Louis Charles Antoine Desaix de Voygoux, born August 27, 1768, won the victory at the Pyramids, July 21, 1798. He was mortally wounded at Marengo, June 14, 1800.
Jean Victor Moreau, born August 11, 1763, was victorious at Engen, May 3, and at Hohenlinden, December 3, 1800. He was struck by a cannonball at the battle of Dresden, August 27, and died September 2, 1813. —Editor ↩
Hor., Od., IV c. IX l. 25—
“Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona,” etc.
—Editor ↩
Hor., Epist. Ad Pisones, lines 148, 149—
“Semper ad eventum festinat, et in medias res,
Non secus ac notas, auditorem rapit—”
—Editor ↩
[“Quien no ha visto Sevilla, no ha visto maravilla.”]
In his reply to Blackwood (No. XXIX August, 1819), Byron somewhat disingenuously rebuts the charge that Don Juan contained “an elaborate satire on the character and manners of his wife.”
“If,” he writes, “in a poem by no means ascertained to be my production there appears a disagreeable, casuistical, and by no means respectable female pedant, it is set down for my wife. Is there any resemblance? If there be, it is in those who make it—I can see none.”
—Letters, 1900, IV 477
The allusions in stanzas XII–XIV, and, again, in stanzas XXVII–XXIX, are, and must have been meant to be, unmistakable. —Editor ↩
Gregor von Feinagle, born? 1765, was the inventor of a system of mnemonics, “founded on the topical memory of the ancients,” as described by Cicero and Quinctilian. He lectured, in 1811, at the Royal Institution and elsewhere. When Rogers was asked if he attended the lectures, he replied, “No; I wished to learn the Art of Forgetting” (Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, 1856, p. 42). —Editor ↩
Little she spoke—but what she spoke was Attic all,
—[MS.]
With words and deeds in perfect unanimity.
Sir Samuel Romilly, born 1757, lost his wife on the 29th of October, and committed suicide on the 2nd of November, 1818.—
“But there will come a day of reckoning, even if I should not live to see it. I have at least seen Romilly shivered, who was one of the assassins. When that felon or lunatic … was doing his worst to uproot my whole family, tree, branch, and blossoms—when, after taking my retainer, he went over to them [see Letters, 1899, III 324]—when he was bringing desolation … on my household gods—did he think that, in less than three years, a natural event—a severe, domestic, but an unexpected and common calamity—would lay his carcase in a crossroad, or stamp his name in a verdict of Lunacy! Did he (who in his drivelling sexagenary dotage had not the courage to survive his Nurse—for what else was a wife to him at his time of life?)—reflect or consider what my feelings must have been, when wife, and child, and sister, and name, and fame, and country, were to be my sacrifice on his legal altar—and this at a moment when my health was declining, my fortune embarrassed, and my mind had been shaken by many kinds of disappointment—while I was yet young, and might have reformed what might be wrong in my conduct, and retrieved what was perplexing in my affairs! But the wretch is in his grave,” etc.
—Letter to Murray, June 7, 1819, Letters, 1900, IV 316
—Editor ↩
Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849) published Castle Rackrent, etc., etc., etc., in 1800.
“In 1813,” says Byron, “I recollect to have met them [the Edgeworths] in the fashionable world of London. … She was a nice little unassuming ‘Jeannie Deans-looking body,’ as we Scotch say; and if not handsome, certainly not ill-looking.”
(Diary, January 19, 1821, Letters, 1901, V 177–179) —Editor
Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810) published, in 1782, Easy Introduction to the Study of Nature; History of the Robins (dedicated to the Princess Sophia) in 1786, etc. —Editor ↩
Hannah More (1745–1833) published Coelebs in Search of a Wife in 1809. —Editor ↩
Pope, Rape of the Lock, Canto II line 17. —Editor ↩
John Harrison (1693–1776), known as “Longitude” Harrison, was the inventor of watch compensation. He received, in slowly and reluctantly paid instalments, a sum of £20,000 from the Government, for producing a chronometer which should determine the longitude within half a degree. A watch which contained his latest improvements was worn by Captain Cook during his three years’ circumnavigation of the globe. —Editor ↩
“Description des vertus incomparables de l’Huile de Macassar.”
See the Advertisement. [An Historical, Philosophical and Practical Essay on the Human Hair, was published by Alexander Rowland, Jun., in 1816. It was inscribed,
“To her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte of Wales and Cobourg.”]
Where all was innocence and quiet bliss.
—[MS.]
And so she seemed, in all outside formalities.
—[MS.]
“ ’Zounds, an I were now by this rascal, I could brain him with his lady’s fan.”
—1 Henry IV, act II, sc. 3, lines 19, 2
—Editor ↩
Wishing each other damned, divorced, or dead.
—[MS.]
According to Medwin (Conversations, 1824, p. 55), Byron “was surprised one day by a Doctor and a Lawyer almost forcing themselves at the same time into my room. I did not know,” he adds, “till afterwards the real object of their visit. I thought their questions singular, frivolous, and somewhat importunate, if not impertinent: but what should I have thought, if I had known that they were sent to provide proofs of my insanity?” Lady Byron, in her Remarks on Mr. Moore’s Life, etc. (Life,
