English Bards & Scotch Reviewers, Leslie Marchand Byron: A Portrait, Chapter VI (1808-1809) Alfred A. Knopf (New York:1970)

Still busy with the revision of his poems and the preparation of a new volume, Byron settled at Dorant's Hotel in London at the beginning of 1808 and was soon enjoying the life of an author and man about town. On January 20 he received an effusively flattering letter from the Reverend Robert Charles Dallas, who claimed kinship with him (Dallas's sister Charlotte had married Byron's uncle, George Anson Byron). Dallas was the sort of person whom Byron in other circumstances might readily have pilloried as a dullard, but politeness and flattery generally neutralized his critical acids. Byron tried to put a damper on any hopes the pious correspondent might have of reforming him: "I have been already held up as a votary of licentiousness, and the disciple of infidelity." Finally Dallas's sanctimonious platitudes elicited a flippant rejoinder intended to shock him: "In morality, I prefer Confucius to the Ten Commandments, and Socrates to St. Paul (though the two latter agree in their opinion of marriage). . . . I believe truth the prime attribute of the Deity, and death an eternal sleep, at least of the body."

This did not stop Dallas, who called upon Byron within a few days, became devoted to him, aided him, sometimes officiously, in putting his poems through the press, and was a frequent caller for several months. But Byron had more congenial friends in several spheres. He began to cultivate his old Harrow associates again. In his insecurity, with no clear goal before him, he clung to the image of Harrow as a symbol of the happiest times of his boyhood. He was soon reconciled with Henry Drury, to whom he had been obstreperous as a schoolboy, and through him with Dr. Butler, the new headmaster, against whom he had rebelled, and all obstacles were removed to his frequent return to the school.

Pinched for money as usual, he felt he could not return to Cambridge. "I am now in my one and twentieth year, and cannot command as many pounds," he complained to Hanson just after his birthday." Lack of cash at this period must have been peculiarly galling to Byron. Generosity was always his greatest extravagance. He had already given £200 to the sycophantic Dallas. Now that he was living as a man about town, entertaining people as careless with money as Scrope Davies and some of his theatrical cronies, he must make a showing even if he had to borrow money for his breakfast. When he had least he was most careless in giving it away. He customarily slipped £5 notes into the embarrassed hands of Henry Long and of Lord Delawarr at Harrow.

Byron's associations at Harrow seem to have been the most innocent of his pastimes, for he soon became involved in excesses in London that undermined his health (already shaken by his excessive dieting) and all but ended his career. He wrote to Becher on February 26: " . . . to give you some idea of my late life, I have this moment received a prescription from Pearson, not for any complaint, but from debility, and literally too much Love." Then he treated his reverend friend to a little malicious boasting, perhaps with a recollection of Becher's part in the suppression of his early volume where the passions had been "too warmly drawn." "In fact, my blue eyed Caroline, who is only sixteen, has been lately so charming, that though we are both in perfect health, we are at present commanded to repose, being nearly worn out. -- So much for Venus."

To Hobhouse, who had returned to Cambridge, he wrote a similar confession: "I am buried in an abyss of Sensuality. I have renounced hazard, however, but I am given to Harlots, and live in a state of Concubinage." Scrope Davies was in town, and also another Cambridge friend, Altamont (later Lord Sligo). "Last night, at the Opera Masquerade, we supped with seven whores, a Bawd, and a Ballet-master in Madame [Angelical] Catalani's apartment behind the scenes. . . . I have some thoughts of purchasing D'Egville's pupils; they would fill a glorious harem."

The recklessness of his dissipations may have been owing in part to the fact that he felt his fame had been demolished by some ridiculing reviews. He had already been greatly agitated by a caustic critique in The Satirist, and the Monthly Mirror in January had said that if these school exercises had not caused him to be whipped at Harrow, they had "an undue respect for lords' bottoms." Byron was eager to challenge the editor to a duel, but nothing came of it. Now the much more prestigious Edinburgh Review had attacked the sensitive vanity of the author. Byron seemed not to be aware that the reviewer would not know his Whig leanings and would attack him as he appeared in his preface, a conceited young lord. He later pretended to have taken the review in his stride, but Hobhouse said emphatically: "this was not the case -- he was very near destroying himself." In the end the feeling that predominated was anger, and the desire for revenge. But for the moment his despondency was acute.

Through the spring his excesses continued, until his health was seriously undermined. He spoke of it lightly to Hobhouse, as was the convention of their set: "The Game is almost up. For these last five days I have been confined to my room, Laudanum is my sole support. . . . on disclosing the mode of my life for these last two years (of which my residence at Cambridge constituted the most sober part), my Chirurgeon pronounced another quarter would have settled my earthly accounts, and left the worms but a scanty repast."

But at the same time he announced boastingly that he had two "nymphs" in his keeping. One of these, according to Moore, he kept in lodgings at Brompton. This was probably the Miss Cameron whom he "redeemed" for a hundred guineas from a Madame D. She may have been the girl he disguised in boy's clothes and took to Brighton with him in the summer. According to one story current after Byron's death, he passed her off as his brother or cousin, "but the affair had a most ludicrous conclusion, for the young gentleman miscarried in a certain family hotel in Bond Street, to the inexpressible horror of the chambermaids ... ."

It may be that Byron, in a chivalrous mood when he discovered the girl was pregnant, told his friends he would marry her, for Hobhouse wrote anxiously: "The story of your engagement to Miss (I forget her name) is all over Cambridge." But Hobhouse was relieved to learn that he was dividing his attentions and would probably not be drawn into an unequal marriage. "You will never after all you have said be a Benedict, and as for myself I find my hatred and disgust of that sex . . . every day increasing. You must for certain either have a whore or a termagant." Byron was in perfect agreement. He would not make the sacrifice even for an heir, he told Augusta.

Byron had a taste for low company which continued throughout his life. He had become a familiar of pugilists through "Gentleman" Jackson and now he arranged a match on Epsom Downs between the popular little boxer Tom Belcher and the Irish champion Don Dogherty, whom he backed. Dogherty was beaten. Although Byron had renounced gambling because he realized that he could not afford it, he liked gamblers and he found the sport exhilarating. In his "Detached Thoughts" he wrote: "I have a notion that Gamblers are as happy as most people, being always excited. Women, wine, fame, the table, even Ambition, sate now and then; but every turn of the card, and cast of the dice, keeps the Gamester alive ... ."

Byron's health had improved but his financial situation was hopeless. "Entre nous," he wrote to Becher, "I am cursedly dipped; my debts, every thing inclusive, will be nine or ten thousand before I am twenty-one." Partly to get away from the extravagance of London, on June i6 he left for Brighton. The chief attraction was sea bathing, in which, as in everything else, he indulged to excess. On July 4 he went to Cambridge to take his degree. ". . . the old beldam [Alma Mater] gave me my M.A. degree because she could not avoid it. --You know what a farce a noble Cantab. must perform."

Hobhouse and Davies were with him when he returned to Brighton. There, with fierce plunges in the sea, the writing of disconsolate verses to one of his London inamoratas, and occasional orgies of drinking, he spent July and August. Surges of melancholia would come over him occasionally, and these moods generally found outlet in verse. The secret dissatisfactions and longings that were covered up in the buffoonery of his letters came out in the poem beginning "I would I were a careless child." The greater his disenchantments, the more pathetically he clung to the dreams of his youth. What never appeared in his letters is apparent in his verses of that summer: that he was emotionally involved beyond what he would admit to his friends with one of his London "nymphs," possibly the blue-eyed Caroline.

Early in September he was back at Newstead. Although his tenant, Lord Grey, had taken little care of the park or the lakes, Byron fell in love with the Abbey all over again and soon strenuously rejected his tentative thoughts of selling Newstead to pay his debts. He was already dreaming of entertaining as lavishly as his ancestors had done. Hobhouse had come and they were planning amusements, but for the time being the house was "filled with workmen, and undergoing a thorough repair," at an expense that was alarming his mother, to whom he wrote grandly, "You can hardly object to my rendering my mansion habitable, notwithstanding my departure for Persia in March (or May at farthest), since you will be tenant till my return."

That Eastern voyage he had conceived back in January, when he wrote to his Harrow friend De Bathe: "In January 1809 I shall be twenty-one & in the Spring of the same year proceed abroad, not on the usual Tour, but a route of a more extensive Description. . . . are you disposed for a view of the Peloponnesus and a voyage through the Archipelago? I am . . . very serious with regard to my own Intention which is fixed on the Pilgrimage. . . ." In the back of his mind was the desire to take his seat in the House of Lords and then go abroad to enlarge his horizons as preparation for a career in Parliament. That much was most likely to impress his guardian, his attorney, and his mother. But his motives were more complicated. A deep-seated romantic longing for greener fields and fresh experience, and a growing dissatisfaction with the wastrel and dissipated life he was living also stimulated his longing to leave England. He was too weak and easygoing to extricate himself by any but a major break from the routines into which he so easily fell throughout his life.

The direction of his thoughts is traceable in the fact that for a masquerade in Nottingham he had a tailor make him a rich Turkish costume with "Full Trimmed Turban." And of his Eastern tour he wrote his mother: "After all, you must own my project is not a bad one. If I do not travel now, I never shall, and all men should one day or other. . . . If we see no nation but our own, we do not give mankind a fair chance."

Byron installed as head of his domestic retainers old Joe Murray, who had been the chief servant of "the Wicked Lord." The others included William Fletcher, his valet, and Robert Rushton, a handsome boy, son of one of his tenants, to whom he had taken a great fancy. Byron's favorite dog, Boatswain, and the tame bear he had kept at Cambridge were now at the Abbey. Byron and Hobhouse enjoyed the lordly independence of their life in the decayed baronial mansion. They bathed in the lake and rode through the spacious park. "Hobhouse hunts, etc.," Byron wrote Hodgson, "and I do nothing."" But he was not idle, for he was constantly adding to his satire.

When Mary Chaworth, now Mrs. Musters, heard he was at Newstead, she invited him and his guest to dinner at Annesley Hall, which had such poignant memories for him. Byron confessed to Hodgson, "I forgot my valour and my nonchalance, and never opened my lips even to laugh, far less to speak, and the lady was almost as absurd as myself. . . ."" Hobhouse saw nothing of this, and Byron, who could not reveal such feelings to his cynical friend, passed off the whole matter with bitter ribaldry. But the emotional disturbance and the chagrin of the experience again found its way into his poetry.

Byron's depression was increased by another disturbing experience. Boatswain, the great Newfoundland dog with which he had romped so often, went mad and died before his eyes. Moore says that "so little aware was Lord Byron of the nature of the malady, that he, more than once, with his bare hand, wiped away the slaver from the dog's lips during the paroxysms." Byron's grief was genuine, and as usual he turned to poetry for an outlet, writing an epitaph in verse to be placed on Boatswain's tomb, which he later erected in the garden at Newstead.

Now he was more eager than ever to leave England. He wrote persuasively to Hanson of the wisdom of his voyage. "I wish to study India and Asiatic policy and manners. I am young, tolerably vigorous, abstemious in my way of living; I have no pleasure in fashionable dissipation, and I am determined to take a wider field than is customary with travellers. . . . A voyage to India will take me six months, and if I had a dozen attendants cannot cost me five hundred pounds; and you will agree with me that a like terrn of months in England would lead me into four times that expenditure."

Indeed, Hanson had seen enough of Byron's ways to convince him of the truth of the latter statement. But the next proposal must have appalled him. "You honour my debts; they amount to perhaps twelve thousand pounds, and I shall require perhaps three or four thousand at setting out. . . . If my resources are not adequate to the supply I must sell, but not Newstead." His hope was set on selling his Rochdale estate in Lancashire, which "the Wicked Lord" had leased illegally. His mood was not brightened by Hanson's reply that the Rochdale estate was in a hopeless legal tangle. He wrote with exasperated humor: "I suppose it will end in my marrying a Golden Dolly or blowing my brains out; it does not much matter which, the remedies are nearly alike."

Toward the end of November Hobhouse had left Newstead. Byron had invited several friends for the Christmas holidays, including such disparate characters as Hodgson and Gentleman Jackson, but none of them could come. In the loneliness of the Abbey he returned to his misanthropic meditations. When the gardener brought him a human skull that had been unearthed, it suited his sardonic whim to have it made into a drinking cup. As he touched up the account later, it was "a skull that had probably belonged to some jolly friar or monk of the Abbey about the time it was dismonasteried." He sent it to Nottingham and it returned "with a very high polish, and of a mottled colour like tortoiseshell." It was set in heavy silver resting on four balls; the jeweller's bill -- which did not worry Byron, for he had many larger -- was £17 17s. The event was worthy of a poem, "Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull":

Start not-nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull,
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.

Byron spent his twenty-first birthday in London, leaving Hanson to represent him at Newstead where the tenants were preparing a manorial fete for the occasion. In a casual sentence he revealed that he had not been without feminine consolation at the Abbey. He was retaining two of the maids to take care of the house, "more especially as the youngest is pregnant (I need not tell you by whom) and I cannot have the girl on the parish." But Byron was never as callous in his human relationships as his letters sometimes suggested. Although he was obviously not in love with the girl [Lucy] and did not pretend to be, he had made a provision for her beyond what, in the code of the time, was considered a young lord's obligation in such a situation: £50 for her and £50 for the child annually. And apparently when the child was born, he wrote a poem "To My Son" in which he hailed his "dearest child of love.""

Byron's first concerns when he reached London were to get his satire published and to take his seat with appropriate dignity in the corning session of Parliament. He had written to the Earl of Carlisle of his intention of entering the House of Lords, hoping that his guardian would save him the trouble of presenting credentials by introducing him in the House as a near relation. The Earl merely informed him of the technical procedure, but did not offer to introduce him. Byron was deeply mortified that he was forced by Carlisle's snub to go through the formalities of proving his legitimacy to the Chancellor.

In the meantime he was preparing himself for a career in Parliament by reading political memoirs and history. His bill at the bookseller's went up rapidly. He bought such heavy works as Holinshed's Chronicles and Cobbett's Debates and Parliamentary History, in addition to the Memoirs of Grammont and forty-five volumes of British Essayists. His extravagance continued to make his mother uneasy. She wrote to Hanson: "I wish to God he would exert himself and retrieve his affairs. He must marry a woman of fortune this spring; love matches is all nonsense. Let him make use of the Talents God has given him. He is an English Peer, and has all the privileges of that situation."

Through February, during the delays before he could take his seat, Byron continued to send Dallas corrections and alterations for English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, the title he had settled on. Dallas had finally arranged for James Cawthorn to bring out an edition of a thousand copies.

When Dallas passed by Reddish's Hotel in St. James's Street on March 13, he found Byron's carriage waiting and went in. Byron was agitated and paler than usual. He was about to take his seat in Parliament, and Dallas accompanied him to the House of Lords. Because of the delays and what he considered the humiliation, he was in a sullen mood. After the ceremony, the Chancellor, Lord Eldon, left the Woolsack and offered his hand in welcome, but Byron merely touched his fingers, and then seated himself for a few minutes on one of the Opposition benches. He later recalled that the Chancellor had apologized for the delay, saying that "these forms were a part of his duty." But he replied, "Your Lordship was exactly like 'Tom Thumb' (which was then being acted). You did your duty, and you did no more." But the ungracious behavior was only in part due to pique; he was "born for opposition" and he didn't want the Tory Chancellor to think that he was of his party. And his shyness made him assume a nonchalance he did not feel.

English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers appeared a few days later, though at the author's request, without his name on the title page. With youthful brashness Byron had struck out against almost all contemporary writers, who, compared with Pope or Dryden, or his more immediate model, Gifford, were either "little wits" or "knaves and fools": "The cry is up, and scribblers are my game." He damned "Ballad-monger Southey" for writing too much; Moore, whom Byron had read with avidity as a boy, was upbraided for the immorality of his lays; and Scott accused of writing "stale romance" for money. But despite the imitativeness of the poem, Byron's originality and wit sometimes transcended the limitations of the model. Echoing the current critical views of Wordsworth, he equaled his master Pope in voicing "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd."

The simple Wordsworth
Who, both by precept and example, shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.
And Christmas stories tortured into rhyme
Contain the essence of the true sublime.
Thus, when he tells the tale of Betty Foy,
The idiot mother of "an idiot boy;"
A moon-struck, silly lad, who lost his way,
And, like his bard, confounded night with day, . . all who view the "idiot in his glory"
Conceive the Bard the hero of the story:

To the satire built on his "British Bards" he had added an attack on Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, imagining him the author of tlie devastating review of Hours of Idleness. But this becomes rather pedestrian except when he calls on the famous hanging judge Jeffries to yield his rope to his namesake, "To wield in judgment, and at last to wear."

Feeling that he had evened the score with the reviewers, and having taken his seat in Parliament, Byron was ready to go abroad. He felt that he would be cutting all his ties, and he clung to his Harrow associates, with whom his bonds were sentimental rather than intellectual. He had commissioned the miniature painter George Sanders to make several portraits to be exchanged with his favorites.

While waiting for Hanson to find money for his voyage, Byron invited several of his more amusing friends, including Hobhouse, Matthews, and Wedderburn Webster, to share the hospitality of his baronial estate. The stories of the unholy orgies carried on there, circulated in Byron's lifetime and later, grew out of what was actually little more than some spirited horseplay spurred on by drafts from Byron's stock of choice wines. Byron recalled: "We went down to Newstead together, where I had got a famous cellar, and Monks' dresses from a masquerade warehouse. . . . [We] used to sit up late in our friars' dresses, drinking burgundy, claret, champagne, and what not, out of the skull-cup . . and buffooning all around the house. . . . Matthews was one of the leaders in this exalted foolery. He always called Byron "the Abbot," and it was he who played the ghost, rising out of a stone coffin to blow out Hobhouse's candle.

As for "Paphian girls" singing and smiling at the Abbey, as Byron proclaimed to the world in Childe Harold, they must have been the servant girls reserved for his pleasure when he was alone there. The "Haunted Chamber," the small room adjoining Byron's bedroom on the top floor near the ruined church -- in which visitors to the Abbey were said to have seen a headless monk -- was occupied by Robert Rushton, the handsome boy whom Byron had taken as a page.

Byron continued to press Hanson to raise the money necessary for his voyage. On April 16 he wrote from Newstead: "If the consequences of my leaving England were ten times as ruinous as you describe, I have no alternative, there are circumstances which render it absolutely indispensable, and quit the country I must immediately." He had booked a passage abroad for the sixth of May from Falmouth, and he urged Hanson to raise money "on any terms." The manner in which he speaks of the urgency suggests some personal impasse more serious than the importunities of his creditors. Later, in Greece, he referred again to some mysterious reasons for his leaving England and not wanting to return there. He assured Hanson that it was not fear of the consequences of his satire that caused his impatience to leave, "but I will never live in England if I can avoid it. Why -- must remain a secret." These dark hints in contrast to the open and boastful avow als of his prowess with his "nymphs" in London, or his frank confession to Hanson of his faux pas with the maid Lucy, might tempt the speculation that he wished to escape his own proclivities toward attachment to boys, or even that he feared some closer alliance with the Cambridge choirboy Edleston, who had wanted to live with him in London. But we shall probably never know.

Byron arrived at Batt's Hotel, Jermyn Street, on April 25, eager to have news of his satire and to get cash for his journey. There was some prospect of a loan of £6,000 from a Mr. Sawbridge, but negotiations dragged into June and his sailing had to be postponed. In the meantime, he was buoyed up somewhat by the success of his poem, and he was busy preparing a second edition with additional lines, to which he would put his name before he went abroad. But he was in alternate moods of exhilaration and despondency. He made two sentimental Speech Day visits to Harrow. His friend Lord Falkland had been killed in a duel, and Byron, to help his widow, put himself still further into debt by inserting £500 in a breakfast cup at Lady Falkland's so that it would not be discovered until he left.

But with his Cambridge companions he could be scintillating and witty. The cynicism and the nonchalant fatalism of Hobhouse, Matthews, and Davies appealed to Byron more than the socially accepted hypocrisies of others. He had invited both Hobhouse and Matthews to join him on his tour, but only Hobhouse, who had quarreled with his father, accepted the invitation, though he had no money. But Byron, who had less than none -- he owed more than £13,000 -- offered to furnish him with whatever he needed.

Really excited now about his voyage, he was exasperated by the delays in getting the necessary cash. He had written to Hanson: ". . . procure me three thousand pounds . . . if possible sell Rochdale in my absence, pay off these annuities and my debts, and with the little that remains do as you will, but allow me to depart from this cursed country, and I promise to turn Mussulman, rather than return to it." While awaiting Sawbridge's loan, Byron blandly took further money from a usurer, promising an annuity of £400 for seven years.

By June 19 he could wait no longer and announced that he was setting off. He and Hobhouse left for Falmouth with all Byron's servants and equipment. He had brought old Joe Murray, William Fletcher, his faithful valet (who was to serve Byron until his master's death in Missolonghi), and Robert Rushton, "because, like myself, he seems a friendless animal," he told his mother. It was probably while they were in London that Byron and Robert posed in wide-flowing ties for a full-length portrait by Sanders."

He wrote his mother from Falmouth: "I am ruined -- at least till Rochdale is sold; and if that does not turn out well, I shall enter into the Austrian or Russian service -- perhaps the Turkish, if I like their manners. The world is all before me, and I leave England without regret, and without a wish to visit any thing it contains, except yourself, and your present residence." Mrs. Byron who was taking care of Newstead for him, wrote wistfully to Hanson something she wouldn't have ventured to tell her son: "Lord Grey de Ruthyn has married a Farmer's Daughter, and Smith Wright is to marry a Lady with two hundred thousand pounds!!!"'

The disappointing news from Hanson that Sawbridge had remitted only £2,000 was countered by a providential loan of £4,800 from Scrope Davies, who had made a happy winning at the gambling tables. Byron wrote gaily to Henry Drury: "The Malta vessel not sailing for some weeks we have determined to go by way of Lisbon. . . . Hobhouse has made woundy preparations for a book at his return, 100 pens two gallons Japan Ink, and several vols best blank is no bad provision for a discerning Public. -- I have laid down my pen, but have promised to contribute a chapter on the state of morals, and a further treatise on the same to be entitled "Sodomy simplified or Paederasty proved to be praiseworthy from ancient authors and modern practice." Hobhouse further hopes to indemnify himself in Turkey for a life of exemplary chastity at home by letting out his 'fair bodye to the whole Divan. . . . P.S. We have been sadly fleabitten at Falmouth."

And to Matthews he wrote, with the buffooning innuendo that was their common language, of the amusing aspects of Falmouth, a sailor's town, and a "delectable region, as I do not think Georgia itself can emulate in capabilities or incitements to the 'Plen. and optabil.-- Coit.'. . . We are surrounded by Hyacinths & other flowers of the most fragrant nature, & I have some intention of culling a handsome Bouquet to compare with the exotics we expect to meet in Asia.-- One specimen I shall certainly carry off."

On board the Lisbon packet, the Princess Elizabeth, on June 30, Byron wrote some rollicking verses for Hodgson, imagining the vessel already at sea and in a storm:

Hobhouse muttering fearful curses,
As the hatchway down he rolls;
Now his breakfast, now his verses,
Vomits forth -- and damns our souls.

But the ship did not sail until July 2. Despite the badinage of his letters, Byron's state of mind on leaving his native shores was at once more sober and sentimental and more sensible than appeared on the surface. With due allowance for the distortions and exaggerations of self-dramatization, the essential moods and motives that drove him to travel are recorded in the first canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. And shining through the melancholy of that poem is also a fairly faithful record of the joie de vivre that the new experiences of travel animated in him.

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