Byron in Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

Gibbon said, ‘where the first men of the Kingdom in point of Fashion and Fortune assemble[d]’. Byron paints a more bibulous picture: ‘We clareted and champagned till two–then supped and finished with a kind of Regency punch composed of Madeira, brandy and green tea, no real water being admitted therein.’
    Jackson, as well as being his boxing master, helped in his ever-burgeoning yen for gambling, purchased a pony and pedigree greyhounds for him, along with encouraging him to bet on promising fighters. Another of his haunts was the apartment of Madame Catalani, a prima donna from the opera Masquerade at Covent Garden, who entertained whores, bawds and gigolos, which Byron described to Hobhouse as ‘a glorious Harem’. His relationship with Caroline Cameron, a sixteen-year-old prostitute, whom he called Dahlia, was so intense that for a week or so he even considered marriage. When they went to Brighton to join his old friends Hobhouse, Scrope, Ned Long and Wedderburn Webster, Caroline was paraded on the seafront in boy’s clothing, Byron introducing her to strangers as his brother Gordon. Though Byron was lame and ever conscious of it, Webster noted that he could vault ‘with the agility of a harlequin’.
    When the poetry ‘mania’ came on him, he would spin a prologue or a few satires, visiting Southwell whenever he chose, whence, by the most rigorous dieting, he had metamorphosed himself, becoming gaunt and spectral, in Hamlet guise. All his life he fretted about being overweight and in a letter to Hanson at that time, he boasted of his regime of violent exercise and fasting–‘I wear seven waistcoats and a great coat, run, and play at cricket in this Dress, till quite exhausted by excessive perspiration, use the Hip Bath daily; eat only a quarter of a pound of Butcher’s Meat in twenty four hours, no Suppers or Breakfast, only one meal a day; drink no malt liquor, but a little wine, and take Physic occasionally. By these means my Ribs display skin of no great Thickness…’
    He dabbled in love, verse, and writing plays, which he also starred in, and his cousin Elizabeth Pigot nicknamed him ‘Tristam Fickle et L’Amoureuse’. It was she who observed that he did not know his own mind for more than ten minutes. His conceit was unbounded. When his tutor, the Reverend Thomas Jones, enquired if he might be returning to Cambridge, Byron’s reply was categoric and condescending–‘I have other reasons for not residing at Cambridge, I dislike it…I have never considered it my alma mater, but rather as a nurse of no very promising appearance, on whom I have been forced against her inclinations and contrary to mine.’
    The break with Edleston drew him more seriously to his poetry, perfecting and honing the several pieces which he had written over the past few years. Translations and imitations from Virgil and Anacreon were gathered together to be published in a slim volume, titled Hours of Idleness , in 1807. It was not, as he told Elizabeth Pigot, for the approbation of ‘Citizen Mob’, but for a few elite friends. It was to be published by a printer in Newark, Mr Ridge, whom Byron instructed and bullied, then sold by a Mr Crosby, a London bookseller, who would also be the butt of Byron’s impetuous demands. Mr Ridge was bombarded with corrections, additions, disquisitions over the size of print, the illustrations, whether they should be of Harrow, Newstead or a portrait of Byron himself, and was latterly told to suspend all printing, as the poet had decided to give the work a new form.
    Though he suffered the author’s ‘usual trepidations’, he told his Cambridge friend William Bankes, a classicist and art collector, that he did not wish to be ‘cloyed with insipid compliments’, except that he did. To Elizabeth he wrote that sales were going well in the town and the watering places but sluggish with