Life of Lord Byron Volume III Part 39

&c.) which have already been given in one of his letters to myself.]

LETTER 269. TO MR. MOORE.

"Venice, March 31. 1817.

"You will begin to think my epistolary offerings (to whatever altar you please to devote them) rather prodigal. But until you answer, I shall not abate, because you deserve no better. I know you are well, because I hear of your voyaging to London and the environs, which I rejoice to learn, because your note alarmed me by the purgation and phlebotomy therein prognosticated. I also hear of your being in the press; all which, methinks, might have furnished you with subject-matter for a middle-sized letter, considering that I am in foreign parts, and that the last month's advertis.e.m.e.nts and obituary would be absolute news to me from your Tramontane country.

"I told you, in my last, I have had a smart fever. There is an epidemic in the place; but I suspect, from the symptoms, that mine was a fever of my own, and had nothing in common with the low, vulgar typhus, which is at this moment decimating Venice, and which has half unpeopled Milan, if the accounts be true. This malady has sorely discomfited my serving men, who want sadly to be gone away, and get me to remove. But, besides my natural perversity, I was seasoned in Turkey, by the continual whispers of the plague, against apprehensions of contagion. Besides which, apprehension would not prevent it; and then I am still in love, and 'forty thousand' fevers should not make me stir before my minute, while under the influence of that paramount delirium. Seriously speaking, there is a malady rife in the city--a dangerous one, they say. However, mine did not appear so, though it was not pleasant.

"This is Pa.s.sion-week--and twilight--and all the world are at vespers. They have an eternal churching, as in all Catholic countries, but are not so bigoted as they seem to be in Spain.

"I don't know whether to be glad or sorry that you are leaving Mayfield. Had I ever been at Newstead during your stay there, (except during the winter of 1813-14, when the roads were impracticable,) we should have been within hail, and I should like to have made a giro of the Peak with you. I know that country well, having been all over it when a boy. Was you ever in Dovedale? I can a.s.sure you there are things in Derbys.h.i.+re as n.o.ble as Greece or Switzerland. But you had always a lingering after London, and I don't wonder at it. I liked it as well as any body, myself, now and then.

"Will you remember me to Rogers? whom I presume to be flouris.h.i.+ng, and whom I regard as our poetical papa. You are his lawful son, and I the illegitimate. Has he begun yet upon Sheridan? If you see our republican friend, Leigh Hunt, pray present my remembrances. I saw about nine months ago that he was in a row (like my friend Hobhouse) with the Quarterly Reviewers. For my part, I never could understand these quarrels of authors with critics and with one another. 'For G.o.d's sake, gentlemen, what do they mean?'

"What think you of your countryman, Maturin? I take some credit to myself for having done my best to bring out Bertram; but I must say my colleagues were quite as ready and willing. Walter Scott, however, was the _first_ who mentioned him, which he did to me, with great commendation, in 1815; and it is to this casualty, and two or three other accidents, that this very clever fellow owed his first and well-merited public success. What a chance is fame!

"Did I tell you that I have translated two Epistles?--a correspondence between St. Paul and the Corinthians, not to be found in our version, but the Armenian--but which seems to me very orthodox, and I have done it into scriptural prose English.[134]

"Ever," &c.

[Footnote 134: The only plausible claim of these epistles to authenticity arises from the circ.u.mstance of St. Paul having (according to the opinion of Mosheim and others) written an epistle to the Corinthians, before that which we now call his first. They are, however, universally given up as spurious. Though frequently referred to as existing in the Armenian, by Primate Usher, Johan. Gregorius, and other learned men, they were for the first time, I believe, translated from that language by the two Whistons, who subjoined the correspondence, with a Greek and Latin version, to their edition of the Armenian History of Moses of Ch.o.r.ene, published in 1736.

The translation by Lord Byron is, as far as I can learn, the first that has ever been attempted in English; and as, proceeding from _his_ pen, it must possess, of course, additional interest, the reader will not be displeased to find it in the Appendix. Annexed to the copy in my possession are the following words in his own handwriting:--"Done into English by me, January, February, 1817, at the Convent of San Lazaro, with the aid and exposition of the Armenian text by the Father Paschal Aucher, Armenian friar.--BYRON. I had also (he adds) the Latin text, but it is in many places very corrupt, and with great omissions."]

LETTER 270. TO MR. MURRAY.

"Venice, April 2. 1817.

"I sent you the whole of the Drama at _three several_ times, act by act, in separate covers. I hope that you have, or will receive, some or the whole of it.

"So Love has a conscience. By Diana! I shall make him take back the box, though it were Pandora's. The discovery of its intrinsic silver occurred on sending it to have the lid adapted to admit Marianna's portrait. Of course I had the box remitted _in statu quo_, and had the picture set in another, which suits it (the picture) very well. The defaulting box is not touched, hardly, and was not in the man's hands above an hour.

"I am aware of what you say of Otway; and am a very great admirer of his,--all except of that maudlin b--h of chaste lewdness and blubbering curiosity, Belvidera, whom I utterly despise, abhor, and detest. But the story of Marino Faliero is different, and, I think, so much finer, that I wish Otway had taken it instead: the head conspiring against the body for refusal of redress for a real injury,--jealousy--treason, with the more fixed and inveterate pa.s.sions (mixed with policy) of an old or elderly man--the devil himself could not have a finer subject, and he is your only tragic dramatist.

"There is still, in the Doge's palace, the black veil painted over Faliero's picture, and the staircase whereon he was first crowned Doge, and subsequently decapitated. This was the thing that most struck my imagination in Venice--more than the Rialto, which I visited for the sake of Shylock; and more, too, than Schiller's '_Armenian_,' a novel which took a great hold of me when a boy. It is also called the 'Ghost Seer,' and I never walked down St. Mark's by moonlight without thinking of it, and 'at nine o'clock he died!'--But I hate things _all fiction_; and therefore the _Merchant_ and _Oth.e.l.lo_ have no great a.s.sociations to me: but _Pierre_ has. There should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric, and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

"Maturin's tragedy.--By your account of him last year to me, he seemed a bit of a c.o.xcomb, personally. Poor fellow! to be sure, he had had a long seasoning of adversity, which is not so hard to bear as t'other thing. I hope that this won't throw him back into the 'slough of Despond.'

"You talk of 'marriage;'--ever since my own funeral, the word makes me giddy, and throws me into a cold sweat. Pray, don't repeat it.

"You should close with Madame de Stael. This will be her best work, and permanently historical; it is on her father, the Revolution, and Buonaparte, &c. Bunstetten told me in Switzerland it was _very_ _great_. I have not seen it myself, but the author often.

She was very kind to me at Copet.

"There have been two articles in the Venice papers, one a Review of Glenarvon * * * *, and the other a Review of Childe Harold, in which it proclaims me the most rebellious and contumacious admirer of Buonaparte now surviving in Europe. Both these articles are translations from the Literary Gazette of German Jena.

"Tell me that Walter Scott is better. I would not have him ill for the world. I suppose it was by sympathy that I had my fever at the same time.

"I joy in the success of your Quarterly, but I must still stick by the Edinburgh; Jeffrey has done so by me, I must say, through every thing, and this is more than I deserved from him. I have more than once acknowledged to you by letter the 'Article' (and articles); say that you have received the said letters, as I do not otherwise know what letters arrive. Both Reviews came, but nothing more. M.'s play and the extract not yet come.

"Write to say whether my Magician has arrived, with all his scenes, spells, &c. Yours ever, &c.

"It is useless to send to the _Foreign Office_: nothing arrives to me by that conveyance. I suppose some zealous clerk thinks it a Tory duty to prevent it."

LETTER 271. TO MR. ROGERS.

"Venice, April 4. 1817.

"It is a considerable time since I wrote to you last, and I hardly know why I should trouble you now, except that I think you will not be sorry to hear from me now and then. You and I were never correspondents, but always something better, which is, very good friends.

"I saw your friend Sharp in Switzerland, or rather in the German _territory_ (which is and is not Switzerland), and he gave Hobhouse and me a very good route for the Bernese Alps; however we took another from a German, and went by Clarens, the Dent de Jamen to Montbovon, and through Simmenthal to Thoun, and so on to Lauterbrounn; except that from thence to the Grindelwald, instead of round about, we went right over the Wengen Alps' very summit, and being close under the Jungfrau, saw it, its glaciers, and heard the avalanches in all their glory, having famous weather there_for_. We of course went from the Grindelwald over the Sheidech to Brientz and its lake; past the Reichenbach and all that mountain road, which reminded me of Albania and aetolia and Greece, except that the people here were more civilised and rascally. I do not think so very much of Chamouni (except the source of the Arveron, to which we went up to the teeth of the ice, so as to look into and touch the cavity, against the warning of the guides, only one of whom would go with us so close,) as of the Jungfrau, and the p.i.s.sevache, and Simplon, which are quite out of all mortal compet.i.tion.

"I was at Milan about a moon, and saw Monti and some other living curiosities, and thence on to Verona, where I did not forget your story of the a.s.sa.s.sination during your sojourn there, and brought away with me some fragments of Juliet's tomb, and a lively recollection of the amphitheatre. The Countess Goetz (the governor's wife here) told me that there is still a ruined castle of the Montecchi between Verona and Vicenza. I have been at Venice since November, but shall proceed to Rome shortly. For my deeds here, are they not written in my letters to the unreplying Thomas Moore? to him I refer you: he has received them all, and not answered one.

"Will you remember me to Lord and Lady Holland? I have to thank the former for a book which. I have not yet received, but expect to reperuse with great pleasure on my return, viz. the 2d edition of Lope de Vega. I have heard of Moore's forthcoming poem: he cannot wish himself more success than I wish and augur for him. I have also heard great things of 'Tales of my Landlord,' but I have not yet received them; by all accounts they beat even Waverley, &c., and are by the same author. Maturin's second tragedy has, it seems, failed, for which I should think any body would be sorry. My health was very victorious till within the last month, when I had a fever.

There is a typhus in these parts, but I don't think it was that.

However, I got well without a physician or drugs.

"I forgot to tell you that, last autumn, I furnished Lewis with 'bread and salt' for some days at Diodati, in reward for which (besides his conversation) he translated 'Goethe's Faust' to me by word of mouth, and I set him by the ears with Madame de Stael about the slave trade. I am indebted for many and kind courtesies to our Lady of Copet, and I now love her as much as I always did her works, of which I was and am a great admirer. When are you to begin with Sheridan? what are you doing, and how do you do? Ever very truly," &c.

END OF THE THIRD VOLUME.