Whether the offense has been solely on my side, or reciprocal, or on yours chiefly, I have ceased to reflect upon any but two things, viz., that you are the mother of my child, and that we shall never meet again. I think if you also consider the two corresponding points with reference to myself, it will be better for all three.
Yours ever,
Noel Byron.
III
TO SIR WALTER SCOTT[32]
My Dear Sir Walter—I need not say how grateful I am for your letter, but I must own my ingratitude in not having written to you again long ago. Since I left England (and it is not for all the usual term of transportation) I have scribbled to five hundred blockheads on business, etc., without difficulty, tho with no great pleasure; and yet, with the notion of addressing you a hundred times in my head, and always in my heart, I have not done what I ought to have done. I can only account for it on the same principle of tremulous anxiety with which one sometimes makes love to a beautiful woman of our own degree, with whom one is enamored in good earnest; whereas we attack a fresh-colored housemaid without (I speak, of course, of earlier times) any sentimental remorse or mitigation of our virtuous purpose.
I owe to you far more than usual obligation for the courtesies of literature and common friendship; for you went out of your way in 1817 to do me a service, when it required not merely kindness, but courage to do so; to have been recorded by you in such a manner would have been a proud memorial at any time, but at such a time, when "all the world and his wife," as the proverb goes, were trying to trample upon me, was something still higher to my self-esteem—I allude to the Quarterly Review of the Third Canto of "Childe Harold," which Murray told me was written by you—and, indeed, I should have known it without his information, as there could not be two who could and would have done this at the time. Had it been a common criticism, however eloquent or panegyrical, I should have felt pleased, undoubtedly, and grateful, but not to the extent which the extraordinary good-heartedness of the whole proceeding must induce in any mind capable of such sensations. The very tardiness of this acknowledgment will, at least, show that I have not forgotten the obligation; and I can assure you that my sense of it has been out at compound interest during the delay. I shall only add one word upon the subject, which is, that I think that you, and Jeffrey, and Leigh Hunt, were the only literary men, of numbers whom I know (and some of whom I had served), who dared venture even an anonymous word in my favor just then: and that, of those three, I had never seen one at all—of the second much less than I desired—and that the third was under no kind of obligation to me whatever; while the other two had been actually attacked by me on a former occasion; one, indeed, with some provocation, but the other wantonly enough. So you see you have been heaping "coals of fire," etc., in the true gospel manner, and I can assure you that they have burned down to my very heart.
I am glad you accepted the Inscription.[33] I meant to have inscribed "The Foscarini" to you instead; but, first, I heard that "Cain" was thought the least bad of the two as a composition; and, secondly, I have abused Southey like a pickpocket, in a note to "The Foscarini," and I recollected that he is a friend of yours (tho not of mine), and that it would not be the handsome thing to dedicate to one friend anything containing such matters about another. However, I'll work the Laureate before I have done therefor. I like a row, and always did from a boy, in the course of which propensity, I must needs say, that I have found it the most easy of all to be gratified, personally and poetically. You disclaim "jealousies"; but I would ask, as Boswell did of Johnson, "of whom could you be jealous?"—of none of the living certainly, and (taking all and all into consideration) of which of the dead? I don't like to bore you about the Scotch novels (as they call them, tho two of them are wholly English, and the rest half so), but nothing can or could ever persuade me, since I was the first ten minutes in your company, that you are not the man. To me those novels have so much of "Auld lang syne" (I was bred a canny Scot till ten years old), that I never move without them; and when I removed from Ravenna to Pisa the other day, and sent on my library before, they were the only books that I kept by me, altho I already have them by heart.