go I must be ready in April at whatever risk, whatever loss"; Here no power on earth shall make me remain six weeks longer" (on March 6, 1813). Debts and passion were equal factors. Everything I have done to extricate myself has been useless"—and he was really economising; he had sold his books and horses, dismissed his groom. April had to be abandoned; June became the fixed month. But when June arrived he was still in England-either in London or at Salthill, near Maidenhead, probably with Lady Oxford, for the Post Office at Salthill was his only address; but "still as determined as I have been for the last six months" on going abroad " at all hazards, all losses". As far as going with the enchantress was concerned, hope died ere June was far advanced. He went to Portsmouth with her, to see her off, on June 13; and on July 8 wrote to Moore from Bennet Street, St. James's (his London rooms), to say, "The Oxfords have sailed almost a fortnight". So ended the Lucretian blisses. Still he wanted to get away. Everything was tried, a companion was found in Mr. Dudley Ward (afterwards fourth Earl of Dudley), one of the most delightful men of his time; but obstacles of every kind interposed, and, in a word, Byron never left England even for a day until in 1816 he left it for ever. How had the poesy progressed? Until 1813 he did nothing worth speaking of. At Cheltenham he wrote the entirely worthless Waltz, which was published anonymously in the spring of 1813; and the still more uninteresting Address for the Opening of Drury Lane Theatre on October 10, 1812, after the fire of 1809. The latter task was undertaken at Lord Holland's special request. A prize of twenty guineas had been offered for an address; one hundred and twelve aspirants had entered, but no effort was considered worthy of the prize.1 Lord Holland, who was one of the Committee of Selection, then asked Byron to write an address. He had not competed, though at first he had meant to do so; he agreed to write one now, and spent an infinity of pains and enthusiasm on the thing. From Cheltenham there came to Lord Holland no fewer than thirteen letters, sometimes two in a day, and all filled with corrections and alternative readings. "I am almost ashamed", wrote the kindly peer to Rogers, "of having induced Lord Byron to write on so ungrateful a theme. He took so much pains, corrected so " 1 This competition and its abortive result produced the famous Rejected Addresses by James and Horace Smith—a volume of brilliant parodies of all the notable poets of the day. That on Byron, called "Cui Bono ? was the source of infinite delight to him: he said that the second and third stanzas were just what he could have wished to write on a similar subject. good-humouredly. . . . You cannot imagine how I grew to like Lord Byron in my critical intercourse with him." The Address, spoken by Elliston (Charles Lamb's" joyousest of once embodied spirits "), was a failure, and the circumstances in which it was written produced much irritation among the unsuccessful competitors. In the earliest days of the Cheltenham sojourn, Byron had written to Murray: "What will you give me or mine for a poem of six cantos (when complete-no rhyme, no recompense) as like the last two as I can make them? I have some ideas which one day may be embodied, and till winter I shall have much leisure". His leisure was eaten up until October by the troublesome Address; moreover, the love-affair with Lady Oxford idled him a good deal. But at last he spurred himself to effort; and in May sent Murray "a corrected, and, I hope, amended copy of the lines for the 'fragment' already sent this evening ". The fragment was the first draft of The Giaour. In the Journal for that year he affirmed that it was a week's work; but it is only to these first four hundred lines that that can be said to apply. The poem, either in the course of printing or in the successive editions, expanded from 407 to 1334 lines. Byron's feeling about it was mingled pride and annoyance. He was amazed at his facility, but somewhat irritated by its fragmentary form. "I have, but with some difficulty, not added any more to this snake of a poem, which has been lengthening its rattles every month ". In sending Moore a copy of the fifth edition he wrote: "I send you .. that awful pamphlet, The Giaour you will perceive that I have added much in quantity". He had added close on two hundred lines. Nor was that the end, for on September 29, in preparation for the seventh edition (which presented the poem in its final shape) there is a note to Murray: "Pray suspend the proofs, for I am bitten again, and have quantities for other parts of The Giaour ". These technical details would be better omitted if they were not so highly characteristic of Byron's method. On the passage beginning "Clime of the unforgotten brave! and consisting of 138 lines, there is a note, quoted by Mr. Ernest Coleridge, from the edition of 1837.1 "From hence to the conclusion of the paragraph, the MS. is written in a hurried and almost illegible hand, as if these splendid lines had been poured forth in one continuous burst of poetic feeling, which would hardly allow time for the pen to follow the imagination". 1 This was a Collected Edition of the Poems, "with all the notes by Sir Walter Scott". The idea of a poem in fragments had been suggested to Byron by Rogers's Columbus, which appeared in 1812; and the method certainly indulged to the full his impatience of "those mechanical difficulties which, in a regular narrative, embarrass, if not chill, the poet, leaving it to the imagination of his readers to fill up the intervals between those abrupt bursts of passion in which his chief power lay" He could dash off a purple passage, and dispatch it to Murray with a note: "I have not yet fixed the place of insertion for the following lines, but will when I see you-as I have no copy". But as with Balzac, it was when the proofs came that his serious work began. He would touch and retouch, finding fresher epithets, more musical lines, a sharper emphasis-and finding also, to his infinite anger and our infinite amusement, those unbelievable blunders of the printer over which every writer has in his turn blinked and fulminated. "There is an ingenuity in his blunders peculiar to himself", wrote Byron, convinced like each new sufferer that the ingenuity of his peculiar printer was peculiar. It was with The Giaour that he first passed the ordeal by proof-sheets; for Dallas had seen the Satire and Childe Harold through the press. He bore it worse than most of us. Galley-proofs were a surprise, almost an insult: "a mile-long, ballad-singing sheet. I can't read them distinctly ". And soon another spectre barred his path. "Do you know anybody who can stop-I mean point commas, and so forth; for I am, I hear, a sad hand at your punctuation ". Hodgson came to the rescue ; but the novelty of the terror had left traces on Byron's nerves. In another letter enclosing revise, he added a postscript: "Do attend to the punctuation; I can't, for I don't know a comma -at least, where to place one". The anguish temporarily ceased on June 5, 1813, when The Giaour made its first appearance-a fragment of no more than 685 lines. It pleased sufficiently in this guise for a second edition to be demanded before the end of the month. This was swelled by 131 lines, among them perhaps the most renowned of all Byron's purple passages: "He who hath bent him o'er the dead "– that strange, slipshod loveliness, where He never fulfills his destiny as the subject of the opening phrase. Bent o'er the dead he remains immovable to the end of time. It is another instance of the Spell-that transfixed form, who for so long was never seen to be transfixed! As an instance of his retouching 1 Moore, p. 178. none seems to me more striking-though Moore chooses a long passage than the single line: "Such moment pours the grief of years," which in the two first editions had the variants: and "Such moment holds a thousand years "— "Such moment proves the grief of years both entirely uninteresting, while the final rendering is made, by a single word, one of the most striking of his isolated beauties. In the seventh edition there stood for the first time the quatrain : "She was a form of life and light, That, seen, became a part of sight, And rose, where'er I turned mine eye, The Morning-Star of Memory ! " These lines, and the long passage beginning: "Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven' -the hundred and twenty-six lines which "Hodgson liked", and which the world followed him in liking—were, it has been supposed, the expression of his love for Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, 2 "My good, my guilt, my weal, my woe, " How many a lover has murmured those syllables to "the cherished madness of his heart", and how many an one will still murmur them, whether he be a reader of Byron or not! For they are, like so much else that he wrote, the instinctive language of humanity; and in deep emotion, that is the language which humanity uses. How natural, for example, is the arrière-pensée "Or, if it doth, in vain for me "-that anti-climax which, to a lover's brooding soul, will seem the very climax of his answer to the woman's eternal question. The tragic narrative of this poem became of course a theme for gossip. We have seen, in Chapter IX., that Byron called Lord Sligo to his rescue. The letter thus obtained left the 1 That beginning" Fair clime! where every season smiles "-lines 7 to 20 (Poems, ii. 86). * But he did not meet her till the September of 1813. And when he did, these lines would be a highly idealized expression of his feeling for her, as detailed in his letters to Lady Melbourne ! mystery unsolved; but it is clear from an entry in Byron's Journal of 1813 that some poignant memory had informed the poem. "12, midnight.-Here are two confounded proofs from the printer. I have looked at the one, but for the soul of me, I can't look over that Giaour again—at least just now and at this hour-and yet there is no moon". In Chapter IX., I have put the various theories together; we shall get no further by any cudgelling of the brains or of the Journal. His success was beyond doubt. Edition crowded on edition, and the great Reviews were kind; the Edinburgh's article upon it came second in the summer number. "So very mild and sentimental", said Byron, "that it must be written by Jeffrey in love'.1 All this time a sort of correspondence with Caroline Lamb was kept up. She was mentioned to Murray as one of those to whom the earliest copies of The Giaour were to be sent; but there was no longer any pretence at love on Byron's side. Even Lady Oxford was hardly gone before a new charmer began to figure in the letters to Moore. This time it was from a matrimonial point of view. On July 13: "Do you know, Moore, I am amazingly inclined-remember I say but inclined to be seriously enamoured of Lady Adelaide Forbes". Lady Adelaide's father was the sixth Earl of Granard, and her mother a daughter of the first Earl of Moira. Lord Moira was Moore's patron, and political sympathies brought the Irish poet into close relation with Lord Granard as well. The daughter was a noted beauty. When in 1817 Byron visited Rome, he wrote to Moore: "The Apollo Belvedere is the image of Lady Adelaide Forbes-I think I never saw such a likeness". Moore, whom Byron treated as the match-maker in this very transient affair, was reluctant to assume the part. He confesses that he smiled upon his friend's suit-such as it was—but adds, "If the lady could have consented to undertake the perilous-but still possible and glorious -achievement of attracting Byron to virtue, I own that, sanguinely as in theory I might have looked to the result, I should have seen not without trembling the happiness of one whom I had known and valued from her childhood risked in the experiment". In a fortnight Byron perceived that he was making no way. "I am not well-versed enough in the ways of single woman to make much matrimonial progress". It was directly after the scene with Caroline at Lady Heathcote's ball that he had " 1 It was written by Jeffrey, and Jeffrey was in love; he had just " gone to America to marry some fair one ", with whom he had long been éperdûment amoureux |