PAINTED BY HIS COMPEERS; OR, ALL ABOUT LORD BYRON, From his Marriage to his Death, AS GIVEN IN THE VARIOUS NEWSPAPERS OF HIS DAY, SHEWING WHEREIN THE AMERICAN NOVELIST GIVES A TRUTHFUL "Facts are stronger than Fiction." LONDON: SAMUEL PALMER, 20, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND. PREFACE. HEN the great Louis desired his secretary to read to WH him, he asked his Majesty what he should read: "Should it be a Memoir or a History?" "No," said the Monarch, "for that is sure to be false." So if we want a truthful account of our great poet, let us not read the exciting pages of a sensational novelist, but turn to the genuine accounts given as they occurred in the papers of the day, and see what his contemporaries said of him, both while he was living and after his decease. The truest portrait of a man must be that which is photographed in his lifetime, and not that which is drawn after a dreamy recollection of some fifty years gone by. UPPER HOLLOWAY, October, 1869. |