Selected English Letters by - (most read books of all time TXT) 📖

to you by report, otherwise I shall come upon you with a most painful abruptness; but Shelley, my divine-minded friend, your friend, the friend of the universe, he has perished at sea. He was in a boat with his friend Captain Williams, going from Leghorn to Lerici, when a storm arose, and it is supposed the boat must have foundered. It was on the 8th instant, about four or five in the evening, they guess. A fisherman says he saw the boat a few minutes before it went down: he looked again and it was gone. He saw the boy they had with them aloft furling one of the sails. We hope his story is true, as their passage from life to death will then have been short; and what adds to the hope is, that in S's pocket (for the bodies were both thrown on shore some days afterwards,—conceive our horrible certainty, after trying all we could to hope!) a copy of Keats's last volume, which he had borrowed of me to read on his passage, was found open and doubled back as if it had been thrust in, in the hurry of a surprise. God bless him! I cannot help thinking of him as if he were alive as much as ever, so unearthly he always appeared to me, and so seraphical a thing of the elements; and this is what all his friends say. But what we all feel, your own heart will tell you….

It has been often feared that Shelley and Captain Williams would meet with some accident, they were so hazardous; but when they set out on the 8th, in the morning it was fine. Our dear friend was passionately fond of the sea, and has been heard to say he should like it to be his death-bed….

To MRS. PROCTER

Accepting an invitation

5 York Buildings, 13 March [1831].

MY DEAR MRS. PROCTER (for Madam, somehow, is not the thing),

I am most pleased to be reminded of my promise, which I must have made if you say I did. I suppose I have been coming to keep it ever since; but it is a long road from sorrow to joy, and one is apt to get confused on the road. Do you know your letter brought the tears into my eyes? I hardly know why, unless it was that I saw Procter had been pouring his kind heart into yours, and you said:—'We must have him here instead of the coffee-house, and plant him by the fire, and warm him like a stray bird till he sings.' But indeed a kind word affects me where many a hard thump does not. Nevertheless, you must not tell this, except to the very masculine or feminine; though if you do not take it as a compliment to yourself,—I mean the confession of my weakness,—why, you are not Procter's wife, nor Mrs. Montagu's daughter, nor she who wrote the letter this morning to a poor battered author.

PS. I eat any plain joint, of the plainer order, beef or mutton:—and you know I care for nothing at dinner, so that it does not hurt me. Friends' company is the thing.

To A FRIEND

Offence and punishment

Wimbledon, 11 and 12 August, 1846.

… I find I made a great confusion of my portion of the legal expenses incurred by the Examiner, with the whole of them. That portion only amounted to £750, the whole being £1500. Of this £750 out of my pocket (which was quite enough), £250 went to pay for expenses (counsel, &c.) attendant on the failure of two Government prosecutions,—one for saying (totidem verbis) that 'of all monarchs since the Revolution, the successor of George III would have the finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular'; (think, nowadays, of being prosecuted for that!) and the other for copying from the Stamford News the paragraph against military flogging, alluded to the other day in the Daily News. (Think, now, this moment, of being prosecuted for That!) The £500 fine and two years' imprisonment was for ludicrously contrasting the Morning Post's picture of the Regent as an 'Adonis', &c. with the old and real fat state of the case, and for adding that his Royal Highness had lived for 'upwards of half a century without doing anything to deserve the admiration of his contemporaries or the gratitude of posterity'. Words to that effect, and I believe better,—but I do not quite remember them. They might be easily ascertained by reference to Peel's Coffee-house, and the words of the Post, too.

Besides the fine, my imprisonment cost me several hundred pounds (I can't exactly say how many) in monstrous douceurs to the gaoler for liberty to walk in the garden, for help towards getting me permission to fit up rooms in the sick hospital, and for fitting up said rooms, or rather converting them from sorts of washhouses, hitherto uninhabited and unfloored, into comfortable apartments,—which I did too expensively,—at least as far as papering the sitting-room with a trellis of roses went, and having my ceiling painted to imitate an out-of-door sky. No notice, however, could be taken, I suppose, of any of this portion of the expenses, governments having nothing to do with the secret corruptions of gaolers or the pastorals of incarcerated poets: otherwise the prosecutions cost me altogether a good bit beyond a thousand pounds.

But perhaps it might be mentioned that I went to prison from all but a sick bed, having been just ordered by the physician to go to the seaside, and ride for the benefit of my health (pleasing dramatic contrast to the verdict!). I also declined, as I told you, to try avoiding the imprisonment by the help of Perry's offer of the famous secret 'Book'; and I further declined (as I think I also told you) to avail myself of an offer on the part of a royal agent (made, of course, in the guarded, though obvious manner in which such offers are conveyed), to drop the prosecution, provided we would agree to drop all future hostile mention of the Regent. But of this, too, governments could not be expected to take notice—perhaps would regard it as an addition to the offence. This, however, I must add, that the whole attack on the Regent was owing, not merely to the nonsense of the Post, but to his violation of those promises of conceding the Catholic claims, to which his princely word stood pledged. The subject of the article was the 'Dinner on St. Patrick's day'. All the Whig world was indignant at that violation; so were the Irish, of course, vehemently; and it was on the spur of this publicly indignant movement that I wrote what I did,—as angrily and as much in earnest in the serious part of what I said as I was derisive in the rest. I did not care for any factious object, nor was I what is called anti-monarchical. I didn't know Cobbett, or Henry Hunt, or any demagogue, even by sight, except Sir Francis Burdett, and him by sight alone. Nor did I ever see, or speak a word with them, afterwards. I knew nothing, in fact, of politics themselves, except in some of those large and, as it appeared to me, obvious phases, which, at all events, have since become obvious to most people, and in fighting for which (if a man can be said to fight for a 'phase'!) I suffered all that Tories could inflict upon me,—by expenses in law and calumnies in literature;—reform, Catholic claims, free trade, abolition of flogging, right of free speech, as opposed by attorneys-general. I was, in fact, all the while nothing but a poetic student, appearing in politics once a week, but given up entirely to letters almost all the rest of it, and loving nothing so much as a book and a walk in the fields. I was precisely the sort of person, in these respects, which I am at this moment. As to George the Fourth, I aided, years afterwards, in publicly wishing him well—'years having brought the philosophic mind'. I believe I even expressed regret at not having given him the excuses due to all human beings (the passage, I take it, is in the book which Colburn called Lord Byron and his Contemporaries); and when I consider that Moore has been pensioned, not only in spite of all his libels on him, but perhaps by very reason of their Whig partisanship, I should think it hard to be refused a pension purely because I openly suffered for what I had earnestly said. I knew George the Fourth's physician, Sir William Knighton, who had been mine before I was imprisoned (it was not he who was the royal agent alluded to); and, if my memory does not deceive me, Sir William told me that George had been gratified by the book above mentioned. Perhaps he had found out, by Sir William's help, that I was not an ill-natured man, or one who could not outlive what was mistaken in himself or resentful in others. As to my opinions about Governments, the bad conduct of the Allies, and of Napoleon, and the old Bourbons, certainly made them waver as to what might be ultimately best, monarchy or republicanism; but they ended in favour of their old predilections; and no man, for a long while, has been less a republican than myself, monarchies and courts appearing to me salutary for the good and graces of mankind, and Americanisms anything but either. But nobody, I conceive, that knew my writings, or heard of me truly from others, ever took me for a republican. William the Fourth saw or heard nothing of me to hinder his letting Lord Melbourne give me £200 out of the Royal Fund. Queen Victoria gave me another, through the same kind friend. She also went twice to see my play; and everybody knows how I praise and love her. I do not think, therefore, in reference to the pension, that the public would care twopence about George the Fourth, one way or the other; or that if any remembered the case at all, they would connect the pension in the least with anything about him, but attribute it solely to the Queen's and Minister's goodness, and the wants of a sincere and not undeserving man of letters, distinguished for his loyal attachment. I certainly think the £500 fine ought not to have been taken out of my pocket, or the other two £125 either; and I think also, that a liberal Whig minister might reasonably and privately think some compensation on those accounts due to me. I have been fighting his own fight from first to last, and helping to prepare matters for his triumph. But still the above, in my opinion, is what the public would think of the matter, and my friends of the press could lay it entirely to the literary account.

GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD BYRON

1788-1824

To MR. HODGSON

Travel in Portugal

Lisbon, 16 July, 1809.

Thus far have we pursued our route, and seen all sorts of marvellous sights, palaces, convents, &c.,—which, being to be heard in my friend Hobhouse's forthcoming Book of Travels, I shall not anticipate by smuggling any account whatsoever to you in a private and clandestine manner. I must just observe, that the village of Cintra in Estremadura is the most beautiful, perhaps, in the world.

I am very happy here, because I loves oranges, and talks bad Latin to the monks, who understand it, as it is like their own,—and I goes into society (with my pocket pistols), and I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a-pleasuring.

When the Portuguese are pertinacious, I say 'Carracho!'—the great oath of the grandees, that very well supplies the place of 'Damme!'—and when dissatisfied with my neighbour, I pronounce him 'Ambra di merdo'. With these two phrases, and a third,'Avra bouro', which signifieth 'Get an ass', I am universally understood to be a person of degree and a master of languages. How merrily we lives that travellers be!—if we had food and raiment. But, in sober sadness, anything is better than England, and I am infinitely amused with my pilgrimage, as far as it has gone.

To-morrow we start to ride post near 400 miles as far as Gibraltar, where we embark for Melita and Byzantium. A letter to Malta will find me, or to be forwarded, if I am absent. Pray embrace the Drury and Dwyer, and all