Note on the Missing Register of Hucknall-Torkard Church
The Album that was given to Hucknall-Torkard church, in 1825, by Sir John Bowring, to be used as a register of the names of visitors to Byron's tomb, disappeared from that church in the year 1834, or soon after, and it is supposed to have been stolen. In 1834 its contents were printed,—from a manuscript copy of it, which had been obtained from the sexton,—in a book of selections from Byron's prose, edited by "J. M. L." Those initials stand for the name of Joseph Munt Langford, who died in 1884. The dedication of the register is in the following words: "To the immortal and illustrious fame of Lord Byron, the first poet of the age in which he lived, these tributes, weak and unworthy of him, but in themselves sincere, are inscribed with the deepest reverence.—July 1825." At that time no memorial of any kind had been placed in the church to mark the poet's sepulchre: a fact which prompted Sir John Bowring to begin his Album with twenty-eight lines of verse, of which these are the best:
"A still, resistless influence,
Unseen but felt, binds up the sense ...
And though the master hand is cold,
And though the lyre it once controlled
Rests mute in death, yet from the gloom
Which dwells about this holy tomb
Silence breathes out more eloquent