No More Learning

_Ecco un' Sonetto! _ There, you dogs! there's a Sonnet for you: you won't
have such as that in a hurry from Mr. Fitzgerald. You may publish it
with my name, an ye wool. He deserves all praise, bad and good; it was a
very noble piece of principality. "--Letter to Murray, August 12, 1819.

For [William Thomas] Fitgerald, see _Poetical Works_, 1898, i. 297, note
3; for Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763-1798), see _Letters_, 1900, iv. 345,
note 1. The royal assent was given to a bill for "restoring Edward Fox
Fitzgerald and his sisters Pamela and Lucy to their blood," July 13,
1819. The sonnet was addressed to George IV. when Prince Regent. The
title, "To George the Fourth," affixed in 1831, is incorrect. ]

[591] {549}["A friend of Lord Byron's, who was with him at Ravenna when
he wrote these stanzas, says, They were composed, like many others, with
no view of publication, but merely to relieve himself in a moment of
suffering.
He had been painfully excited by some circumstances which
appeared to make it necessary that he should immediately quit Italy; and
in the day and the hour that he wrote the song was labouring under an
access of fever" (_Works_, 1832, xii. 317, note 1). Here, too, there is
some confusion of dates and places. Byron was at Venice, not at Ravenna,
December 1, 1819, when these lines were composed. They were sent, as
Lady Blessington testifies, to Kinnaird, and are probably identical with
the "mere verses of society," mentioned in the letter to Murray of May
8, 1820. The last stanza reflects the mood of a letter to the Countess
Guiccioli, dated November 25 (1819), "I go to save you, and leave a
country insupportable to me without you" (_Letters_, 1900, iv. 379, note
2). ]

[ik] _And as a treasure_. --[MS. Guiccioli. ]

[il] {550}

_Through every weather_
_We pluck_. --[MS. G. ]

[im]

_He'll sadly shiver_
_And droop for ever,_
_Shorn of the plumage which sped his spring_. --[MS. G.