Unknown work by Byron found

Press, 2 May 1985, Page 27

Unknown work by Byron found

NZPA-Reuter London An unknown work by the British poet, Lord Byron, a prose satire about the politics of the Eastern despot, Tamerlane, has been found in the cellars of his London publisher, according to his biographer. The biographer, Professor Leslie Marchand, said he found the work in a safe while researching his 12 volumes of Byron’s collected letters and journals, 161 years after the poet’s death. Professor Marchand told the “Sunday Telegraph” newspaper that it was a strange composition in Byrcn’s unmistakeable handwriting, a good-natured satire on the brutality of

Tamerlane, and a cynical appraisal of human nature in general. The Mongol conqueror, Tamerlane, ruler of Samarkand, swept across Iran, Transcaucasia, Iraq, Armenia and Georgia, and invaded India and Syria, before he died in 1405.

Byron, commenting on how Tamerlane extorted heavy taxes to finance wars, wrote that “the whole of the populace trembled for their pockets, which he and his ministers had contracted a habit of emptying.

“He ako cut off heads, but with this practice his subjects found little or no fault, provided that decapitation and confiscation did not go together.”