Polidori's letter, addressed to the Editor of The Morning Chronicle, was, as I have already said, delivered to the office of that paper. It was not however published there, as Messrs. Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, the publishers of The Vampyre in its book-form, represented to Polidori that the appearance of such a letter would tend to compromise them, and he therefore, out of consideration for this firm, withdrew the letter unprinted. This is Polidori's own statement, contained in the Introduction to another romantic tale of his, Ernestus Berchtold, published in 1819; being the tale by Polidori which, as stated by the Editor of The New Monthly Magazine, had been sent to him along with The Vampyre and the outline of Frankenstein. Besides all this, the Doctor wrote a brief letter, published in The Courier on May 5, 1819, saying—what was clearly the fact—"Though the groundwork is certainly Lord Byron's, its development is mine."
I must now revert for a moment to the "skull-headed lady." In the Introduction above named, Polidori asserts that that tale, Ernestus Berchtold, was the one which he began at Cologny. It does not contain any sort of mention of any skull-headed lady. There is some supernatural machinery in the story, of a rather futile kind; it could be excluded without affecting the real basis of the narrative, which relates the love-affair and marriage of a young Swiss patriot with a lady who is ultimately identified as his sister. As to Mrs. Shelley's allegation that the (non-existent) skull-headed lady was punished for "peeping through a keyhole," no such incident exists in Ernestus Berchtold; there is, however, a passage where a certain Julia seeks to solve a mystery by looking "through the wainscot of a closet for wood." Her head, after this inspection, remains exactly what it was before.
The Vampyre was in its way a great success. As stated in The Dictionary of National Biography, Byron's name gave Polidori's production great celebrity on the Continent, where The Vampyre was held to be quite the thing which it behoved Byron to have written. It formed the groundwork of Marschner's opera, and nearly half a volume of Dumas's Memoirs is occupied by an account of the representation of a French play founded upon it.
THE DIARY
1816. April 24.—I left London at 10 in the morning, with Lord Byron, Scrope Davies, Esq., and J. Hobhouse, Esq.
[Mr. Scrope Berdmore Davies had been one of Byron's fellow-students and intimates at Cambridge University, and had continued familiar with him at Newstead Abbey and elsewhere. He has been described as "no less remarkable for elegance of taste than for a generous high-mindedness." Mr. John Cam Hobhouse (afterwards Sir J. C. Hobhouse, and ultimately Lord Broughton de Gifford) was, it need hardly be said, a peculiarly close friend of Byron. He had accompanied him in his travels in Greece prior to the commencement of Childe Harold, wrote notes to that poem, and to the last upheld the essential fineness of his Lordship's character. Byron's intention to travel along with Hobhouse in the spring of 1816 was not a new project conceived in consequence of his separation, only completed on April 22, from his wife. He had entertained this scheme before his daughter Ada was born on December 10, 1815, and had announced it to his wife, to whom the notion was not agreeable.]
The view from Shooter's Hill was extensive and beautiful, being on a much larger scale than the view from Stirling.
[Polidori mentions Stirling, as being no doubt a reminiscence of his own, from the days when he had been in Edinburgh to take his medical degree.]
The plain, enamelled with various colours according to the different growth of the corn, spread far before our sight, was divided irregularly by the river. The Thames next, with its majestic waves, flowed in the plain below, bearing numerous fleets upon its flood. Its banks in many parts were beautiful. The chalky banks were alternated with the swelling hills, rising from the waves, of the pleasing green-brown, the effect of the first dawn of spring on the vegetable creation.