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Updated: June 1, 2025
The idea that dominates throughout is that of race: the character loses its individuality and becomes a mere type, an embodiment of the tropical nature, an illustration of Byron's lines: Africa is all the sun's, And as her earth her human clay is kindled. The unbridled passion, the revengeful fury, is that of a savage.
Fashion soon changes, thought I eagerly to myself; a time will come, and that speedily, when he will be no longer in the fashion; when this idiotic admirer of his, who is still grinning at my side, shall have ceased to mould his style on Byron's; and this aristocracy, squirearchy, and what not, who now send their empty carriages to pay respect to the fashionable corpse, shall have transferred their empty worship to some other animate or inanimate thing.
He says that Lady Lovelace's funeral was too ostentatious. Escutcheons and silver coronals everywhere. Lord Lovelace's taste that, and not Lady Byron's, which is perfectly simple. You know that she was buried in the same vault with her father, whose coffin and the box containing his heart were in perfect preservation. Scott's only grandson, too, is just dead of sheer debauchery. Strange!
Byron's verse is fascinating; it overflows with a sort of desperate and fiery sincerity; but, as he himself says, his life was one long strife of "passion with eternal law."
In epigrammatic power she resembled Kinglake; but while his acrid sayings were emitted with gentlest aspect and with softest speech; while, like Byron's Lambro: "he was the mildest mannered man That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat, With such true breeding of a gentleman, You never could divine his real thought,"
Then, when she had recovered this great heart, instead of keeping it as her own possession, she gave it to humanity. For twenty-seven years after Byron's death, she remained, as it were, widowed and alone. Then, in her old age, she married the Marquis de Boissy; but the marriage was purely one of convenience. Her heart was always Byron's, whom she defended with vivacity.
The subject is set forth in Byron's masterly phrase, "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; 'tis woman's whole existence." Still, I suppose it will not be disputed that much depends upon the man and the woman. In this instance we have a strong, wilful, ambitious and masculine man. Up to the time he met Cleopatra, love was of his life apart; after this, it was his whole existence.
Byron talked more sensibly with Shelley than with his commonplace acquaintances; and when he began to gossip, Shelley retired into his own thoughts. Then they would go pistol-shooting, Byron's trembling hand contrasting with his friend's firmness. They had invented a "little language" for this sport: firing was called tiring; hitting, colping; missing, mancating, etc.
That the Lyrical Ballads attracted no attention, and was practically ignored by a public that would soon go into raptures over Byron's Childe Harold and Don Juan, is of small consequence. Many men will hurry a mile to see skyrockets, who never notice Orion and the Pleiades from their own doorstep.
Perhaps in the future they might momentarily appear beautiful once more, but he did not think that he would ever again wear them for very long, for they were, after all, little, insignificant, trivial, and contrasted poorly with the white heat of Byron's passion, and the flaming ardour of Swinburne, that cried for "the old kingdoms of earth and their kings."
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