[KA] {409}Is when he learns to limit his expenses.—[MS. erased.]
———- till the ice
Cracked, she would ne'er believe in thaws for vice.—[MS. erased.]
[540] {410}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.
[541] [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.]
[542] [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.)]
[543] {411}"Hyde."—I believe a hyde 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