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R. B. Hoppner—whose name is known to us in Russia,
because, in 1813, he translated from the German into
English, our Admiral Krusenstern’s “Voyage round the
world in the years 1803-6”—was married in September,
1814, at Brussels, to Mademoiselle Marie Isabelle May,
daughter to Beat Louis May, living in the Canton of
Berne, in Switzerland. In November of the same year
he was appointed Consul-General at Venice and the
Austrian territories in the Adriatic.
Lord Byron, when at Venice, in 1817, became a great friend of his, as may be seen from his letters, out of which not less than eighteen are printed by Thomas Moore in his “Letters and Journals of Lord Byron.” In several of them he alludes to Hopper’s, then “little, son.”
On examining at Heidelberg the books in which the names of the students at the University are entered, I found that this John William (the name Rizzo is not mentioned) Hoppner became a student there in 1834. He
accompanied Lord Amherst in 1816 to China, and is known as a navigator in the Arctic Seas, with Parry and Ross. He died on the 23rd December, 1833. The third son, Lascelles, drew, as a first artistic production, the frontispiece to the father’s translation of “Oriental Tales,” printed in 1815.
