my wrath and my wit, and now I am haunted by the ghosts of my wholesale assertions. I cannot sufficiently thank you for your praise; and now, waving myself, let me talk to you of the Prince Regent. He ordered me to be presented to him at a ball; and after some sayings peculiarly pleasing from royal lips, as to my own attempts, he talked to me of you and your immortalities: he preferred you to every bard past and present, and asked which of your works pleased me most. It was a difficult question. I answered, I thought the Lay. He said his own opinion was nearly similar. In speaking of the others, I told him that I thought you more particularly the poet of Princes, as they never appeared more fascinating than in Marmion and the Lady of the Lake. He was pleased to coincide, and to dwell on the description of your Jameses as no less royal than poetical. He spoke alternately of Homer and yourself, and seemed well acquainted with both; so that (with the exception of the Turks' and your humble servant) you were in very good company. I defy Murray to have exaggerated his Royal Highness's opinion of your powers, nor can I pretend to enumerate all he said on the subject; but it may give you pleasure to hear that it was conveyed in language which would only suffer by my attempting to transcribe it, and with a tone and taste which gave me a very high idea of his abilities and accomplishments, which I had hitherto considered as confined to manners, certainly superior to those of any living gentleman.

"when Scott and Byron were the two lions of London, Hookham "Frere observed, Great poets formerly (Homer and Milton) were "blind; now they are lame'" (Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, p. 194).

1. The Turkish ambassador and suite were at the ball.

2. Byron had already written his "Stanzas to a Lady Weeping," suggested by the rumour that Princess Charlotte had burst into tears, on being told that there would be no change of Ministry

1812.]

WALTER SCOTT.

135

This interview was accidental. I never went to the levee; for having seen the courts of Mussulman and Catholic sovereigns, my curiosity was sufficiently allayed; and my politics being as perverse as my rhymes, I had, in fact, "no business there." To be thus praised by your Sovereign must be gratifying to you; and if that gratification is not alloyed by the communication being made through me, the bearer of it will consider himself very fortunately and sincerely,

Your obliged and obedient servant,

BYRON.

P.S.-Excuse this scrawl, scratched in a great hurry, and just after a journey.

242.-To Lady Caroline Lamb.

[August, 1812 ?}

MY DEAREST CAROLINE,-If tears which you saw and know I am not apt to shed,—if the agitation in which

when the Prince of Wales assumed the Regency. They appeared anonymously in the Morning Chronicle for March 7, 1812, under the title of a "Sympathetic Address to a Young Lady." They were published, as Byron's work, with The Corsair, in February, 1814. The verses rather betray the influence of Moore than express his own feelings at the time. In Don Juan (Canto XII. stanza lxxxiv.) he thus speaks of the Regent

"There, too, he saw (whate'er he may be now)

A Prince, the prince of princes at the time,
With fascination in his very bow,

And full of promise, as the spring of prime.

Though royalty was written on his brow,

He had then the grace, too, rare in every clime,

Of being, without alloy of fop or beau,

A finish'd gentleman from top to toe."

Dallas found him, shortly after his introduction to the prince, "in a "full-dress court suit of clothes, with his fine black hair in powder," prepared to attend a levee. But the levee was put off, and the subsequent avowal of the authorship of the stanzas rendered it impossible for him to go (Recollections, p. 234).

i. Lady Caroline's infatuation for Byron, expressed in various

I parted from you,-agitation which you must have perceived through the whole of this most nervous affair,

ways-once (in July, 1813) by a self-inflicted stab with a table-knife, or a broken glass-became the talk of society. "Your little friend, "Caro William," writes the Duchess of Devonshire, May 4, 1812, as usual, is doing all sorts of imprudent things for him and with "him." Again she writes, six days later, of Byron: "The ladies, "I hear, spoil him, and the gentlemen are jealous of him. He "is going back to Naxos, and then the husbands may sleep in 66 peace. I should not be surprised if Caro William were to go "with him, she is so wild and imprudent" (The Two Duchesses, pp. 362, 364). But Lady Caroline's extravagant adoration wearied Byron, who felt that it made him ridiculous; Lady Melbourne gave him sound advice about her daughter-in-law; and he was growing attached to Miss Milbanke, and, when rejected by her, at first to Lady Oxford, and later to Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. When Lady Bessborough endeavoured to persuade her daughter to leave London for Ireland, Lady Caroline is said to have forced herself into Byron's room, and implored him to fly with her. Byron refused, conducted her back to Melbourne House, wrote her the letter printed above, and, as she herself admits, kept the secret. In December, 1812, Lady Caroline burned Byron in effigy, with "his book, ring, and chain," at Brocket Hall. The lines which she wrote for the ceremony are preserved in Mrs. Leigh's handwriting, and given in Appendix III., 2.

From Ireland Lady Caroline continued the siege, threatening to follow him into Herefordshire, demanding interviews, and writing about him to Lady Oxford. At length Byron sent her the letter, probably in November, 1812, which she professes to publish in Glenarvon (vol. iii. chap. ix.). The words are acknowledged by Byron to have formed part at least of the real document, which is here quoted as printed in the novel :

66

"Mortanville Priory, November the 9th. "LADY AVONDALE,-I am no longer your lover; and since you oblige me to confess it, by this truly unfeminine persecution, 'learn, that I am attached to another; whose name it would, of "course, be dishonourable to mention. I shall ever remember with "gratitude the many instances I have received of the predilection "you have shown in my favour. I shall ever continue your friend, "if your ladyship will permit me so to style myself; and, as a first "proof of my regard, I offer you this advice, correct your vanity, "which is ridiculous; exert your absurd caprices upon others; and "leave me in peace.

"Your most obedient servant,

"GLENARVON."

The first effect of this letter and her unrequited passion was, as she told Lady Morgan, to deprive her temporarily of reason, and it may be added that, when she was a child, her grandmother was so