This is no help whatever, but...

Two testimonial stanzas (1.91-92) precede the deceptively conventional 
parting address to Byron's readership that formally concludes canto 1 of 
/Childe Harold's Pilgrimage/. ^3 
<http://muse.jhu.edu.libdatabase.newpaltz.edu/journals/elh/v062/62.1elledge.html#FOOT3> 
The collective circumstances inspiring them realized, with horribly 
concentrated impact, the vision of decimation ending Harold's "Good 
Night" song (/CH/, 1.118197), for they resonate with the grief that 
staggered Byron as he learned, in Jobean succession, of the deaths of 
five intimates between July and October 1811, while preparing his new 
poem for the press. Mrs. Byron died on 1 August at Newstead Abbey, 
before reunion with her son who had lingered in London from mid-July. 
News of the deaths of two schoolmates, Hargreaves Hanson, second son of 
Byron's solicitor, at 23, and John Wingfield, at 20, "among my juniors 
and favourites [at Harrow], whom I spoilt by indulgences" (M, 21), 
reached Byron in late July. Charles Skinner Matthews, the poet's 
high-spirited Cambridge companion, strangled among underwater weeds in 
the River Cam on 3 August. And by 10 October, Byron knew that his 
beloved Cambridge chorister John Edleston was dead of consumption. On 7 
August he wrote in (an uncannily proleptic /Frankensteinian/) anguish to 
Scrope Berdmore Davis:

    Some curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this
    house: one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I say,
    or think, or do? My dear Scrope, if you can spare a moment, do come
    down to me, I want a friend. Matthews's last letter was written on
    /Friday/, -- on Saturday he was not.... Come to me, Scrope, I am
    almost desolate -- left almost alone in the world." ^4
    <http://muse.jhu.edu.libdatabase.newpaltz.edu/journals/elh/v062/62.1elledge.html#FOOT4>


And on the 10th to John Cam Hobhouse:

    My dwelling, you already know, is the House of Mourning, & I am
    really so much bewildered with the different shocks I have
    sustained, that I can hardly reduce myself to reason by the most
    frivolous occupations. My poor J. Wingfield, my Mother, & and your
    best friend, (surely not the worst of mine) C [harles] S [kinner] M
    [atthews] have disappeared in one little month since /my return/, &
    without my seeing /either/, though I /heard/ from /All/. (/L/, 2:69). 

Hearing, Byron not only establishes a community of connections; as 
metaphor, hearing, more nearly than reading, realizes the presence only 
teased (and withheld) by epistolary texts, and of course renders 
proportionately more painful the lamented dissociations and the silences 
they signify. *[End Page 122]*

On the 22nd, Byron enrolls Frances Hodgson in the listening fellowship:

    You may have heard of the sudden death of my mother, and poor
    Matthews, which, with that of Wingfield... has made a sad chasm in
    my connexions. Indeed the blows followed each other so rapidly that
    I am yet stupid from the shock, and though I do eat and drink and
    talk, and even laugh, at times, yet I can hardly persuade myself
    that I am awake, did not every morning convince me mournfully to the
    contrary. (/L/, 2:77) 

And finally, on 7 September to Robert Charles Dallas: In M** [Matthews] 
I have lost my 'guide, philosopher, and friend'; in Wingfield a friend 
only, but one whom I could have wished to have preceded in his long 
journey... [Matthews] was indeed an extraordinary man... To me he was 
much, to Hobhouse every thing... I did not love quite so much as I 
honoured him; I was indeed so sensible of his infinite superiority, that 
though I did not envy, I stood in awe of it... I am quite alone, as 
these long letters testify. (/L/, 2:93)

M. Borges Accardi wrote:
> cavern of melancholy from Hamlet?
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Duemer <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Fri, 4 Jan 2008 3:52 am
> Subject: Re: Help!!Robert Charles Dallas
>
>
>
> If it's not on Google it doesn't exist!
>
> jd
>
> On Jan 4, 2008 3:58 AM, Patrick McManus <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>   
>> Hi all you well read hi tech academic friends  -a friend of mine went to
>> Jamaica and saw a poem -up on a wall in a cave??/called 'the Cavern of
>> Melancholy' by Robert Charles Dallas  c1778and was very impressed
>>
>> And would like to see it-I with my limited resources -ie google can't find
>> it -any leads ??
>>
>> Cheers Patrick -perhaps it might have a blowen in it??
>>
>>     
>
>
>
>   

-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/

The moral is this: in American verse,
The better you are, the pay is worse.
  --Corey Ford