Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 08.djvu/149

 mitted suicide in 1821. Byron and Shelley made a tour of the lake in June (described in Shelley's ‘Six Weeks' Tour’), and were nearly lost in a storm. Two rainy days at Ouchy produced Byron's ‘Prisoner of Chillon;’ and about the same time he finished the third canto of ‘Childe Harold.’ Shelley, as Byron told Medwin (p. 237), had dosed him with Wordsworth ‘even to nausea,’ and the influence is apparent in some of his ‘Childe Harold’ stanzas (see Wordsworth's remarks in Diary (1853), iii. 161). In September Byron made a tour in the Bernese Oberland with Hobhouse, and, as his diary shows, worked up his impressions of the scenery. At the Villa Diodati he wrote the stanzas ‘To Augusta’ and the verses addressed to ‘My sweet sister,’ which by her desire were suppressed till after his death. Here, too, he wrote the monody on the death of Sheridan, and the striking fragment called ‘Darkness.’

On 29 Aug. the Shelley party left for England. In January 1817 Miss Clairmont gave birth to Allegra, Byron's daughter. The infant was sent to him at Venice with a Swiss nurse, and placed under the care of the Hoppners. Byron declined an offer from a Mrs. Vavasour to adopt the girl, refusing to abdicate his paternal authority as the lady desired. He afterwards sent for the child to Bologna in August 1819, and kept her with him at Venice and Ravenna till April 1821, when he placed her in a convent at Bagna-Cavallo (twelve miles from Ravenna), paying double fees to insure good treatment. He wished her, he said, to be a Roman catholic, and left her 5,000l. for a marriage portion. The mother vehemently protested against this (Eg. MS. 2332), but the Shelleys approved (To Hoppner, 11 May 1821; To Shelley, 26 April 1821). The child improved in the convent, and is described by Shelley as petted and happy (, Select Letters of Shelley, p. 171, 1882). She died of a fever 20 April 1822. Byron was profoundly agitated by the news, and, as the Countess Guiccioli says, would never afterwards pronounce her name. He directed her to be buried at Harrow, and a tablet to be erected in the church, at a spot precisely indicated by his school recollections (Letter 494). Of the mother he spoke with indifference or aversion (, p. 164). Byron and Hobhouse crossed the Simplon, and reached Milan by October. At Milan Beyle (Stendhal) saw him at the theatre, and has described his impressions (see his Letter first published in Mme. Byron, i. 353, Paris, 1824). He went by Verona to Venice, intending to spend the winter in this ‘the greenest island,’ as he says, ‘of my imagination.’ He stayed for three years, taking as a summer residence a house at La Mira on the Brenta. April and May 1817 were spent in a visit to Rome, whence, 5 May, he sent to Murray a new third act of ‘Manfred,’ having heard that the original was thought unsatisfactory.

On arriving at Venice he found that his ‘mind wanted something craggy to break upon’ (Letter 252), and he set to work learning Armenian at the monastery. He saw something of the literary salon of the Countess Albrizzi. Mme. Albrizzi wrote a book of portraits, one of which is a sketch of Byron, published by Moore, and not without interest. He became bored with the Venetian ‘blues,’ and took to the less pretentious salon of the Countess Benzoni. He soon plunged into worse dissipations. He settled in the Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal. And here, in ostentatious defiance of the world, which tried to take the form of contempt, he abandoned himself to degrading excesses which injured his constitution, and afterwards produced bitter self-reproach. ‘I detest every recollection of the place, the people, and my pursuits,’ he said to Medwin (p. 78). Shelley, whose impressions of a visit to Byron are given in the famous ‘Julian and Maddalo,’ says afterwards that Byron had almost destroyed himself. He could digest no food, and was consumed by hectic fever. Daily rides on the Lido kept him from prostration. Moore says that Byron would often leave his house in a fit of disgust to pass the night in his gondola. In the midst of this debasing life his intellectual activity continued. He began the fourth canto of ‘Childe Harold’ by 1 July 1817, and sent 126 stanzas (afterwards increased to 186) to Murray on 20 July. On 23 Oct. he states that ‘Beppo,’ in imitation, as he says, of ‘Whistlecraft’ (J. H. Frere), is nearly finished. It was sent to Murray 19 Jan. 1819, and published in May. This experiment led to his greatest performance. On 19 Sept. 1818 he has finished the first canto of ‘Don Juan.’ On 25 Jan. 1819 he tells Murray to print fifty copies for private distribution. On 6 April he sends the second canto. The two were published without author's or publisher's name in July 1819. The third canto was begun in October 1819. The outcry against its predecessors had disconcerted him, and he was so put out by hearing that a Mr. Saunders had called it ‘all Grub Street,’ as to lay it aside for a time. The third canto was split into the third and fourth in February 1820, and appeared with the fifth, still anonymously and without the publisher's name, in August 1821.

A new passion had altered his life. In April 1819 he met at the Countess Benzoni's Teresa,