HOW BYRON CAME HOME TO ENGLAND

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19047, 26 June 1924, Page 2

HOW BYRON CAME HOME TO ENGLAND

A dramatic story of the home-coming of Byron’s body is told by John o’ London in the Daily Mail. ‘‘Byron’s body was literally anatomised to pieces; his lungs were given to tho citizens of Missolonghi at their earnest request, and the remainder of a corpse, which the doctors said ‘might have vied with that of Apollo himself,’ was sent to England in 180 gallon.- of spirit. The remains arrived in the Downs in the brig Florida no earlier than July 1.

‘‘All toe dates of this story arc interesting to us to-day. Byron died at six in the morning on April 19. The news did uot reach England until May 14

‘ ‘ The Florida entered the Downs. It had been decided that the interment should take place in the family vault of Hucknall Torkard, a mile or two from the poet’s old seat, Newstead Abbey, his ancestral home, amid the scenes of his first passion—of all his purest —for Mary Chaworth. It seems probable that Byron was brought into London by the very route over which, with all his vivacity of description, he had made Don Juan enter London.

‘‘On July 12 Tom Moore breakfasted comfortably with Samuel Rogers, the banker poet, and what looks and what words and what silences there were at that breakfast table we can only guess. At half-past nine they set off to Great George-street, Westminster, where at No. 25, the house of Sir Edward Knatchbull, which site is now covered, I think, by the Institution of Civil Engineers, the coffin, was resting. ‘‘The scene lives in Moore’s diary. The procession started, Moore riding in a coach with Rogers, the poet Campbell, Colonel Stanhope, and a Greek deputy. As they turned out of the street, away from the Abbey, Moore saw a woman crying in a barouche, and said to himself, ‘Bless her heart, whoever she is. ’

‘‘Most of the mourners left the procession at St. Pancras turnpike and went their ways. It was not until they were nearly home that Moore and Rogers felt the pathos of it all. They met a soldier’s funeral, and tho bugles were wailing ‘l’m wearing awa’ like snaw wreathes in the thaw.’ Had they followed north instead of departing south they would have been moved in more particular ways. As the cortege wavered through Kentish Town it passed a small house, from whose windows it was watched by the widow of Percy Bysshe Shelley and tho widow of Captain Williams, whose husabnds’ bodies had been burned in Byron’s presence on the beach at Leghorn.

“Mrs. Shelley wrote afterwards, 'What should I have said to a Cassandra who, three years ago, should have prophesied that Jane and I Williams and Shelley gone—should wateh the funeral procession of Byron up Highgate Hill? All changes of romance drama lag far behind this.’ “So the sagging file went on, passing near the scenes from which Keats had gone to Italy to die. At Hitchin a young Quakeress ran out of her father’s house to place one flower on the bier. When the dusty caravan was nearing Nottingham, a woman riding past inquired whose funeral it was. She was Lady Caroline Lamb, •vhose infatuation for Byron had onee been the plague of bis life. “Yet if these incidents in Byron’s home-coming give one what Flaubert called ‘the historic shudder,’ not one of them, perhaps, compares with a conversation which took place at the foot of Tottenham Court-road. A tall, untidy man nudged a little dapper man and said, ‘Whoso body is in that hearse?’ Tho little man answered proudly, ‘The mortal relies of Lord Byron—great poet, sir, but unhappy.’ The tall man was George Borrow.”