The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 3 (August 1, 1931)
Newstead Abbey
Newstead Abbey.
Gladly one turns from the sordid story of debts to a traveller in what Keats has called the realms of gold. A little more than a hundred years ago died Lord Byron, poet and friend of Greece; and his fame has survived sufficiently to inspire an unannounced philanthropist (said to be Sir Julian Cahn) to purchase Newstead Abbey, the Byron ancestral home, and transfer it to the public care of the City of Nottingham. Newstead Abbey, according to a British Official Wireless despatch of 17th July, is “to be maintained in perpetuity” by Nottingham for the enjoyment of the people. In Byron's time, and ever since, there have been many of his own countrymen inclined to belittle his poetic merit. In his own life-time his fame stood distinctly higher on the Continent than at Home. But the great Goethe said that whatever the English might think of Byron, “this is certain: that they show no poet who is to be compared with him.”