Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 08.djvu/143

 finished two or three lobsters, washed down by half a dozen glasses of strong brandy, with tumblers of hot water. He wrote ‘Don Juan’ on gin and water, and Medwin (p. 336) speaks of his drinking too much wine and nearly a pint of hollands every night (in 1822). Trelawny (i. 73), however, declares that the spirits was mere ‘water bewitched.’ When Hunt reached Pisa in 1822, he found Byron so fat as to be scarcely recognisable. Medwin, two or three months later, found him starved into ‘unnatural thinness.’ Such a diet was no doubt injurious in the long run; but the starvation seems to have stimulated his brain, and Trelawny says that no man had brighter eyes or a clearer voice.

In the spring of 1813 Byron published anonymously the ‘Waltz,’ and disowned it on its deserved failure. Various avatars of ‘Childe Harold,’ however, repeated his previous success. The ‘Giaour’ appeared in May 1813; the ‘Bride of Abydos’ in December 1813; the ‘Corsair’ in January 1814. They were all struck off at a white heat. The ‘Giaour’ was increased from 400 lines in the first edition to 1,400 in the fifth, which appeared in the autumn of 1813. The first sketch of the ‘Bride’ was written in four nights (Diary, 16 Nov. 1813) ‘to distract his dreams from …,’ and afterwards increased by 200 lines. The ‘Corsair,’ written in ten days, or between 18 and 31 Dec., was hardly touched afterwards. He boasted afterwards that 14,000 copies of the last were sold in a day. With its first edition appeared the impromptu lines, ‘Weep, daughter of a royal line;’ the Princess Charlotte having wept, it was said, on the inability of the whigs to form a cabinet on Perceval's death. The lines were the cause of vehement attacks upon the author by the government papers. A satire called ‘Anti-Byron,’ shown to him by Murray in March 1814, indicated the rise of a hostile feeling. Byron was annoyed by the shift of favour. He had said in the dedication of the ‘Corsair’ to Moore that he should be silent for some years, and on 9 April 1814 tells Moore that he has given up rhyming. The same letter announces the abdication of Napoleon, and next day he composed and sent to Murray his ode upon that event. On 29 April he tells Murray that he has resolved to buy back his copyrights and suppress his poetry, but he instantly withdrew the resolution on Murray's assurance that it would be inconvenient. By the middle of June he had finished ‘Lara,’ which was published in the same volume with Rogers's ‘Jacqueline’ in August. The ‘Hebrew Melodies,’ written at the request of Kinnaird, appeared with music in January 1815. The ‘Siege of Corinth,’ begun July 1815 and copied by Lady Byron, and ‘Parisina,’ written the same autumn, appeared in January and February 1816. Murray gave 700l. for ‘Lara’ and 500 guineas for each of the others. Dallas wrote to the papers in February 1814, defending his noble relative from the charge of accepting payment; and stated that the money for ‘Childe Harold’ and ‘The Corsair’ had been given to himself. The sums due for the other two poems then published were still, it seems, in the publisher's hands. In the beginning of 1816 Byron declined to take the 1,000 guineas for ‘Parisina’ and the ‘Siege of Corinth,’ and it was proposed to hand over the money to Godwin, Coleridge, and Maturin. The plan was dropped at Murray's objection, and the poet soon became less scrupulous. These poems were written in the thick of many distractions. Byron was familiar at Holland, Melbourne, and Devonshire Houses. He knew Brummell and was one of the dandies; he was a member of Watier's, then a ‘superb club,’ and appeared as a caloyer in a masquerade given by his fellow-members in 1813; of the more literary and sober Alfred; of the Union, the Pugilistics, and the Owls, or ‘Fly-by-nights.’ He indulged in the pleasures of his class, with intervals of self-contempt and foreboding. Scott and Mme. de Staël (like Lady Byron) thought that a profound melancholy was in reality his dominant mood. He had reasons enough in his money embarrassments and in dangerous entanglements. Fashionable women adored the beautiful young poet and tried to soothe his blighted affections. Lady Morgan (ii. 2) describes him as ‘cold, silent, and reserved,’ but doubtless not the less fascinating. Dallas (iii. 41) observed that his coyness speedily vanished, and found him in a brown study writing to some fine lady whose page was waiting in scarlet and a hussar jacket. This may have been Lady Caroline Lamb, a woman of some talent, but flighty and excitable to the verge of insanity. She was born 23 Nov. 1785, the daughter of the Earl of Bessborough, and in June 1805 married William Lamb, afterwards Lord Melbourne. The women, as she says, ‘suffocated him’ when she first saw him. On her own introduction by Lady Westmorland, she turned on her heel and wrote in her diary that he was ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know.’ The acquaintance was renewed at Lady Holland's, and for nine months he almost lived at Melbourne House, where he contrived to ‘sweep away’ the dancing, in which he could take no part. Lady Caroline did her best to make her passion notorious. She ‘absolutely besieged