Читать книгу Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (With Byron's Biography) - Lord Byron - Страница 150

And thou, my friend! etc.

Stanza xci. line 1.

The Honourable John Wingfield, of the Guards, who died of a fever at Coimbra (May 14, 1811). I had known him ten years, the better half of his life, and the happiest part of mine. In the short space of one month I have lost her who gave me being, and most of those who had made that being tolerable. To me the lines of Young are no fiction—

"Insatiate archer! could not one suffice?

Thy shaft flew thrice, and thrice my peace was slain,

And thrice ere thrice yon moon had fill'd her horn."

Night Thoughts: The Complaint, Night i. (London, 1825, p. 5).

I should have ventured a verse to the memory of the late Charles Skinner Matthews, Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, were he not too much above all praise of mine. His powers of mind, shown in the attainment of greater honours, against the ablest candidates, than those of any graduate on record at Cambridge, have sufficiently established his fame on the spot where it was acquired; while his softer qualities live in the recollection of friends who loved him too well to envy his superiority. [To an objection made by Dallas to this note, Byron replied, "I was so sincere in my note on the late Charles Matthews, and do feel myself so totally unable to do justice to his talents, that the passage must stand for the very reason you bring against it. To him all the men I ever knew were pigmies. He was an intellectual giant. It is true I loved Wingfield better; he was the earliest and the dearest, and one of the few one could never repent of having loved: but in ability—ah! you did not know Matthews,!"—Letters, 1898, ii. 8. [For Charles Skinner Matthews, and the Honourable John Wingfield, see Letters, 1898, i. 150 note, 180 note. See, too, "Childish Recollections," Poems, 1898, i. 96, note.]

FOOTNOTES:

110 [Vide post, p. 196, note 1.]

111 [In a letter to J. B. S. Morritt, April 26, 1811, Sir Walter Scott writes, "I meditate some wild stanzas referring to the Peninsula; if I can lick them into any shape, I hope to get something handsome from the booksellers for the Portuguese sufferers: 'Silver and gold have I none, but that which I have I will give unto them.' My lyrics are called The Vision of Don Roderick." —Lockhart's Mem. of the Life of Sir W. Scott, 1871, p. 205.]

112 [François Horace Bastien Sebastiani (1772-1851), one of Napoleon's generals, defeated the Spanish at Ciudad Real, March 17, 1809. In his official report he said that he had sabred more than 3000 Spaniards in flight. At the battle of Talavera, July 27, his corps suffered heavily; but at Almonacid, August 11, he was again victorious over the Spanish.]

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE

CANTO THE SECOND.

Childe Harold

Canto 2.

Byron. Joannina in Albania.

Begun Oct. 31st 1809.

Concluded Canto 2. Smyrna.

March 28th, 1810.MS. D.]