been the poker and tongs, which both parties used with peculiar dexterity. An anecdote relative to these disputes is worth mentioning, viz. :—that each was known to have gone privately, after one of them, to the apothecary's, inquiring anxiously whether the other had been to purchase poison, and cautioning the vender of drugs not to attend to such an application, if made. It was at Newark that Byron, under the superintendence of Mr. Ridge, bookseller and publisher, first appeared as a poet. All the anecdotes told of him at this time are indicative of that passion for bull-dogs and Newfoundland dogs, and Wogden's pistols, which seems to have been as much blended with his character and pursuits as even the poetry which he was then preparing to produce; while, in some private theatricals, acting alternately Penruddock in the Wheel of Fortune, and the whimsical Tristram Fickle in the farce of the Weathercock, he even then displayed that powerful versatility and singular contrast of light and shade which in after-life became so conspicuous. It would be difficult to give a more amiable and interesting account of his pursuits at this time than he gave in a letter to Lord Clare. "Southwell, Notts, February 6th, 1807. "My dearest Clare, "Were I to make all the apologies necessary to atone for my late negligence, you would justly say you had received a petition instead of a letter, as it would be filled with prayers for forgiveness; but, instead of this, I will acknow ledge my sins at once, and I trust to your friendship and generosity rather than to my own excuses. Though my health is not perfectly re-established, I am out of all danger, and have recovered every thing but my spirits, which are subject to depression. You will be astonished to hear I have lately written to Delawarr, for the purpose of explaining (as far as possible without involving some old friends of mine in the business) the cause of my behaviour to him during my last residence at Harrow (nearly two years ago), which you will recollect was rather 'en cavalier. Since that period I bave discovered he was treated with injustice, both by those who misrepresented his conduct, and by me in consequence of their suggestions. I have made all the reparation in my power, by apologizing for my mistake, though with very faint hopes of success; indeed I never expected any answer, but desired one for form's sake; that has not yet arrived, and most probably never will. However, I have eased my own conscience by the atonement, which is humiliating enough to one of my disposition; yet I could not have slept satisfied with the reflection of having, even unintentionally, injured any individual. I have done all that could be done to repair the injury, and there the affair must end. Whether we re. new our intimacy or not is of very trivial consequence. "My time has lately been much occupied with very diffe. rent pursuits. I have been transporting a servant (I) who cheated me, rather a disagreeable event;-performing in private theatricals;-publishing a volume of poems (at the request of my friends, for their perusal);-making love, (1) His valet Frank. (2) At this time he seems to have undertaken a poem in and taking physic. The two last amusements have not had the best effect in the world: for my attentions have been divided amongst so many fair damsels, and the drugs I swallow are of such variety in their composition, that between Venus and Esculapius I am harassed to death. However, I have still leisure to devote some hours to the recollections of past regretted friendships, and in the interval to take the advantage of the moment, to assure you how much I am, and ever will be, my dearest Clare, "Your truly attached and sincere "BYRON." The poems, first published for a few friends, were soon afterwards given to the public in general. These poems were, as it appears from his own account, received favourably, and noticed with eulogium in most of the periodical papers of the day, always excepting the Edinburgh Review, the severity of whose attack, as well as the consequences attendant thereupon, are well known. The celebrated article which called forth English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was, as it is now pretty well ascertained, from the pen of our late Lord Chancellor, at that time Mr. Brougham, and who then seemed to feel no common pleasure in displaying the energy of his sneer on a bad poet, who happened to be a lord. It has been usual of late years to discover a merit in these poems, which would render the review in question not only most ungenerous (we don't expect generosity from reviewers), but also most unjust. For my own part, I confess that I do not think I have ever read, even among the most paltry of Lord Byron's juvenile imitators, a more decided specimen of the to-be-damned doggrel, than was then exhibited by Lord Byron himself, with a kind of absurd apology for a lord condescending to be a poet. The little volume, under the title of Hours of Idleness, gave small promise as to his Lordship's future hours being well employed. This does not justify the reviewer, since unnecessary severity is never justifiable; but it justifies, in a certain degree, the aspirations of other young scribblers, who, in testifying a propensity, should not be at once driven from indulging it, even if the early specimens of their taste should seem an accusation on their genius. The value which Lord Byron set upon his aristocratical pretensions, and upon those who enjoy similar titles to respect, fully appears in the letter wherein he states himself, for these anti-poetic compositions, admired by duchesses, and much above the consideration of rustic readers:-"My cousin," he says, "Lord Alexander Gordon, who resided in the same hotel as myself, told me his mother, her Grace of Gordon, requested he would introduce my poetical Lordship to her Highness, as she had bought my volume, and admired it exceedingly, in common with the rest of the fashionable world.” (2) blank verse, on the subject of Bosworth Field; amidst the excitement of which he does not forget to inform his cor. It is not however in his successes, but in his disappointments, that the genius of Byron seemed to delight: then all that was great and masculine in his character came forth. Instead of sickening, like the unfortunate Keats, at the Northern criticism of his work, it was that criticism which seemed to give a tone to his mind, and to awaken powers in his intellect which had hitherto lain dormant; the clang of battle struck upon the ears of a courser, who seemed to have an instinctive passion for the strife. A friend, who found him in the first moments of excitement after this attack, inquired anxiously whether he had just received a challenge, not knowing how else to account for the fierce defiance of his looks. It would indeed be difficult for a sculptor or painter to imagine a subject of more fearful beauty than the fine countenance of the young Poet, in the collected energy of this crisis, when, instead of despairing of poetic immortality, he drank three bottles of claret, and commenced at once twenty lines of that satire by which he ultimately avenged himself. Lord Byron's situation was a singular one. High on the rolls of the aristocracy, without one single aristocratical acquaintance, the heir to a property which had been for centuries in his family,the expectant of wealth which, if not of the nature we are accustomed to consider concomitant with the British peerage, was still such as would in any other country have been considered a noble independence,-having a right to claim a relationship with some of the greatest names in the country, and yet ostensibly connected with only a vulgar and violent old woman, -having no home but a coffee-house,-little immediate income beyond the debts he could create, totally unlinked from that society to which he was born, and just launched in a career which, if we consider the boyish talents, or the more manly propensities which he had evinced, seemed as little likely to suit his abilities and his character, as to be in harmony with his situation, "Reft of his sire-too young such loss to know; He seemed, indeed, in a position where, with every- a prostitute, who accompanied him in man's clothes to Brighton, and laid the foundation of reports which subsequently blackened his reputation,-outwardly occupied with this disgraceful attachment, and with those hardly more honourable amusements that were to be found in Mr. Jackson's pugilistic academy, and d'Egville the ballet-master's and Grimaldi the clown's most intellectual entertainments,-his mind must have been inwardly the prey to a feverish anxiety after nobler pursuits; and it was the impatience, which would not permit him to pause before the different paths which might equally have led to fame, that made him at once take that path which was open to all ages, which required no patrons, and which was in harmony with the singular solitude in which a man of his rank and station is hardly ever similarly found. Having determined to quit, for a time at all events, the country in which he was so unnaturally placed, he resolved to mark his passage from it by a meteor, which should warn the coming times that there was something to expect from his career. Mortified in his person, because the handsome intelligence of his countenance rather served to call a halt in his gait into notice than to extinguish its effects,--mortified in his love, since the only person for whom he seems to have felt a real affection had treated his pretensions with a contempt not easily, under similar circumstances, to be forgiven,-mortified in his ambition, since the effort which he made to show the injustice of the attack upon his muse proved his sensibility to it,-mortified also, in a greater degree, where he was most likely to be susceptible, having been nursed up in all those ideas of family pride and feudal consequence which poverty, allied to nobility and unexpectedly called to assume its honours, is sure to engender,—never had a man more elements in his mind, out of which to form a satirist, than young Lord Byron, when he flung in the face of the critics he was answering, and the country he was quitting, his refutation of one and his farewell to the other. It was in the beginning of the year 1809, that he set out for London, in his way, as he then intended, for Persia, with the intention of first publishing his poem, and taking his seat with the peerage. He first entered the House of Lords in this year, 1809, March 13, "more lone and unfriended," writes his biographer, "than perhaps any youth in his high station had ever been before," not having a single individual of his own class, either to take him by the hand as a friend, or to acknowledge him as an acquaintance. "His countenance," says Mr. Dallas, Outwardly occupied at this time by his passion for who accompanied him on this occasion, "paler than respondents that the Duke of York, the Marchioness of Headfort, and the again-to-be-mentioned Duchess of Gordon, were among the purchasers of his other publication. usual, showed that his mind was agitated. There was not a single member of the senate to which he belonged to whom he could or would apply to intro duce him in a manner becoming his birth. I saw that he felt the situation, and I fully partook of his indignation." This indignation, indeed, was not diminished by certain difficulties that had attended the proof of his birth, and consequently the ceremonial claim of his station; the marriage of Admiral Byron with Miss Trevanion having taken place in a private chapel at Carhais, from which no regular certificate of the ceremony could be produced. Speaking of | this, and of his reception by the Chancellor, Lord Eldon, whose cordial welcome to him was not very welcomely received, Lord Byron himself says:"When I came of age, some delays, on account of birth and marriage certificates from Cornwall, occasioned me not to take my seat for several weeks; when these were over, and I had taken the oaths, the Chancellor apologised to me for the delay, observing that these forms were part of his duty. I begged him to make no apology, and added, as he had certainly shown no violent hurry, 'Your Lordship is exactly like Tom Thumb,' which was then being acted, 'you did your duty, and you did no more.'" A few days after this, was published the bitter expression of those feelings which, even thus early, a variety of circumstances had excited: and now, wrapping himself up in his loneliness, and a desolation which his ardent temperament and poetic imagination led him naturally even to exaggerate, he retired to the seclusion of his cowl-haunted Abbey, in part to brood over the disappointments he had ex│perienced, in part, perhaps, to indulge unchecked in those anticipations of brighter lands and more glorious days which the poem he was publishing, and the expedition he was undertaking, were likely to create. Not but that in his solitude-a solitude perhaps not the less lonely for a crowd-he was, if we may credit his own accounts (which his now sage companions do not disavow)— "Sore given to revel and ungodly glee; Few earthly things found favour in bis sight II. In June he set sail with Mr. Hobhouse for Lisbon, describing the commencement of his undertaking in verses that do no disgrace to the author of Beppo.(1) The following passage, in a prose letter to Mr. Hodgson, exhibits the same boyish and light-hearted spirit:-"I am very happy here (Lisbon), because I loves oranges, and talks bad Latin to the monks, who understand it, as it is like their own; and I goes into society (with my pocket-pistols), and I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass and (1) See page 851. a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhoea, and bites from the musquitos. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a-pleasuring." Few boarding-school misses would have received this as an autograph note from the romantic author of Childe Harold! Lord Byron's travels at this time form an epochand not the least important epoch-in his life. There was naturally in his character a strange assemblage of different and, as some would imagine, incompatible qualities. He had in that character much romance : his early verses, his early loves, his early friendships and fights, his mysterious passion for parading fire-arms, and even the anecdote of his disinterring and drinking out of the old monk's skull, are all proofs of this. He had also much common sense. This we see in his admiration of Pope, in his horror of the Lakeschool, and the Cockney-school, in his careful imitation of the beauties of Shelley, and as careful abstainment from his faults. One of the memorialists of Byron has said, that he had much playfulness and satire; he might have said so from his works--from the English Bards, from Beppo, and from Don Juan: but this talent is far more visible in his incomparable letters, written evidently without effort or affectation, and totally free from that dressing and drapery for stage effect, which is seen in most of his other performances. Indeed, if Byron had one quality more naturally conspicuous than the rest, it was wit. Had he not travelled at this time, left to the success of the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and to his own strong taste and inclination, which, even amidst the mountains of Albania and the temples of Athens, did not wholly yield to more lone and magnificent aspirations, (2) it is very probable, not that his fame would have been less, but that it would have rested on a totally different basis from that which now forms the mystic pedestal of his genius. His travels at this period, when his mind was most likely to be susceptible to their impressions, developed the romantic part of his character in such a manner as to throw the other parts of it into the shade. Remembering, as I do, the sensations which even saluted me on my first visiting a southern climeremembering the strange and wild ecstacy with which I also at an early period of life first found myself on those shores, the images of which are, from their singularity as well as their associations, the most striking-remembering, as I well remember, the strange, exulting, and indescribable feeling with which I stood on the shores of Greece, hearing a new and yet half-familiar language, gazing on garbs wild and picturesque, and looking over, from the spot on which I stood, those plains so sacred to history and to song, and which mingled so naturally with all my youthful recollections and heroic reveries-remember (2) See Hints from Horace. ing my own sensations, as I well remember them, at such a time and in such scenes, it is not difficult for me to imagine what must have been the sensations of a more poetic and impassioned mind, which a passage through Portugal and Spain must have already deeply excited. In Cadiz' white walls, indeed, the young poet seems to have experienced some of the effects of that Spanish beauty which I, judging very differently from Mr. Galt (1) on this subject, think he has se voluptuously described. Among those women “of long black hair, dark languishing eyes, clear olive complexions, and forms more graceful in motion than can be conceived by an Englishman, used to the drowsy listlessness of his countrywomen," he found one to whom he made carnest love, by the help of a dictionary. At Malta again, the interesting and romantic Mrs. S whom he has celebrated as Florence, drew from him those beautiful lines, which I still remember, though I have not read them since I was a boy at school: "Though far from Albin's craggy shore, Divided by the dark blue main, "But wheresoe'er I now may roam, I ne'er may bend my eyes on thee," etc. etc. When I said that I could well conceive Lord Byron's feelings on this his first and least fatal visit to Greece, I ought to have added, that if one man was more likely than another to have deepened the impressions naturally produced by that land, and its people strange and wild, it was the Albanian chief to whose camp our Poet, on first arriving, directed his steps. On many of his subsequent pages fell the dark shadow of the daring Ruler of Albania; and, indeed, it is difficult to underrate the effect which such scenes as the following must have had upon a young and imaginative mind: "I shall never forget the singular scene on entering Tepaleen at five in the afternoon, as the sun was going down. It brought to my mind (with some change of dress, however) Scott's description of Brank some Castle in his Lay, and the feudal system. The Albanians, in their dresses (the most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, gold-worked cloak, crimson velvet gold-laced jacket and waistcoat, silver-mounted pistols and daggers), the Tartars with their high caps, the Turks in their vast pelisses and turbans, the soldiers and black slaves with the horses, the former in groups in an immense large open gallery in front of the palace, the latter placed in a kind of cloister below it, two hundred steeds ready caparisoned to move in a moment, couriers entering or (1) See Galt's Life of Byron. (2) He returned from Constantinople again to Greece. passing out with dispatches, the kettle-drums beating, boys calling the hour from the minaret of the mosque, altogether with the singular appearance of the building itself, formed a new and delightful spectacle to a stranger." At last, after crossing Portugal, traversing the South of Spain, visiting Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, and thence passing through Albania, Illyria, and Chaonia, over the Gulf of Actium and the Achelous, tarrying in the Morea, visiting Thebes, Athens, Delphi, Parnassus, and finally Constantinople (2)—having lived with the highest and the lowest, been for days in a Pacha's palace, and nights in a cow-house, having stored his mind with all that adventure, nature, art, and history, could pour into it,-having, moreover, stimulated and excited those passions which chimed in with the wild and wandering existence he had been leading,—the Childe returned to his native England, with much that had been doubtful in his destiny decided, and all that had been doubtful in his character confirmed. Before his journey, Lord Byron might have been any thing;-after it, he must have beena Poet. His welcome back again was certainly not an inviting one; and affords a new proof of the almost perpetual unhappiness in which persons, eminent in literature, seem usually to pass their lives:-"Indeed, my prospects are not very pleasant. Embarrassed in my private affairs, indifferent to public, solitary without the wish to be social, with a body a little enfeebled by a succession of fevers, but a spirit, I trust, yet unbroken, I am returning home without a hope, and almost without a desire. The first thing I shall have to encounter will be a lawyer, the next a creditor, then colliers, farmers, surveyors, and all the agreeable attachments to estates out of repair and contested coal-pits. In short, I am sick and sorry, and when I have a little repaired my irreparable affairs, away I shall march, either to campaign in Spain, or back again to the East, where I can at least have cloudless skies and a cessation from impertinence."Such were his feelings on arriving; nor did fate seem to brighten with his stay. A short time after his return, died Mrs. Byron, at Newstead. She died suddenly. "I heard," he says, 'one day of her illness-the next, of her death."-Nor was this all besides the loss of his mother, he had to mourn, within a few weeks, two of his most valued friends, Mr. Wingfield and Mr. Matthews. "Some curse," he writes to Mr. S. Davies, " hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends is drowned (3) in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? Come to me, Scrope, I am almost desolate-left almost alone in the world." "Peace, however," he adds, in another (3) Mr. Matthews. Mr. Wingfield died at Coimbre. letter," peace be with the dead. Regret cannot wake them. With a sigh to the departed, let us resume the dull business of life, in the certainty that we also shall have our repose." And now, upshooting from these dark vexations, appeared the glories of his future career; for we are at the dawn of that fame which was soon to rise so brightly above all contemporary reputations. Returning from his travels, Lord Byron had brought with him a kind of light satire, similar in many respects to the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and another work which, as well, perhaps, from its novelty as its merit, created a sensation, which hardly any poem ever produced at its appearance. The first was called Hints from Horace, the second, Childe Harold; and, if we are to believe Mr. Dallas, the Poet gave his preference to the first, a very clever but by no means surprising performance. To account for this is not difficult; a writer who has been for some time employed over his work does not perceive the merits of its originality, while he trembles for his want of example; and Byron, seeing no existing model of his method, shrunk from doing that which nobody had done, nor saw that the very reason of his apprehensions would be the cause of his success. Childe Harold succeeded more than, I think, the merits of the two first Cantos deserved; and not only was the success extraordinary, but of a description the most likely to please. It was not the poem that was admired only; it was the poet, about whom an interest was excited. The fictitious hero of the tale, between whom and the writer of it, we must confess, there was some kind of resemblance, was considered at once as an accurate portrait of the mysterious young noble who had just returned from the lands of romance and song, which he had been describing. If Lord Byron had been known in the world before his travels, the world would have viewed both himself and his travels differently; but, though a peer of England, he was unknown, as I have said, to English society; and those who for the first time now made inquiries respecting him, heard that he was the grand-nephew of the singular old lord who had been tried for killing Mr. Chaworth; that he had a | ruined Abbey, and a damaged estate; that at college he had been known for keeping a bear; and on leaving college for drinking out of a skull; while numerous tales, not altogether without foundation, were circulated as to that life of licentiousness, under the satiety of which his pilgrimage was said to have been begun. His previous satire, though popular and admired, had never awakened any of those stories, and Lord (1) That Lord Byron had in all his passions a kind of premeditation is no where better proved than by a circumstance which I venture to state, namely, that many of the most apparently inspired letters which he sent about this time, as the outpourings of a deep attachment Byron after it, in spite of his bear, in spite of his skull, might have passed for any thing he pleased. But upon THE CHILDE they were all so much appropriate drapery, and set off, with a wilder horror, the enchanting young lord who wrote such beautiful poetry, and who seemed to have known every thing,-himself unknown. In a town always panting for novelty, and amidst that part of a town the curiosity of which is ever most alive, such a melancholy and romantic phoenix as the new poet, a gentleman who had been guilty of every misdemeanour, and, as he seemed to imply, of some dark and unutterable crimes; who had been to Lisbon and to Cadiz, to Athens, and to Constantinople, regions then much more unknown and remote than at the present time; and who, moreover, added to all these qualifications an old title, and a declaration that he had loved very much, and was determined never to love again; having, also, small ears and white hands, and curly hair, as he told the world Ali Pacha had told him, and a countenance peculiarly adapted to a frontispiece arrangement-was destined, for a year at least, to figure as the personage of the epoch. It was at this time, however, when the moodiness of his supposed character added in no small degree to his reputation, that Byron's real character became more amiable and composed. His manners, too, lost that unevenness, betwixt pride and playfulness, which had formerly distinguished them. He was no longer so proud of being a peer, because he found his rank at last attended naturally by all those circumstances which a patrician by birth expected, and which, as a plebeian by acquaintance, he did not formerly enjoy. It was now that a long series of gallantries began, the most notorious of which, as well on account of the singularities as the talent of the lady, was that of Lady Caroline Lamb. Whatever might have been the subsequent faults of this lady, her affection for Lord Byron was the first; and, though not beautiful, it would be difficult to imagine a person who, from the originality of her mind, and the fascination of her manners, was more likely to have attracted the attention, and, if the volatility of her character had permitted it, to have riveted the affections, of the Poet. Deeply attached to her he was at one time, and an elopement was meditated, which the lady had the merit of refusing. This refusal, and an offence to his personal vanity, which was supposed to have followed at no great distance of time, Lord Byron never forgave, and, up to the last hour of his existence, the lady in question, who adored his memory, was treated by him with ridicule and contempt. (1) were nothing more nor less than actual translations from a French novel, which every libertine has studied, but of which few lovers have made so profligate a use • Les Liaisons Dangercuses. |