ET. 32. UGO FOSCOLO. attractions to the gentle living reader); let 6 Remember -as we "Lord! thus I spit at thee and thy counsel ! "So there's argument for you. 66 true, but it is from "I return you Foscolo's letter, because it "So you see that I have seen some strange things in my time. As for your own offer, it was in 1815, when I was in actual uncer I The paragraph is left thus imperfect in the original. have not forgotten it, although you probably "P. S.-Foscolo's Ricciardo was lent, "We are all looking at one another, like "To be sure I took in the British Roberts finely. He fell precisely into the glaring trap laid for him. It was inconceivable how he could be so absurd as to think us serious with him. "Recollect, that if you put my name to Don Juan' in these canting days, any lawyer might oppose my guardian right of my daughter in Chancery, on the plea of its conof a foolish jest. I was not aware of this taining the parody;-such are the perils at the time, but you will find it correct, I believe; and you may be sure that the Noels to a poem at any time, and so should you, would not let it slip. Now I prefer my child as having half a dozen. 66 Let me know your notions. If you turn over the earlier pages of the Huntingdon peerage story, you will see how common a name Ada was in the early PlanIt was also the tagenet days. I found it in my own pedigree in the reign of John and Henry, and name of Charlemagne's sister. It is in an gave it to my daughter. early chapter of Genesis, as the name of the wife of Lamech : and I suppose Ada is the calic, and had been in my family; for which feminine of Adam. It is short, ancient, voreason I gave it to my daughter." LETTER 391. TO MR. MURRAY. “ Ravenna, 8bre 12o, 1820. "By land and sea carriage a considerable quantity of books have arrived; and I am obliged and grateful: but 'medio de fonte leporum, surgit amari aliquid,' &c. &c.; which, being interpreted, means, "I'm thankful for your books, dear Murray; But why not send Scott's Monasturry ? the only book in four living volumes I would give a baioccolo to see-bating the rest of the same author, and an occasional Edinburgh and Quarterly, as brief chroniclers of the times. Instead of this, here are Johnny Keats's * * [p-a-bed] poetry, and three novels by God knows whom, except that there is Peg Holford's name to one of them -a spinster whom I thought we had sent back to her spinning. Crayon is very good; Hogg's Tales rough, but RACY, and welcome. "Books of travels are expensive, and I don't want them, having travelled already; besides, they lie. Thank the author of 'The Profligate, a Comedy,' for his (or her) present. Pray send me no more poetry but what is rare and decidedly good. There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables, that I am ashamed to look at them. I say nothing against your parsons, your Smedleys and your Crolys-it is all very fine- but pray dispense me from the pleasure-as also from Mrs. Hemans. Instead of poetry if you will favour me with a few soda-powders, I shall be delighted: but all prose ('bating travels and novels NOT by Scott) is welcome, especially Scott's Tales of my Landlord, and so on. "In the notes to Marino Faliero, it may be as well to say that ' Benintende' was not really of the Ten, but merely Grand Chancellor, a separate office (although important): it was an arbitrary alteration of mine. The Doges too were all buried in St. Mark's before Faliero. It is singular that when his predecessor, Andrea Dandolo, died, the Ten made a law that all the future Doges should be buried with their families, in their own churches, one would think by a kind of presentiment. So that all that is said of his ancestral Doges, as buried at St. John's and Paul's, is altered from the fact, they being in St. Mark's. Make a note of this, and put Editor as the subscription to it. "As I make such pretensions to accuracy, I should not like to be twitted even with such ["The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.". (Washington Irving.)] 2 ["Ishould recommend your not publishing the prose. It is too late for the Letter to Roberts, and that to Black trifles on that score. Of the play they may say what they please, but not so of my costume and dram. pers., they having been real existences. "I omitted Foscolo in my list of living Venetian worthies, in the notes, considering him as an Italian in general, and not a mere provincial like the rest; and as an Italian I have spoken of him in the preface to Canto 4th of Childe Harold. "The French translation of us!!! oimè! oime! - the German; but I don't understand the latter and his long dissertation at the end about the Fausts. Excuse haste. Of po litics it is not safe to speak, but nothing is decided as yet." "I am in a very fierce humour at not having Scott's Monastery. You are too liberal in quantity, and somewhat careless of the quality, of your missives. All the Quarterlies (four in number) I had had before from you, and two of the Edinburghs; but no matter; we shall have new ones by and by. No more Keats, I entreat :-flay him alive; if some of you don't, I must skin him myself. There is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the manikin. "I don't feel inclined to care further about Don Juan.' What do you think a very pretty Italian lady said to me the other day? She had read it in the French, and paid me some compliments, with due DRAWBACKS, upon it. I answered that what she said was true, but that I suspected it would live longer than Childe Harold. ‘Ah but (said she) I would rather have the fame of Childe Harold for three years than an IMMORTALITY of Don Juan!' The truth is that it is TOO TRUE, and the women hate every thing which strips off the tinsel of sentiment; and they are right, as it would rob them of their weapons. I never knew a woman who did not hate De Grammont's Memoirs for the same reason: even Lady Oxford used to abuse them. "Rose's work I never received. It was seized at Venice. Such is the liberality of the Huns, with their two hundred thousand men, that they dare not let such a volume as his circulate." LETTER 392. TO MR. MURRAY. "Ravenna, 8bre 16o, 1820. The Abbot' has just arrived: many thanks; as also for the Monastery · when you send it!!! wood is too egotistical, and Hobhouse don't like it, except the part about Pope, which is truth, and very good.”—MS.] 3 [Mr. William Stewart Rose's "Letters from the North of Italy."] ET. 32. GOETHE. "The Abbot will have a more than ordinary interest for me, for an ancestor of mine by the mother's side, Sir J. Gordon of Gight, the handsomest of his day, died on a scaffold at Aberdeen for his loyalty to Mary, of whom he was an imputed paramour as well as her relation. His fate was much commented on in the Chronicles of the times. If I mistake not, he had something to do with her escape from Loch Leven, or with her captivity there. 1 But this you will know better than I. "I recollect Loch Leven as it were but yesterday. I saw it in my way to England in 1798, being then ten years of age. My mother, who was as haughty as Lucifer with her descent from the Stuarts, and her right line, from the old Gordons, not the Seyton Gordons, as she disdainfully termed the ducal branch, told me the story, always reminding me how superior her Gordons were to the southern Byrons, notwithstanding our Norman, and always masculine descent, which has never lapsed into a female, as my mother's Gordons had done in her own person. "I have written to you so often lately, that the brevity of this will be welcome. "Yours, &c." "Ravenna, 8bre 17°, 1820. "Enclosed is the Dedication of Marino Faliero to Goethe. Query,-is his title Baron or not? I think yes. Let me know your opinion, and so forth. "P. S. Let me know what Mr. Hobhouse and you have decided about the two prose letters and their publication. 66 I enclose you an Italian abstract of the German translator of Manfred's Appendix, in which you will perceive quoted what Goethe says of the whole body of English poetry (and not of me in particular). On this the Dedication is founded, as you will perceive, though I had thought of it before, for I look upon him as a great man.' The very singular Dedication transmitted with this letter has never before been published, nor, as far as I can learn, ever reached the hands of the illustrious German. It is written in the poet's most whimsical and mocking mood; and the unmeasured severity poured out in it upon the two favourite objects of his wrath and ridicule compels me to deprive the reader of some of its most amusing passages. " DEDICATION TO BARON GOETHE, &c. &c. &c. "I regret to see a great man falling into "There are ten thousand! Macbeth. Geese, villain? Answer. Authors, sir.' Now, of these 'ten thousand authors,' there are actually nineteen hundred and eightyseven poets, all alive at this moment, whatever their works may be, as their booksellers well know; and amongst these there are several who possess a far greater reputation than mine, although considerably less than It is owing to this neglect on the yours. part of your German translators that you are not aware of the works of * "There is also another, named * "I mention these poets by way of sample to enlighten you. They form but two bricks but may serve for a specimen of the building. of our Babel, (WINDSOR bricks, by the way,) "It is, moreover, asserted that the predominant character of the whole body of the present English poetry is a disgust and contempt for life.' But I rather suspect that by one single work of prose, you yourself, have excited a greater contempt for life than were written. Madame de Stael says, that all the English volumes of poesy that ever 'Werther has occasioned more suicides than the most beautiful woman;' and I really believe that he has put more individuals out of this world than Napoleon himself, except in the way of his profession. Perhaps, Illustrious Sir, the acrimonious judgment passed by a celebrated northern journal upon you has rather indisposed you towards English in particular, and the Germans in general, Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland," and dedicated to the Prince Regent, appeared in 1816.] [See an article on Goethe's "Aus Meinen Leben," &c. in the Edinburgh Rev. vol. xxvi. and xxvii.] poetry as well as criticism. But you must not regard our critics, who are at bottom good-natured fellows, considering their two professions, taking up the law in court, and laying it down out of it. No one can more lament their hasty and unfair judgment, in your particular, than I do; and I so expressed myself to your friend Schlegel, in 1816, at Coppet. "In behalf of my 'ten thousand' living brethren, and of myself, I have thus far taken notice of an opinion expressed with regard to English poetry' in general, and which merited notice, because it was YOURS. "My principal object in addressing you was to testify my sincere respect and admiration of a man, who, for half a century, has led the literature of a great nation, and will left it four or five years ago. Some of the English scribblers, it is true, abused Pope and Swift, but the reason was that they themselves did not know how to write either prose or verse; but nobody thought them worth making a sect of. Perhaps there may be something of the kind sprung up lately, but I have not heard much about it, and it would be such bad taste that I shall be very sorry to believe it." CHAPTER XL. 1820. go down to posterity as the first literary RAVENNA.—LETTERS TO MURRAY AND MOORE. character of his age. "You have been fortunate, Sir, not only in the writings which have illustrated your name, but in the name itself, as being sufficiently musical for the articulation of posterity. In this you have the advantage of some of your countrymen, whose names would perhaps be immortal also — if any body could pronounce them. "It may, perhaps, be supposed, by this apparent tone of levity, that I am wanting in intentional respect towards you; but this will be a mistake: I am always flippant in prose. Considering you, as I really and warmly do, in common with all your own," and with most other nations, to be by far the first literary character which has existed in Europe since the death of Voltaire, I felt, and feel, desirous to inscribe to you the following work, not as being either a tragedy or a poem, (for I cannot pronounce upon its pretensions to be either one or the other, or both, or neither,) but as a mark of esteem and admiration from a foreigner to the man who has been hailed in Germany • THE GREAT Goethe.' -A CHANT. -EPIGRAMS. -A POR- "Ravenna, October 17. 1820. You owe me two letters-pay them. I want to know what you are about. The summer is over, and you will be back to Paris. Apropos of Paris, it was not Sophia Gail, but Sophia Gay-the English word Gay - who was my correspondent.' you tell who she is, as you did of the defunct * * ? Can "Have you gone on with your poem? I have received the French of mine. Only think of being traduced into a foreign language in such an abominable travesty! It is useless to rail, but one can't help it. "Have you got my Memoir copied? I have begun a continuation. Shall I send it you, as far as it is gone? "I can't say any thing to you about Italy, for the Government here look upon me with a suspicious eye, as I am well informed. Pretty fellows!—as if I, a solitary stranger, could do any mischief. It is because I am fond of rifle and pistol shooting, I believe; for they took the alarm at the quantity of cartridges I consumed, -the wiseacres ! was Madame Sophie Gay, mother of the celebrated poetess and beauty, Mademoiselle Delphine Gay.] །། ། 22 Er. 32. 46 ANSWER TO BLACKWOOD. -nor a You don't deserve a long letter "The Queen has made a pretty theme for LETTER 395. 66 TO MR. MURRAY. "Ravenna, 8bre 25°, 1820. Pray forward the enclosed to Lady "In thanking you for the Abbot, I made The Pamphlet in answer to Blackwood's "Ravenna, 9bre 4. 1820. As the "I have received from Mr. Galignani the which will explain themselves. 4 enclosed letters, duplicates and receipts, poems are your property by purchase, right, are for you to decide upon. I know not how and justice, all matters of publication, &c. &c. far my compliance with Mr. Galignani's request might be legal, and I doubt that it would not be honest. In case you choose to arrange with him, I enclose the permits to you, and in so doing I wash my hands of the business altogether. I sign them merely to enable you to exert the power you justly to do with it farther, except, in my answer possess more properly. I will have nothing to Mr. Galignani, to state that the letters, thereof. &c. &c. are sent to you, and the causes 66 If you can check these foreign pirates, do; if not, put the permissive papers in the fire. I can have no view nor object whatever, but to secure to you your property. Yours, &c. "P.S. I have read part of the Quarterly just arrived: Mr. Bowles shall be answered; is not quite correct in his statement ers. They support Pope, I see, in the about English Bards and Scotch Review "You had better not publish Blackwood-he [The Duke of Bourdeaux, born the 29th of September 2 [It has since been introduced into the complete edition of Lord Byron's Works (see p. 800.), and is characterised by the Quarterly Reviewers as "one of the finest specimens of English prose produced in this or in any preceding time."] 3 While these sheets are passing through the press, a printed statement has been transmitted to me by Lady Noel Byron, which the reader will find inserted in the Appendix (First Edit.) 4 Mr. Galignani had applied to Lord Byron with the view of procuring from him such legal right over those works of his Lordship of which he had hitherto been the sole publisher in France, as would enable him to prevent others, in future, from usurping the same privilege. [In a pamphlet entitled "The Invariable Principles of Poetry," in a letter to Mr. Campbell, occasioned by |