"BYRON.
"P.S.—Excuse this scrawl, scratched in a great hurry, and just after a journey."
During the summer of this year, he paid visits to some of his noble friends, and, among others, to the Earl of Jersey and the Marquis of Lansdowne. "In 1812," he says, "at Middleton (Lord Jersey's), amongst a goodly company of lords, ladies, and wits, &c., there was (* * *.)[49]
"Erskine, too! Erskine was there; good, but intolerable. He jested, he talked, he did every thing admirably, but then he would be applauded for the same thing twice over. He would read his own verses, his own paragraph, and tell his own story again and again; and then the 'Trial by Jury!!!' I almost wished it abolished, for I sat next him at dinner. As I had read his published speeches, there was no occasion to repeat them to me.
"C * * (the fox-hunter), nicknamed 'Cheek C * *,' and I, sweated the claret, being the only two who did so. C * *, who loves his bottle, and had no notion of meeting with a 'bon-vivant' in a scribbler[50], in making my eulogy to somebody one evening, summed it up in—'By G——d he drinks like a man.'
"Nobody drank, however, but C * * and I. To be sure, there was little occasion, for we swept off what was on the table (a most splendid board, as may be supposed, at Jersey's) very sufficiently. However, we carried our liquor discreetly, like the Baron of Bradwardine."
In the month of August this year, on the completion of the new Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the Committee of Management, desirous of procuring an Address for the opening of the theatre, took the rather novel mode of inviting, by an advertisement in the newspapers, the competition of all the poets of the day towards this object. Though the contributions that ensued were sufficiently numerous, it did not appear to the Committee that there was any one among the number worthy of selection. In this difficulty it occurred to Lord Holland that they could not do better than have recourse to Lord Byron, whose popularity would give additional vogue to the solemnity of their opening, and to whose transcendant claims, as a poet, it was taken for granted, (though without sufficient allowance, as it proved, for the irritability of the brotherhood,) even the rejected candidates themselves would bow without a murmur. The first result of this application to the noble poet will be learned from what follows.
LETTER 96. TO LORD HOLLAND.