“I deem it my duty to God to act as I am acting.”
—Letter of Lady Byron to Mrs. Leigh, February 14, 1816, Letters, 1899, III 311
—Editor ↩
“This is so very pointed.”
—[?Hobhouse]
“If people make application, it is their own fault.”
—[B.]—[Revise]
—Editor ↩
“There is some doubt about this.”
—[H.]
“What has the ‘doubt’ to do with the poem? it is, at least, poetically true. Why apply everything to that absurd woman? I have no reference to living characters.”
—[B.]—[Revise]
Medwin (Conversations, 1824, p. 54) attributes the “breaking open my writing-desk” to Mrs. Charlment (i.e. Mrs. Clermont) the original of “A Sketch,” Poetical Works, 1900, III 540–544. It is evident from Byron’s reply to Hobhouse’s remonstrance that Medwin did not invent this incident, but that someone, perhaps Fletcher’s wife, had told him that his papers had been overhauled. —Editor ↩
First their friends tried at reconciliation.
—[MS.]
The lawyers recommended a divorce.
—[MS.]
He had been ill brought up, besides was
besides being bilious.
or,
The reason was, perhaps, that he was bilious.
—[MS.]
And we may own—since he is now but
—[MS.]
laid in earth.
“I could have forgiven the dagger or the bowl—anything but the deliberate desolation piled upon me, when I stood alone upon my hearth, with my household gods shivered around me. … Do you suppose I have forgotten it? It has, comparatively swallowed up in me every other feeling, and I am only a spectator upon earth till a tenfold opportunity offers.”
—Letter to Moore, September 19, 1818, Letters, 1900, IV 262, 263
Compare, too—
“I had one only fount of quiet left,
Marino Faliero, act III sc. II, lines 361–364
And that they poisoned! My pure household gods
Were shivered on my hearth, and o’er their shrine
Sat grinning Ribaldry and sneering Scorn.”
—Editor ↩
Save death or litigation—
—[MS.]
banishment— so he died.
Compare Leigh Hunt on the illustrations to Andrew Tooke’s Pantheon: “I see before me, as vividly now as ever, his Mars and Apollo … and Venus very handsome, we thought, and not looking too modest in a ‘light cymar.’ ”
—Autobiography, 1860, p. 75
—Editor ↩
Defending still their Iliads and Odysseys.
—[MS.]
See Longinus, Section 10, “Ἵνα μὴ ἕν τι περὶ αὐτὴν πάθος φαίνηται, παθῶν δὲ σύνοδος.”
[“The effect desired is that not one passion only should be seen in her, but a concourse of passions.”
(Longinis on the Sublime, by W. Rhys Roberts, 1899, pp. 70, 71)
The Ode alluded to is the famous Φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν, κ.τ.λ.
“Him rival to the gods I place;
W. E. Gladstone
Him loftier yet, if loftier be,
Who, Lesbia, sits before thy face,
Who listens and who looks on thee.”
“I do not think you are quite held out by the quotation. Longinus says the circumstantial assemblage of the passions makes the sublime; he does not talk of the sublime being soaring and ample.”
—[H.]
“I do not care for this—it must stand.”
—[B.]—[Marginal notes in Revise]]
Bucol., Ecl. II “Alexis.” —Editor ↩
Too much their antique
—[MS.]
modest
downright bard by the elision
omission.
Fact! There is, or was, such an edition, with all the obnoxious epigrams of Martial placed by themselves at the end.
[In the Delphin Martial (Amsterdam, 1701) the Epigrammata Obscaena are printed as an Appendix (pp. 2–56),
“[Ne] quiequam desideraretur a morosis quibusdam hominibus.”]
See his Confessions, lib. I cap. IX; [lib. II cap. II, et passim]. By the representation which Saint Augustine gives of himself in his youth, it is easy to see that he was what we should call a rake. He avoided the school as the plague; he loved nothing but gaming and public shows; he robbed his father of everything he could find; he invented a thousand lies to escape the rod, which they were obliged to make use of to punish his irregularities. ↩
Byron’s early letters are full of complaints of his mother’s violent temper. See, for instance, letter to the Hon. Augusta Byron, April 23, 1805. In another letter to John M. B. Pigot, August 9, 1806, he speaks of her as “Mrs. Byron ‘furiosa’ ” (Letters, 1898, I 60, 101). —Editor ↩
“Having surrendered the last symbol of power, the unfortunate Boabdil continued on towards the Alpuxarras, that he might not behold the entrance of the Christians into his capital. … Having ascended an eminence commanding the last view of Granada, the Moors paused involuntarily to take a farewell gaze at their beloved city, which a few steps more would shut from their sight forever. … The heart of Boabdil, softened by misfortunes, and overcharged with grief, could no longer contain itself. ‘Allah achbar! God is great!’ said he; but the words of resignation died upon his lips, and he burst into a flood of tears.”
—Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, by Washington Irving, 1829, II 379–381
—Editor ↩
I’ll tell you a secret—silence! hush!
—[MS.]
which you’ll hush.
Spouses from twenty years of age to thirty
—[MS.]
Are most admired by women of strict
staid virtue.
For the particulars of St. Anthony’s recipe for
