Buxton Forman in 1886, "To Mary" has never been reprinted—not even in supposedly complete editions of Byron's works.

Only four copies of Fugitive Pieces are known to-day, and one of these is incomplete. The copy from which the present facsimile is made was originally given by Byron to Becher and preserved by him in spite of his objections to the poem "To Mary." From Becher's family it passed into the possession of Mr. Faulkner, of Louth, solicitor for the Becher family. In 1885 it was in the possession of H.W. Ball, antiquary and bookseller of Barton-on-Humber, who sold it to H. Buxton Forman. Forman used it for his facsimile, but incorporated certain manuscript corrections of the original, so that his facsimile is not exact. The original is now owned by Mr. Thomas J. Wise, who has kindly permitted its use for the present facsimile.

Of the other three copies, the incomplete one, lacking pages 17-20 ("To Mary") and all after page 58, is in the possession of the family of the late Mr. H.C. Roe, of Nottingham. This was originally sent by Byron to Pigot, then studying medicine in Edinburgh. Byron later asked Pigot to destroy the copy and Pigot seems to have complied so far as to tear out the offending verses "To Mary." For many years it was thought that only the Pigot and Becher copies had escaped destruction at Byron's hands. But another complete copy came to light in 1907 and is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. This contains numerous manuscript corrections and alterations, and seems to have been used as a proof copy for Poems on Various Occasions (not, as has sometimes been stated, for Hours of Idleness). A fourth copy, also complete, was offered at public sale in 1912, and is now in the hands of the executors of the late Mr. J.A. Spoor, of Chicago.

The present facsimile is an exact photographic reproduction of the text with all typographical and other errors as in the original, except that certain manuscript corrections which appear in the original perforce appear in the photographic reproduction, as follows:

The text has been collated with that in the Morgan library, and except for later corrections made in ink in the Morgan copy, the only differences noted are as follows:

CONTENTS

1.) On p. 5, in the first line of the footnote, the Morgan copy reads "piece" where the Wise copy reads         "p˙ece," the "ı" 

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