250—to Lord Holland
September 26, 1812.
You will think there is no end to my villanous emendations. The fifth and sixth lines I think to alter thus:
Ye who beheld—oh sight admired and mourn'd,
Whose radiance mock'd the ruin it adorn'd;
because "night" is repeated the next line but one; and, as it now stands, the conclusion of the paragraph, "worthy him (Shakspeare) and
you
," appears to apply the "
you
" to those only who were out of bed and in Covent Garden market on the night of conflagration, instead of the audience or the discerning public at large, all of whom are intended to be comprised in that comprehensive and, I hope, comprehensible pronoun.
By the by, one of my corrections in the fair copy sent yesterday has dived into the bathos some sixty fathom:
When Garrick died, and Brinsley ceased to write.
Ceasing
to
live
is a much more serious concern, and ought not to be first; therefore I will let the old couplet stand, with its half rhymes "sought" and "wrote."
Second thoughts in every thing are best, but, in rhyme, third and fourth don't come amiss. I am very anxious on this business, and I do hope that the very trouble I occasion you will plead its own excuse, and that it will tend to show my endeavour to make the most of the time allotted. I wish I had known it months ago, for in that case I had not left one line standing on another. I always scrawl in this way, and smooth as much as I can, but never sufficiently; and, latterly, I can weave a nine-line stanza faster than a couplet, for which measure I have not the cunning. When I began
Childe Harold
, I had never tried Spenser's measure, and now I cannot scribble in any other.
After
all, my dear Lord, if you can get a decent
Address
elsewhere, don't hesitate to put this aside
.
Why did you not trust your own Muse? I am very sure she would have been triumphant, and saved the Committee their trouble—"'tis a joyful one" to me, but I fear I shall not satisfy even myself. After the account you sent me, 'tis no compliment to say you would have beaten your candidates; but I mean that, in
that
case, there would have been no occasion for their being beaten at all.
There
are but two decent prologues in our tongue—Pope's to
Cato
—Johnson's to Drury-Lane
.
These
, with the epilogue to
The Distrest Mother
and, I think, one of Goldsmith's
, and a prologue of old Colman's to Beaumont and Fletcher's
Philaster
, are the best things of the kind we have.
P.S.—I am diluted to the throat with medicine for the stone; and Boisragon wants me to try a warm climate for the winter—but I won't.
Footnote 1:
"Such are the names that here your plaudits sought,
When Garrick acted, and when Brinsley wrote."
At present the couplet stands thus:
"Dear are the days that made our annals bright,
Ere Garrick fled, or Brinsley ceased to write."
Footnote 2:
"I am almost ashamed," writes Lord Holland to Rogers, October 22, 1812 (Clayden's Rogers and his Contemporaries, vol. i. p. 115), "of having induced Lord Byron to write on so ungrateful a theme (ungrateful in all senses) as the opening of a theatre; he was so good-humoured, took so much pains, corrected so good-humouredly, and produced, as I thought and think, a prologue so superior to the common run of that sort of trumpery, that it is quite vexatious to see him attacked for it. Some part of it is a little too much laboured, and the whole too long; but surely it is good and poetical.... You cannot imagine how I grew to like Lord Byron in my critical intercourse with him, and how much I am convinced that your friendship and judgment have contributed to improve both his understanding and his happiness."
Footnote 3:
Pope wrote the Prologue to Addison's
Cato
when it was acted at Drury Lane, April 13, 1713.
Footnote 4:
Johnson wrote the Prologue when Garrick opened Drury Lane, September 15, 1747, with
The Merchant of Venice
. "It is," says Genest (
English Stage
, vol. iv. p. 231), "the best Prologue that was ever written." Johnson wrote the Prologue to Milton's
Comus
, played at Drury Lane, April 5, 1750; to Goldsmith's
Good-Natured Man
, played at Covent Garden, January 29, 1769; and to Hugh Kelly's
A Word to the Wise
, played at Drury Lane, March 3, 1770.
Footnote 5:
The Distrest Mother
, adapted from Racine by Ambrose Philips, was first played at Drury Lane, March 17, 1712. Addison is supposed (Genest,
English Stage
, vol. ii. p. 496) to have written the epilogue.
Footnote 6:
It is impossible to say to which of Goldsmith's epilogues Byron refers. A previous editor of Moore's
Life, etc
., identified it with his epilogue to Charlotte Lennox's unsuccessful comedy,
The Sister
, which was once played at Covent Garden, February 18, 1769, and then withdrawn.
Footnote 7:
George Colman the Elder, who edited an edition of Beaumont and Fletcher (10 vols., 1778), wrote the prologue to
Philaster
, when it was produced at Drury Lane, October 8, 1763.
