The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 3Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron
General
The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 3
Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron
English poetry
Three months later he was, or believed himself to be, in the same mind.
In a letter to Moore, dated April 9, 1814 (_Letters_, 1899, iii. 64), he
writes, "No more rhyme for--or rather, _from_--me. I have taken my leave
of that stage, and henceforth will mountebank it no longer." He had
already--_Journal_, April 8 (_Letters_, 1898, ii. 408)--heard a rumour
"that his poor little pagod, Napoleon" was "pushed off his pedestal,"
and before or after he began his letter to Moore he must have read an
announcement in the _Gazette Extraordinary_ (April 9, 1814--the
abdication was signed April 11) that Napoleon had abdicated the "throne
of the world," and declined upon the kingdom of Elba. On the next day,
April 10, he wrote two notes to Murray, to inform him that he had
written an "ode on the fall of Napoleon," that Murray could print it or
not as he pleased; but that if it appeared by itself, it was to be
published anonymously. A first edition consisting of fifteen stanzas,
and numbering fourteen pages, was issued on the 16th of April, 1814. A
second edition followed immediately, but as publications of less than a
sheet were liable to the stamp tax on newspapers, at Murray's request,
another stanza, the fifth, was inserted in a later (between the second
and the twelfth) edition, and, by this means, the pamphlet was extended
to seventeen pages. The concluding stanzas xvii., xviii., xix., which
Moore gives in a note (_Life_, p. 249), were not printed in Byron's
lifetime, but were first included, in a separate poem, in Murray's
edition of 1831, and first appended to the Ode in the seventeen-volume
edition of 1832.
Although he had stipulated that the _Ode_ should be published
anonymously, Byron had no objection to "its being said to be mine."
There was, in short, no secret about it, and notices on the whole
favourable appeared in the _Morning Chronicle_, April 21, in the
_Examiner_, April 24 (in which Leigh Hunt combated Byron's condemnation
of Buonaparte for not "dying as honour dies"), and in the _Anti-Jacobin_
for May, 1814 (_Letters_, 1899, iii. 73, note 3).
Byron's repeated resolutions and promises to cease writing and
publishing, which sound as if they were only made to be broken, are
somewhat exasperating, and if, as he pleaded in his own behalf, the
occasion (of Napoleon's abdication) was _physically_ irresistible, it is
to be regretted that he did not _swerve_ from his self-denying ordinance
to better purpose. The note of disillusionment and disappointment in the
_Ode_ is but an echo of the sentiments of the "general." Napoleon on his
own "fall" is more original and more interesting: "Il céda," writes
Léonard Gallois (_Histoire de Napoléon d'après lui-même_, 1825, pp. 546,
547), "non sans de grands combats intérieurs, et la dicta en ces termes.
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