LORD BYRON
From the “Spirit of the Age.” Discussions of Byron’s poetry are also to be found in the review of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (Works, XI, 420-426) and in “Pope, Lord Byron and Mr. Bowles” (XI, 486-508).
[P. 236.] As if a man. “Coriolanus,” v, 3, 36.
cloud-capt. “Tempest,” iv, I, 152.
[P. 237.] prouder than. Cf. Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida,” i, 3, 380: “His crest that prouder than blue Iris bends.”
silly sooth. “Twelfth Night,” ii, 4, 47.
[P. 239.] denotes a foregone conclusion. “Othello.” iii, 3, 428.
[P. 240.] in cell monastic. Cf. “As You Like It,” iii, 2, 441: “To live in a nook merely monastic.”
[P. 241.] thoughts that breathe. Gray’s “Progress of Poesy,” 110.
[P. 242.] Lord Byron does not exhibit a new view of nature. In the paper on “Pope, Lord Byron and Mr. Bowles,” Hazlitt’s tone is more generous: “His Lordship likes the poetry, the imaginative part of art, and so do we.... He likes the sombre part of it, the thoughtful, the decayed, the ideal, the spectral shadow of human greatness, the departed spirit of human power. He sympathizes not with art as a display of ingenuity, as the triumph of vanity or luxury, as it is connected with the idiot, superficial, petty self-complacency of the individual and the moment (these are to him not ‘luscious as locusts, but bitter as coloquintida’); but he sympathizes with the triumphs of Time and Fate over the proudest works of man—with the crumbling monuments of human glory—with the dim vestiges and countless generations of men—with that which claims alliance with the grave, or kindred with the elements of nature.” Works, XI, 496.
poor men’s cottages. “Merchant of Venice,” i, 2, 14.
reasons high. “Paradise Lost,” II, 558.
[P. 243.] Till Contemplation. Dyer’s “Grongar Hill,” 26.
this bank. “Macbeth,” i, 7, 6.
[P. 244.] The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South, a quarterly published in Italy by Leigh Hunt and Byron, 1822-23, to which Hazlitt also contributed. In the second of its four numbers appeared Byron’s “Heaven and Earth: A Mystery.”
the deluge, in “Heaven and Earth.”
his aversion. See “Don Juan,” III, stanza 94:
“A drowsy frowzy poem, called the Excursion,
Writ in a manner which is my aversion.”
born in a garret. In the “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” Byron, speaking of Jeffrey, refers to “the sixteenth story, where himself was born.”
Letter to the Editor. The Letter to William Roberts, editor of the British Review, appeared in the first number of the Liberal.
Long’s, a restaurant in Bond Street.
[P. 245.] the controversy about Pope. See note to p. [118].
Scrub, in Farquhar’s “Beaux’ Stratagem.”
very tolerable. “Much Ado About Nothing,” iii, 3, 37.
[P. 246.] a chartered libertine. “Henry V,” i, 1, 48.
[P. 247.] Like proud seas. “Two Noble Kinsmen,” ii, 2, 23.
Did the latter ever acknowledge the obligation? Scott wrote to Byron’s publisher, John Murray, December 17, 1821: “I accept with feelings of great obligation, the flattering proposal of Lord Byron to prefix my name to the very grand and tremendous drama of ‘Cain.’ I may be partial to it, and you will allow I have cause; but I do not think that his Muse has ever taken so lofty a flight amid her former soarings.”
Farthest from them. “Paradise Lost,” I, 247.
[P. 248.] the first Vision of Judgment, the one composed by Southey on the occasion of the death of George III, celebrating that monarch’s entry into heaven and provoking a spirited travesty from Byron.
None but itself. This line is quoted by Burke in the “Letters on a Regicide Peace,” from a play written or adapted by Lewis Theobald, “The Double Falsehood” (1727). Waller-Glover.
the tenth transmitter. Richard Savage’s “The Bastard.”
[P. 250.] Nothing can cover. Beaumont and Fletcher’s “The False One,” ii, 1.