FOOTNOTES:
[123] [Horace Walpole's Memoirs of the Last Nine Years of the Reign of George II. ]
[124] [Memoirs by James Earl Waldegrave, Governor of George III. when Prince of Wales.]
[125] ["Can't accept your courteous offer [i.e. £2000 for three cantos of Don Juan, Sardanapalus, and The Two Foscari.] These matters must be arranged with Mr. Douglas Kinnaird. He is my trustee, and a man of honour. To him you can state all your mercantile reasons, which you might not like to state to me personally, such as 'heavy season'—'flat public'—'don't go off'—'lordship writes too much'—'won't take advice'—'declining popularity'—'deductions for the trade'—'make very little'—'generally lose by him'—'pirated edition'—'foreign edition'—'severe criticisms,' etc., with other hints and howls for an oration, which I leave Douglas, who is an orator, to answer."—Letter to Murray, August 23, 1821, Letters, 1901, v. 348.]
[NAPOLEON'S SNUFF-BOX.][126]
Lady, accept the box a hero wore,
In spite of all this elegiac stuff:
Let not seven stanzas written by a bore,
Prevent your Ladyship from taking snuff!
1821.
[First published, Conversations of Lord Byron, 1824, p. 235.]
FOOTNOTES:
[126] [Napoleon bequeathed to Lady Holland a snuff-box which had been given to him by the Pope for his clemency in sparing Rome. Lord Carlisle wrote eight (not seven) stanzas, urging her, as Byron told Medwin, to decline the gift, "for fear that horror and murder should jump out of the lid every time it is opened."—Conversations, 1824, p. 362. The first stanza of Lord Carlyle's verses, which teste Medwin, Byron parodied, runs thus—
"Lady, reject the gift! 'tis tinged with gore!
Those crimson spots a dreadful tale relate;
It has been grasp'd by an infernal Power;
And by that hand which seal'd young Enghien's fate."