Elegies for the dead, written by a fourteen-year-old girl, a daughter of the Grangerford family and a past master of “obituary poetry.” Said Twain, “Every time...a child died, she would be on hand with her ‘tribute’ before he was cold. The neighbors…
“A wind released involuntarily procures for the impoverished Berthe a most brilliant marriage; which confirms that which is said somewhere, that a fart is sometimes good for something.”
Immediately following publication of the first edition, the…
Byron said it showed “the evils, moral and physical, of true dissipation,” and before his death, he ordered the book destroyed. In 1824, after violent argument, it was burnt by his publisher John Murray and John Cam Hobhouse on the hearth at…