A few years' knowledge of other
countries than our own will not incapacitate me for that part. If we
see no nation but our own, we do not give mankind a fair chance:--it
is from _experience_, not books, we ought to judge of them. There is
nothing like inspection, and trusting to our own senses.
"Yours," &c.
In the November of this year he lost his favourite dog,
Boatswain,--the poor animal having been seized with a fit of madness,
at the commencement of which so little aware was Lord Byron of the
nature of the malady, that he more than once, with his bare hand,
wiped away the slaver from the dog's lips during the paroxysms. In a
letter to his friend, Mr. Hodgson,[96] he thus announces this
event:--"Boatswain is dead!--he expired in a state of madness on the
18th, after suffering much, yet retaining all the gentleness of his
nature to the last, never attempting to do the least injury to any one
near him. I have now lost every thing except old Murray."
The monument raised by him to this dog,--the most memorable tribute of
the kind, since the Dog's Grave, of old, at Salamis,--is still a
conspicuous ornament of the gardens of Newstead. The misanthropic
verses engraved upon it may be found among his poems, and the
following is the inscription by which they are introduced:--
"Near this spot
Are deposited the Remains of one
Who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
And all the Virtues of Man without his Vices.
Pages:
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215