Hereupon he writes to Murray, half joking, half serious:—
"Murray, my dear, make my respects to Thomas Campbell, and tell him from me, with faith and friendship, three things that he must right in his 'Poets.' First, he says Anstey's 'Bath Guide' characters are taken from Smollett. 'Tis impossible: the 'Guide' was published in 1766, and 'Humphry Clinker' in 1771—dunque, 'tis Smollett who has taken from Anstey. Secondly, he does not know to whom Cowper alludes when he says there was one 'who built a church to God, and then blasphemed His name:' it was 'Deo erexit Voltaire' to whom that mad Calvinist and coddled poet alludes. Thirdly, he misquotes and spoils a passage from Shakspeare,—'To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,' etc.; for lily he puts rose, and bedevils in more words than one the whole quotation.
"Now, Tom is a fine fellow; but he should be correct: for the first is an injustice (to Anstey), the second an ignorance, and the third a blunder. Tell him all this, and let him take it in good part: for I might have chastised him in a review and punished him; instead of which, I act like a Christian.
Byron."
With regard to a quotation, or any circumstance intended to prove a truth, his love of exactness amounted to a scruple. He would have thought himself wanting in honor if he had made a false or an incomplete quotation. In one of the notes to "Don Juan," speaking of Voltaire, he had quoted those famous words:—" Zaïre, vous pleurez;" but being accustomed at that time to make great use of the familiar pronoun thou, as in the case in Italy, his quotation ran: "Zaïre, tu pleures." But he hastened to write to Murray, "Voltaire wrote: Zaïre, vous pleurez; don't forget."
In his tragedy of "Faliero," Lord Byron had said that the Doges, Faliero's predecessors, were buried in the church of St. John and St. Paul; but he afterward ascertained that it was only on the death of Andrea Dandolo, Faliero's predecessor, that the Council of Ten, by a sort of presentiment perhaps, decreed that the Doges should in future be buried with their families in their own church; previously they had all been interred in the church of St. Mark:—
" ... All that I said of his ancestral Doges, as buried at St. John's and Paul's, is a mistake, they being interred in St. Mark's. Make a note of this, by the Editor, to rectify the fact.
"In the notes to 'Marino Faliero,' it may be as well to say that 'Benintende' was not really of the Ten, but merely Grand Chancellor, a separate office (although important); it was an arbitrary alteration of mine.
"As I make such pretentious to accuracy, I should not like to be twitted even with such trifles on that score. Of the play they may say what they please, but not so of my costume and dram. pers.,—they having been real existences."[200]
"As to Sardanapalus," he writes to Murray, "I thought of nothing but Asiatic history. The Venetian play, too, is rigidly historical. My object has been to dramatize, like the Greeks (a modest phrase), striking passages of history.