"Gibraltar, August 15. 1809.
"Mr. Rushton,
"I have sent Robert home with Mr. Murray, because the country which I
am about to travel through is in a state which renders it unsafe,
particularly for one so young. I allow you to deduct five-and-twenty
pounds a year for his education for three years, provided I do not
return before that time, and I desire he may be considered as in my
service. Let every care be taken of him, and let him be sent to
school. In case of my death I have provided enough in my will to
render him independent. He has behaved extremely well, and has
travelled a great deal for the time of his absence. Deduct the expense
of his education from your rent.
"BYRON."
It was the fate of Lord Byron, throughout life, to meet, wherever he
went, with persons who, by some tinge of the extraordinary in their
own fates or characters, were prepared to enter, at once, into full
sympathy with his; and to this attraction, by which he drew towards
him all strange and eccentric spirits, he owed some of the most
agreeable connections of his life, as well as some of the most
troublesome. Of the former description was an intimacy which he now
cultivated during his short sojourn at Malta. The lady with whom he
formed this acquaintance was the same addressed by him under the name
of "Florence" in Childe Harold; and in a letter to his mother from
Malta, he thus describes her in prose:--"This letter is committed to
the charge of a very extraordinary woman, whom you have doubtless
heard of, Mrs. S---- S----, of whose escape the Marquis de Salvo
published a narrative a few years ago. She has since been shipwrecked,
and her life has been from its commencement so fertile in remarkable
incidents that in a romance they would appear improbable. She was born
at Constantinople, where her father, Baron H----, was Austrian
ambassador; married unhappily, yet has never been impeached in point
of character; excited the vengeance of Buonaparte by a part in some
conspiracy; several times risked her life; and is not yet twenty-five.
She is here on her way to England, to join her husband, being obliged
to leave Trieste, where she was paying a visit to her mother, by the
approach of the French, and embarks soon in a ship of war. Since my
arrival here. I have had scarcely any other companion. I have found
her very pretty, very accomplished, and extremely eccentric.
Buonaparte is even now so incensed against her, that her life would be
in some danger if she were taken prisoner a second time."
The tone in which he addresses this fair heroine in Childe Harold is
(consistently with the above dispassionate account of her) that of the
purest admiration and interest, unwarmed by any more ardent
sentiment:--
"Sweet Florence! could another ever share
This wayward, loveless heart, it would be thine:
But, check'd by every tie, I may not dare
To cast a worthless offering at thy shrine,
Nor ask so dear a breast to feel one pang for mine.
"Thus Harold deem'd as on that lady's eye
He look'd, and met its beam without a thought,
Save admiration, glancing harmless by," &c. &c.
In one so imaginative as Lord Byron, who, while he infused so much of
his life into his poetry, mingled also not a little of poetry with his
life, it is difficult, in unravelling the texture of his feelings, to
distinguish at all times between the fanciful and the real. His
description here, for instance, of the unmoved and "loveless heart,"
with which he contemplated even the charms of this attractive person,
is wholly at variance, not only with the anecdote from his "Memoranda"
which I have recalled, but with the statements in many of his
subsequent letters, and, above all, with one of the most graceful of
his lesser poems, purporting to be addressed to this same lady during
a thunder-storm, on his road to Zitza.[125]
Notwithstanding, however, these counter evidences, I am much disposed
to believe that the representation of the state of heart in the
foregoing extract from Childe Harold may be regarded as the true one;
and that the notion of his being in love was but a dream that sprung
up afterwards, when the image of the fair Florence had become
idealised in his fancy, and every remembrance of their pleasant hours
among "Calypso's isles" came invested by his imagination with the warm
aspect of love. It will be recollected that to the chilled and sated
feelings which early indulgence, and almost as early disenchantment,
had left behind, he attributes in these verses the calm and
passionless regard, with which even attractions like those of Florence
were viewed by him. That such was actually his distaste, at this
period, to all real objects of love or passion (however his fancy
could call up creatures of its own to worship) there is every reason
to believe; and the same morbid indifference to those pleasures he had
once so ardently pursued still continued to be professed by him on his
return to England. No anchoret, indeed, could claim for himself much
more apathy towards all such allurements than he did at that period.
But to be _thus_ saved from temptation was a dear-bought safety, and,
at the age of three-and-twenty, satiety and disgust are but melancholy
substitutes for virtue.
The brig of war, in which they sailed, having been ordered to convoy a
fleet of small merchant-men to Patras and Prevesa, they remained, for
two or three days, at anchor off the former place. From thence,
proceeding to their ultimate destination, and catching a sunset view
of Missolonghi in their way, they landed, on the 29th of September, at
Prevesa.
The route which Lord Byron now took through Albania, as well as those
subsequent journeys through other parts of Turkey, which he performed
in company with his friend Mr. Hobhouse, may be traced, by such as are
desirous of details on the subject, in the account which the latter
gentleman has given of his travels; an account which, interesting from
its own excellence in every merit that should adorn such a work,
becomes still more so from the feeling that Lord Byron is, as it were,
present through its pages, and that we there follow his first
youthful footsteps into the land with whose name he has intertwined
his own for ever. As I am enabled, however, by the letters of the
noble poet to his mother, as well as by others, still more curious,
which are now, for the first time, published, to give his own rapid
and lively sketches of his wanderings, I shall content myself, after
this general reference to the volume of Mr. Hobhouse, with such
occasional extracts from its pages as may throw light upon the letters
of his friend.