because "night" is repeated the next line but one; and, as it now stands, the conclusion of the paragraph, "worthy him (Shakspeare) and you," appears to apply the "you" to those only who were out of bed and in Covent Garden market on the night of conflagration, instead of the audience or the discerning public at large, all of whom are intended to be comprised in that comprehensive and, I hope, comprehensible pronoun.

By the by, one of my corrections in the fair copy sent yesterday has dived into the bathos some sixty fathom

When Garrick died, and Brinsley ceased to write.

Ceasing to live is a much more serious concern, and ought not to be first; therefore I will let the old couplet stand, with its half rhymes "sought" and "wrote."1 Second thoughts in every thing are best, but, in rhyme, third and fourth don't come amiss. I am very anxious on this business, and I do hope that the very trouble I occasion you will plead its own excuse, and that it will tend to show my endeavour to make the most of the time allotted. I wish I had known it months ago, for in that case I had not left one line standing on another. always scrawl in this way, and smooth as much as I can, but never sufficiently; and, latterly, I can weave a nine-line stanza faster than a couplet, for which measure I have not the cunning. When I began Childe Harold, I had never tried Spenser's measure, and now I cannot scribble in any other.

I.

I

After all, my dear Lord, if you can get a decent

"Such are the names that here your plaudits sought,
When Garrick acted, and when Brinsley wrote."

At present the couplet stands thus

"Dear are the days that made our annals bright,
Ere Garrick fled, or Brinsley ceased to write."

1812.]

PROLOGUES AND EPILOGUES.

151

Address elsewhere, don't hesitate to put this aside.' Why did you not trust your own Muse? I am very sure she would have been triumphant, and saved the Committee their trouble-"'tis a joyful one" to me, but I fear I shall not satisfy even myself. After the account you sent me, 'tis no compliment to say you would have beaten your candidates; but I mean that, in that case, there would have been no occasion for their being beaten at all.

There are but two decent prologues in our tonguePope's to Cato 2-Johnson's to Drury-Lane.3 These, with the epilogue to The Distrest Mother, and, I think, one of Goldsmith's," and a prologue of old Colman's to

66

1. "I am almost ashamed," writes Lord Holland to Rogers, October 22, 1812 (Clayden's Rogers and his Contemporaries, vol. i. p. 115), "of having induced Lord Byron to write on so ungrateful "a theme (ungrateful in all senses) as the opening of a theatre; he was so good-humoured, took so much pains, corrected so good"humouredly, and produced, as I thought and think, a prologue so 'superior to the common run of that sort of trumpery, that it is quite vexatious to see him attacked for it. Some part of it is a "little too much laboured, and the whole too long; but surely it is "good and poetical. . . . You cannot imagine how I grew to like "Lord Byron in my critical intercourse with him, and how much "I am convinced that your friendship and judgment have contributed "to improve both his understanding and his happiness."

2. Pope wrote the Prologue to Addison's Cato when it was acted at Drury Lane, April 13, 1713.

3. Johnson wrote the Prologue when Garrick opened Drury Lane, September 15, 1747, with The Merchant of Venice. "It is," says Genest (English Stage, vol. iv. p. 231), "the best Prologue that was "ever written." Johnson wrote the Prologue to Milton's Comus, played at Drury Lane, April 5, 1750; to Goldsmith's Good-Natured Man, played at Covent Garden, January 29, 1769; and to Hugh Kelly's A Word to the Wise, played at Drury Lane, March 3, 1770. 4. The Distrest Mother, adapted from Racine by Ambrose Philips, was first played at Drury Lane, March 17, 1712. Addison is supposed (Genest, English Stage, vol. ii. p. 496) to have written the epilogue.

5. It is impossible to say to which of Goldsmith's epilogues Byron refers. A previous editor of Moore's Life, etc., identified it with his epilogue to Charlotte Lennox's unsuccessful comedy, The Sister, which was once played at Covent Garden, February 18, 1769, and then withdrawn.

Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster,1 are the best things of the kind we have.

P.S.-I am diluted to the throat with medicine for the stone; and Boisragon wants me to try a warm climate for the winter-but I won't.

251.-To Lord Holland.

Sept. 27, 1812.

I believe this is the third scrawl since yesterday-all about epithets. I think the epithet "intellectual" won't convey the meaning I intend; and though I hate compounds, for the present I will try (col' permesso) the word "genius gifted patriots of our line" instead. Johnson has "many coloured life," a compound-but they are always best avoided. However, it is the only one in ninety lines, but will be happy to give way to a better. I am ashamed to intrude any more remembrances on Lady H. or letters upon you; but you are, fortunately for me, gifted with patience already too often tried by Your etc., etc.,

BYRON.

252.-To Lord Holland.

September 27, 1812.

I have just received your very kind letter, and hope you have met with a second copy corrected and addressed

1. George Colman the Elder, who edited an edition of Beaumont and Fletcher (10 vols., 1778), wrote the prologue to Philaster, when it was produced at Drury Lane, October 8, 1763.

2. This, as finally altered, stood thus

"Immortal names emblazon'd on our line."

3. Reduced to seventy-three lines.

1812.]

SAMUEL WHITBREAD.

153

to Holland House, with some omissions and this new couplet,

As glared each rising flash,1 and ghastly shone

The skies with lightnings awful as their own.

As to remarks, I can only say I will alter and acquiesce in any thing. With regard to the part which Whitbread 2

1. At present

"As glared the volumed blaze.”

2. Samuel Whitbread (1758-1815) married, in 1789, Elizabeth, daughter of General Sir Charles Grey, created (1806) Earl Grey, and sister of the second Earl Grey, of Reform Bill fame. The son of a wealthy brewer, whose fortune he inherited, he entered Parliament as M.P. for Bedford in 1790. Raikes, in his Journal (vol. iv. pp. 50, 51), speaks of him, at the outset of his career, as a staunch Foxite, and "much remarked in society." Comparing him with his brother-in-law Grey, he says, "Mr. Whitbread was a more steady "character; his appearance was heavy; he was fond of agriculture, "and was very plain and simple in his tastes. Both were reckoned "good debaters in the House, but Grey was the most eloquent." An independent Whig, and an advocate for peace with France, Whitbread supported Fox against Pitt throughout the Napoleonic War, strongly opposed its renewal after the return of the emperor from Elba, and interested himself in such measures as moderate Parliamentary reform, the amendment of the poor law, national education, and retrenchment of public expenditure. On April 8, 1805, he moved the resolutions which ended in the impeachment of Lord Melville, and took the lead in the inquiries, which were made, March, 1809, into the conduct of the Duke of York. He was a plain, business-like speaker, and a man of such unimpeachable integrity that Mr., afterwards Lord, Plunket, in a speech on the Roman Catholic claims, February 28, 1821, called him “the incorruptible "sentinel of the constitution."

When he moved the articles of impeachment against Lord Melville, Canning scribbled the following impromptu parody of his speech (Anecdotal History of the British Parliament, p. 222):—

"I'm like Archimedes for science and skill;

I'm like a young prince going straight up a hill;
I'm like (with respect to the fair be it said)-
I'm like a young lady just bringing to bed.
If you ask why the 11th of June I remember
Much better than April, or May, or November,
On that day, my lords, with truth I assure ye,
My sainted progenitor set up his brewery;
On that day, in the morn, he began brewing beer;
On that day, too, commenced his connubial career;

wishes to omit, I believe the Address will go off quicker without it, though, like the agility of the Hottentot, at the expense of its vigour. I leave to your choice entirely the different specimens of stucco-work; and a brick of your own will also much improve my Babylonish

On that day he received and he issued his bills;
On that day he cleared out all the cash from his tills;
On that day he died, having finished his summing,
And the angels all cried, 'Here's old Whitbread a-coming !'
So that day still I hail with a smile and a sigh,
For his beer with an E, and his bier with an I;
And still on that day, in the hottest of weather,
The whole Whitbread family dine all together.-
So long as the beams of this house shall support
The roof which o'ershades this respectable Court,
Where Hastings was tried for oppressing the Hindoos;
So long as that sun shall shine in at those windows,
My name shall shine bright as my ancestor's shines,
Mine recorded in journals, his blazoned on signs!"

An active member of Parliament, a large landed proprietor, the manager of his immense brewery in Chiswell Street, Whitbread also found time, to reduce to order the chaotic concerns of Drury Lane Theatre. He was, with Lord Holland and Harvey Combe, responsible for the request to Byron to write an address, having first rejected his own address with its "poulterer's description of the Phoenix." He was fond of private theatricals, and Dibdin (Reminiscences, vol. ii. pp. 383, 384) gives the play-bill of an entertainment given by him at Southill. In the first play, The Happy Return, he took the part of "Margery;" and in the second, Fatal Duplicity, that of "Eglantine," a very young lady, loved by "Sir Buntybart and "Sir Brandywine." In his capacity as manager of Drury Lane, Whitbread is represented by the author of Accepted Addresses (1813) as addressing "the M-s of H-d "—

"MY LORD,—

"

"As I now have the honour to be

By Man'ging a Playhouse a double M.P.,
In this my address I think fit to complain

Of certain encroachments on great Drury Lane," etc., etc. Whitbread strongly supported the cause of the Princess of Wales. Miss Berry (Journal, vol. iii. p. 25) says that he dictated the letters which the Princess wrote to the Queen, who had desired that she should not attend the two drawing-rooms to be held in June, 1814. "They were good," she adds, "but too long, and sometimes marked "by Whitbread's want of taste."

The strain of his multifarious activities affected both his health and his mind, and he committed suicide July 6, 1815.