THE WORKS OF EDITED BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY Letters, 1 804-1813 LONDON WILLIAM HftJNEMANN 1897 Copyright 1896, Entered at Stationers Hall and at the Library of Congiiss, U. S A. THE MARCHIONESS OF GRANBV IN MEMORY OF TWO ANNIVERSARIES MUSWELL HILL, Sept. fti, 1896. W. E, II. EDITORS PREFACE THE present Edition of Byrons prose is divided Into i Letters 2 Journals and Memoranda and 3 Miscellanies as the epistle to Roberts, the Vampire fragment, the Observations upon Observations and the like. The Text is reprinted from Moore, from Dallas, Leigh Hunt, J. T. Hodgson, and the rest, and, incomplete as probably it is, it is practically the first reissue on novel and peculiar lines which has been attempted for close on seventy years. For the Notes. There is a sense in which Byron is grossly over-annotated. There is also a sense in which his work cries out for annotation. In preparing my commentary, I have diawn when I could on Moore and the others so that a certain proportion of it also is not new. But when the Life and Letters was published in 1830-31, many allusions were plain which are now obscure, or worse so that there was a very great deal to be vii LETTERS done as not a little still remains to do in the way of elucidation pure and simple. More the years whose voice-in-chief was Byron, have always seemed to me among the most personal so to speak, as they are ceitainly the worst understood, in the national existence. They weie years of storm and triumph on all the lines of human destiny and they gave to history a generation at once dandified and truculent, bigoted yet dissolute, magnificent but vulgui or so it seems to us, artistic, very sumptuous, and yet capable of astonishing effortand superb self-sacrifice. It was a generation bent above all upon living its life to the utmost of its capacity and, though there are still those living who can remember when its master poet for that, I take it, the singer of Lara and Juan was W as gathered to his fathers, so great a change has come upon his England in the interval between the obsequies at Hucknall Torkaid and the writing of this Preface, that it is practically not less remote from ours than the England of Spensei and Raleigh. Rightly or wrongly, then, I have written on the theory that to know something of Byron, one should know something of the aims and lives and person alities of contemporary men and women, with some thing of the social and political conditions which viii EDITORS PREFACE made him and his triumph possible. I cannot believe that this first instalment, for all its bulk, will go far towards the accomplishment of such an end. But I confess to cherishing a hope that, by the time I have finished my task, I shall be found to have formed a collection of facts and portraitures, which, by making for a juster apprehension of the quality and temper of Byrons environment, will make for a more intimate understanding of Byrons character and Byrons achievement. Both these are extraordinary neither can be explained, or shouted, or sniffed away and it is merely futile to attempt an estimate of either till one can do so with some knowledge of relevant and significant circumstances, and with a certain sympathy or the reverse, if it must be so with the influences under which the chai-acter was developed and the achievement done. It will be found, I think, that in the course of my work I have made acknowledgments whereverthey were due. In this place I have pleasure in tender ing peculiar thanks to Mr. Alfred Morrison for per mission to copy certain pieces in his unrivalled Collection of Autographs, and to Mr. James Fitz maurice-Kelly, as to Mr. Daniel Conner, for the communication of results, of lasting moment to this ix LETTERS contribution to the literature which has accumulated, and imist go on accumulating, round the sole English poet for Sir Waltei conquered in prose bred since Milton to live a master-influence in the world at large. W. E. H. 23 d November 1896…