—Editor ↩
Some thirty years before at fair eighteen.
—[MS.]
or,
Seven and twenty—which, it does not matter—
—[MS. erased]
Wrinkles, those damnedst democrats, won’t flatter.
Tiberius Gracchus, being tribune of the people, demanded in their name the execution of the Agrarian law; by which all persons possessing above a certain number of acres were to be deprived of the surplus for the benefit of the poor citizens. ↩
“Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.”
Inferno, Canto I line 2
Hut where we travellers bait with dim reflection.
—[MS. erased]
Is when he learns to limit his expenses.
—[MS. erased]
—till the ice
—[MS. erased]
Cracked, she would ne’er believe in thaws for vice.
A metaphor taken from the “forty-horse power” of a steam-engine. That mad wag, the Reverend Sydney Smith, sitting by a brother clergyman at dinner, observed afterwards that his dull neighbour had a “twelve-parson power” of conversation. ↩
In a letter to his sister, October 25, 1804 (Letters, 1898, I 40), Byron mentions an aunt—“the amiable antiquated Sophia,” and asks, “Is she yet in the land of the living, or does she sing psalms with the Blessed in the other world?” This was his father’s sister, Sophia Maria, daughter of Admiral the Hon. John Byron. But his “good old aunt” is, more probably, the Hon. Mrs. Frances Byron, widow of George (born April 22, 1730) son of the fourth, and brother of the “Wicked” lord. She was the daughter and co-heiress of Ellis Levett, Esq., and lived “at Nottingham in her own house.” She died, aged 86, June 13, 1822, not long before this Canto was written. She is described in the obituary notice of the Gentleman’s Magazine, June, 1822, vol. 92, p. 573, as “Daughter of Vice-Admiral the Hon. John Byron (who sailed round the world with Lord Anson), grandfather of the present Lord Byron.” But that is, chronologically, impossible. Byron must have retained a pleasing recollection of the ear-trumpet and the spectacles, and it gratified his kindlier humour to embalm their owner in his verse. —Editor ↩
See Collins’s Peerage, 1779, VII 120. It is probable that Byron was lineally descended from Ralph de Burun, of Horestan, who is mentioned in Doomsday Book (sect. XI) as holding eight lordships in Notts and five in Derbyshire, but with regard to Ernysius or Erneis the pedigree is silent. (See Pedigree of George Gordon, Sixth Lord Byron, by Edward Bernard, 1870.) —Editor ↩
“Hide.”—I believe a hide of land to be a legitimate word, and, as such, subject to the tax of a quibble. ↩
And humbly hope that the same God which hath given
—[MS. erased]
Us land on earth, will do no less in Heaven.
Perhaps—but d⸺n perhaps—.
—[MS.]
For the illness (“a scarlet fever, complicated by angina, both aggravated by premature exhaustion”) and death of Lanskoi, see The Story of a Throne, by K. Waliszewsky, 1895, II 131, 133. For the rumour that he was poisoned by Potemkin, see Mémoires Secrets, etc. [by C. F. P. Masson], 1800, I 170. —Editor ↩
Matthew Baillie (1761–1823), the nephew of William Hunter, the brother of Agnes and Joanna Baillie, was a celebrated anatomist. He attended Byron (1799–1802), when an endeavour was made to effect a cure of the muscular contraction of his right leg and foot. He was consulted by Lady Byron, in 1816, with regard to her husband’s supposed derangement, but was not admitted when he called at the house in Piccadilly. He is said to have “avoided technical and learned phrases; to have affected no sentimental tenderness, but expressed what he had to say in the simplest and plainest terms” (Annual Biography, 1824, p. 319). Jekyll (Letters, 1894, p. 110) repeats or invents an anecdote that “the old king, in his mad fits, used to say he could bring any dead people to converse with him, except those who had died under Baillie’s care, for that the doctor always dissected them into so many morsels, that they had not a leg to walk to Windsor with.” It is hardly necessary to say that John Abernethy (1764–1831) “expressed what he had to say” in the bluntest and rudest terms at his disposal. —Editor ↩
The empress went to the Crimea, accompanied by the Emperor Joseph, in the year—I forget which.
The Prince de Ligne, who accompanied Catherine in her progress through her southern provinces, in 1787, gives the following particulars:
“We have crossed during many days vast, solitary regions, from which her Majesty has driven Zaporogua, Budjak, and Nogais Tartars, who, ten years ago, threatened to ravage her empire. All these places were furnished with magnificent tents for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, suppers, and sleeping-rooms … deserted regions were at once transformed into fields, groves, villages: … The Empress has left in each chief town gifts to the value of a hundred thousand roubles. Every day that we remained stationary was marked with diamonds, balls, fireworks, and illuminations throughout a circuit of ten leagues.”
—The Prince de Ligne, His Memoirs, etc., translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley, 1899, II 31
—Editor ↩
Man, midst thy mouldy mammoths, Cuvier.
—[MS.]
Who like sour fruit to sharpen up the tides
—[MS. erased]
Of their salt veins, and stir their stagnancy.
In the Empress Anne’s time, Biren, her favourite, assumed the name and arms of the “Birons” of France; which families are yet extant with that of England. There are still the daughters of Courland of that name; one of them I remember seeing in England in the blessed year of the Allies (1814)—the
