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remains to trace out how Schilling’s contrivance found its way from Heidelberg to London.
It will surprise many to learn that the individual who became the cause of this being done was, when a new-born child, mentioned by Lord Byron.
In a letter which Lord Byron wrote on the 20th of February, 1818, from Venice to the publisher of his productions, Mr. John Murray, in Albemarle-street, London, he says at the end, “Mr. Hoppner, whom I saw this morning, has been made the father of a very fine boy. Mother and child are doing very well indeed.”[1]
The father of this child, Richard Belgrave Hoppner, was one of three sons of John Hoppner, the celebrated portrait painter, who, even at the time of his birth, in 1759, had received special attention from King George III., and who died as one of the Royal Academicians on the 25th
of January, 1810.[2]
- ↑ On the birth of this child, which was christened: John William Rizzo, Byron wrote four lines in verse, which have been metrically translated in ten other languages. The original lines and the translations, with the exception of the Armenian, are to be seen in Murray’s “Poetical Works of Lord Byron,” p. 571.
- ↑ Another son of his, Henry Perkyns Hoppner, had
