Not that I deem our Chief Judge is a hollow man.—[MS. erased.]
[624] See [William] Mitford's Greece (1829, v. 314, 315), "Græcia Verax." His great pleasure consists in praising tyrants, abusing Plutarch, spelling oddly, and writing quaintly; and what is strange, after all, his is the best modern history of Greece in any language, and he is perhaps the best of all modern historians whatsoever. Having named his sins, it is but fair to state his virtues—learning, labour, research, wrath, and partiality. I call the latter virtues in a writer, because they make him write in earnest.
[Byron consulted Mitford when he was at work on Sardanapalus. (See Extracts from a Diary, January 5, 1821, Letters, 1901, v. 152, note 1.)]
[625] {461}[Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) married, in 1804, Harriet, daughter of John Eckersall of Claverton House, near Bath. There were three children of the marriage, of whom two survived him. Byron may be alluding to the apocryphal story of "his eleven daughters," related by J.L.A. Cherbuliez, in the Journal des Économistes (1850, vol. xxv. p. 135): "Un soir ... il y avait cercle chez M. de Sismondi, à sa maison de campagne près de Genève.... Enfin, on annonce le révérend Malthus et sa famille. Sa famille!... Alors on voit entrer une charmante jeune fille, puis une seconde, puis une troisième, puis une quatrième, puis ... Il n'y en avait, ma fois, pas moins de onze!" See Malthus and his Work, by James Bonar, 1885, pp. 412, 413. See, too, Nouveau Dictionnaire de L'Économie Politique, 1892, art. "Malthus.">[
[626] [Compare—
"How commentators each dark passage shun,
And hold their farthing candle to the sun."
Love of Fame, the Universal Passion, by Edward Young, Sat. vii. lines 97, 98.]
[627] {462}[Philo-progenitiveness. Spurzheim and Gall discover the organ of this name in a bump behind the ears, and say it is remarkably developed in the bull.]
[LJ] He played and paid, made love without much sin.—[MS. erased.]