all the qualms and terrors he had, at first, felt; and, had any further difficulties or objections arisen, it is more than probable he might have relapsed into his original intention.  It was not long, however, before a person was found willing and proud to undertake the publication.  Mr. Murray, who, at this period, resided in Fleet Street, having, some time before, expressed a desire to be allowed to publish some work of Lord Byron, it was in his hands that Mr. Dallas now placed the manuscript of Childe Harold;—­and thus was laid the first foundation of that connection between this gentleman and the noble poet, which continued, with but a temporary interruption, throughout the lifetime of the one, and has proved an abundant source of honour, as well as emolument, to the other.

While thus busily engaged in his literary projects, and having, besides, some law affairs to transact with his agent, he was called suddenly away to Newstead by the intelligence of an event which seems to have affected his mind far more deeply than, considering all the circumstances of the case, could have been expected.  Mrs. Byron, whose excessive corpulence rendered her, at all times, rather a perilous subject for illness, had been of late indisposed, but not to any alarming degree; nor does it appear that, when the following note was written, there existed any grounds for apprehension as to her state.

[Footnote 5:  It is, however, less wonderful that authors should thus misjudge their productions, when whole generations have sometimes fallen into the same sort of error.  The Sonnets of Petrarch were, by the learned of his day, considered only worthy of the ballad-singers by whom they were chanted about the streets; while his Epic Poem, “Africa,” of which few now even know the existence, was sought for on all sides, and the smallest fragment of it begged from the author, for the libraries of the learned.]

[Footnote 6:  Gray, under the influence of a similar predilection, preferred, for a long time, his Latin poems to those by which he has gained such a station in English literature.  “Shall we attribute this,” says Mason, “to his having been educated at Eton, or to what other cause?  Certain it is, that when I first knew him, he seemed to set a greater value on his Latin poetry than on that which he had composed in his native language.”]

[Footnote 7:  One of the manuscript notes of Lord Byron on Mr. D’Israeli’s work, already referred to.—­Vol. i. p. 144.]

[Footnote 8:  “Mac Flecknoe, the Dunciad, and all Swift’s lampooning ballads.—­Whatever their other works may be, these originated in personal feelings and angry retort on unworthy rivals; and though the ability of these satires elevates the poetical, their poignancy detracts from the personal, character of the writers.”]

[Footnote 9:  “Harvey, the circulator of the circulation of the blood, used to fling away Virgil in his ecstasy of admiration, and say ‘the book had a devil.’  Now, such a character as I am copying would probably fling it away also, but rather wish that the devil had the book; not from a dislike to the poet, but a well-founded horror of hexameters.  Indeed, the public-school penance of ‘Long and Short’ is enough to beget an antipathy to poetry for the residue of a man’s life, and perhaps so far may be an advantage.”]