"I must really and seriously request that you will beg of Messrs. Harris or Elliston to let the Doge alone: it is not an acting play; it will not serve their purpose; it will destroy yours (the sale); and it will distress me. It is not courteous, it is hardly even gentlemanly, to persist in this appropriation of a man's writings to their mountebanks."
He wrote thus, on the 19th; but on the 20th his fears had increased to such a pitch that he also addressed the lord-chamberlain, requesting him to forbid this representation. Indeed, so great was his annoyance, that he wrote to Murray twice in the same day:—
"I wish you would speak to Lord Holland, and to all my friends and yours, to interest themselves in preventing this cursed attempt at representation.
"God help me! at this distance, I am treated like a corpse or a fool by the few people that I thought I could rely upon; and I was a fool to think any better of them than of the rest of mankind."
On the 21st his melancholy does not appear to have worn off. This is to be attributed to the additions to all the causes of the previous day; and to the news of the illness of Moore, whom he loved so much, there came, in addition, the following event, which we give in his own words:—
"To-morrow is my birthday—that is to say, at twelve o' the clock, midnight—i.e., in twelve minutes, I shall have completed thirty-three years of age!!! and I go to my bed with a heaviness of heart at having lived so long, and to so little purpose."
Let me be allowed here to make some comment on the beauty of the sentiment causing this sadness; for certainly he was not actuated by a common sensual, selfish regret at youth departing. Beauty, youth, love, fortune, and celebrity, all smiled on him then; he possessed every one of them to a degree capable of satisfying any vanity, or any pride, but they were inadequate, for a modesty so rare and so admirable as his! His regrets certainly did not apply to youth; he was only thirty-three years of age! Nor yet to beauty, for he possessed it in the highest degree; nor to fame, that had only too much been his; nor to love, for he was the object of real idolatry;[189] nor to any actions that called for repentance. To what, then, did they apply? To his aspirations after greater things, after ideal perfections, that neither he nor any one else can arrive at here below. It was a soaring after the infinite!
The cause, noble in itself, of this sadness consisted then in a sort of nostalgia for the great, the beautiful, the good. The simple words in which he expressed it enable us to well understand its nature. "I do not regret this year," said he, "for what I have done, but for what I have not done!"
I will not further multiply proofs; suffice it to say, that this year having been one of incessant annoyances to him, not only can not we be surprised that he should have experienced moments of sadness, but we might rather be astonished at their being so few, if we did not know that living above all for heart, and his heart being then satisfied, he found therein compensation for all the rest. "Thanks for your compliments of the year. I hope that it will be pleasanter than the last. I speak with reference to England only, as far as regards myself, where I had every kind of disappointment—lost an important lawsuit—and the trustees of Lady Byron refusing to allow of an advantageous loan to be made from my property to Lord Blessington, etc., by way of closing the four seasons. These, and a hundred other such things, made a year of bitter business for me in England. Luckily things were a little pleasanter for me here, else I should have taken the liberty of Hannibal's ring."
The political and revolutionary events then taking place in Romagna and throughout Italy, caused emotions and sentiments of too strong a nature in Lord Byron to be confounded with sadness; but they may well have contributed to develop largely certain melancholy inclinations discoverable toward autumn. By degrees, as the first strength of grief passes away, it leaves behind a sort of melancholy current in the soul, which, without being the sentiment itself, serves as a conductor for it, making it gush forth on occurrence of the smallest cause. Causes with him were not so slight at this period, although he considered them such[190] out of the superabundance of his philosophical spirit; and the year that began with so many contradictions, ended in the same manner. The hope of seeing the Counts Gamba back again at Ravenna was daily lessening. All the letters Madame G—— wrote to him from Florence and Pisa, penned as they were amid the anguish of fear lest Lord Byron should be assassinated at Ravenna, were necessarily pregnant with alarm and affliction.