Byron, probably, read the report of the inquest in Cobbett’s Weekly Register (August 17, 1822, vol. 43, pp. 389–425). The “eulogy” was in perfectly good taste, but there can be little doubt that if “Waddington or Watson” had cut their “carotid arteries,” the verdict would have been different. —Editor ↩
From this number must be excepted Canning. Canning is a genius, almost a universal one, an orator, a wit, a poet, a statesman; and no man of talent can long pursue the path of his late predecessor, Lord C. If ever man saved his country, Canning can, but will he? I for one, hope so.
[The phrase, “great moral lesson,” was employed by the Duke of Wellington, apropos of the restoration of pictures and statues to their “rightful owners,” in a despatch addressed to Castlereagh, under date, Paris, September 19, 1815 (The Dispatches, etc. (ed. by Colonel Gurwood), 1847, VIII 270). The words, “moral lesson,” as applied to the French generally, are to be found in Scott’s Field of Waterloo (conclusion, stanza VI line 3), which was written about the same time as the despatch. Byron quotes them in his “Ode from the French,” stanza IV line 8 (see Poetical Works, 1900, III 434, note 1). There is a satirical allusion to the Duke’s “assumption of the didactic” about teaching a “great moral lesson” in the Preface to the first number of the Liberal (1822, p. XI).] ↩
When Lord Sandwich said “he did not know the difference between orthodoxy and heterodoxy,” Warburton, the bishop, replied, “Orthodoxy, my lord, is my doxy, and heterodoxy is another man’s doxy.” A prelate of the present day has discovered, it seems, a third kind of doxy, which has not greatly exalted in the eyes of the elect that which Bentham calls “Church-of-Englandism.”
[For the “prelate,” see Letters, 1902, VI 101, note 2.] ↩
For the Duke of Wellington and the Holy Alliance, see the Introduction to The Age of Bronze, Poetical Works, 1901, V 538, 561. —Editor ↩
“As the Poem is to be published anonymously, omit the Dedication. I won’t attack the dog in the dark. Such things are for scoundrels and renegadoes like himself” [Revise]. See, too, letter to Murray, May 6, 1819 (Letters, 1900, IV 294); and Southey’s letter to Bedford, July 31, 1819 (Selections from the Letters, etc., 1856, in. 137, 138). According to the editor of the Works of Lord Byron, 1833 (XV 101), the existence of the Dedication “became notorious” in consequence of Hobhouse’s article in the Westminster Review, 1824. He adds, for Southey’s consolation and encouragement, that “for several years the verses have been selling in the streets as a broadside,” and that “it would serve no purpose to exclude them on the present occasion.” But Southey was not appeased. He tells Allan Cunningham (June 3, 1833) that “the new edition of Byron’s works is … one of the very worst symptoms of these bad times” (Life and Correspondence, 1850, VI 217). —Editor ↩
In the “Critique on Bertram,” which Coleridge contributed to the Courier, in 1816, and republished in the Biographia Literaria, in 1817 (chap. XXIII), he gives a detailed analysis of “the old Spanish play, entitled Atheista Fulminato [vide ante, the ‘Introduction to Don Juan’] … which under various names (Don Juan, the Libertine, etc.) has had its day of favour in every country throughout Europe. … Rank, fortune, wit, talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person, vigorous health, and constitutional hardihood—all these advantages, elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and national character, are supposed to have combined in Don Juan, so as to give him the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine of a godless nature, as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of all things, events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts, sensations, impulses, and actions. Obedience to nature is the only virtue.” It is possible that Byron traced his own lineaments in this too lifelike portraiture, and at the same time conceived the possibility of a new Don Juan, “made up” after his own likeness. His extreme resentment at Coleridge’s just, though unwise and uncalled-for, attack on Maturin stands in need of some explanation. See letter to Murray, September 17, 1817 (Letters, 1900, IV 172). —Editor ↩
“Have you heard that Don Juan came over with a dedication to me, in which Lord Castlereagh and I (being hand in glove intimates) were coupled together for abuse as ‘the two Roberts’? A fear of persecution (sic) from the one Robert is supposed to be the reason why it has been suppressed.”
(Southey to Rev. H. Hill, August 13, 1819, Selections from the Letters, etc., 1856, III 142)
For “Quarrel between Byron and Southey,” see Introduction to The Vision of Judgment, Poetical Works, 1901, IV 475–480; and Letters, 1901, VI 377–399 (Appendix I). —Editor ↩
The reference must be to the detailed enumeration of “the powers requisite for the production of poetry,” and the subsequent antithesis of Imagination and Fancy contained in the Preface to the collected Poems of William Wordsworth, published in 1815. In the Preface to the Excursion (1814) it is expressly stated that “it is not the author’s intention formally to announce a system.” —Editor ↩
Wordsworth’s place may be in the Customs—it is, I
