Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Autograph letter signed : Venice, to Lord Byron, 1819 July 9.

BIB_ID
101565
Accession number
MA 51.7
Creator
Hoppner, Richard Belgrave, Esq., 1786-1876.
Display Date
1819 July 9.
Credit line
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1903.
Description
1 item (3 p.) ; 24.6 cm
Notes
Lord Byron has enclosed this letter with his letter of July 12th (MA 51.6) to Alexander Scott; Byron has added, on the verso of this letter from Hoppner, a note to Scott telling him about a letter that "The G's brother wrote from Rome to their father here (I saw the letter) a long dissuasion against any 'relazione' with me -- because (principally) I had for molti anni incarcerato -- confined my wife in 'un suo castello' in England of mine out of revenge!!! Tell this to Hoppner it is a good set--off to his letter......I will never forgive H. for his gratuitous -- bilious -- officious intermeddling. -- He might at least have waited till I asked."
Part of a collection of autograph letters written by Lord Byron to Alexander Scott from Ravenna in the summer of 1819. Items in the collection have been described individually in separate catalog records; see collection-level record for more information.
Provenance
Sabina Scott; bequeathed to her cousin Robert Scott Chisholme; Alice Scott Chisholme; purchased by Pierpont Morgan from Warren Vernon Daniell, a London antiquarian bookseller, in May 1903.
Summary
Informing him of the state of his accounts regarding his lease of Palazzo Mocenigo; expressing his concern about his relationship with Mme. Guiccioli saying "....I think in almost every such case they are good feelings thrown away on an unworthy object but because I have reason to think it is particularly so in the present instance. Human nature is such that our greatest pleasures are derived from, and depend upon illusion, and it is therefore the more cruel in anyone who attempts to destroy those which make another happy though but for a moment: but I really cannot with patience see you throwing yourself away upon such people. While it is merely for your amusement, and thus the impression was only to be momentary, I should never interfere with your pleasures: but to hear you talking of a serious attachment to a woman, who under her circumstances would be unworthy of it, if it were only for her breach of duty in admitting it, and who in the present instance is reported avowedly not to return it, but to have entangled you in her nets merely from vanity, is what the friendship you have honoured me with does not allow me to witness without a remonstrance;" adding that "Were it not so, it is the duty of every man to endeavour to aid another in distress; and I see you overwhelmed in a passion which is in every way unworthy of you, and for one who, when she thinks herself sure of you, will leave you in the lurch, and make a boast of having betrayed you. It may be that considering her present illness I ought not to say these hard things of the lady. But this is the last opportunity I shall have to write to you for some time."