Ethel Colburn Mayne was too sensible to push forward such trumped-up scandal-mongering, and in any event her 1912 biography, Byron, is the only full-length scholarly study of Byron in the public domain. Its spirited prose and perceptive insights are supported by thorough research and careful documentation. This is not to say that Mayne's judgments about Byron are in all instances indisputable. Like all of us, she has her own subtle biases and idiosyncrasies. Nonetheless, the modern reader who studies Byron's letters and Mayne's biography will probably end up with a better understanding of the poet than the reader who drops $35 on one of the current biographies.

Thus, like many another writer of many another nation, I (the countrywoman of Thomas Moore, his first biographer) "felt the call"--I longed to write a book about Byron. The coveted opportunity was afforded, and then for the first time realising the task which lay before me, I realised also for the first time the delight. If any degree of the joy I have felt in the work be transmitted to my readers, I shall count myself a fortunate woman. But perhaps I ought to apologise, as Byron's biographer, for being a woman at all. Assuredly he would have thought so. "You should recollect", he wrote of some critical severity on Lady Morgan, "that she is a woman; though, to be sure, they are now and then very provoking, still, as authoresses, they can do no great harm". The indulgence, scathing as it is, would not have been extended to her who dared to ply her pen on the subject of himself.

Much water has run, since Byron's day, under the bridge between authors and "authoresses" ; it seemed high time that a woman should write of this "victim of her sex", as he loved to call himself. There might appear, were I to cite all the arguments in such a biographer's favour, something too much of that sex-vanity which many of us feel to be nowadays losing in subtlety of effect what it has gained in candour; and indeed I think that the extremely articulate method is here, as elsewhere, superfluous. Those who have not already "the arguments" at their fingers' ends, will, I humbly hope, discover them as they read.

A word about the books on Byron.

Moore's Life, published in 1830, is the foundation-stone for all; and if we often wish that it had been more soundly laid, we nevertheless must recognise that it has enabled two structures of supreme value to be erected. I allude to the editions of the Letters and Journals, and of the Poetry, by Mr. Rowland E. Prothero and Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, respectively. Both are published by Mr. John Murray. Praise of such works from me would be an absurdity: I offer my sincerest gratitude and admiration.

John Cordy Jeaffreson's book, The Real Lord Byron (1883), which is by way of being a "full-dress" biography, is, rather, a full-dress debate. All through it the author argues interminably against now an actual, now an imagined, opponent, and we rise from our perusal with brain battered and image shattered. Neither a "real" nor an unreal Byron emerges from these wordy pages, wherein there is an occasional shrewdness, an intermittent flash of insight, a love of truth that pulses, however, chiefly for the sake of defeating some one else's. Further, the book was written at a time when guesswork had to supply the place of knowledge, and Jeaffreson, like many another, guessed badly.

Of the late Lord Lovelace's Astarte (1905), the text of this book says enough. Astarte gives us vivid evocations of Lady Byron and Mrs. Leigh, and it has, besides, the supreme merit of unassailable documents--to a degree which makes the sole attempt at refutation a mere monument of absurdity. (See Appendix III.: Medora Leigh.)

These are the chief sources. Of the rest, I may mention Galt's short Life (1830) and Lady Blessington's Recollections (1834). W. E. Henley's notes to the single volume of letters with which he dealt (1897) have been, I cannot but think, a little overpraised. His inaccuracies are flagrant; his devotion to the "prize-ring" aspect of society is exaggerated to a degree which destroys the values of his picture; while his animus against all the women concerned is so great as to make him a mere special pleader in the record of the Byronic basenesses.

Of Lord Broughton's Recollections, the value, less though it be than fond expectation had long looked forward to, is still considerable, especially as regards the highly controversial topic of the burnt Memoirs.

In writing of Byron, we write of quintessential humanity. "My pang shall find a voice": that cry in Manfred is the word, as it were, of his life; and he uttered it hardly more for himself than for us all. We need that utterance, for scarce one of us would have the honesty, had we the power, to crystallise our feelings into the phrases he has made for us. "Humour" we love to term our lesser form of self-consciousness, but Byron's self-consciousness was supreme, and towered high above the subterfuge of humour. Through its excess it became its own antithesis--it became unconscious. He "did not know when he was doing it". Each time we use that pedestrian saying, we define the last triumph of expression. Yes: the vanity of suffering, which every one possesses in a greater or less degree, Byron possessed in a degree which has made him mankind's most fearless mouthpiece--for courage also is needed for such spontaneity as his.

That he was, besides the Byron of Byronism, the Byron of whom his intimate friend could write (in a travesty of one of his saddest poems) that "Momus himself never painted A livelier creature than thee", alters nothing in the case. The paradox was part of the pose, using "pose" in its true sense of "poise"--the way in which you have to stand if you are to stand at all. We hear too much of his "chameleon" character. His character was not chameleon, but strikingly the reverse. Byron never changed; in all surroundings he remained the same. "Everything that he did is implicit in everything else that he did": I have written that elsewhere of him, and it is, in truth, from his invariability that the whole Byronic legend has grown. So far from not being able to guess what he will do, we know on the instant what he will do, and--still more accurately--what he will say. We could not have imagined the words, but we can imagine the sense. Did he ever fail to say it? Not once. "My pang shall find a voice"--and it was always the same voice. The songs, with growing powers, became more complex; even as a De Reszke advances from singing scales to singing Tristan, so Byron advanced from the vibrant monotony of the early narratives to the vibrant variety of his World-poem. What is Lara, after all, but an inarticulate Juan? And in Juan, again, we find further proof of his invariability--for how persistently, in Juan, the imperishable boy that Byron was flames forth! Men are not so intoxicated with "knowing". Goethe perceived this puerile strain in him: "As soon as he reflects, he is a child" (Sobald er reflectirt, ist er ein Kind).

Thus, in the continual portrayal of himself, he was in reality portraying a recurrent aspect of young manhood. The mode, to be sure, is for the hour altered: young men nowadays are morbidly cheerful, amused as never children were by children's toys--and does not the much-paraded bloom seem often to be only painted on the peach? Byron's pallor, Byron's wild-eyed woe, histrionic though they be, convince us of some profound, unseizable sincerity. The sunt lacrimae rerum is somewhere therein affirmed--with all the crudeness of half-comprehension, it is true, yet with a quality in the utterance which persuades the soul. We believe in the Byronic youth from the bottom of our hearts, in short, simply because there never was such a youth, and (as Voltaire said of the Deity) it was necessary to invent him. And if ever, in such more abstract sense, the child was father of the man, Byron's "youth" was father of the wildfire Byron whose stone is not, and never will be, in Westminster Abbey; yet whose memory tingles so keenly through the veins of England that, forgotten as he is often said to be, there is rarely a day even now on which, in one connection or another, we do not find, as they found when he was alive, his name in the newspaper.

John, father of the poet, and elder son of Foulweather Jack, was the other stormy petrel. At twenty-two, a dazzlingly handsome and very dissipated Guardsman, he ran away with, and in a year married, the Marchioness of Carmarthen[5] - born Amelia d'Arcy, only child and heiress of the last Earl of Holderness, and, moreover, Baroness Conyers in her own right. They lived in France, and had three children, of whom only the last-born, Augusta, survived. This was the girl who, in 1807, married her first cousin, George Leigh, and thus became the Augusta Leigh whose name runs through the whole Byron story.

In 1784, the year after Augusta's birth, Lady Conyers[6] died, and Captain Byron returned to England, head over ears in debt, and avowedly on the look-out for what his son, in after years, was to describe as a "Golden Dolly ". He found her quickly in Miss Catherine Gordon of Gight,[7] a direct descendant of the Royal House of Scotland - for Annabella Stewart, daughter of James I of Scotland, had married the second Earl of Huntley, and their third son became Sir William Gordon of Gight. The lairds of Gight were a "hot-headed, hasty-handed race, sufficiently notable to be commemorated by Thomas the Rhymer - and Catherine's father, George Gordon, was the fifth who bore the two names which his grandson was to make immortal. He married one Catherine Innes of Rosieburn; the daughter was born in 1765, and was their only child. Both her parents died early, and she was brought up by her grandmother - a Duff of the Fife family - who lived at Banff, and was commonly called Lady Gight. This was a very parsimonious great lady, and an illiterate one as well; but, aware of the disadvantages of illiteracy, she was solicitous that the little girl should be better educated than herself. Her solicitude bore fruit. Catherine Gordon - destined to be the mother of a great poet - was all her life particularly fond of reading, and read good literature; she wrote vivid, though inelegant, letters; and she could criticise shrewdly, in after years, not only her son's poems (those which she saw, for she died before his notable works were published),[8] but the discrepant reviews of them. On the other hand, she never lost the provinciality, the uncouthness even, of the atmosphere wherein she had grown up, and to this defect was added the far more distressing one of a violent temper which had never known control, and which expressed itself not only in speech, but in all too appropriate action. China as well as "words" flew at her victims' heads; with fire-irons no less than with opprobrium were they pursued.

In this undisciplined personality an evident and overweening pride of birth, justified though it was by facts, made a ludicrous impression. She seemed of the soil - nay, of the slums (had the word then been in vogue); yet in her the observer was enjoined to honour a "gentlewoman"!

It was in Catherine Gordon's twentieth year that, for her sins, she met and married John Byron. Bath was the scene of both events - Bath where, some years earlier, her father had drowned himself.[9] In a girl so superstitious as was the heiress of Gight, it seems a reckless ruffling of destiny to have fixed her wedding-day, in Bath, for the thirteenth of May. But that was what she did, that was how she "defied augury" - and all the world knows whether augury or she prevailed. The union was unimaginably wretched. She had been married for her money - as an anonymous Scottish rhymer had warned her on her wedding-day, in a ballad openly addressed to Miss Gordon of Gight; and her money was instantly snatched from her. In two years (1784-86) the heiress was landless and almost penniless; she had nothing of her own in the world but a pittance of £150 a year.

He was born with a caul. The fabled talisman against drowning was sold by his nurse to one Captain Hanson, brother of Mrs. Byron's family lawyer, John Hanson; and two years after buying it, Captain Hanson was drowned. It is strange that Byron should never have commented on this little irony, and the more so because tragedies of drowning entered with unusual frequency into the story of his life. He had much to say, on the other hand, of the two remaining peculiarities of his birth: his "only childism ", and his twisted foot. Of the former, he made a subject for vanity. "I have been thinking", he says in his Detached Thoughts,[11]" of an odd circumstance. My daughter, wife, half-sister,[12] mother, sister's mother, natural daughter, and myself, are or were all only children. . . . Such a complication of only children, all tending to one family, is singular enough, and looks like fatality almost. But the fiercest animals have the fewest numbers in their litters". Not many passages of his characteristic prose are more characteristic than this one, wherein his constant brooding over the family history is mingled with the special form to which his vanity tended. He would be exceptional at any cost, fierce at any cost: thus horses (the "one-litter" animal par excellence) are omitted from a list in which "lions, tigers, and even elephants, which are mild in comparison", are eagerly displayed. Horses, though spirited, are not "fierce"-and horses are ignored.

Of the other circumstance - the twisted foot - vanity possessed itself also, but this time with a morbid intensity which turned it into one of the keynotes of his life. It is as well one of the puzzles of his story. Inured as the student of biography must needs become to conflicting evidence, the discrepancies here afford a fresh amazement. Of all things, this - a question of visible and tactual fact - would seem the easiest to establish; yet even in the Byron legend no point is more debated. I shall not summon the cloud of witnesses, for they witness only to the enigma; what this one positively affirms, that one as positively contradicts; what the lasts on which his shoes were made[13] would seem to prove - that both feet were perfect - is powerless to convince when set against the observation of all who knew him, and the (perhaps less cogent) testimony of his own incessant mental suffering. . . . From the maze, one certainty alone emerges. The foot was not a club foot. But he, in the histrionic heats of his imagination, fanned as they were by the continuous actual drama which his (in all other respects) surpassing personal beauty kept ablaze - he would be satisfied, so to speak, with nothing less than the worst, the ugliest aspect. He had a club-foot: only the "big word" would do, and it must be in the biggest letters, and the limelight must illume them. It is not difficult to understand. Dowered as he was with almost everything else that the fairies can bring to the christening, this was, as Macaulay said, the bad fairy's bundle. She flung it into his cradle, and she flung a curse with it: he was to attribute it to his mother. The allusion (made by himself) to that mother's "false modesty" remains obscure, but we can conjecture its meaning; and his persuasion of its truth embittered hopelessly a relationship which nothing could have made an even tolerable one. We shall learn later what his life with her contained of mental torture - and we shall not forget, while learning it, that her offences against him dated, as he came to believe, from before his conscious existence. Once, in a fit of her unhappy fury, she called him a lame brat. He answered, "I was born so, mother"; and the boyish face was white with such anguish as permits no further analysis. . . . Words! No blows have ever shown men hell as words can show it.

When the little boy was two years old, Mrs. Byron left London for Aberdeen, where her husband joined her. They lived together for a short time in lodgings in Queen Street, but domesticity with this latter-day Catherine the Curst was out of the question. Jack Byron - then safely self-exiled in Valenciennes - wrote of her in 1791 to his sister, Mrs. Charles Leigh, with whom he corresponded: "She is very amiable at a distance; but I defy you and all the Apostles to live with her two months, for if anybody could live with her, it was me." Nor had he given it up without a fair trial. If they could by no means agree in the same house, perhaps they might contrive to do so, if it were only in the same street. So the lady "flitted" to the farther end of Queen Street, bearing all expenses of the move herself; and they visited one another, drank tea with one another - but even this soon proved to be more than could be tranquilly got through, and they agreed to meet not at all. Captain Byron still lingered a while in Aberdeen - his wife occasionally possessed small sums of ready money which could be wrested from her by letter - and in his walks he often met the little son, out for an airing with his nurse. The father would stop and chat with his offspring, and at last he expressed a wish to have the child on a couple of days' visit. Mrs. Byron demurred, but the nurse declared that if his father kept the boy one night, he would certainly not keep him another. Her presage was fulfilled. When she went next morning to inquire about her charge, Captain Byron earnestly requested her to take him home at once. Moore pleads for his darling that since the nurse (Mrs. Byron having only that one servant) could not stay with him, the little boy was naturally disconcerted, and hence "naughty." No doubt of it; and a still more forcible defence should occur to any one who has ever beheld a man (and a fashionable and dissipated young man at that) helpless before the indomitable will of a child of two years old - to say nothing of its complicated toilet and feeding arrangements.

After this exploit, Jack Byron, probably feeling that he had done all that could be required of him, fled to France, and lived at Valenciennes on his wife's money, until he died in the summer of the following year (1791), aged only thirty-six.

Little though the visit to his father may prove concerning the character of the small "Geordie" (as our poet was called during his Scottish period), there can be no question that he inherited the passionate temper which came to him, as it were, from every side. He was once scolded for having soiled a new frock in which he had just been dressed. The tiny creature, in speechless resentment (" one of my silent rages") seized the frock in both hands and tore it from top to bottom. He had many times seen his mother do the same with her gowns and caps; but we must hope that he had not seen her commit the further delinquency which a relic, treasured in Aberdeen, was still attesting when Moore published his biography in 1830. This was a china saucer, out of which, in another "silent rage", the baby Byron had bitten a large piece.

In such manner was the stage set for his existence with his mother. That rent gown and bitten saucer were sufficiently significant properties, and the drama proceeded in their sense. What was there not to intensify it! There was soon even aggravated poverty. While Jack Byron lived, his wife had been obliged to pay all his expenses; and now that he was dead - now that her characteristic shrieks of grief at that news (they had been heard all over the street) had sunk into silence - the woman who had been the victim of those foibles which deserved "no worse name", found herself heavily involved in debt. For since he to the last had snatched all such ready money as she might have painfully saved out of her very hands, she was forced to procure on credit the furnishing for the flat to which she moved after his death. This was in Broad Street; her expenses in connection with it, joined to the continuous drain that had gone on in the past, now loaded her down with a debt of £300.[14] She was a woman who worried herself vehemently over money-matters; and the incessant strain of grinding penury exacerbated all her natural feelings. Catherine the Curst may claim, in the early days of her motherhood at any rate, some sympathy. An heretofore considerable heiress, totally despoiled, living in a scrubby flat in a depressing northern town, cuts a deplorable figure enough, though she be of docile temper; what the ordeal must have been to this one, fancy hesitates to grasp. She was only twenty-seven years old; she had been, besides a notable heiress, a vain, capricious girl, "as proud as Lucifer": now here she was, a disclassed, unfriended widow, beggared to such a degree that she saw herself obliged to send her spirited and sensitive child to a cheap and nasty day-school in the Long Acre of Aberdeen!

Day-schools, one gathers, were always nasty in those days, and this one was abnormally cheap - only five shillings a quarter. Learning, even of the simplest kind, can hardly have been looked for at the price, and Byron himself has told us how much the year of his attendance taught him: "not even my letters". When his mother found this out, she first soundly boxed his ears, and then got a private tutor for him, "a very devout, clever little clergyman, named Ross". Under Ross the boy discovered the passionate delight in historical reading which remained with him to the end. Next came Paterson, the "very serious, saturnine, but kind young man, the son of my shoemaker" - who was nevertheless a good scholar, and initiated him into Latin. From Paterson's hands he passed into the Aberdeen Grammar School, where he remained till he was ten years old.

In 1796, after an attack of scarlet fever, Mrs. Byron took him to the Highlands, and either in that year or the following one they lived at a farmhouse near Ballater. "From this period", he wrote long afterwards, "I date my love of mountainous countries". . . . It is said that our earliest clear memory of anything in Nature is always connected with that aspect which in later life is to prove the nearest to our hearts. Byron's joy was tardy in arrival: he was eight years old before he ever saw a mountain; but the first vision was remembered as only the destined vision is - and, to account for its immanent vividity, we need no thin-spun theorising (such as Moore and Christopher North resort to) but merely the knowledge that these are something more than revocations, and shine for their possessors in the light that never was on sea or land. Such to me is my first outdoor memory - and each will find, on reflection, that the First-Remembered is, as well, the heart of all dreaming.

In Byron's boyish volume there are two poems relating to the Highland sojourn.[15] Of the first, the subject is the mountain of Loch-na-gar (or Lachin-y-gair) near Invercauld; one Mary - "sweet Mary" with "the long flowing ringlets of gold" - is the inspiration of the second. "Byron", says Mr. E. H. Coleridge, "was in early youth 'unco' wastefu'' of Marys". Between the ages of eight and ten we find two - this evanescent Highland nymph,[16] and the dark-haired, hazel-eyed little cousin and beauty, whose "very dress" he remembered sixteen years later when, in 1813, he wrote the famous passage in his journal for November 26: "I have been thinking a good deal lately of Mary Duff".

Precocity in love is not uncommon among ordinary mortals, though Alfieri considered such youthful sensibility to be an unerring sign of the artistic soul. He himself fell in love at nine years old; Dante is so conspicuous an instance as hardly to permit of citation; Heine, at eleven, began his career of passion with the idyll of Little Veronica. Like Byron, Heine never forgot his childish love; but, unlike Byron, he beheld her die while she was still a child. Hazel-eyed Mary Duff married, at eighteen, an eminent wine-merchant;[17] and it is Byron's narrative of his reception of that news which makes the episode so singularly differ from other records of precocious passion. When he was sixteen (1804) his mother one day told him that she had had a letter from Edinburgh saying that his old sweet heart, Mary Duff, was married. "And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much that, after I grew better, she generally avoided the subject to me - and contented herself with telling all her acquaintance. . . . We were both the merest children. I had and have been attached fifty times since that period; yet I recollect all we said to each other, all our caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness, my tormenting my mother's maid to write for me to her, which she at last did, to quiet me. . . . I remember, too, our walks, and the happiness of sitting by Mary, in the children's apartment, at their house not far from the Plain-stones at Aberdeen, while her lesser sister Helen played with the doll, and we sat gravely making love, in our way.

"How the deuce did all this occur so early? where could it originate? I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet my misery, my love for that girl were so violent that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since. . . . Hearing of her marriage . . . was like a thunder-stroke - it nearly choked me - to the horror of my mother and the astonishment and almost incredulity of everybody. . . How very pretty is the perfect image of her in my memory - her brown, dark hair, and hazel eyes; her very dress! I should be quite grieved to see her now; the reality, however beautiful, would destroy, or at least confuse, the features of the lovely Peri which then existed in her, and still lives in my imagination, at the distance of more than sixteen years."

Again, in 1815, writing to one Mrs. Hay, a cousin of Mary, he says, "I never forgot her, and never can. . . . I have the most perfect idea of her as a child"; and a year later Major Pryse Lockhart Gordon heard the same confidence. "We met at the dancing-school",[18] added Byron - and most of us have pirouetted through a similar idyll!

What the episode demonstrates, then, is not so much unusual precocity of feeling, as unusual violence in the expression of that instinctive masculine egotism which revolts at the capture by another of the once desired woman. Most boys of sixteen would have felt and looked for the moment mortified; Byron was "thrown nearly into convulsions". His sensibility was at any time excessive; we shall see that, at this time, he was in the throes of Mary Chaworth's rejection of him for John Musters. Now here was another beloved Mary, and another proof that he could be forgotten. With remembrance of our own young vanities and their frequent wounds, even feminine readers will refuse to wonder with him (and many of his biographers) over the intensity of his childish love. Not that was wonderful - but the intensity of his vanity, and of his generic masculine egotism.

In 1794 he had become heir to the title. In May 1798, his grand-uncle died at Newstead Abbey, and he became George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron.

[1] She was his first cousin as well. William, fourth Baron Byron, married Frances, second daughter of the fourth Baron Berkeley of Stratton, and had by her the two sons known as the "Wicked Lord" (William, fifth Baron) ad "Foulweather Jack". Her sister married John Trevanion of Caerhayes, Cornwall, and had by her that daughter, Sophia, who, marrying "Foulweather Jack," became the mother of John Byron ("Mad Jack") and grandmother of the poet. To the Berkeley strain John Cordy Jeaffreson attributes "the impulsiveness and vehemence of Jack Byron and his son" (The Real Lord Byron, i. 28).

[2] Mrs. Piozzi wrote of Mrs. Byron, "She is wife to the Admiral, pour ses péchés" (Life and Writings of Mrs. Piozzi ii. 456).

[3] They were: (1) John, eldest son; father of the poet. (2) George, who married Henrietta Dallas. Their son, George (R.N.), succeeded the poet in 1824 as seventh lord. (3) Frances, who married Colonel Charles Leigh. Their son, George, married his first cousin, Augusta Byron (Hon. Augusta Leigh), daughter of John Byron by his first marriage. (4) Juliana-Elizabeth, who married her first cousin, the Hon. William Byron, only son and heir of William, fifth lord, whom the poet (his grand-nephew) succeeded in 1798 - the son having died before his father. (5) Sophia-Mary, who died unmarried. (6) Charlotte-Augusta, who married Vice-Admiral Parker.

[4] This son was killed fighting at the siege of Calvi, in Corsica.

[5] Wife of Francis, Marquis of Carmarthen, afterwards fifth Duke of Leeds.

[6] Her death deprived her husband of £4000 a year. She is said to have died of grief caused by his vices and brutalities. This was strenuously denied by the poet in a letter written to a Swiss admirer in 1823. "So far from [my father's] being 'brutal', he was of an extremely amiable and joyous character though careless and dissipated. . . . It is not by brutality that a young officer in the Guards seduces and carries off a Marchioness, and marries two heiresses". Elze pours contempt on this letter "it is either self-delusion, or deliberate falsehood".

[7] She had a fortune of £23,000, "doubled by rumour" (Dict. Nat. Biog.). In 1784, the year of Lady Conyers' death, before Miss Gordon met Jack Byron, she saw, at Edinburgh, Mrs. Siddons act the character of Isabella in Southerne's Fatal Marriage, and was so overcome that she fell into convulsions and had to be carried out, uttering, with a loud cry - an exclamation belonging to the character acted by Mrs. Siddons -" Oh, my Biron, my Biron!" (Moore; 1838, p. 3).

[8]With the exception of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. There is said to be in existence a book in which she collected all the criticisms of his early poems, and inserted on blank pages interleaved her own comments, which were written with wit and ability. The whereabouts of the volume is unknown (Notes and Queries, 4th series, December 1869, p. 495).

[9] "You know, or you do not know, that my maternal grandfather* (a very clever man, and amiable, I am told) was strongly suspected of suicide . . . and that another very near relative of the same branch took poison, and was merely saved by antidotes. For the first of these events there was no apparent cause, as he was rich, respected, and of considerable intellectual resources, hardly forty years of age, and not at all addicted to any unhinging vice. It was, however, but a strong suspicion, owing to his melancholy temper. The second had a cause, but it does not become me to touch upon it; it happened when I was far too young to be aware of it, and I never heard of it till after the death of that relative, many years afterwards. I think, then, that I may call this dejection constitutional. I had always been told that in temper I more resembled my maternal grandfather than any of my father's family - that is, in the gloomier part of his temper, for he was what you call a good-natured man, and I am not" (Letter to John Murray; Moore, ed. 1838, p. 531).

* Byron's grandfather, George Gordon, was found drowned in the canal at Bath in 1779. His great-grandfather, Alexander Davidson Gordon, was drowned in the Ythan, a river of Aberdeenshire, in 1760. In both eases there was suspicion of suicide.

[10] Since numbered 24, and now destroyed.

[11] Prothero, Letters and Journals, v. 467.

[12] In this instance he "thought" erroneously. Augusta Leigh was not an only child, except in the sense that the two other children of John Byron's first marriage died before her birth.

[13] Preserved in Nottingham Museum.

[14] The payment of interest on this debt and of her grandmother's annuity reduced her annual income to £'35 On such a sum, however, she contrived to live without increasing her obligations, and on the death of her grandmother she discharged them all.

[15] See also the famous lines in The Island:

"The infant rapture still survived the boy,
And Loch-na-gar with Ida looked o'er Troy".
(Poems, 1903, V. 609)

[16]This is the "Highland Mary" of local tradition. She was the daughter of James Robertson, a farmer of Deeside, and was of gentle birth through her mother - tracing her descent, indeed, to Macdonald, the Lord of the Isles. "She died at Aberdeen, in 1867, aged eighty-five" (Poems, i. 192).

[17] Mr. Robert Cockburn, of Edinburgh and London. There is a long reference to Mary Duff in Ruskin's Præterita, i. 169.

[18] P. L. Gordon, Personal Memoirs, ii. 321-22.

No communication of any kind had been held with the former lord, who on the few occasions of mentioning his heir at all would speak of him as "the little boy at Aberdeen". Acquaintance with William, fifth Baron Byron, would, however, have afforded scant enjoyment to any one. He had lived under a cloud since the notorious Chaworth Duel in 1765; and the cloud was not only black, but charged with the lightning of every kind of scandal. His wife[1] had been unable to live with him; and however exaggerated the tales of his brutalities to her (they were still current in the neighborhood in 1830) there must have been some foundation of misery on which to build them. "He had thrown her into the pond at Newstead"; "he had shot his coachman in a fit of fury, flung the body into the carriage where his wife sat alone; then had mounted the box and driven her for miles through the darkness in that companionship". These things are not to be believed; but about what type of man are they invented? Something gives rise to the fell imaginings; it may be excusable when all is known; but it is there. The "Calumniated Angel" is a myth.

The Chaworth Duel had been more or less forced upon him. Mr. Chaworth[2] was a fire and the subject of their quarrel was one which has ever, in the hearts of country gentlemen, aroused strong passions namely, the preservation of game. Chaworth was of the most stringent severity for poachers; Lord Byron (very characteristically) maintained that the way to have game was not to preserve at all. It came to a wager; Chaworth declared that he had more birds on five acres than his neighbour on all his estates, and Lord Byron proposed a bet of one hundred guineas. A third person intervened: "such a bet could never be decided"; and the conversation seemed to diverge. But Chaworth soon broke out again, and this time, instead of a wager, it was a challenge. He then left the room much excited. "Had he been hasty?" he demanded of a friend, and seemed uneasy; but Lord Byron had followed. The angry men ordered a waiter the quarrel took place[3] on the occasion of the Notts Club Dinner at the Star and Garter Tavern, Pall Mall to show them to an empty room. He did so, and placed on the table one small tallow candle. By this light they fought, with swords. In a few minutes the bell rang; the waiter entered, and found Mr. Chaworth supported in Lord Byron's arms, and mortally wounded. Chaworth had made the first pass, through his opponent's waistcoat, and thought he had killed him; but while he was asking the peer if he were in truth so sorely hurt, "Lord Byron shortened his sword, and stabbed him in the belly". Chaworth was carried to his own house, where he died, lamenting his folly in fighting in the dark, for that was what had led to his mistake: his sword, instead of being in Lord Byron's breast, had been merely entangled in the waistcoat. Lord Byron was tried by his peers at Westminster Hall in April of the same year, and found guilty of manslaughter;[4] but by an old statute ordaining that "in all cases where clergy are allowed, a Peer is to be dismissed without burning in the hand, loss of inheritance, or corruption of blood", this Peer escaped all punishment, and was immediately dismissed "on paying his fees".

Such is one version of the famous Chaworth Duel, over which the slayer's grand-nephew was to ponder so moodily when, in process of time, he fell in love with the victim's grand

William, fifth lord, called by the country-folk The Wicked, lived thenceforth in utter seclusion for twenty-four years.[5] He always went armed; and when, by a particular exception, an old friend once dined with him, a case of pistols was placed on the table, as if it were part of the dinner-service and as probably to be used. He kept but two servants: old Joe Murray, afterwards to be the favourite of our sixth lord; and a woman who was dubbed by the neighbourhood "Lady Betty" a nickname obvious in its implication. The only other Inmates of Newstead Abbey were a colony of crickets, which he spent much time in feeding and training. They did come to know his voice, and would even obey his call; and our Byron used to relate, on the authority of Joe Murray and "Lady Betty", that on the day of the fifth lord's death the crickets left the house in a body and in such numbers that "you could not cross the hall without treading on them".

To such a being did the boy succeed and to what inheritance? To an inheritance which had been deliberately ruined for revenge upon an only son. The grounds and house of Newstead had been allowed to fall into helpless decay; five thousand pounds' worth of oaks[6] had been cut down (for the old lord, despite his sordid way of life, had the family knack of impecuniosity); worst of all, the Lancashire estate of Rochdale had been sold and sold illegally, both sellers and buyers being perfectly aware of the inability to make out a title. But Lord Byron did not care, and the purchasers shrewdly calculated that by the time the tort could be set aside, they would have indemnified themselves for any pecuniary loss which their dispossession might then bring about.[7] For Rochdale was very rich in coal. Legal proceedings to recover the estate were begun by Byron's advisers in 1805. It may be said at once that the delays were so interminable fresh points arising at every stage that he found himself obliged to sell Newstead long before he regained Rochdale, which, according to his solicitor and agent, John Hanson, was "worth three Newsteads." How harassing these postponements were can best be displayed by passages from his many adjurations to that agent, whose probity was only equalled by his dilatoriness. One letter bears date July 19, 1814. "Pray think of Rochdale; it is the delay which drives me mad. I declare to God, I would rather have but ten thousand pounds clear and out of debt, than drag on the cursed existence of expectation and disappointment which I have endured for the last six years, for six months longer, though a million came at the end of them". And again, in a letter to John Murray, referring to Hanson, and dated August 21, 1817, he wrote: "The devil take everybody: I never can get any person to be explicit about anything or anybody, and my whole life is passed in conjectures of what people mean".

In 1823, the year before his death, having at last regained the estate, he sold it to Mr. James Dearden with whom he had been in litigation all along, for Dearden was the lessee of the coal-pits for thirty-four thousand pounds, "a very low price", as the Blackburn Mail for March 10, 1824, commented. The money was devoted to the Greek cause.

So much for one inheritance. And what of Newstead, the inheritance of the heart, so to speak, as Rochdale should have been of the pocket? Newstead Abbey, Notts, in the heart of the Sherwood Forest, the " Robin Hood" country,[8] had been with the Byrons since the time of Henry VIII. The priory had been founded and dedicated to God and the Virgin by Henry II, in expiation for the murder of Thomas … Becket, and its monks were of the order of St. Augustine.[9] They surrendered in July 1539, the thirty-first year of Henry VIII's reign; and in May 1540, the King granted Newstead and all its appurtenances to Sir John Byron, "little Sir John with the Great Beard". Sir John made it into a "castellated dwelling", and preferred it to the Lancashire house. Horace Walpole visited Newstead in 1760 (during the less insane years of the fifth lord's reign) and wrote: "It is the very Abbey. The great East window of the church remains and connects with the house; the hall entire, the refectory entire, the cloister untouched, with the eastern cistern of the convent, and their arms upon it; a private chapel quite perfect. The park, which is still charming, has not been so much unprofaned; the present lord has lost large sums, and paid part in old oaks, five thousand pounds' worth of which have been cut near the house. In recompense he has built two baby forts, to pay his country in castles for the damage done to the navy, and planted a handful of Scotch firs that look like ploughboys dressed in old family liveries for a public day. . . . Newstead delighted me. There is grace and Gothic indeed".

Walpole wrote before the days of deliberate despoilment, in which the oaks were sacrificed to malice rather than to necessity; but already one of the many saws about the Byrons had been brought to the earlier stage of fulfilment through the hatred of the countryside for the fifth lord. Mother Shipton had declared that "when a ship laden with ling should cross over Sherwood Forest, the Newstead estate would pass from the Byron family". This might well have seemed a promise of their keeping it for ever since what could be more improbable than the necessary concatenation? But Lord Byron, to get the full enjoyment of his naval forts upon the lake, used in his more sociable days to amuse himself with sham fights, and for these had vessels built for him at a seaport on the eastern coast. The largest of sum at a seaport on the eastern coast. The largest of them was brought on wheels through the Forest to Newstead; and in order to bear out Mother Shipton and spite the detested owner, the people ran beside the ship, heaping it with heather (for which "ling" is the Nottinghamshire word) all the way along. They did their part; but who shall name the agent for the rest of that fulfilment?

In the late summer of 1798, Mrs. Byron and her son left Aberdeen for Newstead. So ended the Scottish sojourn, which was never repeated, though he kept alive to the last an affection for the Auld Lang Syne of it all. The first tour in Greece "carried me back to Morven";[10] and in the second expedition (says Moore) the dress chiefly worn at Cephalonia included a jacket of the Gordon tartan.[11] But what of the other association which Scotland came to have for him what of the Edinburgh Review? Can we doubt, on even slender knowledge of him, that during that turmoil Scotland became the very Hades? A girl, at the time of the notorious article, happened to observe that she thought he had a slight Scotch accent. "Good God!" he cried, on hearing of it, "I hope not. I would rather the d----d country was sunk in the sea. I, the Scotch accent!"

"He passed", said a writer in the Quarterly Review for 1831, "as at the changing of a theatrical scene . . . from a shabby Scotch flat to a palace". Well, if not to a palace, at least to something almost as fairy-tale-like in its difference from that abode whose furnishing, when sold on their departure, fetched £74. 7S. 7d.! At the Newstead toll-house, Mrs. Byron, savouring the drama of the moment, asked the woman in charge "to whom these woods might belong?"

"The owner, Lord Byron, has been dead some weeks".

"And who is the next heir?"

"They say it is a little boy who lives at Aberdeen".

"And here he is, bless him!" broke in the nurse that "May Gray" around whom Moore hangs a garland of pathos, and whom John Hanson (in a letter to Mrs. Byron of September 1, 1799)[12] despoils of it with blunt and all too convincing hand. Let us compare the accounts, for this child's childhood is of poignant interest. If his nurse were really "another mother" to him, no overcharged fiction of young mental suffering surpasses his reality. "Such is his dread of the woman that I really believe he would forego the satisfaction of seeing you if he thought he was to meet her again. He told me that she was perpetually beating him . . . that she brought all sorts of company of the very lowest description into his apartments; that she was out late at nights, and he was frequently left to put himself to bed; that she would take the Chaise-boys into the Chaise with her, and stopped at every little Ale-house to drink with them"; and Hanson adds that her conduct towards the boy was so shocking that it was the general topic of conversation among "dispassionate persons" at Nottingham.

When we examine Moore's garland in connection with this unmistakably truthful tale, we find him, perhaps, at nothing worse than his darling trick of the suppressio veri. In the very early days (he tells us), "she gained an influence over the boy's mind against which he rarely rebelled" and this will, to the reader enlightened by Hanson, seem a not wholly ingenuous statement of the possible case. Again, when putting on the appliances which the little twisted limb required, the woman "would . . . teach him to repeat the first and twenty-third Psalms". Such teachings may be, have often been, associated with personal cruelties; and we read elsewhere that in the Aberdeen days, after the first and twenty-third Psalms had been duly repeated, the woman, leaving the child alone in that darkness which is so easily filled with every chosen horror of the mind, would slip out to her lover, while "Geordie", who was persuaded that the house was haunted, would get out of bed and run along the lobby till he saw a light, there to stand until he got so cold that he was obliged to go back to the warmth of the dreaded bedroom. And of course, in the mysterious and pathetic secrecy of babyhood, he never spoke of all this suffering to his mother until after May Gray had left them. Moore's wreath was twined of flowers supplied by herself to the doctor who attended her when she died in 1827 three years after the death in Greece. Dr. Ewing of Aberdeen was an ardent admirer of Byron, whose name just then was haloed like a saint's. May Gray would perhaps hardly have been human if she had not enskied herself. The doctor may be excused for his credulity, and all the more because she could show him keepsakes given her by the boy when she left Mrs. Byron's service in 1827 a date coinciding too well with Hanson's accusatory letter. The keepsakes were a watch the first that he had ever possessed and a full-lenght miniature of himself, painted by Kay of Edinburgh in 1795 (when he was six years old), which shows him with a bow and arrows in his hand, and long, curly hair falling over his shoulders. Both these treasures were given by May Gray's husband, after her death, to Dr. Ewing.

Thus stands the case for and against the nurse: and unfortunately Moore is a witness too often convicted of amiable evasions for us to take his word against the damning bluntness of the Hanson letter. I fear that the, garland must be scattered, and a new pang added to the heartache with which we ponder on Byron's childhood.

They did not live at Newstead Abbey. Inured though Mrs. Byron was to poverty and hardship, the unspeakable desolation wrought by the fifth lord was more than she could face. Nottingham was chosen for their first home in the neighbourhood; and there, in the hope of curing his lameness, the boy was placed in the hands of a man named Lavender, "trussmaker to the General Hospital". Again the doom! Assuredly it seems that this child was singled out for misery. Lavender was the merest quack, and the merest brute as well, if we are to believe the earnest and reiterated testimony of a writer in Notes and Queries, who says that when the boy was living[13] with him (and undergoing tortures from the maltreatment of the defective limb) "he was frequently sent across the Street for Lavender's beer".[14] The method adopted for the cure was to rub the foot with oil, then forcibly twist it round and screw it up in a wooden machine. This caused frightful suffering, visible to any one present, despite the bravery with which the boy endured it. Byron's teacher at this time was one Dummer Rogers,[15] who read Latin with him; and Rogers one day broke out in urgent sympathy. . . . "Such pain as I know you must be suffering, my Lord!" "Never mind, Mr. Rogers", said the boy. "You shall not see any signs of it in me". He was fond of the kindly man; and many years afterwards, when in the neighbourhood of Nottingham, sent him a message to say that he could still recite some lines of Virgil which he had read during the period of Lavender's torture. For the latter he had a burning contempt. One day he scribbled all the letters of the alphabet on a sheet of paper, combined them anyhow into words and sentences, and asked Lavender what language that was.

"Italian", pronounced he for he never could own to any ignorance; and the boy burst into a shout of rapturous laughter.

Mrs. Byron was soon shown that Lavender's "cure" was merely the infliction of useless torture, and she then took her son to London to consult the renowned Dr. Baillie brother of the still more renowned Joanna Baillie. She left Nottingham in the summer of 1799, and took a house in Sloane Terrace. From that time until the end of 1802 Byron was attended by Dr. Baillie, in consultation with Dr. Laurie, of 2 St. Bartholomew's Close, and special boots were made for him by an expert named Sheldrake, in the Strand.[16] No cure was effected, and judging by Laurie's letters to Mrs. Byron, it is not astonishing that the foot remained as it was. "I much fear his Extreme Inattention will counteract every exertion on my part to make him better"; "I cannot help lamenting he has so little sense of the Benefit he has already received as to be so apparently neglectful" for in the second letter, written on October 2, 1802, Laurie had to complain that the boy (who was then at Harrow) had spent several days in London without seeing him. This was the last attempt made at a cure; but Sheldrake in later years, contrived a sort of shoe which did away with the worst inconveniences.

While the two surgeons were tending the foot, Dr Glennie, of Dulwich, was doing his best to develop the head, in the Lordship Lane of that pretty suburb stood the private school of this first "serious" teacher of Byron, who was to be the first also to form any well-considered view of his character. But Glennie was in addition to learn the full force of Mrs. Byron's. Everything that he thought desirable she opposed; she interfered with his instruction, and when the master tried to stop the foolish system of Saturday-to-Monday sojourns in London, Mrs. Byron retorted by making them into weeks instead of "week-ends". With any tolerable opportunity, Glennie could have done much; as things were, he could do almost nothing. Nor did even the injunctions of Lord Carlisle,[17] the boy's guardian, avail to influence Mrs. Byron. To every remonstrance from the master she would reply by one of her "paroxysms of passion", and these, unlike her son's rages, were audible over the whole school. Glennie overheard one day a painful morsel of dialogue. One of the boy's companions bluntly came out with: "Byron, your mother is a fool". "I know it", he answered gloomily, not knowing to what a degree the worse than folly was to injure him in later life. For Lord Carlisle was soon irretrievably alienated. He ceased to have any intercourse with his ward's mother, and when Glennnie once again implored his intervention, he replied, "I can have nothing more to do with Mrs. Byron. You must manage her as you can". No one had ever succeeded in managing her, and Glennie failed with the rest. . . . Natures like hers make the constant problem of the observer. She had a warm heart, courage, generosity, some shrewdness, and a crazy kind of devotion. Yet she made the mere misery, and might easily have made the ruin, of her only child. What practical care, after all, had she ever given him? None in his babyhood: where was the mother on all those haunted nights in Aberdeen? None, or far too little, in his physical distress, or Lavender's peer beer-boy could not have been the common gapeseed of St. James's Lane in Nottingham. None, and worse than none, in his first really vital contact with the outer world, or Glennie would have been permitted to do what he could, and the guardian, influential and prepared at least for duty-kindness, would not have been fatally estranged. It would have been better for Byron, as Elze comments, to be a "double" orphan. No relative could have proved a more infelicitous guardian than his mother proved. Her sudden gusts of maudlin tender (in which his eyes were pronounced to be "as beautiful as his father's") became, we may well suppose, as abhorrent as her gusts of loud-mouthed fury and yet the boy was warm, generous, kind. As he grew up, he was forced into deception that she might not haunt and disgrace him; he wrote to her, when he did write (but indeed it is remarkable how dutiful he was in that respect), with frequent cold rejection of advances which would end, as he knew, in only one way. His deep and bitter suffering shows itself in various forms throughout his letters to the one woman who did, for a time, retain him by the proverbial "silken thread" his halfAugusta Leigh, then Augusta Byron. But what profound, what inexpressive, anguish lay beneath the brilliant mockery, and the stinging satire, and the outraged accusations of destiny, only those whose experience has been similar can in any degree compute. No pain is like it, since (as he was himself to cry when she lay dead and what must not the words have carried beyond the hackneyed surface pathos?) "We have only one mother".

The year 1800 is a notable one to Byron's biographer, for in it he made his "first dash into poetry". This adventure was in honour of his second first love if one may use a term which occupation with his early history soon makes indispensable. The result of the "dash" has perished, but the name of its victim remains. She was his first cousin, Margaret Parker,[18] "one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings". Few girls, indeed, have left a more exquisite memory in a lover's heart. "She looked as if she had been made of a rainbow, all beauty and peace". So he wrote in a diary of 1821. Margaret died at fifteen of consumption, two years after their meeting; and Augusta Byron went to see her shortly before the end. Augusta happened casually to mention his name. He knew nothing of Margaret's illness ("being at Harrow and in the country at the time"); it was plainly not a continued episode but as the sister spoke, the girl's shadowed face flushed into vivid, lovely colour to the very eyelids. No wonder that he never forgot her! But the elegiac verses which he wrote in 1802, the year of her death (though he, in the diary, says "Some years after") are deplorable. Frigidly correct in such technique and such sentiment as they aspire to, they are the one dull element in an idyll as "transparent" in its beauty as the memory she left behind.

"The Coroner's jury brought in a verdict of Wilful Murder, and on the presentation of their testimony to the House of Lords, Byron pleaded for a trial 'by God and his peers', whereupon he was arrested and sent to the Tower. The case was tried by the Lords Temporal (the Lords Spiritual asked permission to withdraw), and after a defence had been read by the prisoner, 119 peers brought in a verdict of 'Not guilty of murder; guilty of manslaughter, on my honour'. Four peers only returned a verdict of 'Not guilty'. The result of the verdict was that Lord Byron claimed the benefit of the statute of Edward VI, and was discharged on paying the fees.

"The defence . . . is able and convincing . . . the accused conto throw the onus of criminality upon his antagonist. It was Mr. Chaworth who began the quarrel . . . it was he who insisted on an interview, not on the stairs but in a private room, who locked the door, and whose demeanour made a challenge 'to draw' inevitable . . . Lord Byron came to close quarters with his adversary, and 'as he supposed, gave the unlucky wound which he would ever reflect upon with the utmost regret'" (Poems, iv. note to p. 542).

The poet, in his famous letter to Coulmann of 1823, said that, so far from feeling any remorse for having killed Mr. Chaworth, who was a fire(spadassin) . . . his grand"always kept the sword . . . in his bedwhere it still was when he died" (Elze, Life of Byron, Authorised translation, 1872, Appendix, p. 445).

[1] She was the daughter and heiress of Mr. Charles Shaw, of Besthorpe Hall, Norfolk. She married him in 1747, and died in 1788, the year of our Byron's birth.

[2] He was the greatof George Chaworth, created (1627) Viscount Chaworth of Armagh, whose daughter Elizabeth married William, third Lord Byron, grandfather of the Wicked Lord. See note at end of chapter with reference to the Duel.

[3] On January 26, 1765.

[4] The coroner's jury had given a verdict of "wilful murder". Lord Byron was consequently imprisoned in the Tower.

[5] When compelled by business to go to London, he travelled as Mr. Waters" (Dallas, Recollections etc., 1824).

[6] One splendid oak, known as the "Pilgrim's" which stood and stands near the north lodge of the park, was bought in by the neighbouring gentry and made over to the estate. "Perhaps" (says Mr. E. H. Coleridge, Poems, vi. 497) "by the Druid oak [in Don Juan, xiii. 56] Byron meant to celebrate this 'last of the clan', which, in his day, before the woods were replanted, must have stood out in Solitary grandeur".

[7] The Rochdale estate had been in the Byron family since the time of Edward I. When Sir John Byron was, under Charles I (1643), raised to the peerage, he was entitled Baron Byron of Rochdale in the county of Lancaster. He had been a devoted partisan of the King: "Sir John Biron", says the writer of Colonel Hutchinson's Memoirs, " . . . and all his brothers, bred up in arms, and valiant men in their own persons, were all passionately the King's". Seven brothers of the family, indeed, had fought at Edgehill. Newstead was besieged by the Parliamentarians; at Charles I's death, the Parliament sequestered the Byron estates, but they were restored immediately on the accession of Charles II.

[8] About five miles southof Mansfield, "whose size, antiquity, and ancient privileges make it the capital of the Forest".

[9] They appear to have been high in the Royal favour, no less in spiritual than in temporal concerns. In the fifth lord's lifetime there was found in the lake at Newstead a large brass eagle, in the body of which was discovered a secret aperture, containing many legal deeds of rights and privileges. One was a grant of full pardon by Henry V for every possible crime (and there is added a long catalogue of such) which the monks might have committed previous to the 8th of December preceding! At the sale of the old lord's effects in 1776this eagle, together with three candelfound at the same time, was purchased by a watchmaker of Nottingham, and passed from his hands into those of Sir Richard Kaye, who was a Prebendary of Southw'ell Minster. It now serves as a lectern in that church.

[10] A lofty mountain in Aberdeenshire.

[11] And see the famous Don Juan stanza (x. 18).

[12] Letters and Journals, i, 10.

[13] The "living" must have been during temporary absences of Mrs. Byron (that these took place is attested by Hanson's letter about May Gray), and the abode was at a Mrs. Giles's, in St. James's Lane (Notes and Queries, 4th series, iii. 284, 418, 561). The writer signed himself "Ellcee".

[14] "Lord Byron going to fetch a tankard of ale with one of Lavender's sixpences" was, says "Ellcee", one of the familiar sights of the locality. Lavender was what was termed a sixpence"Whenever he met with a pretty good halfhe would hammer it out to make six sixpences from it"'. (Notes and Queries, 4th series iii. 284).

[15] Rogers was an American loyalist who was pensioned by the English Government. He lived at Hen Cross, Nottingham.

[16] In The Lancet for 1827 (ii. 779) Mr. T. Sheldrake describes "Lord Byron's case", giving an illustration of the foot. But his account is as diswith the rest as they all are with each other. For a r‚sum‚ of the Opinions see Letters and Journals, i. 11

[17] He was the son of Isabella Byron, daughter of the fourth Lord Byron, by her marriage with the fourth Ear] of Carlisle.

[18] Charlotte Augusta, daughter of Admiral, and sister of Captain "Jack", Byron, married Christopher Parker, son of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Peter Parker, Bart.; and this Margaret was her daughter.

John Hanson, on bringing him to the school, had warned the Head-Master, Dr. Joseph Drury, that his education had been much neglected, but "thought there was a cleverness about him". Drury was at once convinced not only of that - "there was mind in his eye" - but of something far more valid for the boy's immediate happiness. He perceived that it was "a wild mountain-colt" that Hanson had left behind, but the colt, he thought, was "to be led by a silken string rather than by a cable" - and he obeyed the intuition. Wisest of his indulgences was that for the supersensitive vanity which was so marked a trait in Byron. The new boy, hearing from a comrade that many younger than himself were immensely more advanced in learning, fell into a mood of deep dejection. He would be placed in a class below these juniors - he would be humbled and degraded - everything would be hopeless! Drury divined the apprehensive misery, and promised him that he should not be "placed" at all until it could be with boys of his own age. From that moment he revived, and soon his shyness (he suffered much all through life from shyness) began to give way. The master kept a discreet look-out, and found some of his first impressions confirming themselves. When, not long afterwards, Lord Carlisle expressed a wish to see him, Drury hastened up to London. Carlisle was anxious to discuss future prospects, and to hear his view of the boy's abilities. "He will never be a rich man, said the guardian. Drury made no comment on that, but remarked with emphasis, "He has talents, my lord, which will add lustre to his rank".

Lord Carlisle raised his eyebrows. "Indeed!" said he coldly; and Drury, with some repugnance, felt that he would rather have been told of mediocrity in mind as well as in fortune.

The truth was that Mrs. Byron had left an indelible impression on Frederick Howard, Earl of Carlisle - at one time among the most prodigious dandies of his period, and now a perfect type of the reformed rake. He desired to be kind; but to like the son of such a woman, even to wish him well in any but the most conventional sense, was more than he could achieve. And probably he had disturbing memories of his own mother - that Isabella Byron (sister of the notorious fifth lord) whom Fox had satirised as "a recluse in pride and rags", and who, when her eldest son was ten years old, had taken for second husband a mere baronet![2] Isabella was, indeed, of the pure Byron tradition. She wrote Maxims for Young Ladies, and she also wrote an answer to one Mrs. Greville's Ode on Indifference. The answer contained two stanzas which most of her near relatives might have signed:

The Byronic doom, then, had followed our youth in this relationship as in so many others; but now at last, as the school-life developed, he was to know what kindness and judicious authority and (above all) passionate friendship could mean. For Dr. Drury he had a deep and reverent affection. In his letters to Augusta at this period, and in his later diaries, there are many warm tributes; and Drury himself told Moore an entertaining anecdote of the later days of renown. None of the publications of which the world was talking had ever been presented to him, and, meeting in London just after The Corsair had appeared in 1814, he asked Byron why, "as in duty bound", he had never sent his old master any of his books. "Because you are the only man I never wish to read them", Byron answered, delightfully in the tone of them all; but then, forgetting the pose of a profligate abashed before the beloved mentor of youth, he added eagerly, "What do you think of The Corsair?"

Truly he could do nothing that did not epitomise himself - all pose yet all spontaneity as he inveterately was! The Corsair was selling at "a perfectly unprecedented rate" (as Murray had already panted), and not only so, but glorious whisperings were rife. "Its author was the veritable Conrad, the actual Corsair; part of his travels had been spent in real piracy"; and that author was helping on the craze with beautiful dark hints, with "I could an if I woulds"; and Drury was sure to have read it, and this would the more deeply move him since he was sure to have been shocked; and above all, beyond all, had Drury read it, and read the others? . . . We may not mock overmuch - not those of us, at any rate, who have published, and met old friends afterwards. And he was, with Napoleon Buonaparte, the most talked-of creature at that time alive!

But the thing of all others that Harrow brought about was the discovery of the passionate heart. There had been the love-affairs, to be sure, but the delights of comradeship were of a happier order than such fervid heats. Not that the friendships lacked ardour. "They were with me passions (for I was always violent)"; and indeed one hardly knows whether the traits displayed are matter for smiles or sighs. To a feminine reader, at any rate, the excess of sensibility is disturbing - nor was it shown by him alone. Jealousy, flaming perpetually, flamed mutually too. If he could take offence at being addressed in a letter as "my dear" instead of "my dearest", and sulk because his correspondent said he was sorry another boy had gone abroad - that correspondent could write him a letter so extraordinary in its matter, so striking in its manner, as to demand reproduction here.

TO THE LORD BYRON
HARROW-ON-THE-HILL, July 28, 1805

"Since you have been so unusually unkind to me, in calling me names whenever you met me, of late, I must beg an explanation, wishing to know whether you choose to be as good friends with me as ever. I must own that, for this last month, you have entirely cut me - for, I suppose, your new cronies. But think not that I will (because you choose to take into your head some whim or other) be always giving up to you, nor do, as I observe other fellows doing, to regain your friendship; nor think that I am your friend either through interest, or because you are bigger and older than I am. No - it never was so, nor ever shall be so. I was only your friend, and am so still - unless you go on in this way, calling me names whenever you see me. I am sure you may easily perceive I do not like it; therefore, why should you do it, unless you wish that I should no longer be your friend? . . . Though you do not let the boys bully me, yet if you treat me unkindly, that is to me a great deal worse.

"I am no hypocrite, Byron, nor will I, for your pleasure, ever suffer you to call me names, if you wish me to be your friend. . . . I am sure no one can say that I will cringe to regain a friendship that you have rejected. Why should I do so? Am I not your equal? Therefore, what interest can I have in doing so? When we meet again in the world (that is, if you choose it) you cannot advance or promote me, nor I you. Therefore I beg and intreat of you if you value my friendship - which, by your conduct, I am sure I cannot think you do - not to call me the names you do, nor abuse me. Till that time, it will be out of my power to call you friend. I shall be obliged for an answer as soon as it is convenient; till then, I remain yours, CLARE

"I cannot say your friend".

The writer was thirteen, Byron seventeen, for the incident belongs to his last year at Harrow; and what a picture does the letter set before us, of the handsome, cross youth (for his beauty was, at times, already remarkable), passing with his "new cronies", and breathing flame as he went on the small, hot-hearted Forsaken! The quarrel was of short duration; "our first and last" he commented in an endorsement (he kept the letter all his life) - but later reproaches from the same pen seem to contradict that assertion.[4]

The boy was John FitzGibbon, second Earl of Clare,[5] the "Lycus" of Childish Recollections, and the most beloved of all friends through all Byron's life. Not that they met often; but the feeling for this "earliest and dearest" was one of those shrined things which can almost disdain the personal contact - though that, when it was vouchsafed, caused joy so uplifting that it was "like rising from the grave". In the quasi-journal of 1821 there are two mentions of this friendship. "I never hear the word 'Clare' without a beating of the heart even now". The "word", one may observe in passing, is eminent among the lovely both in sound and aspect; this, when the dear memories were added, may have played some part in the emotion; but it was rooted in genuine feeling, as the subsequent entry, which speaks of their meeting, strikingly demonstrates.

PISA, November 5, 1821

"[In] this collection of scattered things, I had alluded to my friend Lord Clare in terms such as my feelings suggested. About a week or two afterwards, I met him on the road between Imola and Bologna, after not having met for seven or eight years....

"This meeting annihilated for a moment all the years between the present time and the days of Harrow. It was a new and inexplicable feeling, like rising from the grave, to me. Clare, too, was much agitated - more in appearance than even myself; for I could feel his heart beat to his fingers' ends, unless, indeed, it was the pulse of my own which made me think so....We were but five minutes together, and in the public road; but I hardly recollect an hour of my existence which could be weighed against them".

They met once more. In the following year Clare came for "one day only" to the salmon-coloured Villa Dupuy at Leghorn. "I have a presentiment that I shall never see him again", Byron said when they parted, and his eyes filled with tears. He never did see him again, but one of the last letters from Missolonghi (March 31, 1824) was written to this "dearest Clare", whom he had "always loved better than any (male) thing in the world", who indeed was "the only male human being" for whom he felt "anything that deserves the name of friendship.[6] "All my others were men-of-the-world friendships".

But Clare, though the dearest, was not by any means the only Harrow intimate. Lord Delawarr[7] at first was given pride of place: "the most good-tempered, amiable, clever fellow in the universe. To all which he adds the quality...of being remarkably handsome, almost too much so for a boy". Delawarr was only nine years old at this time (1804), but already in the preceding year a copy of verses had been addressed to him:

Envy seems to have treated the handsome little boy like a shuttlecock, and tossed him back to Byron - quickly, however, to receive him again with another lyric tagged on like one of the feathers; for a later address, still more poignant, is balanced throughout between passionate reproach and freezing politeness:

Poor Delawarr was unequal, all along, to the strain.[8] Before Byron left Harrow, a definite breach had taken place; and though he ultimately figured as "Euryalus" in Childish Recollections there had been a peremptory order to the publisher to "omit the whole character". They must have renewed their intercourse in London, for the old schoolfellow who refused to spend with him the day before he set out on his Albanian travels in 1809, on the plea that he was "engaged to go shopping with some ladies", is believed by most of the biographers to have been Delawarr, "who had recently in a marked manner withdrawn from him".[9] Byron was bitterly angry; but it suggested a picturesque stanza for Childe Harold:

Two other Harrovians, very dear, were the Hon. John Wingfield and Edward Noel Long, the "Cleon" of Childish Recollections:

Edward Noel Long, John Wingfield, and George, Duke of Dorset (who was Byron's fag at Harrow, and in the early days much beloved), all died in the early twenties. Dorset was killed by a fall in the hunting-field. This was in 1815, and Byron wrote to Moore a strange, morbid letter.

"I have just been - or, rather, ought to be - very much shocked by the death of the Duke of Dorset. We were at school together, and there I was passionately attached to him. Since, we have never met...and it would be a paltry affectation to pretend that I had any feeling for him worthy the name. But there was a time in my life when this event would have broken my heart; and all I can say for it now is that - it is not worth breaking".

Enclosed in his next letter were the well-known verses:

--of which he "flattered himself" that they might pass for an imitation of the Irish poet. He must have written at the same time the lines beginning:

They are among the worst he ever composed, which is not surprising, since they were written expressly to declare the lack of any feeling.

If I have dwelt long upon the school-friendships, my reason for doing so is that they seem to me of great importance in reviewing his character; and this not only because the Harrow period was formative in a high degree, but because (whatever they may have signified) these boyish experiences were, each in its varying development, recurrent through Byron's life. The brooding emotion of the attachment to Clare was repeated in the Mary Chaworth romance; the distrust, reaction from distrust, and final loss of all illusion, which mark the Delawarr affair, are still more characteristic, are indeed a kind of epitome of Byronism; while the grief of early and tragically sudden death - as in the cases of Long, Wingfield, and Dorset - is one of the sadnesses that haunted his career. He noted this himself. "Some curse hangs over me", he wrote at twenty-three in recounting the death of a later friend and again at thirty-one, "I never could keep alive even a dog that I liked, or that liked me."

While all this luxuriance of emotion was unfolding itself, the intellectual growth was taking as determined a personal note. His general information on modern topics was "so great as to induce a suspicion that I could only collect so much information from Reviews, because I was never seen reading; but always idle, and in mischief, or at play. The truth is that I read eating, read in bed, read when no one else read, and had read all sorts of reading since I was five years old". He drew up, in 1807 at Cambridge, a list of the books he had been through: "the greater part of them before the age of fifteen". It oppresses the imagination. Of historical writers the number cited would be by itself overwhelming; his mind must have been gorged, the half undigested. "There is a way of scouting through books", remarked the Westminster Review in 1830, commenting on Moore's infatuated awe before the list, "which some people call reading, and we are afraid much of the reading here set down was of that description". History was the passion of his mind, we should remember;[12] but the biographical muster is also stupendous, for, after setting down many names, he adds, "with thousands not to be detailed". Poetry came next; philosophy was a bad fourth; law, geography, "eloquence", and divinity were comparatively nowhere. The note on divinity is frank. "Blair, Porteous, Tillotson, Hooker", he enumerates, "--all very tiresome. I abhor books of religion". There is a summing up and a confession: "Since I left Harrow, I have become idle and conceited, from scribbling rhyme and making love to women.

At school his destiny was believed to be that of an orator. He was fluent, turbulent, copious in declamation; he selected always for speech-days the most vehement passages - such as Lear's address to the storm, and the tirade of Zanga in Young's Revenge. Drury was struck by all this, but the instance which led him to foretell an orator's destiny was a declamatory exercise composed by the boy himself. These efforts were always rehearsed, before public delivery to the Head-Master; and at the rehearsal Drury was already pleased with Byron's display. The day came; all the other boys delivered the words that had been already "passed", and Byron did the same in the beginning of his speech. But suddenly Drury realised that he was reciting something quite different from the draft - and reciting it with such boldness and rapidity as to alarm the listener. Surely he must break down! But he went on to the end; there was not a falter nor a stumble, and the whole seemed far more striking than the original. . . . When all was over, Drury inquired of him why he had altered the speech. He declared that he had not altered it. Drury pressed him for the truth. "I did not know that I had deviated by a letter", the boy reiterated; and the observant master believed and understood. "He was so impressed by the subject that he hurried on to expressions and colourings more striking than his pen had expressed".

He was very idle. "Always in scrapes"; "I rarely knew my lesson, but when I did know it, I knew it well". His schoolbooks were scribbled over with clumsy interlined translations . . . "the most ordinary Greek words had their English signification scrawled under them". His incorrigible laziness, joined to "his propensity to make others laugh and disregard their Employments as much as himself", soon got him into serious trouble. On his entrance to the school he had been placed in the house of Henry Drury, the Doctor's eldest son, who was an assistant-master. When the Christmas holidays of the 1802 term were over, Byron refused to return to Harrow unless he were removed from this care. Henry was quite as eager to get rid of him as he could be to go, but the Head had hesitated to consent until the boy's request was thus urgently made. He was then placed (January 1803) in Mr. Evans's house, and every one hoped that this was the dawn of a new era. By May 1 those hopes were dead. The date is interesting, for upon it the first of the vivid, pulsating things that we know as Byron's letters came into the world.[13] It was to his mother; he was fifteen.

"I am sorry to say that Mr. Henry Drury has behaved to me in a manner that I neither can nor will bear. He has seized now an opportunity of showing his resentment towards me. To-day in church I was talking to a Boy who was sitting next me; that perhaps was not right, but hear what followed. After church he spoke not a word to me, but he took this Boy to his pupil-room, where he abused me in a most violent manner, called me blackguard, said he would and could have me expelled from the School, and bade me thank his Charity that prevented him; this is the message he sent me, to which I shall return no answer, but submit my case to you and those you may think fit to consult. Is this fit usage for anybody? had I stole or behaved in the most abominable way to him, his language could not have been more outrageous. What must the boys think of me to hear such a message ordered to be delivered to me by a Master? Better let him take away my life than ruin my Character.... Among other things I forgot to tell you he said he had a great mind to expel the Boy for speaking to me, and that if he ever again spoke to me he would expel him. Let him explain his meaning; he abused me, but he neither did nor can mention anything bad of me, further than what every boy else in the School has done....If you do not take notice of this, I will leave the School myself ...better that I should suffer anything than this....If you love me, you will now show it".[14]

Mrs. Byron sent this explosive to Hanson, who sent it to Drury. The result was little short of a formal apology for Henry's hasty word. "I am sorry", wrote his father, "that it was ever uttered; but certainly it was never intended to make so deep a wound". He continued in a strain of particular and anxious affection for the boy. "He possesses, as his letter shows, a mind that feels, and that can discriminate reasonably on points in which it conceives itself injured.... I feel particularly hurt to see him idle, and negligent, and apparently indifferent".... But even this letter ends on a hopeful note.

That Byron really was - as Drury had at first believed - the proverbial creature to be "led with a silken thread" is, I think, more than doubtful. The thread could draw him only so far as his heart would go too; and his heart was hot, turbulent, and as easily drawn in the wrong as in the right direction. Reason rarely spoke, and when it did, was most often silenced. No matter how gentle it be, authority must ever smack of discipline; and discipline had, for Byron, as little attraction as it is possible to conceive. There was something in the nature of the boy, as of the man, that was at bottom wholly unmalleable. He would learn and submit when he chose, and at no other hour; and there was arrogance even in the submission. "So he, Byron, had elected to act". When he did not so elect, all trouble must take its course, for the only thing that mattered was his election. Drury, in the end, sadly realised this - to the extent of desiring him to leave the school; moreover, as we shall see, his very affection for Drury caused the final months at Harrow (under Dr. Butler) to be one long scene of violent insolence. Such a tribute could not gratify; nor did it reflect any honour on Drury's training. But these were not the aspects to influence Byron. We may suspect that the picturesque, here as elsewhere, was the snare: how scenic to hate and despise Butler because one had loved and respected Drury, and because Drury's brother had been a candidate for the prize that Butler won!... I think there is no doubt that Drury, for all his sagacity, failed to comprehend the innate rebelliousness of his pupil's nature. The charm, the brilliancy, the quick warm heart - these he understood, and, as it were, succumbed to; we might call the Head-Master of Harrow Byron's first conquest!

By the time the Christmas holidays of 1804-5 arrived, matters had come to a crisis. Byron spent the vacation with John Hanson's family in London, and told Hanson that he wished to leave Harrow. Hanson wrote to Drury, urging that the boy was too young to finish with school. Drury's reply, dated December 29, 1804, puts a startling gloss on the matter. "The wish", he wrote, "originated with me. During his last residence... his conduct gave me much trouble and uneasiness.... If we part now, we may entertain affectionate dispositions towards each other, and his Lordship will have left the school with credit".[15] The Doctor's urgent advice was that he should go to a private tutor; but Lord Carlisle and Hanson joined in an appeal to allow him to return to Harrow. Drury yielded, and Byron remained there till July 1805 ; "always", as he confessed himself "cricketing, rebelling, rowing - (from row, not boat-rowing, a different practice) and in all manner of mischiefs". The rebelling came to a head on Drury's retirement from the head-mastership in March 1805. There were three candidates for the vacant chair - Mark Drury (his brother), Mr. Evans, and the Rev. George Butler, then Fellow, tutor, and classical lecturer at Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge. A strong party was formed for Mark Drury. At its head was at first young Wildman.[16] Byron had not then declared himself for any of the candidates. The Mark Drury faction was anxious to attach him, and one of the boys said to Wildman, "Byron, I know, won't join, because he doesn't choose to act second to any one; but, by giving up the leadership to him, you may at once secure him". Wildman, surprisingly enough, gave it up, and Byron "at once" took command.

Dr. Butler, who was only thirty-one,[17] prevailed; and paid for his victory by becoming the "Pomposus" of two poetical attacks. Not only so, but he found himself faced by a fierce personal enemy in the boy, who was now a resident in his House. One day Butler found the iron gratings gone from the hall window. Byron had torn them down in a fit of rage. When summoned to give a reason for such violence, he answered coolly that "they darkened the hall." Again, at the end of term, Butler, according to custom, invited the upper form to dine with him - a kind of royal command. Byron refused. He was asked, in the presence of other boys of the same standing, his reason for this second insolence.

"Why, Dr. Butler", he replied, "if you should happen to come into my neighbourhood when I was staying at Newstead, I certainly should not ask you to dine with me, and therefore I feel that I ought not to dine with you".[18]

The "Pomposus" portraits were mere caricatures, as he afterwards admitted, although the feeling of enmity endured for some time after he left Harrow. He wrote to his ancient foe, Henry Drury (by that time a close personal friend), in 1808, alluding to Butler: "We have only spoken once since my departure from Harrow in 1805, and then he politely told Tatersall[19] that I was not a proper associate for his pupils". On February 21 of the same year, however, we find him "now reconciled to Butler"; and when in 1809 he went on his Albanian tour, he took with him a gold pen given him by the Doctor, and "a treasure of a German servant, named Fritz", who had been recommended by Pomposus himself!

Thus, under a cloud, Byron left Harrow in July 1805 - seventeen and a half years old. What did he bring away from the life which he had entered on so ill equipped? He brought at any rate a much developed heart and body. Of the mind we may suppose that the progress had followed inevitable lines. Wherever he had been he would have learned what suited him, and learned that only. . . . There was ground for some apprehension. Nearly all his close friends at Harrow had been much younger than himself, and outside the school, his chosen comradeship had hitherto been with the son of one of his tenants at Newstead, immeasurably his inferior in rank - and, again, years younger. The misery of his home-life would oppress him the more heavily now because his heart was developed - and because, within these last two years, it had been much wounded as well. The Mary Chaworth episode had begun in 1803 during the summer holidays.... On the other hand, there was the University to look forward to. Intimacies would spring up there, and though individual ones might throb and smart as they had done at Harrow, the boy now knew besides what comradeship was. And there was hope in the great increase of his bodily activities. He had given proofs of capacity for many athletic exercises. "At Harrow I fought my way very fairly. I think I lost but one battle out of seven". He was noted for feats in swimming - could mount a younger boy on his shoulders and dive thus into the water. Cricket, too, he enjoyed; his reputation for the game rests on the match between Eton and Harrow on August 2, 1805,[20] when, says a note in the Letters and Journals: "Lord Stratford de Redcliffe remembered seeing a 'moody-looking boy' dismissed for a small score. The boy was Byron ".[21]

Despite the enmity with Butler, he was so unhappy at leaving school that "it broke my very rest for the last quarter, counting the days that remained.... One of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life was to feel that I was no longer a boy"; and Harrow was sung in several poems of the earliest volume.

the famous "Peachey" grave in the pretty little churchyard that adjoins the school, so well known to be his favourite resting-place that the boys called it "Byron's tomb". Here he would sometimes lie for hours, gazing over the wide and radiant prospect, where the battlements of Windsor shone in the evening light, and London rose, as it were, from the sea: "A fairy city of the heart", as he was to write in later years, of a lovelier town.

Before the tomb, on the side looking towards Windsor, there now stands a tablet inscribed with the opening of the Lines written beneath an Elm in the Churchyard at Harrow. The elm (no doubt to preserve what may be still preserved of so historic a tree) has been cut down to within a few feet of the ground; there are no branches to droop or moan,

But the thought of him follows every footstep that one takes in the place. From the first sight of the high-set spires to the climbing of the hill; in the hall where he thrice stood to declaim the "passionate speech" he loved; in the church where gleam the tablets of the Drury family[22] and of "Pomposus" and his wife; in the churchyard, above all, where the air blows embalmed with the scent of many crimson rose trees - Harrow-on-the-Hill is lyrical of Byron. He found there, and there only throughout all his life, "a home, a world, a paradise--

[1] At Dulwich School he had been nicknamed the "Old English Baron" - from his "frequent boast of the superiority of an old English Barony over later creations": a kind of vapouring soon cut short at Harrow.

[2] This was Sir William Musgrave, of Heaton Castle, Cumberland.

[3] L. and J. i. 36.

[4] Another school-friend, William Harness, said of his attachments a Harrow: He required a great deal from [his friends]--not more, perhaps than he, from the abundance of his love, freely and fully gave--but more than they had to return.

[5] This earls brother, Richard, succeeded him in 1851 as third and last Earl of Clare.

[6] This phrase occurs in an undated letter, presumably from the context, to Mrs. Shelley, of 1823 (Moore, p. 574).

[7] George John, fifth Earl Delawarr. He married, in 1813, Lady Elizabeth Sackville.

[8] In the Life of the Rev. W. Harness we find the following reference (in a letter of 1869) to Lord Delawarr, who had lately died: "I believe there was no actual quarrel with Byron. It was simply a case of incompatibility. The ardour of B. was more than D. could adequately meet" (Literary Life of the Rev. William Harness, by the Rev. A. G. L'Estrange).

[9] They were in a way connected, for the families had twice intermarried in the time of Charles I, the third Lord Deiawarr's daughters, Cecilie and Lucy, having both married Byrons. Cecilie's husband was that Sir John who became the first Baron Byron. He left no heirs, and his brother Richard succeeded. The first Lord Byron's second wife, by the way, was a daughter of Lord Kilmorey, and the widow of Peter Warburton. Of her Pepys, in his Journal, relates that she was the seventeenth mistress of Charles II when abroad, and did not leave him till she had extorted from him an assignment of silver plate to the value of £4000, "but by delays, thanks be to God, she died before she had it."

[10] "And thou, my friend! - since unavailing woe"...(Canto i. stanzas 91, 92.)

[11] These verses have been by some writers (myself among them) erroneously attributed to a later period - the Teresa Guiccioli period; and said to have been written during her illness at Ravenna, when Byron thought she was going into consumption. They were not published until two years after his death, in a Paris edition of his poems.

[12] Next to history, descriptions of travels in the East particularly interested him. "All books upon the East I could meet with I had read before I was ten years old".

[13] In the Letters and Journals there are three of earlier date. The second, to his mother, dated March 13, 1799, when he was eleven, has a hint of his peculiar vivacity: "Mr. Rogers could attend me every night at a separate hour from the Miss Parkynses, and I am astonished you do not acquiesce in this Scheme, which would keep me in mind of what I have almost entirely forgot. . . . If some plan of this kind is not adopted I shall be called, or rather branded with the name of a dunce, which you know I never could bear" (i. 8).

[14] L. and J. i. 12, 13.

[15] L. and J. i. 52.

[16] Many years later, when Colonel Wildman, he bought Newstead Abbey from Byron.

[17]

These lines were in the Ms. draft of Childish Recollections.

[18] Moore, on quoting this in his second edition, added a note to say that Dr. Butler assured him it had very little foundation in fact.

[19] John Cecil Tatersall was the "Davus" of Childish Recollections: "the laughing herald of the harmless pun". He died at twenty-four.

[20] Played in the old cricket-ground in Dorset Square.

[21] Lord Stratford de Redcliffe also said that another boy "ran" for Byron in this match (Dict. Nat. Biog.).

[22] One of Henry Drury's sons was named Byron. His tablet is in the church.

ALONG with the school-life there had run, since the summer of 1803, the course of that love-affair whose influence upon him has been so grossly exaggerated by his biographers. But this has been because it was so grossly exaggerated by himself, in that most deceptive of all moods - the sentimental-reminiscent one. That he believed in the tears which, long after it had been for anything but sentimentality forgotten, the revocation of this episode could draw from him, adds no tincture of reality to the flow. The Dream (he said) "was written at Diodati in 1816, amid a flood of tears". Yes; and with just such tears every one of us can blot the page when we enter the region of self-pity. It is a mood most incident to, most fruitful for, poets; let us rejoice that they enjoy it, and let us, for our part, see it as it is - sincere, but sincere through its very insincerity. If, through the thirteen years that had swept by since that boyish passion absorbed him, Byron had been constantly occupied with its remembrance, The Dream could never have been written. Just because it crept back into his consciousness, after many years of oblivion, in an hour of deep and ever-deepening bitterness, did those memories take substance with such authentic accent, such limpid truth and purity. They were almost as fresh to him as to his readers!

He had met Mary Chaworth first, probably, in London; and during the summer holidays of 1803 the acquaintance was renewed at Nottingham. Mrs. Byron was at that time lodging in the town, awaiting her move to Southwell, where, in the latter part of the same year, she took up a fixed residence at Burgage Manor, on the Green. Newstead was let, in March 1803, to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, whom Byron came so passionately and mysteriously to detest;[1] but at this time they were great friends, and he often slept at the Abbey. About three miles from Newstead, and nine from Nottingham,[2] stood (and stands) Annesley Hall, where Mary Chaworth lived with her mother, Mrs. Clarke. She was heiress to the estate, she was two years older than her boy-lover, and she was grand-niece of the Mr. Chaworth whom William, fifth Lord Byron, had killed. There was a Romeo and Juliet flavour in the situation which would have been enough in itself to attract Byron, overflowing as he was at this time with newly awakened sensibilities and the heiress of Annesley was plainly something of a coquette. A girl of seventeen and a schoolboy - she in the dawning days of power, he still under discipline; she volatile and he serious (as he said in later years) - the position is familiar, and its effects are almost invariable. Mary was considered "handsome "-a pronounced brunette, with dark eyes and clouds of dense black hair. Something of espièglerie lurks in the little oval face, which to modern eyes is barely pretty, though we can guess at a mobile charm when laughter lit it. Byron, on the other hand, is at fifteen not to be figured as attractive. He had a tendency to fatness (his mother was by this time monstrously corpulent), and his features had not yet refined and kindled into the beauty which was soon to reveal itself.[3] Moreover, he was lame, and Miss Chaworth loved dancing. She accepted his adoration; she may even, in very romantic moonlit hours, have imagined herself into a kind of reciprocity; which of us has not passed through the melting moments of such a relationship? She did give him her picture - which meant something in those days; there is a tradition that she gave him a ring.[4] If she did, the instant consequence of her gift was the announcement of her engagement to "another ". The story goes that this Mr. John Musters - a fox-hunting squire of the neighbourhood - was bathing with Byron in the river which ran through his estate of Colwick Hall, and suddenly perceived among the boy's clothes, scattered on the bank, a ring which he recognised as Mary's. He at once took possession; Byron claimed it, but Musters refused to restore. They contended hotly, and soon Musters mounted his horse and galloped to Annesley Hall, there to confront the girl with the disputed token. She confessed that Byron wore it as her gift - but she solaced the rival by promising to declare without delay her engagement to himself.

There is nothing very reprehensible in all this; it merely gives an impression of shallowness of feeling. She cannot have cared much for either lover, one judges. More than probably she did not; of Mary Chaworth's real calibre we know practically nothing. She was "the bright Morning-Star of Annesley ", and she was the Lady of the Dream: beyond that, she scarcely exists for us, except as, in later years, a miserably unhappy wife.... But let us see what effects her coquetry had upon the boy who now for the first time met, on intimate terms, a "grown-up young lady ". The earliest one was as violent as most things were with Byron. After the summer vacation of 1803, he refused to go back to school. Drury wrote to ask for an explanation, got no answer, and then applied to Hanson. Hanson wrote to Mrs. Byron, and on October 30 received the following answer, which enclosed a letter to herself from the boy.

"The truth is, I cannot get him to return to school, though I have done all in my power for six weeks past. He has no indisposition that I know of, but love, desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion. In short, the Boy is distractedly in love with Miss Chaworth, and he has not been with me three weeks all the time he has been in this County, but spent all his time at Annesley. If my son was of a proper age, and the lady disengaged, it is the last of all connexions that I would wish to take place; it has given me much uneasiness."[5]

This was the period during which he still "hated Harrow"; he hated Nottingham too, where his mother was then lodging; so that everything combined to keep him at Annesley and Newstead as much as might be, and it is evident that Mary Chaworth (though even then, apparently, known to be pledged to Musters) showed him favour enough to keep him dangling at her side. The "Morning-Star" here loses some of the lustre which Moore lavishly assigns her as the paramount good influence of Byron's life. She seems to emerge as an ordinary young lady of the drawing-rooms, "in love" with a good-looking country clown, but very willing to have a soupirant, however negligible, at her beck and call. For we may safely conjecture that if Mary had told her adorer to go back to Harrow, he would have gone. He did not return until January 1804 - missing the whole autumn term.

The summer holidays had been vibrant both with joy and anguish. There had been a trip with her party to Matlock and a tête-à-tête in a boat, during which they crossed, in a cavern, a stream which followed so close under a rock that the boat could only be pushed along by a stooping ferryman who waded at the stern. More than two people could not go in a boat; and they must lie down. "I recollect my sensations", he wrote in 1821, "but cannot describe them, and it is as well". They were of a different kind in the evening, when the party went to one of the balls which were held in the Assembly Rooms at Matlock. Here the sources of pain were manifold, for Mary excelled in the dance, and it was the custom to accept as partners total strangers; while he, forcibly excluded from all active share in the festivity, felt the old wound reopening with a pang that made all former pangs mere nothings.[6] He attacked her bitterly; of course she laughed at him; and, to complete his humiliation, a terrible guy of a Scotchwoman came up and loudly claimed him as a cousin.... "I hope you like your friend !" he had hissed in Mary's ear as she came back from dancing with her stranger; now she contrived to pass close to him in the throng, and to murmur mockingly, with a girlish grimace, "I hope you like yours!"

But away from the Assembly Rooms all was bliss. "I passed the summer vacation among the Malvern H ills" - already familiar, for in 1801 he had spent the summer at Cheltenham with his mother, and had "watched the hills every afternoon at sunset with a sensation I cannot describe". They were the first "mountains" he had seen since Lachin-y-gair and Morven; and now, in 1803, he was looking at them with Mary. "Those were the days of romance!" he said to Medwin in 1822. "She was the beau idéal of all that my youthful fancy could paint of beautiful; and I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of women from the perfection my imagination created in her - I say created, for I found her, like the rest of the sex, anything but angelic".

In 1821 he wrote in the Detached Thoughts, recalling this Sojourn: "We were a party - a Mr. W., two Miss W.'s, Mr. and Mrs. Cl--ke" (her mother and stepfather), "Miss M. and my M. A. C. Alas! why do I say My? Our union would have healed feuds, in which blood had been shed by our fathers; it would have joined lands, broad and rich; it would have joined at least one heart, and two persons not ill-matched in years (she is two years my elder); and - and - what has been the result? She has married a man older than herself, been wretched, and separated. I have married, and am separated; and yet we are not united".

But the probabilities are as strong in one direction as in the other. Elsewhere, in the same quasi-diary, he says: "I doubt sometimes, after all, whether a quiet and unagitated life would have suited me". We may go further, and say that "a quiet and unagitated life" not only would not have suited him, but was unthinkable for him - wedded to mere routine though he often showed himself. But that routine had to be of his own choosing, and was most followed when living alone. No wife, at any rate, could have shared it. And, moreover, it was sometimes open to interpretations which are usually foreign to the word. "If I stay six weeks in a place, I require six months to get out of it" - and what did he do, in some of the places!

Back at Annesley, after the Derbyshire excursion, he now - having conquered a superstitious dread of the family pictures, which he fancied to have "a grudge against him because of the Duel, and to be ready to come out of their frames and haunt him" - became almost a fixture in the house. The days were spent in riding with Mary and her cousin, in sitting lost in dreams beside her, and in shooting at a door which opened on the terrace of the Hall, and which, when Moore wrote, "still bore the marks of his shots". There was music too; Mary could play and sing, and one of her ditties, the Welsh air "Mary Anne ", was very often pleaded for. Mary Anne was her full name, not then so overlaid with unromantic associations as we now have it - a love-sick boy could gloat upon it without being more ridiculous than usual. Very love-sick he must have been by this time, for now there was no doubt that she was in love with "handsome Jack Musters". "He was one of the most eminent sportsmen of his day", said a writer[7] in the Athenaeum in 1834; and he was also, in a florid, stupid sort, of way, very good-looking. (A portrait of him by Reynolds, belonging to Lt.-Col. W. H. Poë, was shown in the Japanese-British Exhibition of 1910.) She had seen him first at a fox-hunt - "the Unspeakable in pursuit of the Uneatable"; but it was not so that she would, in those days at any rate, have characterised him. No; for she would stand, on the famed Diadem Hill,[8]

The steed would have come "along the road that winds up the common from Hucknall", says the same Athenaeum writer; and thither Mary's dark eyes gazed, and Byron's too:

though not, we may suppose, with the same admiration for Jack Musters. To show the absorbed maiden a locket which an earlier love had given him (Moore thinks it may have been the exquisite dead cousin, Margaret Parker) can have availed little for solace against these hours of boyish jealousy: we may conjecture that her attention and interest were perfunctory. And indeed it was during the latter part of the same holidays that the most poignant incident of the affair occurred. "He either was told of, or overheard, Miss Chaworth saying to her maid, 'Do you think I could care anything for that lame boy?' This speech" (says Moore, on the authority of Byron's own Memoranda) "was like a shot through the heart. Though late at night when he heard it, he instantly darted out of the house, and scarcely knowing whither he ran, never stopped till he found himself at Newstead" - three miles away. It gives us the measure of his young infatuation that so agonising a stab could be forgotten.

He went back to Harrow in January 1804, "more deeply enamoured than ever", and passed the next holidays too in her neighbourhood. "I now began to fancy myself a man, and to make love in earnest", he told Medwin - to whom, however, he told many a fib. For Medwin (John Cordy Jeaffreson's "perplexing simpleton") was the dedicated victim of Byron's favourite game of mystification: Medwin would swallow anything. The story he heard differs considerably from Moore's, who assigns only six weeks to the whole of the "Chaworth love-affair". Medwin heard that, in the holidays of 1804, "Our meetings were stolen ones, and my letters passed through the medium of a confidant. A gate leading from Mr. Chaworth's grounds to those of my mother" (plainly a fib, for Southwell and Annesley are several miles apart) "was the place of our interviews. But the ardour was all on my side. I was serious; she was volatile. She liked me as a younger brother, and treated me and laughed at me as a boy. She, however, gave me her picture, and that was something to make verses on".

With his return to Harrow in the end of 1804, the dream - if it could be called a dream - was over. He said his good-bye to her on the historic hill. With quiet voice and quiet face he spoke. "The next time I see you, I suppose you will be Mrs. Chaworth".[9]

"I hope so", she replied.

That is Moore's account; The Dream gives a different setting to the farewell.

and when the interview with "the Lady of his love" was over,

In the following year (August 1805) Mary was married to John Musters. There had been a letter from Byron to Augusta in June: "The later one makes one's self miserable with the matrimonial clog, the better"; and to all correspondents he complained of utter ennui, besides the never-failing strain of the quarrels with his mother. He wrote, in after years, of Mary's marriage: "This threw me out again 'alone on a wide, wide sea'. In the year 1804, I recollect meeting my sister at General Harcourt's in Portland Place. I was then one thing, and as she had always till then found me. When we met again in 1805 (she told me since) my temper and disposition were so completely altered that I was hardly to be recognised. I was not then sensible of the change, but I can believe it, and account for it". We may remind ourselves that between 1804 and 1805 had come the great change from school to university life - from boyhood to young manhood; and also a prolonged residence with Mrs. Byron, which could not leave any temper unaltered for the worse.

Moore's account of Byron's hearing the news of the marriage is well known, and is told on the authority of "a friend who was present". But John Cordy Jeaffreson pours contempt on the story, pointing out the similarity between it and the hearing of the same news about his child-love, Mary Duff - an incident, moreover, which had happened only the year before.[11] Mrs. Byron had then been sufficiently alarmed by her son's demeanour; is it likely (asks Jeaffreson) that she would have repeated her - in the first instance unconscious - cruelty at so short an interval? Moreover, the news can scarcely have been news; the boy would either have known it already or have been hourly expecting to hear it, of neighbours so near, so intimate, and so prominent in the social life of the place. Jeaffreson's point is striking. More than probably, almost certainly, his explanation is the just one: the name of Mary Duff "got mixed", in the gossip of the tattling little town, with the name of Mary Chaworth.

He met her again in 1808, when she had been for two years a mother.[12] Mr. Chaworth-Musters invited him to dine at Annesley not long before he left England on his Albanian tour. He did, then, revisit Annesley Hall; "but" (says Mr. E. H. Coleridge) "it is possible that he avoided the 'mossy gate' of set purpose, and entered by another way".[13] He has left three descriptions of his feelings - one in prose, the others in verse. The former was contained in a letter of November 3, 1808. "You know, laughing is the sign of a rational animal...I think so, too, but unluckily my spirits don't always keep pace with my opinions. I had not so much scope for risibility the other day as I could have wished, for I was seated near a woman to whom, when a boy, I was as much attached as boys generally are, and more than a man should be. I knew this before I went, and was determined to be valiant and converse with sang froid; but instead I forgot my valour and my nonchalance, and never opened my lips even to laug