reached him (October ii, iSii]. Some of his wildest and most fiercelj' misanthropical verse, as well as some of his sweetest and saddest, belongs to that saddest of dates on his calendar. It is time that somethmg were done to trace this attachment, which has been strangely overlooked by the essayists and biographers. It furnishes an important clue to Byron's characters, and is, indeed, of hardly less importance than his later attachment to the Countess Guiccioli. Mr. John Morley, in an essay which ought to be read by everybody who wishes to form an idea of Byron's poetry as a revolutionary force in itself, remarks upon the respect which Byron, with all his raillery of the married state in modern society, still shows for the domestic idea. It is against the artificial union, the marriage of convenience, that his scorn is directed. However cynically or mourn- , fully he laments its infrequence he always upholds singleness of attachment as an ideal, and points with laughter or with tears at the way m which it is cut short where it does exist. Who Thyrza was can probably never be viii LOJ^n BYRON'S LIFE

known, but, in trying to convey the impression that she was purely imaginary, probably with the intention of shielding his friend's memory by declaring him innocent ot' a relationship unsanctioned by society, Moore really did Byron an injustice. The poor girl, whoever she was, and however much she was deified after her death by his imagination, would really seem to have been his grand passion. Her " dear sacred name " his hand, he says years afterwards, would have trembled to write ; he " wished it forever unrevealed." When he was questioned by the Countess. Guiccioli, he was deeply agitated and begged her never to recur to the subject. In his yournal, with Thyrza in his memory, we find him writing with contempt of the amours of some of his acquaintances, and scoffing at the idea of their applying the name of love to favors that, more or less directly, could be purchased. He has recorded the fact that when he drew the portrait of Zuleika his whole soul was full of her memory, and her image was again before him when he described the relationship between Zara and the disguised Gulnare. Indeed, she is the presiding genius of his Eastern Tales. Conrad, with all his conscious villany, had one redeeming passion — " love unchangeable, unchanged." The Giaour, too, loved but one ; — he leanit that lesson from the birds, and despised " the fool still prone to range," and "envied not his varied joys." All these portraitures of single-hearted devotion are tributes to the memory of Thyrza, the " more than friend," commemorated in the second canto of Cliilde Harold. Medora's song in the Corsair, " Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells," though not faultless as a lyric, is one of his most beautiful e.x-pressions of this mournful sentiment. There seems some reason for believing that the mysterious object of Manfred's love and remorse is another of the forms that she took in his imagination.

For some time after his return to England, Byron lived at Newstead very unhappily. He wrote that he was growing nervous, really, wretchedly, ridiculously, fine-ladically nervous. He could not arrange his thoughts — he feared his brain was giving way and that it would end in madness — and he felt occasionally a strange tendency to mirth. At other times lie thought more soberly of parliament as a diversion. He went to London, not to plunge into a lawless and pitiless course of crime, but to enter upon a political career. He had spoken two or three times in the Hovise of Lords, ineffectively however, when the publication of Childe Harold put an end to his parliamentary ambitions. " When Childe Harold was published," he says, " nobody thought of my prose afterwards, nor indeed did I."