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Authors: John Crowley
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father’s life, of which, I am obliged to admit, I have often little personal knowledge. It has however been to me a source of diversion, even of delight and solace in difficult and painful times, to have thus laboured over those connexions which I was able to discover, and to expound; and I beg those readers who find my glosses presumptuous or otiose simply to pass over them, as they might the troublesome informations of a guide to a cathedral or castle, who has only his passion and his devotion to sustain him.
NOTES FOR THE 1ST CHAPTER
The Laird his father: The wickedness of Byrons past has become legendary, and as such contains a great admixture of untruth. Ld. B. himself delighted, it is reported, in shocking his friends with tales of his ancestor, William, the fifth Lord, who despoiled his estates and murdered a man in an irregular duel; Ld. B.’s own father, ‘Mad Jack’, went through the estate of his first and then of his second wife (Ld. B.’s mother) in an astonishingly short time. He fled to the Continent to avoid his debtors when his son was but two years old, and never saw him again, for he died abroad at the age of thirty-four, penniless, perhaps by his own hand. When I was two years old, my father left England forever; he died in Greece at the age of thirty-six.
his wife’s Scotch estates: Ld. B. is pleased to set his story in a habitation like his own Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, but transported to the land he liked to consider himself to have sprung from; indeed he talked of ‘we Scots’, &c., often enough. His mother, Catherine Gordon, was indeed Scottish, and possessed estates at Gight—those that her husband sold for debt—and from his infancy to the age of ten he lived in Aberdeen, and swam in the Dee. His mother, he said, was inordinately proud of her descent from the Stuarts, and looked down upon the ‘Southron’ Byrons.
Kendals drops: Lord Byron at the end of his time in England was known to use laudanum—in a combination with stimulants such as claret or brandy. It is a palliative known to many with afflictions both physical and mental, though now-a-days morphine is preferred to the old-fashioned black drops. My own physicians recommend a regimen of alternating opiates with stimulants, which has proved beneficial at times, though the prospect of deliberately lowering a mental exaltation by the use of a narcotic is at times repellent even to one who knows the consequences of too high, and too rapid, a flight.
his pistols within reach: Lord Byron was an excellent shot with the pistol, though he said himself that his hand shook, and he had to train himself specially to squeeze the trigger at the right moment. When I was a child it was thought possible that my father would send agents to my mother’s house to abduct me; possibly he would himself return to England for that purpose. My grandmother, Lady Noel, kept loaded pistols by her bedside to foil such attempts; the thought of that kindly and gentle lady actually employing them seems as amusing now to me as her conviction of sinister plots afoot.
his father’s tame bear: Byron kept a bear when he was at Cambridge, and for a time it was resident at Newstead Abbey, where it amused his friends. Ld. B. was always surrounded by animals in whatever household he established—dogs in particular were favourites, but the poet Shelley remembered coming upon a crane, a goat, a monkey, and cats as well as dogs at his house in Pisa. A love and respect for animals is a trait that I discovered in myself long before I learned that I shared it with my father. The beasts that Descartes regarded as automata without more feeling than a clock-work will one day be shewn to be more like ourselves—or, ourselves to be more like them—than we can now conceive.
somnambulations: Lord Byron could not have known of the speculations of Dr Elliotson and others concerning what that physician calls ‘diseased sleep’, a state, like that a poet or saint may fall
NOTES FOR THE 1ST CHAPTER
The Laird his father: The wickedness of Byrons past has become legendary, and as such contains a great admixture of untruth. Ld. B. himself delighted, it is reported, in shocking his friends with tales of his ancestor, William, the fifth Lord, who despoiled his estates and murdered a man in an irregular duel; Ld. B.’s own father, ‘Mad Jack’, went through the estate of his first and then of his second wife (Ld. B.’s mother) in an astonishingly short time. He fled to the Continent to avoid his debtors when his son was but two years old, and never saw him again, for he died abroad at the age of thirty-four, penniless, perhaps by his own hand. When I was two years old, my father left England forever; he died in Greece at the age of thirty-six.
his wife’s Scotch estates: Ld. B. is pleased to set his story in a habitation like his own Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, but transported to the land he liked to consider himself to have sprung from; indeed he talked of ‘we Scots’, &c., often enough. His mother, Catherine Gordon, was indeed Scottish, and possessed estates at Gight—those that her husband sold for debt—and from his infancy to the age of ten he lived in Aberdeen, and swam in the Dee. His mother, he said, was inordinately proud of her descent from the Stuarts, and looked down upon the ‘Southron’ Byrons.
Kendals drops: Lord Byron at the end of his time in England was known to use laudanum—in a combination with stimulants such as claret or brandy. It is a palliative known to many with afflictions both physical and mental, though now-a-days morphine is preferred to the old-fashioned black drops. My own physicians recommend a regimen of alternating opiates with stimulants, which has proved beneficial at times, though the prospect of deliberately lowering a mental exaltation by the use of a narcotic is at times repellent even to one who knows the consequences of too high, and too rapid, a flight.
his pistols within reach: Lord Byron was an excellent shot with the pistol, though he said himself that his hand shook, and he had to train himself specially to squeeze the trigger at the right moment. When I was a child it was thought possible that my father would send agents to my mother’s house to abduct me; possibly he would himself return to England for that purpose. My grandmother, Lady Noel, kept loaded pistols by her bedside to foil such attempts; the thought of that kindly and gentle lady actually employing them seems as amusing now to me as her conviction of sinister plots afoot.
his father’s tame bear: Byron kept a bear when he was at Cambridge, and for a time it was resident at Newstead Abbey, where it amused his friends. Ld. B. was always surrounded by animals in whatever household he established—dogs in particular were favourites, but the poet Shelley remembered coming upon a crane, a goat, a monkey, and cats as well as dogs at his house in Pisa. A love and respect for animals is a trait that I discovered in myself long before I learned that I shared it with my father. The beasts that Descartes regarded as automata without more feeling than a clock-work will one day be shewn to be more like ourselves—or, ourselves to be more like them—than we can now conceive.
somnambulations: Lord Byron could not have known of the speculations of Dr Elliotson and others concerning what that physician calls ‘diseased sleep’, a state, like that a poet or saint may fall
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