FOOTNOTES:
[654] {482}[The allusion is to the refrain of Canning's verses on Pitt, "The Pilot that weathered the storm." Compare, too, "The daring pilot in extremity" (i.e. the Earl of Shaftesbury), who "sought the storms" (Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, lines 159-161).]
[655] [Johnson loved "dear, dear Bathurst," because he was "a very good hater."—See Boswell's Johnson, 1876, p. 78 (Croker's footnote).]
[656] {483}[So, too, Charles Kingsley, in Westward Ho! ii. 299, 300, calls Don Quixote "the saddest of books in spite of all its wit."—Notes and Queries, Second Series, iii. 124.]
[LX] By that great Epic——.—[MS.]
[657] {484}["Your husband is in his old lunes again." Merry Wives of Windsor, act iv. sc. 2, lines 16, 17.]
[658] ["Davus sum, non Oedipus." Terence, Andria, act i. sc. 2, line 23.]
[659] {485}
["'T is not in mortals to command success,
But we'll do more, Sempronius—we'll deserve it."
Addison's Cato, act i. sc. 2, ed. 1777, ii. 77.]
[660] {487}[Compare—"The colt that's backed and burthened being young." Venus and Adonis, lxx. line 5.]
[661] [To "break square," or "squares," is to interrupt the regular order, as in the proverbial phrase, "It breaks no squares," i.e. does no harm—does not matter. Compare Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1802), ii. v. 152, "This fault in Trim broke no squares with them" (N. Engl. Dict., art. "Break," No. 46). The origin of the phrase is uncertain, but it may, perhaps, refer to military tactics. Shakespeare (Henry V., act iv. sc. 2, line 28) speaks of "squares of battle."]
"With every thing that pretty bin,
My lady sweet, arise."
Cymbeline, act ii. sc. 3, lines, 25, 26.
[So Warburton and Hanmer. The folio reads "that pretty is." See Knight's Shakespeare, Pictorial Edition, Tragedies, i. 203.]
[663] {488}[The house which Byron occupied, 1815-1816, No. 13, Piccadilly Terrace, was the property of Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire.]
[LY] {489}
The slightest obstacle which may encumber
The path downhill is something grand.—[MS. erased.]
[LZ] Not even in fools who howsoever blind.—[MS. erased.]
[MA] {490}
That anything is new to a Chinese;
And such is Europe's fashionable ease.—[MS. erased.]
[MB] {491}A hidden wine beneath an icy presence.—[MS. erased.]
[MC] Though this we hope has been reserved for this age.—[MS. erased.]
[664] ["For the creed of Zoroaster," see Sir Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 1830, pp. 87, 88. (See, too, Cain, act ii. sc. 2, line 404, Poetical Works, 1901, v. 254, note 2.)]
[665] {492}"Arcades ambo." [Virgil, Bucol., Ecl. vii. 4.]
[666] {493}[So travel the rich.]
[MD] {494}—the noble host intends.—[MS. erased.]
[667] ["Judicious drank, and greatly-daring dined." Pope, Dunciad, iv. 318.]
[668] {495}[Byron's description of the place of his inheritance, which was to know him no more, is sketched from memory, but it unites the charm of a picture with the accuracy of a ground-plan. Eight years had gone by since he had looked his last on "venerable arch" and "lucid lake" (see "Epistle to Augusta," stanza viii. lines 7, 8), but he had not forgotten, he could not forget, that enchanted and enchanting scene.
Newstead Abbey or Priory was founded by Henry II., by way of deodand or expiation for the murder of Thomas Becket. Lands which bordered the valley of the Leen, and which had formed part of Sherwood Forest, were assigned for the use and endowment of a chapter of "black canons regular of the order of St. Augustine," and on a site, by the river-side to the south of the forest uplands (stanza lv. lines 5-8) the new stede, or place, or station, arose. It was a "Norman Abbey" (stanza lv. line 1) which the Black Canons dedicated to Our Lady, and, here and there, in the cloisters, traces of Norman architecture remain, but the enlargement and completion of the monastery was carried out in successive stages and "transition periods," in a style or styles which, perhaps, more by hap than by cunning, Byron rightly named "mixed Gothic" (stanza lv. line 4). To work their mills, and perhaps to drain the marshy valley, the monks dammed the Leen and excavated a chain of lakes—the largest to the north-west, Byron's "lucid lake;" a second to the south of the Abbey; and a third, now surrounded with woods, and overlooked by the "wicked lord's" "ragged rock" below the Abbey, half a mile to the south-east. The "cascade," which flows over and through a stone-work sluice, and forms a rocky water-fall, issues from the upper lake, and is in full view of the west front of the Abbey. Almost at right angles to these lakes are three ponds: the Forest Pond to the north of the stone wall, which divides the garden from the forest; the square "Eagle" Pond in the Monks' Garden; and the narrow stew-pond, bordered on either side with overhanging yews, which drains into the second or Garden Lake. Byron does not enlarge on this double chain of lakes and ponds, and, perhaps for the sake of pictorial unity, converts the second (if a second then existed) and third lakes into a river.
The Abbey, which, at the dissolution of monasteries in 1539, was handed over by Henry VIII. to Sir John Byron, "steward and warden of the forest of Shirewood," was converted, here and there, more or less, into a baronial "mansion" (stanza lxvi.). It is, roughly speaking, a square block of buildings, flanking the sides of a grassy quadrangle. Surrounding the quadrangle are two-storied cloisters, and in the centre a "Gothic fountain" (stanza lxv. line 1) of composite workmanship. The upper portion of the stonework is hexagonal, and is ornamented with a double row of gargoyles (all "monsters" and no "saints," recalling, perhaps identical with, the "seven deadly sins" gargoyles, still in situ in the quadrangle of Magdalen College, Oxford); the lower half, which belongs to the seventeenth or eighteenth century, is hollowed into niches of a Roman or classical design. (In Byron's time the fountain stood in a courtyard in front of the Abbey, but before he composed this canto it had been restored by Colonel Wildman to its original place within the quadrangle. Byron was acquainted with the change, and writes accordingly.) When the Byrons took possession of the Abbey the upper stories of the cloisters were converted, on three sides of the quadrangle, into galleries, and on the fourth, the north side, into a library. Abutting on the cloisters are the monastic buildings proper, in part transformed, but with "much of the monastic" preserved. On the west, the front of the Abbey, the ground floor consists of the entrance hall and Monks' Parlour, and, above, the Guests' Refectory or Banqueting-hall, and the Prior's Parlour. On the south, the Xenodochium or Guesten Hall, and, above, the Monks' Refectory, or Grand Drawing-room; on the south and east, on the ground floor, the Prior's Lodgings, the Chapter House ("the exquisite small chapel," stanza lxvi. line 5), the "slype" or passage between church and Chapter House; and in the upper story, the state bedrooms, named after the kings, Edward III., Henry VII., etc., who, by the terms of the grant of land to the Prior and Canons, were entitled to free quarters in the Abbey. During Byron's brief tenure of Newstead, and for long years before, these "huge halls, long galleries, and spacious chambers" (stanza lxxvii. line 1) were half dismantled, and in a more or less ruinous condition. A few pictures remained on the walls of the Great Drawing-room, of the Prior's Parlour, and in the apartments of the south-east wing or annexe, which dates from the seventeenth century (see the account of a visit to Newstead in 1812, in Beauties of England and Wales, 1813, xii. 401-405). There are and were portraits, by Lely (stanza lxviii. line 7), of a Lady Byron, of Fanny Jennings, Duchess of Tyrconnel, "loveliness personified," of Mrs. Hughes, and of Nell Gwynne; by Sir Godfrey Kneller, of William and Mary; by unnamed artists, of George I. and George II.; and by Ramsay, of George III. There are portraits of a fat Prior, William Sandall, with a jewelled reliquary; of "Sir John the Little with the Great Beard," who ruled in the Prior's stead; and there is the portrait, a votive tablet of penitence and remorse, "of that Lord Arundel Who struck in heat the child he loved so well" (see "A Picture at Newstead," by Matthew Arnold, Poetical Works, 1890, p. 177); but of portraits of judges or bishops, or of pictures by old masters, there is neither trace nor record.
But the characteristic feature of Newstead Abbey, so familiar that description seems unnecessary, and, yet, never quite accurately described, is the west front of the Priory Church, which is in line with the west front of the Abbey. "Half apart," the southern portion of this front, which abuts on the windows of the Prior's Parlour, and the room above, where Byron slept, flanks and conceals the west end of the north cloisters and library; but, with this exception, it is a screen, and nothing more. In the centre is the "mighty window" (stanza lxii. line 1), shorn of glass and tracery; above are six lancet windows (which Byron seems to have regarded as niches), and, above again, in a "higher niche" (stanza lxi. line 1), is the crowned Virgin with the Babe in her arms, which escaped, as by a miracle, the "fiery darts"—the shot and cannon-balls of the Cromwellian troopers. On either side of the central window are "two blank windows containing tracery ['geometrical decorated'] ... carved [in relief] on the solid ashlar;" on either side of the window, and at the northern and southern extremities of the front, are buttresses with canopied niches, in each of which a saint or apostle must once have stood. Over the west door there is the mutilated figure of (?) the Saviour, but of twelve saints or twelve niches there is no trace. The "grand arch" is an ivy-clad screen, and nothing more. Behind and beyond, in place of vanished nave, of aisle and transept, is the smooth green turf; and at the east end, on the site of the high altar, stands the urn-crowned masonry of Boatswain's tomb.
Newstead Abbey was sold by Lord Byron to his old schoolfellow, Colonel Thomas Wildman, in November, 1817. The house and property were resold in 1861, by his widow, to William Frederick Webb, Esq., a traveller in many lands, the friend and host of David Livingstone. At his death the estate was inherited by his daughter, Miss Geraldine Webb, who was married to General Sir Herbert Charles Chermside, G.C.M.G., etc., Governor of Queensland, in 1899.
For Newstead Abbey, see Beauties of England and Wales, 1813, xii. Part I. 401-405 (often reprinted without acknowledgment); Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey, by Washington Irving, 1835; Journal of the Archaeological Association (papers by T.J. Pettigrew, F.R.S., and Arthur Ashpitel, F.S.A.), 1854, vol. ix. pp. 14-39; and A Souvenir of Newstead Abbey (illustrated by a series of admirable photographs), by Richard Allen, Nottingham, 1874, etc., etc.]
[669] {497}[The woodlands were sacrificed to the needs or fancies of Byron's great-uncle, the "wicked Lord." One splendid oak, known as the "Pilgrim's Oak," which stood and stands near the north lodge of the park, near the "Hut," was bought in by the neighbouring gentry, and made over to the estate. Perhaps by the Druid oak Byron meant to celebrate this "last of the clan," which, in his day, before the woods were replanted, must have stood out in solitary grandeur.]
[670] {498}[Compare "Epistle to Augusta," stanza x. line 1, Poetical Works, 1901, iv. 68.]
[671] [The little wood which Byron planted at the south-east corner of the upper or "Stable" Lake, known as "Poet's Corner," still slopes to the water's brink. Nor have the wild-fowl diminished. The lower of the three lakes is specially reserved as a breeding-place.]
[ME] Its shriller echo——.—[MS.]
Which sympathized with Time's and Tempest's march,
In gazing on that high and haughty Arch.—[MS.]
[672] {499}[See lines "On Leaving Newstead Abbey," stanza 5, Poetical Works, 1898, i. 3, note 1.]
[MG] But in the stillness of the moon——.—[MS.]
[673] {500}[Vide ante, The Deformed Transformed, Part I. line 532, Poetical Works, 1901, v. 497.]
[674] This is not a frolic invention: it is useless to specify the spot, or in what county, but I have heard it both alone and in company with those who will never hear it more. It can, of course, be accounted for by some natural or accidental cause, but it was a strange sound, and unlike any other I have ever heard (and I have heard many above and below the surface of the earth produced in ruins, etc., etc., or caverns).—[MS.]
["The unearthly sound" may still be heard at rare intervals, but it is difficult to believe that the "huge arch" can act as an Æolian harp. Perhaps the smaller lancet windows may vocalize the wind.]
[MH] {501}Prouder of such a toy than of their breed.—[MS. erased.]
[675] {502}Salvator Rosa. The wicked necessity of rhyming obliges me to adapt the name to the verse.—[MS.]
[Compare—
"Whate'er Lorraine light touch'd with softening hue,
Or savage Rosa dash'd, or learned Poussin drew."
Thomson's Castle of Indolence, Canto I. stanza xxxviii. lines 8, 9.]
[676] If I err not, "your Dane" is one of Iago's catalogue of nations "exquisite in their drinking."
["Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander—drink hoa! are nothing to your English." "Is your Englishman so exquisite in his drinking?" (So Collier and Knight. The Quarto reads "expert").—Othello, act ii. sc. 3, lines 71-74.]
His bell-mouthed goblet—and his laughing group
Provoke my thirst—what ho! a flask of Rhenish.—[MS. erased.]
[MJ] {503}Hath yet at night the very best of wines.—[MS.]
[677] ["Sea-coal" (i.e. Newcastle coal), as distinguished from "charcoal" and "earth-coal." But the qualification must have been unusual and old-fashioned in 1822. "Earth-coal" is found in large quantities on the Newstead estate, and the Abbey, far below its foundations, is tunnelled by a coal-drift.]
[678] [See Gray's omitted stanza—
"'Here scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen, are showers of violets found;
The red-breast loves to build and warble here,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.'
As fine ... as any in his Elegy. I wonder that he could have the heart to omit it."—"Extracts from a Diary," February 27, 1821, Letters, 1901, v. 210. The stanza originally preceded the Epitaph.]
[679] {504}In Assyria. [See Daniel iii. 1.]
—— she hath the tame
Preserved within doors—why not make them Game?—[MS.]
[680] [It is difficult, if not impossible, to furnish a clue to the names of all the guests at Norman Abbey. Some who are included in this ghostly "house-party" seem to be, and, perhaps, were meant to be, nomina umbrarum; and others are, undoubtedly, contemporary celebrities, under a more or less transparent disguise. A few of these shadows have been substantiated (vide infra, et post), but the greater part decline to be materialized or verified.]
[ML]—— the Countess Squabby.—[MS.]
[681] [Perhaps Mary, widow of the eighth Earl of Cork and Orrery: "Dowager Cork," "Old Corky," of Joseph Jekyll's Correspondence, 1894, pp. 83, 275.]
[682] [Mrs. Rabbi may be Mrs. Coutts, the Mrs. Million of Vivian Grey (1826, i. 183), who arrived at "Château Desir in a crimson silk pelisse, hat and feathers, with diamond ear-rings, and a rope of gold round her neck."]
[683] {505}[Lie, lye, or ley, is a solution of potassium salts obtained by bleaching wood-ashes. Byron seems to have confused "lie" with "lee," i.e. dregs, sediment.]
[684] ["Aroint thee, witch! the rump-fed ronyon cries." Macbeth, act ii. sc. 3, line 6.]
[MM] Or (to come to the point, like my friend Pulci).—[MS. erased.]
[685] [Hor., Epist. Ad Pisones, line 343.]
[MN]—— by fear or flattery.—[MS. erased.]
[686] Siria, i.e. bitch-star.
[MO] I have seen—no matter what—we now shall see.—[MS. erased.]
[687] {506}[Parolles [see All's Well that Ends Well, passim] is Brougham (vide ante, the suppressed stanzas, Canto I. pp. 67-69). It is possible that this stanza was written after the Canto as a whole was finished. But, if not, an incident which took place in the House of Commons, April 17, 1823, during a debate on Catholic Emancipation, may be quoted in corroboration of Brougham's unreadiness with regard to the point of honour. In the course of his speech he accused Canning of "monstrous truckling for the purpose of obtaining office," and Canning, without waiting for Brougham to finish, gave him the lie: "I rise to say that that is false" (Parl. Deb., N.S. vol. 8, p. 1091).
There was a "scene," which ended in an exchange of explanations and quasi-apologies, and henceforth, as a rule, parliamentary insults were given and received without recourse to duelling. Byron was not aware that the "old order" had passed or was passing. Compare Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age, 1825, pp. 302, 303: "He [Brougham] is adventurous, but easily panic-struck, and sacrifices the vanity of self-opinion to the necessity of self-preservation ... himself the first to get out of harm's way and escape from the danger;" and Mr. Parthenopex Puff (W. Stewart Rose), in Vivian Grey (1826, i. 186, 187), "Oh! he's a prodigious fellow! What do you think Booby says? he says, that Foaming Fudge [Brougham] can do more than any man in Great Britain; that he had one day to plead in the King's Bench, spout at a tavern, speak in the House, and fight a duel—and that he found time for everything but the last."]
[MP] There was, too, Henry B——.—[MS. erased.]
[688] [In his Journal for December 5, 1813, Byron writes: "The Duke of —— called.... His Grace is a good, noble, ducal person" (Letters, 1898, ii. 361). Possibly the earlier "Duke of Dash" was William Spencer, sixth Duke of Devonshire, an old schoolfellow of Byron's, who was eager to renew the acquaintance (Letters, 1899, iii. 98, note 2); and, if so, he may be reckoned as one of the guests of "Norman Abbey."]
[689] {507}[Gronow (Reminiscences, 1889, i. 234-240) identifies the Chevalier de la Ruse with Casimir Comte de Montrond (1768-1843), back-stairs diplomatist, wit, gambler, and man of fashion. He was the lifelong companion, if not friend, of Talleyrand, who pleaded for him: "Qui est-ce qui ne l'aimerait pas, il est si vicieux!" At one time in the pay of Napoleon, he fell under his displeasure, and, to avoid arrest, spent two years of exile (1812-14) in England. "He was not," says Gronow, "a great talker, nor did he swagger ... or laugh at his own bons-mots. He was demure, sleek, sly, and dangerous.... In the London clubs he went by the name of Old French." He was a constant guest of the Duke of York's at Oatlands, "and won much at his whist-table" (English Whist, by W.P. Courtney, 1894, p. 181). For his second residence in England, and for a sketch by D'Orsay, see A Portion of the Journal, etc., by Thomas Raikes, 1857, frontispiece to vol. iv., et vols. i.-iv. passim. See, for biographical notice, L'Ami de M. de Talleyrand, par Henri Welschinger, La Revue de Paris, 1895, Fev., tom. i. pp. 640-654.]
[690] [Perhaps Sir James Mackintosh—a frequent guest at Holland House.]
[691] {508}[Possibly Colonel (afterwards Sir James) Macdonell [d. 1857], "a man of colossal stature," who occupied and defended the Château of Hougoumont on the night before the battle of Waterloo. (See Gronow, Reminiscences, 1889, i. 76, 77.)]
[692] [Sir George Prevost (1767-1816), the Governor-General of British North America, and nominally Commander-in-chief of the Army in the second American War, contributed, by his excess of caution, supineness, and delay, to the humiliation of the British forces. The particular allusion is to his alleged inaction at a critical moment in the engagement of September 11, 1814, between Commodore Macdonough and Captain Downie in Plattsburg Bay. "A letter was sent to Capt. Downie, strongly urging him to come on, as the army had long been waiting for his co-operation.... The brave Downie replied that he required no urging to do his duty.... He was as good as his word. The guns were scaled when he got under way, upon hearing which Sir George issued an order for the troops to cook, instead of that of instant co-operation."—To Editor of the Montreal Herald, May 23, 1815, Letters of Veritas, 1815, pp. 116, 117. See, too, The Quarterly Review, July, 1822, vol. xxvii. p. 446.]
[693] [George Hardinge (1744-1816), who was returned M.P. for Old Sarum in 1784, was appointed, in 1787, Senior Justice of the Counties of Brecon, Glamorgan, and Radnor. According to the Gentleman's Magazine, 1816 (vol. lxxxvi. p. 563), "In conversation he had few equals.... He delighted in pleasantries, and always afforded to his auditors abundance of mirth and entertainment as well as information." Byron seems to have supposed that these "pleasantries" found their way into his addresses to condemned prisoners, but if the charges printed in his Miscellaneous Works, edited by John Nichols in 1818, are reported in full, he was entirely mistaken. They are tedious, but the "waggery" is conspicuous by its absence.]
[MQ] {509}With all his laurels growing upon one tree.—[MS. erased.]
[694] [John Philpot Curran (1750-1817). "Did you know Curran?" asked Byron of Lady Blessington (Conversations, 1834, p. 176); "he was the most wonderful person I ever saw. In him was combined an imagination the most brilliant and profound, with a flexibility and wit that would have justified the observation applied to——that his heart was in his head." (See, too, Detached Thoughts, No. 24, Letters, 1901, v. 421.)]
[695] [For Thomas Lord Erskine (1750-1823), see Letters, 1898, ii. 390, note 5. See, too, Detached Thoughts, No. 93, Letters, 1901, v. 455, 456. In his Spirit of the Age, 1825, pp. 297, 298, Hazlitt contrasts "the impassioned appeals and flashes of wit of a Curran ... the golden tide of wisdom, eloquence, and fancy of a Burke," with the "dashing and graceful manner" which concealed the poverty and "deadness" of the matter of Erskine's speeches.]
[MR] {510}
—— all classes mostly pull
At the same oar——.—[MS. erased.]
[696] {511}["Mrs. Adams answered Mr. Adams, that it was blasphemous to talk of Scripture out of church." This dogma was broached to her husband—the best Christian in any book.—See The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, Bk. IV. chap. xi. ed. 1876, p. 324.]
[MS] —— in the ripe age.—[MS.]
[697] [Probably Richard Sharp (1759-1835), known as "Conversation Sharp." Byron frequently met him in society in 1813-14, and in "Extracts from a Diary," January 9, 1821, Letters, 1901, v. 161, describes him as "the Conversationist." He visited Byron at the Villa Diodati in the autumn of 1816 (Life, p. 323).]
[698] [Hamlet, act i. sc. 5, line 22.]
[MT] Nor bate (read bait)——.—[MS.]
[699] {512}[See letters to the Earl of Blessington, April 5, 1823, Letters, 1891, vi. 187.]
[MU] {513}
But full of wisdom——.—[MS.]
A sort of rose entwining with a thistle.—[MS. erased.]
[700] [Iliad, x. 341, sq.]
[701] It would have taught him humanity at least. This sentimental savage, whom it is a mode to quote (amongst the novelists) to show their sympathy for innocent sports and old songs, teaches how to sew up frogs, and break their legs by way of experiment, in addition to the art of angling,—the cruelest, the coldest, and the stupidest of pretended sports. They may talk about the beauties of nature, but the angler merely thinks of his dish of fish; he has no leisure to take his eyes from off the streams, and a single bite is worth to him more than all the scenery around. Besides, some fish bite best on a rainy day. The whale, the shark, and the tunny fishery have somewhat of noble and perilous in them; even net fishing, trawling, etc., are more humane and useful. But angling!—no angler can be a good man.
"One of the best men I ever knew,—as humane, delicate-minded, generous, and excellent a creature as any in the world,—was an angler: true, he angled with painted flies, and would have been incapable of the extravagancies of I. Walton."
The above addition was made by a friend in reading over the MS.—"Audi alteram partem."—I leave it to counter-balance my own observation.
[702] {515}B. Fy. 19th 1823.—[MS.]
