The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2

(1) LORD BYRON (’The Courier’, February 1, 1814).

A new Poem has just been published by the above Nobleman, and the ‘Morning Chronicle’ of to-day has favoured its readers with his Lordship’s Dedication of it to THOMAS MOORE, Esq., in what that paper calls “an elegant eulogium.”  If the elegance of an eulogium consist in its extravagance, the ‘Chronicle’s’ epithet is well chosen.  But our purpose is not with the Dedication, nor the main Poem, ‘The Corsair’, but with one of the pieces called Poems, published at the end of the ‘Corsair’.  Nearly two years ago (in March, 1812), when the REGENT was attacked with a bitterness and rancour that disgusted the whole country; when attempts were made day after day to wound every feeling of the heart; there appeared in the ‘Morning Chronicle’ an anonymous ’Address to a Young Lady weeping’, upon which we remarked at the time (’Courier of March’ 7, 1812), considering it as tending to make the Princess CHARLOTTE of WALES view the PRINCE REGENT her father as an object of suspicion and disgrace.  Few of our readers have forgotten the disgust which this address excited.  The author of it, however, unwilling that it should sleep in the oblivion to which it had been consigned with the other trash of that day, has republished it, and, placed the first of what are called Poems at the end of this newly published work the Corsair, we find this very address: 

  “Weep daughter of a royal line,
  A Sire’s disgrace, a realm’s decay;”

Lord Byron thus avows himself to be the Author.

To be sure the Prince has been extremely disgraced by the policy he has adopted, and the events which that policy has produced; and the realm has experienced great decay, no doubt, by the occurrences in the Peninsula, the resistance of Russia, the rising in Germany, the counter-revolution in Holland, and the defeat, disgrace, and shame of BUONAPARTE.  But, instead of continuing our observations, suppose we parody his Lordship’s Address, and apply it to February 1814: