SCOTCH REVIEWERS. 73 have already so be-deviled with their ungodly ribaldry. "Tantæne animis cœlestibus iræ!" "I suppose I must say of Jeffrey, as Sir Andrew Aguecheek saith, an I had known he was so cunning of fence I had seen him damned ere I had fought him.' What a pity it is that I shall be beyond the Bosphorus, before the next number has passed the Tweed. But I yet hope to light my pipe with it in Persia." After this able exposure of the Edinburgh Reviewers, whose critical crania solemnly affirmed that Lord Byron was a man wanting both talent and genius, is it at all necessary to point out how far public opinion should trust these, and such other self-constituted critics? It was rather a singular circumstance, that although the "Hours of Idleness" were inscribed to the Right Hon. Fred. Earl of Carlisle, by his obliged ward and affectionate kinsman, yet in the subsequent satire, to which it gave birth, the same obliged ward and affectionate kinsman should have classed the Earl with the "rest of Grubstreet;" and in a note he says, "It may be asked why I have censured the Earl of Carlisle, my guardian and relative, to whom I dedicated a volume of puerile poems a few years ago. The guardianship was nominal; at least, as far as I have been able to discover; the relationship I cannot help, and am very sorry for it; but as his lord 74 ENGLISH BARDS AND ship seemed to forget it on a very essential occasion to me, I shall not burthen my memory with the recollection." For this public mode of avenging himself for his private differences his Lordship has been again arraigned, as an ungenerous mode of procedure. It was so ; and his Lordship acknowledged his error in the third canto of "Childe Harold," where, as he surveys the field of Waterloo, and the spot where his cousin, Major Howard, fell, he acknowledges that he "did his sire some wrong. This literary squabble also elicited another whimsical circumstance (noticed likewise by his Lordship in the postscript to his satire), viz. that his Lordship's fellow-student at Cambridge was a young Bear (perhaps not the only bear in the university); and that, on leaving college, the bear was also left in possession of his chambers, to stand, as he expressed it, for the next vacant fellowship! Another singularity has been related of his Lordship, which was, that having raked out a skull from the cemetery of Newstead-Abbey, sufficiently capacious and in sound state to be made a drinking cup of, without inquiring to whom it had belonged, he had it mounted upon a silver stand, with an inscription engraven on it in the following lines: "Start not-nor deem my spirit fled: In me behold the only skull, From which, unlike a living head, Whatever flows is never dull. SCOTCH REVIEWERS. I liv'd, I lov'd, I quaff'd, like thee; Better to hold the sparkling grape, Than nurse the earth-worm's slimy brood; The drink of gods, than reptiles food. Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone, And when, alas! our brains are gone, Quaff while thou canst-another race, Why not? since through life's little day This chance is their's, to be of use." "Newstead Abbey, 1808." 75 These witty and spirited stanzas were composed by his Lordship for the express purpose of flashing forth from all sides of this memorable carousing goblet, and were, no doubt, designed by him as a compliment courteously paid by one fellow-skull to another; the compliment, it cannot be denied, was elegant, and, unlike the generality of such civilities, worth accepting; for the naïveté, 76 A CURIOUS DRINKING CUP. strength of expression, and boldness of conception, which pervade these verses, rank them as vying with the most celebrated Bacchanalian compositions of Anacreon. This deed, however, as his Lordship afterwards observed, had been imputed to him as a sort of sacrilegious violation of the dead, and a species of Vaudalism. Whether the owner of the skull may ever call the violator to account we know not; but this is certain, that if the skulls of most of us were to be applied to similar uses, they would inspire more wit and humour than ever flowed from them whilst they were animated. The wisest and best of men have ridiculed the uses to which man may be put after death; it should be some consolation to us to think that we might be made useful.* * Some workmen, while demolishing a bone-house at Brisac, in the county of Baden, found a human skull filled with pieces of money of the sixteenth century. It appears that certain skulls at that period used to be converted into a kind of money boxes. Ah, Messrs. Gall and Spurzheim, why have ye not been fortunate enough to light upon some of these precious repositories! The Scandinavians deemed it the point of felicity in a future state to be seated in the hall of Odin, and quaff strong liquors from the skulls of those whom they had slain in battle: 66 Bibemus cerevisiam "Ex concavis craniorum crateribus." The Italian poet Marino, from whom Milton borrowed not a few of his splendid incidents in Paradise Lost, makes the conclave of fiends in Pandæmonium quaff wine from the cranium of Minerva. Mandeville relates that the old Guèbres exposed the dead UNSUCCESSFUL AMOURS. 77 When Lord Byron's literary, and, perhaps, more serious business, called him to London, he took up his residence in Albany House; where he might enjoy as much company, or as much seclusion as suited his humour. His earlier years seem to have been passed in a constant struggle between his passions and his genius. Pleasure allured him on the one hand, and a glowing desire for fame pulled a different way. It was the natural consequence of the state in which he found himself placed. Succeeding to unexpected honours and wealth at a very early period of life, that he should not fall into some of the errors of youth was not to be expected; that he should have fallen into so few will reflect the highest credit on his memory. Like Anacreon, his Lordship was neither averse dead bodies of their parents to the fowls of the air, reserving the skulls, of which he says, "the son maketh a cuppe, and therefrom drynkethe he with gret devocion." In our elder dramatists there is frequent mention of a similar custom. In Middleton's Witch, when the Duke takes a bowl, and is informed it is a skull, he replies— "Call it a soldier's cup; Our Duchess, I know, will pledge us, though the cup We'll keep till death." Massinger has frequent allusions to this custom; and in Dekker's Wonder of a Kingdom, Torrenti says "Would I had ten thousand soldiers' heads, Their skulls set all in silver, to drink healths No bad wish!! |