1831.] [ 145 ] 



BYRON^S MEMOIRS.* 



OP course, no one will suppose that we are now going to anatomize 

 Byron in either his character or his verses. The topics are already 

 antediluvian, and are worthy only of the conversaziones of a country 

 town of the tenth magnitude. The discussions on his uneasy wedlock 

 and mysterious separation are equally obsolete ; and we shall leave the 

 universe of old women to settle the never-dying gossip of whether the 

 Lord or the Lady was more to blame whether the Lord did not behave 

 like a roue, and the Lady like a fashionable spouse? We have now 

 nothing to look to but the reliques of his tours, the gatherings of his 

 journals, and those letters on all rambling subjects which, in all his 

 contempt for England, he seems to have spent his best hours in writing, 

 and to correspondents whom, in nine cases out of ten, he was in the 

 habit of turning to ridicule on all occasions. 



The world can be mistaken in no man's character ; and it has been 

 so saturated and superfluxed with illustrations and documents of every 

 transaction of Lord Byron's life, that there is not a scribbler or dilettante 

 within the bills of mortality, who could not furnish a regular memoir of 

 the poet and peer at an hour's notice. But the whole result of the matter 

 is this that his lordship was a spoiled boy, who grew up into a spoiled 

 man ; gifted naturally with great poetic powers, but either ignorant or 

 wilfully contemptuous of the higher principles that regulate life, and 

 either tasteless enough to discover no beauty in the decencies of human 

 morals, or blind enough to imagine that himself and the set about him 

 were to be the guides of society. But those things are past and gone. 

 He is now where he can do no harm ; and as we suppose that the idea 

 of defending his vices enters into no man's head, we proceed, without 

 further controversy, to the selection, or rather accumulation, of letters 

 which Mr. Moore has gathered for the amusement of the public. 



The volume commences without preface or remark accounting for its 

 separation from its elder brother, but plunges headlong into the corres- 

 pondence and journalizing in which Byron evidently delighted. After 

 he had thrown off the chains of matrimony, his lordship's first resource 

 was a journey through Switzerland. There he revelled in torrents, 

 glaciers, jungfraus, and the civilities of that queen of talkers and plague 

 of readers Madame de Stael. 



Byron, with all his contempt of all vulgar things and people, loved 

 his own indulgences ; and he commenced his journey with preparations 

 that by no means argued excessive misery of mind. " He travelled," 

 as Pryse Gordon's amusing narrative tells us, " in a huge coach, copied 

 from the celebrated one of Napoleon, taken at Genappe, and with 

 additions. Besides a lit de repos, it contained a library, a plate-chest, 

 and every apparatus for dining in it. It was not, however, found suffi- 

 ciently capacious for his luggage and suite ; and he purchased a caleche 

 at Brussels for his servants." His first letter is from Lausanne, in June, 

 1816 : 



" My route through Flanders, and by the Rhine, to Switzerland, was all 

 that I expected, and more. 



" I have traversed all Rousseau's ground, with the ' Heloise' before me, 

 and am struck to a degree that I cannot express, with the force and accu- 



* Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life, by Thomas Moore, 

 Vol. ii. 



M.M. New Series. VOL. XI. No. 62. U 



