AUTHORSHIP OF "WERNER" 325 No words one year I took a villa for four months. can describe the kindness I have always there met with in nearly every quarter. A young man looks upon the hospitality he receives as a matter of course, but it is very different with an old manat least, it is so with me. I am grateful for the welcome often given me by Lady Alfred Paget, Lord and Lady Rendel, and Lord Glenesk at their respective châteaux of Garibondy, Thorenc and St. Michel, all in their different ways delicious abodes, and I heartily thank them and many other friends at Cannes for their constant goodness towards me. Before concluding, I will, although with some hesitation, venture to refer to the subject of the authorship of Werner. In an article in the August number of 1899 of the Nineteenth Century I maintained that my grandmother the Duchess of Devonshire and not Lord Byron wrote that drama. It is a startling statement, but is borne out by undeniable facts. I shall not here repeat the substance of my article, but am convinced that most people who take the trouble to read it will arrive at the same conclusion about it. Mr. Hartley Coleridge, the editor of Byron's Poems in Mr. Murray's edition of his Works, deals with my article in his notes to Werner. He does not answer my arguments, but disbelieves my story for the two following reasons. The first is that there is ample proof that Byron just before its publication informed his entourage that he was busy writing Werner. Surely if he contemplated publishing as his own a poem written by some one else, he would be anxious to make people believe that it was his own production. You would not say that the innocence of a man suspected of some offence was proved by his having told his friends that he had not committed it. The second reason is on account of the parallel passages which are to be found in Werner and in the works of Byron. But this does not disprove my case, as Byron may have inserted, and probably did insert, some lines of his own in the original poem. Moreover, the argument derived from parallel passages as to the identity of authorship is not reliable, or else we must believe that Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, as so many parallel passages are to be met with in their writings. Byron did, at an earlier date, write the first act of a drama founded on the plot of Werner. The copy of it, in his handwriting, was mislaid in his lifetime, and was only found the other day by Mr. Murray. I wish Mr. Coleridge had printed it in his notes to Werner, as I am sure that any one comparing it with the first act of the published version would see at once that the two could not have been written by the same person. Little attention was paid to my article, which I partly attribute to its having appeared in the month in which the Boer War began, when everybody was engrossed by the events in South Africa. I am therefore induced to make another attempt to point out what appears to me to be a curious incident in the history of literature. My escape to Cannes from fogs and short, damp days in England during the last eight years has probably prolonged my life, and thereby enabled me to write this little book. For this I am thankful. Although aware of its deficiencies-being rambling patchwork ill put together-it has still amused me to write it, and I hope that some of the stories I tell may be found entertaining, and some of my accounts, however trivial, of the great men I allude to, not without interest. |