XCVI.

Himself, and much (heaven knows how gotten!) cash,
He then embark'd, with risk of life and limb,
And got clear off, although the attempt was rash;
He said that Providence protected him-

For my part, I say nothing lest we clash

In our opinions :—well, the ship was trim, Set sail, and kept her reckoning fairly on, Except three days of calm when off Cape Bonn.

XCVII.

They reach'd the island, he transferr❜d his lading,
And self and live stock to another bottom,
And pass'd for a true Turkey-merchant, trading
With goods of various names, but I've forgot 'em.
However, he got off by this evading,

Or else the people would perhaps have shot him; And thus at Venice landed to reclaim

His wife, religion, house, and Christian name.

XCVIII.

His wife received, the patriarch re-baptised him,
(He made the church a present, by the way;)
He then threw off the garments which disguised him,
And borrow'd the Count's smallclothes for a day:
His friends the more for his long absence prized him,

Finding he'd wherewithal to make them gay,

With dinners, where he oft became the laugh of them, For stories-but I don't believe the half of them.

XCIX.

Whate'er his youth had suffer'd, his old age

With wealth and talking made him some amends;

Though Laura sometimes put him in a rage,
I've heard the Count and he were always friends.

My pen is at the bottom of a page,

Which being finish'd, here the story ends; "Tis to be wish'd it had been sooner done, But stories somehow lengthen when begun."

NOTES TO BEPPO.

1 [AN extract from Mr. Frere's Specimen, which has long been out of print, will show how closely the versification resembles that of "Beppo."

"PVE often wish'd that I could write a book,

Such as all English people might peruse;

I never shall regret the pains it took,

That's just the sort of fame that I should choose :

To sail about the world like Captain Cook,

I'd sling a cot up for my favourite Muse,

And we'd take verses out to Demarara,
To New South Wales, and up to Niagara.

"Poets consume exciseable commodities,

They raise the nation's spirit when victorious,
They drive an export trade in whims and oddities,
Making our commerce and revenue glorious;
As an industrious and pains-taking body 'tis
That Poets should be reckon'd meritorious :
And therefore I submissively propose

To erect one Board for Verse and one for Prose.

"Princes protecting Sciences and Art

I've often seen in copper-plate and print;
I never saw them elsewhere, for my part,
And therefore I conclude there's nothing in't :
But every body knows the Regent's heart;

I trust he won't reject a well-meant hint ;
Each Board to have twelve members, with a seat
To bring them in per ann. five hundred neat :-

"From Princes I descend to the Nobility:

In former times all persons of high stations,
Lords, Baronets, and Persons of gentility,
Paid twenty guineas for the dedications;
This practice was attended with utility;

The patrons lived to future generations,
The poets lived by their industrious earning, -
So men alive and dead could live by Learning.

"Then twenty guineas was a little fortune;

Now, we must starve unless the times should mend :
Our poets now-a-days are deem'd importune

If their addresses are diffusely penn'd ;

Most fashionable authors make a short one
To their own wife, or child, or private friend,
To show their independence, I suppose;
And that may do for Gentlemen like those.

"Lastly, the common people I beseech

Dear people! if you think my verses clever,
Preserve with care your noble parts of speech,
And take it as a maxim to endeavour
To talk as your good mothers used to teach,

And then these lines of mine may last for ever;
And don't confound the language of the nation
With long-tail'd words in osity and ation."]

2 ["The Carnival," says Mr. Rose, "though it is gayer or duller, according to the genius of the nations which celebrate it, is, in its general character, nearly the same all over the peninsula. The beginning is like any other season; towards the middle you begin to meet masques and mummers in sunshine in the last fifteen days the plot thickens; and during the three last all is hurly-burly. The shops are shut, all business is at a stand, and the drunken cries heard at night afford a clear proof of the pleasures to which these days of leisure are dedicated."]

3 [The Venus is in the Medici gallery. Giorgione was Lord Byron's favourite artist. "I know nothing," he wrote in 1820, "of pictures myself, and care almost as little, but to me there are none like the Venetian,-above all, Giorgione."]

4 [The following is Lord Byron's account of his visit to this palace, in April, 1817.— "To-day, I have been over the Manfrini palace, famous for its pictures. What struck

me most in the general collection, was the extreme resemblance of the style of the female faces in the mass of pictures, so many centuries or generations old, to those you see and meet every day among the existing Italians. The Queen of Cyprus and Giorgione's wife, particularly the latter, are Venetians as it were of yesterday; the same eyes and expression, and, to my mind, there is none finer."]

5 [This appears to be an incorrect description of the picture; as, according to Vasari and others, Giorgione never was married, and died young.]

6

7

["Quæ septem dici sex tamen esse solent."—OVID.]

["Look to't:

In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks

They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience
Is-not to leave undone, but keep unknown."-Othello.]

8 ["Jealousy is not the order of the day in Venice, and daggers are out of fashion, while duels on love matters are unknown—at least, with the husbands."—Byron Letters.]

9 [An English abbreviation. Rialto is the name, not of the bridge, but of the island from which it is called; and the Venetians say, il ponte di Rialto, as we say Westminster Bridge. In that island is the Exchange. It was there that the Christian held discourse with the Jew; and Shylock refers to it, when he says,

10

"Signor Antonio, many a time and oft,

In the Rialto, you have rated me."--ROGERS.]

["A Count of wealth inferior to his quality,

Which somewhat limited his liberality."-MS.]

11 ["The general state of morals here is much the same as in the Doges' time: a woman is virtuous (according to the code) who limits herself to her husband and one lover; those who have two, three, or more, are a little wild; but it is only those who

are indiscriminately diffuse, and form a low connection, who are considered as overstepping the modesty of marriage. There is no convincing a woman here, that she is in the smallest degree deviating from the rule of right or the fitness of things, in having an amoroso. The great sin seems to lie in concealing it, or having more than one; that is, unless such an extension of the prerogative is understood and approved of by the prior claimant."-Byron Letters, 1817.]

12 Cortejo is pronounced Corteho, with an aspirate, according to the Arabesque guttural. It means what there is as yet no precise name for in England, though the practice is as common as in any tramontane country whatever.

13

14

["From the tall peasant with her ruddy bronze."-MS.] ["Like her own clime, all sun, and bloom, and skies."—MS.]

15 For the received accounts of the cause of Raphael's death, see his Lives.

16

(In talking thus, the writer, more especially

Of women, would be understood to say,

He speaks as a spectator, not officially,
And always, reader, in a modest way;
Perhaps, too, in no very great degree shall he

Appear to have offended in this lay,

Since, as all know, without the sex, our sonnets

Would seem unfinish'd, like their untrimm'd bonnets.)

17 ["I liked the Dandies: they were always very civil to me; though, in general, they disliked literary people, and persecuted and mystified Madame de Stäel, Lewis, Horace Twiss, and the like. The truth is, that though I gave up the business early, I had a tinge of Dandyism in my minority, and probably retained enough of it to conciliate the great ones at four and twenty."-Byron Diary, 1821.]

18 ["When Brummell was obliged to retire to France, he knew no French; and having obtained a grammar for the purpose of study, our friend Scrope Davies was asked what progress Brummell had made in French; he responded, "that Brummell had been stopped, like Bonaparte in Russia, by the elements.' I have put this pun into Beppo, which is a fair exchange and no robbery;' for Scrope made his fortune at several dinners (as he owned himself), by repeating occasionally, as his own, some of the buffooneries with which I had encountered him in the morning."-Byron Diary, 1821.]

19 ["Like Sylla, I have always believed that all things depend upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves. I am not aware of any one thought or action, worthy of being called good to myself or others, which is not to be attributed to the good goddess -Fortune!"-Byron Diary, 1821.]

20 In the margin of the original MS. Lord Byron has written-"January, 19th, 1818. To-morrow will be a Sunday, and full Ridotto."]

21

["Sate Laura with a kind of comic horror."-MS.]

-a

22 [This extremely clever and amusing performance affords a very curious and complete specimen of a kind of diction and composition of which our English literature has hitherto presented very few examples. It is, in itself, absolutely a thing of nothing without story, characters, sentiments, or intelligible object;-a mere piece of lively and loquacious prattling, in short, upon all kinds of frivolous subjects, sort of gay and desultory babbling about Italy and England, Turks, balls, literature, and fish sauces. But still there is something very engaging in the uniform gaiety, politeness, and good humour of the author, and something still more striking and admirable in the matchless facility with which he has cast into regular, and even difficult, versification the unmingled, unconstrained, and unselected language of the

most light, familiar, and ordinary conversation. With great skill and felicity, he has furnished us with an example of about one hundred stanzas of good verse, entirely composed of common words, in their common places; never presenting us with one sprig of what is called poetical diction, or even making use of a single inversion, either to raise the style or assist the rhyme, but running on in an inexhaustible series of good, easy colloquial phrases, and finding them fall into verse by some unaccountable and happy fatality. In this great and characteristic quality it is almost invariably excellent. In some other respects, it is more unequal. About one half is as good as possible, in the style to which it belongs; the other half bears, perhaps, too many marks of that haste with which such a work must necessarily be written. Some passages are rather too snappish, and some run too much on the cheap and rather plebeian humour of out-of-the-way rhymes, and strange-sounding words and epithets. But the greater part is extremely pleasant, amiable, and gentlemanlike.—JEFFREY.]