Sir Egerton Brydges on Lord Byron

Abstract

ONE of the curiosities of literature is the fervent defense of Lord Byron's morality by the very circumspect Sir Egerton Brydges.' Byron's death in I824 was the excuse for the elderly antiquarian to write profusely about his misunderstood hero. Within little more than a year Brydges had written two books on Byron and included a defense of the poet's patriotism in still a third book. By I83 I Brydges had made Byron a central figure in two poems. Finally, in I834, the old man sat down to write his autobiography, and the loving manner in which he introduces and defends Byron shows that he has adopted the youthful poet as his spiritual son. The reasons for this strange partnership are not hard to find when the evidence is examined more closely. I shall attempt, first of all, to show how Brydges defended Byron, and then to analyze the motives behind the defense. The first bond of sympathy began when the young nobleman's verses were ridiculed by the Scotch reviewers. Brydges believed in aristocracy and had done prodigious research on the British peerage. Like Byron he had received rebuffs at the hand of the despised "new" peers, and so it was with intense interest and delight that he noticed the young lord's poetical retorts in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as well as his later acclaim on the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The strange hero worship reached a climax on Byron's death. The spark set off Brydges' smoldering desire to become the poet's public champion, and a rapid succession of writings about Byron came from the garrulous Sir Egerton. In less than three months after Byron's death in Greece on April 19, I824, Brydges had finished his Letters on the Character and Poetical Genius of Lord Byron, which attracted very little attention at the time,2 although it is probably, as Professor Chew calls it, the