[191] {153}["Although I was in Italie only ix. days, I saw, in that little tyme, more liberty to sin than ever I heard tell of in our noble citie of London in ix. yeares."—Schoolmaster, bk. i. ad fin. By Roger Ascham.]

[192] {155}

["I've often wish'd that I could write a book,

Such as all English people might peruse;

I never shall regret the pains it took,

That's just the sort of fame that I should choose:

To sail about the world like Captain Cook,

I'd sling a cot up for my favourite Muse,

And we'd take verses out to Demerara,

To New South Wales, and up to Niagara.

"Poets consume exciseable commodities,

They raise the nation's spirit when victorious,

They drive an export trade in whims and oddities,

Making our commerce and revenue glorious;

As an industrious and pains-taking body 'tis

That Poets should be reckoned meritorious:

And therefore I submissively propose

To erect one Board for Verse and one for Prose.

"Princes protecting Sciences and Art

I've often seen in copper-plate and print;

I never saw them elsewhere, for my part,

And therefore I conclude there's nothing in't:

But every body knows the Regent's heart;

I trust he won't reject a well-meant hint;

Each Board to have twelve members, with a seat

To bring them in per ann. five hundred neat:—

"From Princes I descend to the Nobility:

In former times all persons of high stations,

Lords, Baronets, and Persons of gentility,

Paid twenty guineas for the dedications;

This practice was attended with utility;

The patrons lived to future generations,

The poets lived by their industrious earning,—

So men alive and dead could live by Learning.

"Then twenty guineas was a little fortune;

Now, we must starve unless the times should mend:

Our poets now-a-days are deemed importune

If their addresses are diffusely penned;

Most fashionable authors make a short one

To their own wife, or child, or private friend,

To show their independence, I suppose;

And that may do for Gentlemen like those.

"Lastly, the common people I beseech—

Dear People! if you think my verses clever,

Preserve with care your noble parts of speech,

And take it as a maxim to endeavour

To talk as your good mothers used to teach,

And then these lines of mine may last for ever;

And don't confound the language of the nation

With long-tailed words in osity and ation."

Canto I. stanzas i.-vi.]

[193] {156}[For some admirable stanzas in the metre and style of Beppo, by W.S. Rose, who passed the winter of 1817-18 in Venice, and who sent them to Byron from Albaro in the spring of 1818, see Letters, 1900 iv. 211-214, note 1.]

[194] {159}[The MS. of Beppo, in Byron's handwriting, is now in the possession of Captain the Hon. F. L. King Noel. It is dated October 10, 1817.]

[195] [The use of "persuasion" as a synonime for "religion," is, perhaps, of American descent. Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address as President of U.S.A., speaks "of whatever state or persuasion, political or religious." At the beginning of the nineteenth century theological niceties were not regarded, and the great gulph between a religion and a sect or party was imperfectly discerned. Hence the solecism.]

[196] [Compare the lines which Byron enclosed in a letter to Moore, dated December 24, 1816 (Letters, 1900, iv. 30)—

"But the Carnival's coming,

Oh Thomas Moore,

Masking and humming,

Fifing and drumming,

Guitarring and strumming,

Oh Thomas Moore."]

[197] {160}[Monmouth Street, now absorbed in Shaftesbury Avenue (west side), was noted throughout the eighteenth century for the sale of second-hand clothes. Compare—

"Thames Street gives cheeses, Covent Garden fruits,

Moorfields old books, and Monmouth Street old suits."

Gay's Trivia, ii. 547, 548.

Rag Fair or Rosemary Lane, now Royal Mint Street, was the Monmouth Street of the City. Compare—

"Where wave the tattered ensigns of Rag Fair."

Pope's Dunciad, i. 29, var.

The Arcade, or "Piazza," so called, which was built by Inigo Jones in 1652, ran along the whole of the north and east sides of the Piazza or Square of Covent Garden. The Arcade on the north side is still described as the "Piazzas."—London Past and Present, by H. B. Wheatley, 1891, i. 461, ii. 554, iii. 145.]

[198] {162}["At Florence I remained but a day.... What struck me most was ... the mistress of Titian, a portrait; a Venus of Titian in the Medici Gallery ..."—Letter to Murray, April 27, 1817, Letters, 1900, iv. 113. Compare, too, Childe Harold, Canto IV. stanza xlix. line i, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 365, note 2.]

[199] ["I know nothing of pictures myself, and care almost as little: but to me there are none like the Venetian—above all, Giorgione. I remember well his Judgment of Solomon in the Mareschalchi Gallery [in the Via Delle Asse, formerly celebrated for its pictures] in Bologna."—Letter to William Bankes, February 26, 1820, Letters, 1900, iv. 411.]

[200] ["I also went over the Manfrini Palace, famous for its pictures. Among them, there is a portrait of Ariosto by Titian [now in the possession of the Earl of Rosebery], surpassing all my anticipations of the power of painting or human expression: it is the poetry of portrait, and the portrait of poetry. There was also one of some learned lady, centuries old, whose name I forget, but whose features must always be remembered. I never saw greater beauty, or sweetness, or wisdom:—it is the kind of face to go mad for, because it cannot walk out of its frame.... What struck me most in the general collection was the extreme resemblance of the style of the female faces in the mass of pictures, so many centuries or generations old, to those you see and meet every day amongst the existing Italians. The Queen of Cyprus and Giorgione's wife, particularly the latter, are Venetians as it were of yesterday; the same eyes and expression, and, to my mind, there is none finer,"—Letter to Murray, April 14, 1817, Letters, 1900, iv. 105. The picture which caught Byron's fancy was the so-called Famiglia di Giorgione, which was removed from the Manfrini Palace in 1856, and is now in the Palazzo Giovanelli. It represents "an almost nude woman, probably a gipsy, seated with a child in her lap, and a standing warrior gazing upon her, a storm breaking over the landscape."—Handbook of Painting, by Austen H. Layard, 1891, part ii. p. 553.]

[201] {163}[According to Vasari and others, Giorgione (Giorgio Barbarelli, b. 1478) was never married. He died of the plague, A.D. 1511.]

[202] {164} "Quæ septem dici, sex tanien esse solent."—Ovid., [Fastorum, lib. iv. line 170.]

[202A] [Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793). His play, Belisarius, was first performed November 24, 1734; Le Bourru Bienfaisant, November 4, 1771. La Bottega del Caffé, La Locandiera, etc., still hold the stage. His Mémoires were published in 1787.]

[202B]

["Look to't:

In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks

They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience

Is not to leave't undone, but keep't unknown."

Othello, act iii. sc. 3, lines 206-208.]

[203] {165}[Compare—

"An English lady asked of an Italian,

What were the actual and official duties

Of the strange thing, some women set a value on,

Which hovers oft about some married beauties,

Called 'Cavalier Servente,' a Pygmalion

Whose statues warm (I fear, alas! too true 't is)

Beneath his art. The dame, pressed to disclose them,

Said—'Lady, I beseech you to suppose them.'"

Don Juan, Canto IX. stanza li.

A critic, in the Monthly Review (March, 1818, vol. lxxxv. p. 286), took Byron to task for omitting the e in Cavaliere. In a letter to Murray, April 17, 1818, he shows that he is right, and takes his revenge on the editor (George Edward) Griffiths, and his "scribbler Mr. Hodgson."—Letters, 1900, iv. 226.]

[204] ["An English abbreviation. Rialto is the name, not of the bridge, but of the island from which it is called; and the Venetians say, Il ponti di Rialto, as we say Westminster Bridge. In that island is the Exchange; and I have often walked there as on classic ground.... 'I Sopportichi,' says Sansovino, writing in 1580 [Venetia, 1581, p. 134], 'sono ogni giorno frequentati da i mercatanti Fiorentini, Genovesi, Milanesi, Spagnuoli, Turchi, e d'altre nationi diverse del mondo, i quali vi concorrono in tanta copia, che questa piazza è annoverata fra le prime dell' universo.' It was there that the Christian held discourse with the Jew; and Shylock refers to it when he says—

"'Signer Antonio, many a time and oft,

In the Rialto you have rated me.'

'Andiamo a Rialto,'—' L'ora di Rialto,' were on every tongue; and continue so to the present day, as we learn from the Comedies of Goldoni, and particularly from his Mercanti."—Note to the Brides of Venice, Poems, by Samuel Rogers, 1852, ii. 88, 89. See, too, Childe Harold, Canto IV. stanza iv. line 6, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 331.]

[205] {166}[Compare "At the epoch called a certain age she found herself an old maid."—Jane Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803), cap. xxxviii. (See N. Eng. Dict., art. "Certain.")

Ugo Foscolo, in his article in the Quarterly Review, April, 1819, vol. xxi. pp. 486-556, quotes these lines in illustration of a stanza from Forteguerri's Ricciardetto, iv. 2—

Quando si giugne ad una certa età,

Ch'io non voglio descrivervi qual è," etc.]

[206] {167}[A clean bill of health after quarantine. Howell spells the word "pratic," and Milton "pratticke."]

[207] Beppo is the "Joe" of the Italian Joseph.

[208] {168}["The general state of morals here is much the same as in the Doges' time; a woman is virtuous (according to the code) who limits herself to her husband and one lover; those who have two, three, or more, are a little wild; but it is only those who are indiscriminately diffuse, and form a low connection ... who are considered as over-stepping the modesty of marriage.... There is no convincing a woman here, that she is in the smallest degree deviating from the rule of right, or the fitness of things, in having an Amoroso."—Letter to Murray, January 2, 1817, Letters, 1900, iv. 40, 41.]

[bk] {169}

A Count of wealth inferior to his quality,

Which somewhat limited his liberality.—[MS.]

[209]["Some of the Italians liked him [a famous improvisatore], others called his performance 'seccatura' (a devilish good word, by the way), and all Milan was in controversy about him."—Letter to Moore, November 6, 1816, Letters, 1899, iii. 384.]

[210] {170}[The saying, "Il n'y a point de héros pour son valet de chambre," is attributed to Maréchal (Nicholas) Catinat (1637-1712). His biographer speaks of presenting "le héros en déshabillé." (See his Mémoires, 1819, ii. 118.)]

[211] {171}[The origin of the word is obscure. According to the Vocab. della Crusca, "cicisbeo" is an inversion of "bel cece," beautiful chick (pea). Pasqualino, cited by Diez, says it is derived from the French chiche beau.—N. Eng. Dict., art. "Cicisbeo."]

[212] Cortejo is pronounced Corteho, with an aspirate, according to the Arabesque guttural. It means what there is as yet no precise name for in England, though the practice is as common as in any tramontane country whatever.

[213] [Stanzas xxxviii., xxxix., are not in the original MS.]

[214] {172}[For the association of bread and butter with immaturity, compare, "Ye bread-and-butter rogues, do ye run from me?" (Beaumont and Fletcher, The Humorous Lieutenant, act iii. sc. 7). (See N. Eng. Dict., art. "Bread.")]

[215] {173}[Compare—

" ... the Tuscan's siren tongue?

That music in itself, whose sounds are song,

The poetry of speech?"

Childe Harold, Canto IV. stanza lviii. lines 4-6, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 374, note i.]

[216] Sattin, eh? Query, I can't spell it.—[MS.]

[bl] From the tall peasant with her ruddy bronze.—[MS.]

[bm] Like her own clime, all sun, and bloom, and skies.—[MS.]

[217] {174}[For the received accounts of the cause of Raphael's death, see his Lives. "Fidem matrimonii quidem dederat nepti cuidam Cardinal. Bibiani, sed partim Cardinalatûs spe lactatus partim pro seculi locique more, Romæ enim plerumque vixit, vagis amoribus delectatus, morbo hinc contracto, obiit A.C. 1520, ætat. 37."—Art. "Raphael," apud Hofmann, Lexicon Universale. It would seem that Raphael was betrothed to Maria, daughter of Antonio Divizio da Bibiena, the nephew of Cardinal Bibiena (see his letter to his uncle Simone di Battista di Ciarla da Urbino, dated July 1, 1514), and it is a fact that a girl named Margarita, supposed to be his mistress, is mentioned in his will. But the "causes of his death," April 6, 1520, were a delicate constitution, overwork, and a malarial fever, caught during his researches among the ruins of ancient Rome" (Raphael of Urbino, by J. D. Passavant, 1872, pp. 140, 196, 197. See, too, Raphael, by E. Muntz, 1888).]

[218] [Compare the lines enclosed in a letter to Murray, dated November 25, 1816—

"In this belovéd marble view,

Above the works and thoughts of man,

What Nature could but would not do,

And Beauty and Canova can."]

[219]

["(In talking thus, the writer, more especially

Of women, would be understood to say,

He speaks as a Spectator, not officially,

And always, Reader, in a modest way;

Perhaps, too, in no very great degree shall he

Appear to have offended in this lay,

Since, as all know, without the Sex, our Sonnets

Would seem unfinished, like their untrimmed bonnets.)

"(Signed) Printer's Devil."]

[220] [The Task, by William Cowper, ii. 206. Compare The Farewell, line 27, by Charles

Churchill—

"Be England what she will,

With all her faults, she is my Country still."]

[221] {175}[The allusion is to Gally Knight's Ilderim, a Syrian Tale. See, too, Letter to Moore, March 25, 1817, Letters, 1900, iv. 78: "Talking of tail, I wish you had not called it [Lalla Rookh] a 'Persian Tale.' Say a 'Poem,' or 'Romance,' but not 'Tale.' I am very sorry that I called some of my own things 'Tales.' ... Besides, we have had Arabian, and Hindoo, and Turkish, and Assyrian Tales." Beppo, it must be remembered, was published anonymously, and in the concluding lines of the stanza the satire is probably directed against his own "Tales."]

[222] {176}["The expressions 'blue-stocking' and 'dandy' may furnish matter for the learning of a commentator at some future period. At this moment every English reader will understand them. Our present ephemeral dandy is akin to the maccaroni of my earlier days. The first of these expressions has become classical, by Mrs. Hannah More's poem of 'Bas-Bleu' and the other by the use of it in one of Lord Byron's poems. Though now become familiar and rather trite, their day may not be long.

' ... Cadentque

Quæ nunc sunt in honore vocabula.'"

—Translation of Forteguerri's Ricciardetto, by Lord Glenbervie, 1822 (note to stanza v.).

Compare, too, a memorandum of 1820. "I liked the Dandies; they were always very civil to me, though in general they disliked literary people ... The truth is, that, though I gave up the business early, I had a tinge of Dandyism in my minority, and probably retained enough of it to conciliate the great ones at four-and-twenty."—Letters, 1901, v. 423.]

[223] {177}[The Morning Chronicle of June 17, 1817, reports at length "Mrs. Boehm's Grand Masquerade." "On Monday evening this distinguished lady of the haut ton gave a splendid masquerade at her residence in St. James's Square." "The Dukes of Gloucester, Wellington, etc., were present in plain dress. Among the dominoes were the Duke and Duchess of Grafton, etc." Lady Caroline Lamb was among the guests.]

[224] {178}[The reference is, probably, to the Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics (1809-1829), which was illustrated by coloured plates of dresses, "artistic" furniture, Gothic cottages, park lodges, etc.]

[225] [For "Ridotto," see Letter to Moore, January 28, 1817, Letters, 1900, iv. 49, note 1.]

[bn] Of Imited (sic) Imitations, how soon! how.—[MS.]

[226] ["When Brummell was obliged ... to retire to France, he knew no French; and having obtained a Grammar for the purposes of study, our friend Scrope Davies was asked what progress Brummell had made in French ... he responded, 'that Brummell had been stopped, like Buonaparte in Russia, by the Elements.' I have put this pun into Beppo, which is 'a fair exchange and no robbery;' for Scrope made his fortune at several dinners (as he owned himself), by repeating occasionally, as his own, some of the buffooneries with which I had encountered him in the Morning."—Detached Thoughts, 1821, Letters, 1901, v. 422, 423.]

[227] ["Like Sylla, I have always believed that all things depend upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves. I am not aware of any one thought or action, worthy of being called good to myself or others, which is not to be attributed to the Good Goddess—Fortune!"—Ibid., p. 451.]

[228] "January 19th, 1818. To-morrow will be a Sunday, and full Ridotto."—[MS.]

[bo] {181}——philoguny,—[MS.]

[229] {182}[Botherby is, of course, Sotheby. In the English Bards (line 818) he is bracketed with Gifford and Macneil honoris causti, but at this time (1817-18) Byron was "against" Sotheby, under the impression that he had sent him "an anonymous note ... accompanying a copy of the Castle of Chillon, etc. [sic]." Sotheby affirmed that he had not written the note, but Byron, while formally accepting the disclaimer, refers to the firmness of his "former persuasion," and renews the attack with increased bitterness. "As to Beppo, I will not alter or suppress a syllable for any man's pleasure but my own. If there are resemblances between Botherby and Sotheby, or Sotheby and Botherby, the fault is not mine, but in the person who resembles,—or the persons who trace a resemblance. Who find out this resemblance? Mr. S.'s friends. Who go about moaning over him and laughing? Mr. S.'s friends" (Letters to Murray, April 17, 23, 1818, Letters, 1900, iv. 226-230). A writer of satires is of necessity satirical, and Sotheby, like "Wordswords and Co.," made excellent "copy." If he had not written the "anonymous note," he was, from Byron's point of view, ridiculous and a bore, and "ready to hand" to be tossed up in rhyme as Botherby. (For a brief account of Sotheby, see Poetical Works, i. 362, note 2.)]

[bp] {183} Gorging the slightest slice of Flattery raw.—[MS. in a letter to Murray, April 11, 1818, Letters, 1900, iv. 218.]

[230] {184}[So, too, elsewhere. Wordsworth and Coleridge had depreciated Voltaire, and Byron, en revanche, contrasts the "tea-drinking neutrality of morals" of the school, i.e. the Lake poets, with "their convenient treachery in politics" (see Letters, 1901, v. 600).]

[231] ["Lady Byron," her husband wrote, "would have made an excellent wrangler at Cambridge." Compare—

"Her favourite science was the mathematical."

Don Juan, Canto I. stanza xii. line 1.]

[232] {185}[Stanza lxxx. is not in the original MS.]

[bq] {186} Sate Laura with a kind of comic horror.—[MS.]

[233] {189}[Cap Bon, or Ras Adden, is the northernmost point of Tunis.]