a^otntU 3llntu0r0itg Ethrarg Stlfutu, Kent fork FROM THE BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY COLLECTED BY BENNO LOEWY 1854-1919 BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVERSITV Cornell University Library PR 4381.J43 1883 The real Lord Byron; new views of the poe 3 1924 013 451 020 ,0i^ '^ TVS /n3 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013451020 THE REAL LORD BYRON NEW VIEWS OF THE POET'S LIFE JOHN CORDY JEAFFRESON O Author of "A Booh about the Clergy," "A Booh about Doctors," "A Booh about Lawyers," etc., etc. BOSTON JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY i'NlVi883 »"1 Y COPTBIGHT, 1883, By J. E. OSGOOD & COMPAHr. All rights reserved. fflOOgV^ 00]5TTEN"TS. CHAPTEE I. MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT BTBON. Byron's Temper — His Personal Characteristics — His Freedom from Aristocratic Insolence — His Early Friendships — Homage to Rank — Leigh Hunt's Malice — Familiar Pride . • . . 1 CHAPTEE II. THE BYKONS OF KOCHDALE AND NBWSTBAD. Mediaeval Bunins — Sir John the Little with the Great Beard — Filius Naturalis — Thoroton's " Nottinghamshire " — Elizabeth Halghe's Slip — Knight of the Bath — The Byron Barony — Byronic Fecundity and Longevity — Thomas Shipman's Patron — The Byron-Chavrorfh Duel — The Berkeley Strain — Taste for the Fine Arts . 7 CHAPTER III. bteon's near ancestoks. Admiral Byron — " Foul- Weather Jack"-:- "Mad Jack Byron" — The Marchioness of Carmarthen (Lady Conyers) — Augusta Byron's Birth — Miss Gordon of Gight 21 CHAPTER IV. MORE OP "MAD JACK ETRON." Holies Street, Cavendish Square — Augusta's Grandmother — " Baby Byron" — Mad Jack in Scotland — Catherine Gordon's Charac- teristics — Mad Jack's Death 29 CHAPTEE V. ABERDEEN. The Widow's Poverty — The Poet's Childhood — May Gray's Cal-. vinism — Catherine Gordon's Treatment of her Boy — His Scotch Tutors — His Lameness — Banks of Dee — Heir Presumptive — Aberdeen Grammar School — The Fifth Lord's Death— Byron's First Love : Mary Duff — His Temper in Childhood — His Girl- jshness —" Auld Lang Syne " 38 IV CONTENTS. CHAPTEB VI. NOTTINGHAM AND LONDON. The Sixth Lord — His Pirst Visit to Ne wstead — The Abbey — Tutor at Nottingham — Lavender the Bone-setter — Dulwich Grove — Dr. Glennie — A Very Troublesome Mamma — Guardian and "Ward — Byron's First Dash into Poetry — His Second Love : Margaret Parker — His Later Attachments — His Sensibility, Memory, and Imagination — Malvern Hills and Scotch Moun- tains . . .^ 54 CHAPTEB VIL HAKROW. Dr. Drury — " Good-by, Gaby" — The Fat Boy — His Hatred and Love of Harrow — "All the Sports" — Cricket and Rebellion — Passionate Friendships — Girlish Sentimentality — Tender- hearted Harrovians — The Poet's AfiFection for his School-master — "The Butler Row" — "Little Latin and Less Greek" — Declamations — Lord Carlisle's " Indeed! " . . . .68 CHAPTER VIII. HAKKOW HOLIDAYS. Lady Holderness' Death — "Baby Byron" — His Sister Augusta — Her Plain Face and Sweet Nature — Life at Southwell — Mary Anne Chaworth — Matlock and Castleton — Annesley Hall — Who was Thyrza? — ' ' The Dream " — Its Falsehood and Malice, 89 CHAPTER IX. LOUD- BTEON OP TRINITY. Despondency — Eddleston, the Chorister — Dr. William Lort Mansell — College Friends — Hobhouse on Byron's Nature — Eighteen Long Years Hence — "Hours of Idleness" — Lord Carlisle — College Debts — Cambridge Dissipations — The "Edinburgh Article " — Walter Scott's Opinion of the Article — Who Wrote It? — The Poet's Regard for Cambridge — Honor Done the Poet by the University . 104 CHAPTER X. CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. In London — "The Noble Art of Self-defence" — Swimming in the Thames — Byron's Life at Southwell — His Quarrels with his Mother — Harrowgate — First and Second Editions of • The Southwell Poems — " The Prayer of Nature " — Byron's Scepti- cism — His Height and Fatness — Starvation and Physio — Their Results — Tobacco and Laudanum 121 CONTEOTS. V CHAPTER XI. PEEB AND PILGRIM. The Rochdale Property — Brompton and Brighton — "Brother Gordon" — Life at Newstead — The "Coming of Age" — Byron'8 Quarrel with the Earl of Carlisle — Missing Evidence — The House of Lords — " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers " — Neither Whig nor Tory — The "Pilgrimage" — Homeward Bound ... 141 CHAPTER Xn. " CHILDE HAROLD." Hints from Horace — The Valley of The Shadow of Death — Melan- choly Poetry — Sam Rogers' Dinner — Newstead and London — First Speech in " The Lords" — Sudden Fame — Social Triumph — The Poet's Demeanor — The Prince Regent — The Season of 1812 — Cheltenham — Pecuniary Affairs — Dissentient Yoices 155 CHAPTER XIII. THE KIVAI, OOnSINS-IN-LAMT. The World of Fashion — Lady Caroline Lamb — Her Looks and Nature — "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know" — Platonic Love — Miss Milbanke — Her Fortune and Expectations — Her Influence over Bjrron — Lady Caroline "Playing the Devil" — Love Turned to Hate 180 CHAPTER' XIV. THE TUKNING OP THE TIDE. Bennet Street —Mrs. Mule — ' ' The Albany " — The Poet's Clubs — "The Gaiour" — The Marquis of Sligo's Testimony — Horse- monger Lane Gaol — The Seasons of '13 and '14 — " The Bride of Abydos" — " The ' Corsair " — Anti-Byron — Disgust for Literature — Renewal of Industry 202 CHAPTER. XV. BTRON's MABRIED LIFE. Byron's Spirits During the Engagement — The Wedding at Seaham — Art of "Bamming" — Duck, Pippin, and Goose — Quiet Time at 13 Piccadilly Terrace — Lord Wentworth's Death — Matri- monial Felicity — The Poet's Will — Commencement of Bicker- ings — "An Unhappy Sort of Life " — Causes of Quarrel . .212 VI CONTENTS. CHAPTER XVI. THE SEPARATION. Ada's Birth — Augusta, the Comforter — Lady Byron's Withdrawal from London — Her Case Against Her Husband — Written State- ment for Doctor and Lawyer — Lady Noel's Interview with Dr. Lushington — Lady Byron's " Additional Statement" — Mrs. Clermont, the Mischief-maker — Jane Clermont, AUegra's Mother — The " Fare Thee Well " —Results of Its Publication, 235 CHAPTER XVII. THE STOBU. " Simple Causes " — Lady Byron's Justification — Her Abundant Frankness — The "Quarterly Review" Letter — Byron's Sur- prise at His Wife's Resolve — His First Action on the Intelligence — His Subsequent Behavior — Extravagances of Social Senti- ment — Observations on the ' ' Remarks on Don Juan " — " Glen- arvon" — Lady Jersey's Farewell Party — The Poet's With- drawal from England CHAPTER XVIII. SWITZERLAND. Brussels — Waterloo — The Poet's Mode of Travelling — Other Tourists — Hotel Secheron — Villa Diodati — Polidori — Gene- vese Scandal-mongers — Byron's Wrath against Southey — His Overture to Lady Byron — His Rage at its Failure — His Promise to Claire — AUegra's Birth and Death — Claire's Scornful Words — Teresa Guiccioli ^- Bernese Oberland 283 CHAPTER XIX. VENICE : ETBON'S DEPRAVATION. Marianna Segati — Convent of St. Lazarus — Madame Albrizzi and Madame Benzoni — Malarial Fever — Byron at Rome — ' ' Count Maddalo " — AUegra at Venice — The Pecuniary Resources — His Literary Earnings — Sale of Ne wstead — Poet and Salesman — Gallops on the Lido — Sordid Dissipation — The Poet's Home- sickness and Irritability — His Alarming Illness — His Recovery and Reappearance in Society 311 CHAPTER XX. TERESA GAMBA GUICCIOLI. Byron's Regard for Teresa — Her Childhood and Beauty — Byron's First Introduction to Her — Their Friendship at Venice — Teresa's Homeward Journey — "A Stranger Loves the Lady of the Land " — Byron at Ravenna — Student of Medicine — Byron at Bologna — Mrs. Vavassour and AUegra — The Elopement (?) CONTENTS. TU — Teresa at La Mira — Sensation in Venice — Count Guiccioli Seeks Compensation — Teresa Returns to Her Husband — Byron's Preparations for Eeturning to England — Invitation to Bavenna — The Poet " At Home " in the Palazza Guiecioli . , .339 CHAPTER XXI. BAVENNA. The Palazza Guiccioli — BjTon's Feelings for Teresa — Italian Poli- tics — The Carbonari — Count Guiccioli's Virtuous Indignation — Teresa's Revolt Against Her Husband — The Decree of Separa- tion — Byron's Political Prescience — The Capo ot the Americani — The Revolutionary Movement — Its Failure — The Black Sen- tence and Proscription — Teresa in Exile — Byron's Slowness in Following Her — AUegra at Bagna Cavallo — Poetic Fecundity at Ravenna — Migration from Ravenna to Pisa .... 365 CHAPTER XXII. FISA. Byron's Friends at Pisa and Genoa — Their Views of and Books about Him — His Appearance, Costume, and Habits — Letter from Mr. Sheppard of Frome — The Poet Relents towards His Wife — Lady Noel's Death — Byron's Consequent Enrichment — Allegra's Death — The Pistol Club — The Affair with the Trooper — The Fracas at Montenero — Difficulties with the Government — Shelley's Death — The Hunts in Italy — Leigh Hunt's Disap- appointment and Byron's Annoyance — Migration to Genoa . 396 CHAPTER XXIII. GENOA. Casa Saluzzi — Failure of "The Liberal" — Byron's Annoyance at the Misadventure — His Literary Work at Albaro — The Bless- ingtons at Genoa — ^"Count D'Orsay's " English Notes " — Message of Peace to Lady Byron — Leigh Hunt on Byronic Pettinesses — Teresa Guiccioli's Influence — Byron's Letters to Her from Cephalonia — His Correspondence with the London Greek Com- mittee — Farewell to the Blessingtons — Departure from Genoa — Leghorn — Goethe's Letter — Argostoli 430 CHAPTER XXIV. CEPHALONIA. Byron's Delight at Seeing Greece again — Blaqui6re's Departure for England — The Voyage from Leghorn to Argostoli — The Poet's Demeanor on Board the "Hercules" — His Alternate Sadness and Hilarity — His Gossip with Trelawny — King of Greece — William Parry — The Excursion to Ithaca — Shattered Nerves and Broken Health — Byron's Life at Metaxata — His Disputa- tions with Dr. Kennedy — His Motives for Lingering in Cepha- lonia — Policy and Indolence 452 vm CONTENTS. CHAPTER XXV. MISSOLONGHI. Tlie Mistico and the Bombard at Sea — Their Adventures on the Passage — Byron's Enthusiastic Reception at Missolonghi — Marco Botzaris's Suliotes — The Birthday Ode — The Poet's Behavior at Missolonghi — His Differences with Colonel Stanhope — The Failure of His Health — The Successive Epileptic Seizures — Lady Byron's Letter — The Poet's Unfinished Letter to Augusta — Exasperating Incidents and Gloomy Circumstances — The Rivalry of Odysseus and Mavrocordatos — Negotiations for the Congress of Salona — The Poet's Fatal Illness — His Last Moments and Last Words — His Funeral at Hacknall-Torkard . 469 CHAPTER XXVI. THE DESTRUCTION Or " THE MEMOIES." Who was the Destroyer? — John Cam Hobhouse — Byron's Gift of the " Memoirs " to Moore — The Joint Assignment by Byron and Moore to Murray — The Power of Redemption — News in London of the Poet's Death — Hobhouse's Prompt Measures — The De- struction—The Scene in Albemarle Street — The Late Mr. Murray's Letter to Wilmot Horton — The Present Mr. Murray's Letter to the "Academy" — Misconceptions respecting Lady Byron — Tom Moore's Friends in the City — Spirit and Sub- stance of the " Memoirs " 4.98 CHAPTER XXVII. EYEONIC WOMANKIND. Completion of Lady Caroline's Distress — That Awful Legacy by Medwin — Teresa Guiccioli's Sacrifices for the Poet — Her Second Husband — Lady Byron's Hard Fate — The Valet's Verdict — The Sisters-in-Law after Byron's Death — Their Rupture Moore's " Life " — Lady Byron's "Remarks " on the " Life " No Monomaniac — Dark Suspicions — The Origin of the Worst Slander — The Last Interview of the Sisters-in-Law — Mrs. Leigh's Death — Revival of Lady Byron's Animosity . . . 526 CHAPTER XXVIII. A PARTING NOTE. The Whole of the Evil — Byron's several Failings — Gifts and their Givers — Seventy Years since — Now and Then — The Change of Manners — One of its Causes — Thurlow and Nelson Free- living and Free-thinking — The Man and his Times . . .553 THE REAL LORD BYRON. CHAPTER I. MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT BYRON. In great things and small things it was Byron's lot to be misunderstood during his life, and misrepresented after his death. "With the exception of the few, perhaps the few hun- dred, persons who, with sufficient discrimination for the task, have taken care to separate the few facts from the many fic- tions of his numerous biographers and the many facts from the few fictions of his published letters and journals, and out of the reliable data to make a memoir of him for themselves, the man is still almost as little known to the students of his poetry .as he was to the people who on the evening of his withdrawal from England frowned at him in London draw- ing-rooms or murmured against him in the London streets. After all that has been written about him, readers have still to learn the qualities of his temper, the real failings of his nature, the peculiarities of his manner, and even the most conspicuous points of his personal appearance. They have been taught to regard him as a man of mysteries, tort- ured by remorse for crimes too terrible for confession and guarding secrets too revolting for avowal, whilst in simple truth he went through life from first to last with his heart and all its frailties upon his sleeve, and lived from boyhood to his last hour under glass, that, whilst it magnified all his faults, put all his virtues in miniature. With all his perverse and baneful delight in mystifying people about trifles, this man of mystery could not, to save his life, or what was far Z IHE REAL LOKD BYEON'. dearer to him, — his fame, — hold within his own breast a single secret that vexed it seriously. Inspired at times by vanity to make himself the enigma of his period, even in his most perplexing moods he was nothing more than a riddle to be solved by any one of ordinary shrewdness with a brain clear of romantic fancies. What marvellous stuff has been written of the stern and cruel spirit of the misanthrope, who, with the sensibility and impulsiveness of the gentler sex, could not in his softer moments see misery without weeping over it and seeking to relieve it ! Who has not been invited to ponder on the habitual melancholy of the man, who in his brighter time brimmed over with frolic, and even in the sad- ness of his closing years made the world ring with laughter, and delighted in practical jokes ? Who has not heard of his gloomy brovr, black locks, dark eyes, and club-foot? And yet his face was not more remarkable for the beauty of its features than for the brightness of its smiles ; his hair, light chestnut in childhood, never darkened to the deepest brown of auburn ; his eyes were gray-blue ; and he hadn't a club- foot. One of the fictions is that, valuing himself inordinately on his birth, he was less proud of the genius that gave us "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan," than of the accidents that made him a Lord of the Upper House. Due in some measure to the biographers who, like Leigh Hunt and Tom Moore, could never lose sight of his patrician quality, this misconception of a nature, innocent of all such miserable weakness, is referable chiefly and in an equal degree to the simplicity and obsequiousness of the many readers, who would have honored him for being an insignificant peer, even if they had not reverenced him for being a great poet. It is not usual for those who plume themselves on their ancestral advantages to attach themselves strongly to persons of infe- rior extraction. Though he may admit persons of plebeian birth to his intimacy, the noble, who is greatly prouder of his pedigree than his natural endowments, never fails to draw a line between the acquaintances who are beneath him and the friends who are his equals, and, whilst cultivating the former for the entertainment they afford him, to give his MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT BYEON. 3 warmest affection and perfect confidence only to those who are of his own order. "With the single exception of Lord Clare, Byron's closest comrades were found in ranks some- thing or greatly beneath his Own. There were times, doubtless, when Hobhouse was justified in thinking his friend gave too ready an ear to flatterers whom he should have kept at a distance. But there never was a time of his whole career when the particular insolence, that biographers are pleased to call " pride of race," pre- cluded Byron from sympathizing cordially with his social inferiors. In boyhood, whilst composing some of the weakest lines of the " Hours of Idleness " to the honor of those " mail-covered barons who proudly to battle led their vassals from Europe to ^Palestijje's plain " (ancestors, by the way, who are not known to have donned armor in the cru- sades, or set foot in the Holy Land) , he cherished a romantic fondness for the son of one of his Newstead tenants. At Cambridge he conceived a similar affection for the college- chorister (Eddlestone) , of whom he wrote in his nineteenth year to Miss Pigot, of Southwell, " During the whole of my residence at Cambridge we met every day, summer and win- ter, without passing one tiresome moment, and separated each time with increasing reluctance." Though they were gentlemen by birth, culture, taste, and purpose, Hobhouse, Hodgson, Scrope Davies, Charles Skinner Matthews, and the other members of his particular set at Trinity, were not the persons to whom he would have attached himself had he rated his descent at more than its proper worth. The pleasant terms on which he lived, during his Cambridge va- cations, with the Bechers, the Pigots, and the other modest gentry of a small provincial town, are evidence that the youthful peer was not so largely animated by a sense of his patrician magnificence as some of his biographers would have us believe. In later time this aristocrat, with all his over- weening arrogance, took for his peculiar intimate the son of a Dublin tradesman. Though the main purpdse of his almost unpardonably spiteful book was to render Byron contemp- tible and ludicrous by magnifying his weaknesses, and put- ting them in the strongest and fiercest light, Leigh Hunt was 4 THE REAL LORD BYEON. held to truth in this matter by enmity that was even keener and more rancorous than his animosity against the author of "Don Juan." Smarting under the slights put upon him. and the injury done him by the men who were of opinion that Byron would suffer in dignity and reputation from his connection with the Hunts, the author of "Rimini" re- marked in a vein scarcely consistent with his affectation of a republican superiority to aristocratic prejudices, "The manner of such of his lordship's friends as I ever happened to meet with were in fact, with one exception, nothing supe- rior to their birth. . . . It is remarkable (and, in- deed, may account for the cry about gentility, which none are so given to as the vulgar) that they were almost all per- sons of humble origin : one of a raQC of booksellers ; another the son of a grocer ; another of a glazier ; and a fourth, though the son of a baronet, the grandson of a linen-draper." Nor can it be fairly urged, though it has often been un- fairly suggested, that Byron surrounded himself with men beneath him in rank, because they rendered deference to his social superiority, and fed him with flattery. Now and again sycophants approached him, as they never fail to ap- proach men of eminence ; now and again, in a season of weakness, he yielded more than he should have yielded to their addresses ; but the weakness was always transient, and the ascendency so gained over him w^s never lasting. Vehement in all things, Byron was especially vehement in his friendships ; and despite all that may be urged to the con- trary, on the strength of cynical flippancies uttered to aston- ish his hearers, and bitter words spoken or written under the spur of sudden resentments or the torture of exasperating suspicions, it may be averred stoutly that in choosing his friends and dealing with them he was altogether controlled by his heart. As for the way in which his friends treated him, it is not more unjust than ludicrous to attribute sub- serviency to the men who were wont to criticise his writings severely in words spoken to his face, or letters sent to him through the post. Tom Moore certainly "noble lord's" and "noble friend's " him through six rather tedious volumes, in a fashion that to readers of the present day is not a little MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT BYEON. 5 laughable and offensive. But, in fairness to the biographer, it should be remembered that what offends us in this matter was less due to the writer's idolatry of rank than to the etiquette of the period in which he figured as a man of fash- ion, and first warbler of aristocratic drawing-rooms. In the first twenty years of the present century, when rank was hon- ored at least verbally in a degree not easily imagined in these last twenty years of the same epoch, it was the mode of our grandfathers to seize every occasion to remind lords of their nobility. The Irish ballad-writer was not singular in this respect. Himself the heir of an ancient and dignified fam- ily, and a man whose way of living and thinking had alto- gether disqualified him for courtly service, Shelley — abso- lutely devoid of respect for mere conventional nobility — was no less careful to give Byron his title in the written page, and, like the author of "Lalla Rookh," refers to him in letters as his "noble friend." Had the author of "The Cenci" employed himself at Pisa in writing six small octavo volumes about his "noble friend's" life and adventures, the performance would have contained almost as many " lords " and " noble lords " and " my noble friends " as may be counted in Moore's occasionally dishonest pages. Whilst literature honored peers in this obsolete and curious fashion, and the world at every turn bowed before hereditary rank far lower than it bowed to rank of any other kind, it was not in the nature of things that Byron should be indiffer- ent to the distinction that, coming to him from his ancestors, made him a personage before he had laid aside his Highland petticoats. Naturally it pleased the child to listen to brave stories of the Byrons of olden time, who may (for all any one can say) have led their vassals to the Holy Land, and certainly might have done so for pay or piety had they been so disposed. On taking a poetic turn in his boyhood, it would have been strange had he not written verses on the four brothers who fell at Marston. Nor is it wonderful that, towards the close of his short career, when art required of his pen the picture of a lordly English home, he travelled in memory from his Italian villegiatura to the old familiar abbey (from which Childe Harold had so few years since set forth 6 THE REAL LORD BYRON. on his pilgrimage) and sung again, tenderly as in former days, but far more strenuously, of " The gallant cavaliers, who fought in vain For those who knew not to resign or reign." This wholesome pride in his domestic annals peeps forth now and then in all his writings, from his earliest boyish verses to his last dying song, but it neyer made him insolent or in any other way foolish. Though it was powerless- to save him from many errors and much avoidable misery, he had, with all his waywardness and perilous sensibility, too liberal a store of " saving common-sense " to commit the blunders of a pure simpleton. Possibly his arms were set in Italy over his bed, in the manner described by Mr. Leigh Hunt, who records the unimportant fact in the spirit of a discharged valet. Fifty years since beds of state were often so adorned in England, as well as Italy, just as spoons, and hall-chairs, and carriage- panels are still ornamented in like manner by owners who have not gone crazy with ancestral insolence. Though Hunt's malice inspires him to reproduce a piquant story of the anger with which Byron returned a box of pills to an apothecary, because the packet was directed to " Mr." instead of " Lord" Byron, the malice of five hundred detractors would, induce no discriminating reader to believe so egregious and manifest a fabrication. If family pride had been inordinately strong in Byron, he would not have sold Newstead for the sake of adding a few hundreds yearly to an already sufficient , income. Is[or was the sentiment in him a peculiar and dis- tinguishing characteristic. In the fulness of its force it was nothing more than a fair share of the almost universal senti- ment that causes many an ordinary, undistinguished English gentleman to resemble General Braddock, of " The Virgin- ■ ians," in being as proud of his no family in particular, as any peer can well be of his particular family. THE BTEONS OF EOCHDALB AND NEW8TEAD. CHAPTEE n. THE BYEONS OF KOCHDALB AND NEWSTEAD. Other considerations discountenance the notion that the poet regarded his pedigree and the annals of his house with unqualified complacence. For, though the Byrons of New- stead, county Notts, and Rochdale, county Lancaster, were a family from which a modest squire of George the Third's England might well have been proud to trace his descent, their annals were deficient in lustre, and their pedigree was not stainless. There are peerages and peerages, — those that contribute to our national glory, and those that are mere affairs of county history. There are peers whose sev- eral dignities are the memorials of their ancestors' achieve- ments in the successive generations of successive centuries. There are also peers whose nobility, instead of growing in honor and gathering lustre from the flying decades, has acquired nothing but age from the time that has slowly obscured the services for which it was created. To say of the Byron barony that, on coming to the poet at the close of the last century, it was a specimen of this fruitless, leaf- less, lifeless nobility, is not to say all that could be urged to its discredit. It is recorded by his not invariably accurate biographers that Byron's school-fellows nicknamed him " the Old English Baron," in derision of his practice of vaunting how superior his ancestral dignity was to modern creations of a higher grade. If he was guilty of such boastfulness, the boy knew strangely little about the matter. Too old to be called a mushroom peerage, his dignity was far too young to be rated with ancient baronies. Given in 1643 by Charles the First to Sir John Byron, in acknowl- edgment of the knight's zeal and devotion, and in the hope that it would lure other gentlemen to their sovereign's stand- 8 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. ard, it had not completed the hundred and fifty-sixth year of its existence when it devolved on Catherine Gordon's son ; and it certainly had not grown in social esteem during its passage from its first to its sixth possessor. Against the antiquity of the Nottinghamshire Byrons noth- ing can be urged, with the exception of a certain matter to which the reader's attention will be called in another minute. The poet may have had no better authority than his fancy and Collins' " Peerage " for the precise number of his ances- tors' manors when he wrote in "Don Juan's" 10th Canto : — " a sort of doomsday scroll, Such as the conqueror William did repay His knights with, lotting others' properties Into some sixty thousand new knights' fees. " I can't complain, whose ancestors are there, Erneis, Kadulphus — eight-and-forty manors (If that my memory doth not greatly err) Were their reward for following Billy's banners : And though I can't help thinking 'twas scarce fair To strip the Saxons of their hydes, like tanners ; Yet as they founded churches with the produce, Tou'll deem, no doubt, they put it to a good use." But whilst there is sufficient evidence that the Byrons came from Normandy in WiUiam's train, it is certainly " as true as ever truth hath been of late " that Erneis de Burun got from the Arch-Invader a grant of lands in Yorkshire and Lanca- shire, and that Ralph with same surname found his proper share of real estate in Nottinghamshire. Nothing more can be told of this pair of rather mythical adventurers. Nor is history much more communicative respecting those of their descendants who were the first Byrons to acquire possessions in Derbyshire, and in later time (under Edward the First) yet more land in Rochdale, county Lancaster. Save that they were great landholders, little is known of these fortunate Byrons during the next eight or nine generations. If any of them went to Palestine they missed the poet to celebrate their achievements until the dawn of the present century, when all their descendants could say of them was that they went thither, arrayed and attended in the manner already mentioned. Now and again one of the broad-acred clan shows himself for THE BYEONS OP ROCHDALE AND NEWSTEAD. 9 a moment, and then passes from the cognizance of history. The name appears in the records of the siege of Calais under our third Edward. Byrons fought at Cressy, and a Byron was at Bosworth on Richmond's side. From the general silence of the chroniclers about their doings it is not unfair to assume that these descendants of Ralph and Erneis were more intent on keeping their old lands, and adding to the number of their manors, than on winning new honors. And this in- ference from their historic unobtrusiveness is countenanced by their good fortune in retaining their acres in their hands and keeping their heads on their shoulders, in those troublous times that were so disastrous to adventurous men and ambi- tious families. Anyhow, it is noteworthy how much oftener a Byron is mentioned in connection with a stroke of peaceful acquisitiveness than with an essay of martial daring. Their good fortune in getting and keeping was, however, coming to an end when, on the suppression of the religious houses. Sir John Byron — styled more familiarly and picturesquely " Sir John the Little with the Great Beard " — received from Henry the Eighth a grant of the church and priory of Newstead : a property that, after remaining for something less than three centuries in the hands of the Byrons, passed by sale and pur- chase from the poet to his former schoolmate. Colonel Wild- man. With this parting benefaction fortune seems to have turned her back on the family who had enjoyed her favor for so many years, whilst doing so little to deserve it. Hitherto they had been rich and undistinguished. Henceforth they went to ruin and nobility. Had Sir John the Little with the Great Beard either inher- ited or acquired an hereditary dignity, the honor would not have passed from him to his son, for the simple and sufficient reason that this son — through whom the poet and the five pre- ceding Lords Byron traced their descent from the Norman Buruns — was a bastard. On this point there is no uncer- tainty. The record of the Herald's visitation of the county ofl^ancaster (1567 A.D.) leaves no room for doubt on this matter. Here is what the Elizabethan record says of Sir John the Little with the Great Beard, the poet's direct lineal an- cestor : — 10 THE KEAL LORD BYRON. " S^ John Byron of Clayton aforesayd Knight, sonne and heire to S'. Nycholas, maried to his firste wiefe Isabell daughter to Peter Shelton of Lynne in Norfolke, and by her had no yssue. After the said S^ John maried to his second Wiefe Ehzabethe daur to W"". Costerden of Blakesley in Com Lane and Wydowe to George Halghe of Halghe Com Lane Gent, and by her hatha yssue John Byron, his eldest sonne and heire jilius naturalis. John Byron of Clayton in Com Lane ar, sonne and heire by deade of gifte to Sir John Byron knt. , maried Alyce daughter to Sir Nycholas Strelley of Strelley, &c." This is exphcit and altogether devoid of ambiguity. Sir John Byron, the great grandfather • of the first Lord Byron, was of illegitimate birth ; and the Norman blood on which the poet unquestionably reflected with compla- cence, though never with the absurd pride attributed to him by his biographers, was tainted with the defilement of bastardy, — a matter of no moment to the physiologist ; but a matter of high moment to churchmen, heralds, and law- yers, and to all persons who accept the doctrine of church- men or the sentiment of heralds. Though he is not in possession of the facts that counte- nance his opinion. Dr. Karl Elze (Byron's German biog- rapher, and the best of all the poet's biographers) de- clares it inconceivable that the author of " Childe Harold " was ignorant of this serious defect of his Norman pedigree. On the other hand. Dr. Elze's anonymous English translator insists that Byron may be presumed to have been ignorant of a circumstance that was mentioned in no Book of the Peerage or other genealogical work published during his life. Hence the translator argues that the poet should be acquitted of the meanness and imposture of vaunting his Norman blood, whilst he was well aware of its defilement, and of its consequent inability to bring him honor or estate from any of his ancestors preceding the son of Sir John the Little with the Great Beard. It happens, however, that this dis- quahfying incident of the Byron lineage is alluded to by Thoroton, in the "History of Nottinghamshire" (1677 A.D.), ar work that certainly was not unknown to the poet, and THE BYEONS OF EOCHDALE AND NEWSTEAD. 11 probably afforded him his earliest knowledge of the main features of his ancestral story, and even his first acquaintance with those prime heroes of his house — Erneis and Eadul- phus. In Thoroton's notice of the Nottinghamshire Byrons, it is observed with quaint caution and delicacy that Sir John the Little with the Great Beard took to him a second wife, " on whom he begot (soon enough) Sir John Byron of New- stede who married Alice, the daughter of Sir Nicholas Strelley, of Strelley." On reading the bracketed words, Byron could not fail to see their meaning. If he needed further enlightenment, he could have obtained it from his lawyer, who was well aware that instead of holding New- stead by inheritance from Sir John the Little with the Great Beard, his client inherited it from Alice Strelley 's husband, who acquired the estate by deed of gift from his father, from whom he could, as a bastard, have inherited nothing. Or the poet might have gained the needful information from the officers of the Herald's College, his neighbors of the county, or the curate of Hucknall-Torkard. In Notting- hamshire there were scores of people capable of informing him of the matter that was no secret. If the Newstead Byrons of Charles the Second's time were unaware of the blemish in their pedigree before 1677, none of the family can be suspected of the same ignorance after the publication of Thoroton's "Nottinghamshire," — a bookto be found in every library of the county. Whilst he is right in maintaining that Byron cannot have been ignorant of this dark page of his familiar history, Dr. Elze errs in imagining that the poet was meanly sensi- tive and discreditably reticent on the subject. Byron was not the man to attach undue importance to sacerdotal sanc- tion of any kind. Had he lost an estate or a dignity through Sir John's libertinism, he would have thought himself unfor- tunate, and spoken angrily of his ancestor's morals. Of course he would have preferred a stainless roll. But it was not in his nature to trouble himself seriously about such an accident, or to think less honorably of himself because one of his remote ancestors loved his wife something too soon, and sought the priest's blessing on their union something too 12 THE REAL LORD EYRON. late for decorum. Instead of reflecting upon it from the priest's point of view, or the herald's point of view, he regarded his Norman descent from the physiologist's stand- point, which was not afl^ected by the naughty behavior of Madam Elizabeth Halghe, nee Costerden (or Constmitine, as the lady's maiden surname is spelt in Thoroton's book) . It was enough for him to know or fancy that the pluck, and energy, and chivalric sentiment of the Norman Burons had come to him through twenty or more generations. It was enough for him to know that Alice Strelley's husband was his "father's son." Of course he was not perpetually calling attention to the awkward affair. When he talks of his pedi- gree a man is under no obligation to proclaim its blemishes, or speak of the black sheep of the family. Thus far Byron may have been, and was reticent ; but so far was he from trying to conceal under falsehood a matter that was no secret to the antiquaries of Nottinghamshire, and all persons curious in aristocratic genealogies, he could allude to the aflfair with lightness and pleasantry in pages written for the amusement of any one who cared to peruse them. Few persons will question that Elizabeth Halghe's slip and its consequences were in his mind when, after condensing his view of Cathe- rine the Great's character and conduct into one of the most pungent and notorious couplets of " Don Juan," he wrote : — " But oh, thou grand legitimate Alexander ! Her son's son, let not this last phrase offend Thine ear, if it should reach — and now rhymes wander Almost as far as Petersburgh, and lend A dreadful impulse to each loud meander Of murmuring Liberty's wide waves, which blend Their roar even with the Baltic's — so you be Your father's son, 'tis quite enough for me. " To call men love-begotten, or proclaim Their mothers as the antipodes of Timon, That hater of mankind, would be a shame, A libel, or whate'er you please to rhyme on : But people's ancestors are history's game ; And if one lady's slip should leave a crime on All generations, I should like to know What pedigree the best would have to show? " THE BYKONS OF EOCHDALE AND NEWSTEAD. 13 The sixteenth century did not end before the Nottingham- shire Byrons had felt the annoyances, if not the humiliations, of pecuniary embarrassment. After living at Newstead with profuseness and ostentation, Alice Strelley's husband left a mortgaged estate and costly establishment to his heir, who was made a Knight of the Bath on the occasion of James the First's coronation. "I do therefore advise you," the Earl of Shrewsbury wrote to the young man, immediately after his father's death, "that so soon as you have, in such sort as shall be fit, finished your father's funerals, to dispose and disperse that great household, reducing them to the number of forty or fifty at the most, of all sorts ; and, in my opinion, it win be far better for you to live for a time in Lancashire than in Notts, for many good reasons that 1 can tell you when we meet, fitter for words than writing." Being good, this advice was, probably not taken. Young men are apt to think lightly of counsel supported by sound reasons. Lan- cashire was further than Newstead from the Court where the Knight of the Bath had friends and hopes of preferment. At Rochdale the young man would be amongst comparative strangers ; at Newstead he was surrounded by friends who had known him from boyhood. It may, therefore, be taken for granted that the new Chief of the Byrons was slow to act on the earl's suggestions of prudence, and never acted on them with resoluteness and perseverance. Anyhow, it is certain that the estate, which came to the Knight of the Bath burdened with mortgages and liabilities, passed to his heir under still more disadvantageous conditions ; and that when troubles grew and thickened about Charles the First, troubles were also growing and thickening about the Byrons, who could barely pay their own rather stately way, on being invited to raise money as they best could for the king's use, and help him with their swords and men to prostrate hie enemies. For staking heavily on the Crown, and venturing their all in its service, the cavaliers of Newstead were rewarded with impoverishment and a peerage. It would have been better for them if they had received only the former part of the reward, and missed the barony, that was only an incumbrance to them 14 THE REAL LOED BYEON. in their fallen fortunes. "Without their nobility they might have recovered from their poverty : but with it, as things virent in the later half of the seventeenth century, they were doomed to go from bad to worse ; and when it has gone half the way to ruin, nobility usually finishes the journey. The Byrons were singularly unfortunate when once Fortune, after befriending them so long, deserted them forever. Crippled with a peerage, they scrambled on for something more than a century and a half, to be broken up and extin- guished by a man of rare genius, — the only man of genius they ever produced. The poet killed the family of which he was abundantly proud. There is stdl a Lord Byron ; for generations to come there will doubtless be gentlemen and gentlewomen of the name figuring in the peerage, and play- ing minor parts on the social stage ; but for all practical pur- poses the family perished, territorially and historically, with the man who made it famous. The first Lord Byron having died without male issue, the barony went to his brother, whose long epitaph, telling nearly all one knows or wants to know about him, is still to be read in Hucknall-Torkard Church, where the poet was bxiried, after the dean's refusal to give him sleeping-room in Westminster Abbey. One of the poet's quite erroneous notions about his own people was that they had nothing to do with longevity or livers. " The Byrons," he used to say, "die early and have no livers." Another of his fancies about them was that they were not prolific, — a failing for which he used to console himself by reflecting that the fiercer and nobler animals had few cubs. The family had, upon the whole, sound livers and big broods of babies ; and its mem- bers went to the proverbial threescore and ten years and upwards, like the men and women of other families, when they steadily eschewed late hours and excess in drink. On all these points he was mistaken. B3Ton himself had a good liver till he destroyed it, and it certainly was due to no con- stitutional weakness that he was not the father of a numerous family. The second lord of the family is an example that it was not impossible for a Byron to live long and beget a numerous progeny ; for he had ten children by his first wife, THE BYEONS OF ROCHDALE AND NEWSTEAD. 15 and survived his seventy-third year, after "repurchasing part of the ancient inheritance " of the seven Byrons (himself and his six brothers) , who " faithfully served Charles the First in the Civil War, suffered much for their loyalty, and " (the epitaph adds with some obscurity of expression) " lost all their present fortune." This worthy gentleman's eldest son, who became the third Lord Byron, is chiefly memorable for having written some execrably bad verses to his political friend, Thomas Shipman, and for being the nobleman whose marriage with a daughter of the Viscount Chaworth was accountable for his famous descendant's consanguinity with Mary Chaworth. If this Lord Byron was not a foolish and stupid person, his wretched doggerel in Shipman's "Carolina, or Loyal Poems'' (1683), does him gross injustice. The fourth lord does not seem to have been a man of brilliant parts, or any force of character ; but he played with the fine arts, and, together with other children, he begat two sons, who in very different ways distinguished themselves enough to be much talked about, — the fifth Lord Byron, who killed his cousin and neighbor, Mr. Chaworth, in a duel of so singular a kind that he was tried for wilful murder by his peers, who, acquitting him of that gravest offence, found him guilty of nothing worse than manslaughter ; and Admiral John Byron, the hardy and daring sailor, to whose misadventures at sea the poet referred in the familiar lines of the " Epistle " to his sister, Augusta : — " A strange doom is thy father's son's, and past Recalling, as it lies beyond redress ; Reversed for him our grandsire's fate of yore, — He had no rest at sea, nor I on shore.' In the remarkable letter which he wrote at Genoa to Monsieur Coulmann, in July, 1823, shortly before his de- parture for Greece, the poet observed, "As to the Lord Byron who killed Mr. Chaworth in a duel, so far from retiring from the world, he made the tour of Europe, and was appointed Master of the Staghounds after that event, and did not give up society until his son had offended him by marrying in a manner contrary to his duty. So far from 16 THE EEAL LORD BYKON. feeling any remorse for having killed Mr. Chaworth, who was a fire-eater (spadassin), and celebrated for his quarrel- some disposition, he always kept the sword which he used on that occasion in his bedchamber, where it still was when he died." From these statements, the accuracy of which has never been questioned, it appears that the fracas and subse- quent trial did not cause the survivor of the two combatants so much discredit as successive writers have represented, and that had he lived with ordinary prudence and decency during the subsequent three-and-thirty years of his time in this world, no great amount of posthumous obloquy would have been put upon him for the affair that created prodigious noise and excitement at the time of its occurrence. In fairness to a man who has no especial title to chari- table consideration, it may be admitted that, notwithstanding its irregularity and several suspicious circumstances, the fatal duel would not have justified society in sending the survivor to Coventry. The blame seems, from the evidence, to have been equally divided. The quarrel arose out of a trivial dispute, — no uncommon thing in duels. Both of the com- batants were so quick-tempered and vehement in passion that they may be presumed to have been alike captious and offensive. As to the statement that Lord Byron thrust his adversary into the fatal room, Mr. Chaworth was not a man to be pushed about like a little boy. He entered the room, and entered it with the intention of fighting. The absence of seconds and the darkness of the chamber, lit with only a single candle, were features of the case to be regarded as matters for which the enemies were alike accountable. Lastly, the duel was fought with swords, Mr. Chaworth being well known to be a much better swordsman than his antagonist. The first impression that Lord Byron took his adversary at a disadvantage, and slew him in a dark corner, without warning, was removed by the evidence. In short, it was a case of two practised duellists flying at one another in the fierceness of rage begotten of much wine and mutual in- solence. Had Lord Byron fallen, there would have been an outcry against Mr. Chaworth, whose superior swordmanship would, in that case, have been produced in testimony that he THE BYRONS OF ROCHDALE AND NEWSTEAD. 17 pushed the quarrel to an immediate issue, in order to fight with the weapon of which he was a consummate master. But though he was less culpable in this ugly business than people have been led to imagine, the fifth Lord Byron deserved the evil fame that covered him in his old age as with a garment, and still clings to him, though he has been entombed for more than eighty years. A morose husband, tyrannical father, hard landlord, and harsh master, he was detested by the peasantry of Nottinghamshire, who spoke of him habitually as the " wicked Lord Byron," and sincerely believed there was no enormity of crime of which he was incapable in his darkest and most vindictive moods. Of course, things were said of him that on inquiry were found to be untrue. But, when due allowance has been made for exaggeration, it is certain that in his closing years his nature was detestable and his position pitiable. He did not, as rumor, averred, shoot his coachman in a sudden frenzy of rage, and then throw the man's dead body into the carriage, whilst Lady Byron was seated in it. He did not, as it was reported, throw his wife into one of the Newstead ponds with the purpose of drowning her ; but he drove her from Newstead by ill-usage ; and when she had fled from her proper home he called to her vacant place a common woman, who was styled "Lady Betty " by the sat- irists of the village. His solitude, even to the last, was not so complete as successive writers have represented, for his niece, Mrs. Leigh (General Leigh's wife), never ceased to visit him ; but the Nottinghamshire nobility avoided him, and it was seldom that any of the nainor gentry of the county called upon him. Having quarrelled with his heir for marrying a cousin whom he loved, this curious old reprobate let the abbey go to ruin, and cut down the timber- on the estate. Always in straits for money, though he spent little on hospitality, he replenished his empty exchequer by making an illegal sale of Eochdale property, to the serious injury of his successor. After losing his son and his son's son, the miser- able old man transferred something of his aversion for them to " the little boy at Aberdeen," as he invariably styled the future poet and sixth lord. There are grounds for the 18 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. opinion that he was entreated to contribute something towards the charges of the education of this little boy at Aberdeen. If the prayer was made, it was unsuccessful ; for the old man never sent a doit to the widow, who, rearing the child in the poverty to which a Byron had reduced her, lived through a hard time at Aberdeen. And when at last this little boy came to Newstead, in the company of his irascible mother and pious Scotch nurse, he found the Abbey in ruins and its only tenan table rooms empty of furniture. And yet the " old lord " — the " wicked old Lord Byron " — had to the end of his wicked existence one or two innocent pastimes. Having built mock forts about the lake in his park, and put a fleet of toy gun-boats on the water, he used to amuse himself, like the big, hoary-headed baby that he was, with mock-fights of a naval character — the toy-ships firing away at the forts, which returned the fire in gallant style. And when he was weary of this ridiculous game, the old man used to lie on the ground and gossip with the crickets, whom he loved far more than " the little boy at Aberdeen." When the crickets were troublesome, he used to whip them with a whisp of hay ; and the crickets are said to have left the Abbey in a body, as soon as their one friend of human kind was dead, and never to have returned thither. On the death (19th May, 1798) of this lord of evil fame and miserable nature "the little boy at Aberdeen " became the sixth Lord Byron of Rochdale, county Lancaster, the master of the dilapidated Abbey of Newstead, and the Hereditary ( ?) Chief of all the descendants of Erneis and Eadulphus, when he was just ten years and four months of age, and when the barony — that had not illustrated itself by win- ning a higher rank in the peerage — had been in existence just one hundred and fifty-five years. The family was certainly an ancient one ; but whilst houses may be eminent without being ancient, for families to be illustrious it is not enough that they should be old. Had the Byrons of Rochdale and Newstead possessed higher claims to reverence the poet would have said less of their antiquity. "With the single exception of Admiral John THE BTRONS OF EOCHDALE AND NEWSTEAD. 19 Byron (the fifth lord's brother) , who seems to have derived his pluck and devilry and delight in adventure from the Stratton Berkeleys, the Byrons had lived in the land for up- wards of seven hundred years without producing a man of conspicuous natural eminence. "When the most favorable view is taken of the soldier and political partisan, who won the barony from Charles the First, he is seen to be a person of merely respectable endowments. On a greater field, and under more auspicious circumstances, he might have figured in history as a considerable soldier ; for, in addition to the fidelity which is his strongest title to honorable recollection, he was well endowed with energy, courage, and common- sense. But it would be simply ridiculous to rate him with men of genius. So much arrant nonsense has been written about the poet and his remote forefathers by literary charlatans — whose only dispute amongst themselves turns on the question whether his genius should be referred altogether to his Norman extraction, or should be regarded as the result of a felicitous fusion of Norman force and Celtic sensibility — it is well for readers to be assured how little countenance is lent to such fanciful the- ories by the history of his progenitors in this country. Till Byron's genius broke suddenly upon the world, and captivated it almost in a single hour, no one ever thought of looking to his peculiar people for any signal exhibition of intellectual power. In the whole peerage no family appeared less likely to produce a poet who would make a new period in the history of English literature. Not that the family was exceptionally wanting in refinement and taste. On the contrary, from Charles the Second's restoration the Newstead Byrons had taken an interest in letters and the fine arts. Though the third lord's poetical performances were contemptible, his friendship for Thomas Shipman indicates a creditable concern for literature and its followers. The fourth Lord Byron in- herited a taste for painting from his mother (a Chaworth), and produced some landscapes, which Sir William Musgrave reproduced in etching. One of this lord's sons — Richard Byron, who took holy orders — has a modest niche in the Temple of Fame for copying Rembrandt's famous landscape of 20 THE KEAL LOED BYKOJf. the "Three Trees" so skilfully that the copy was mistaken and bought by a connoisseur for the original work. And though the earlier book exposed him to charges of imaginative exaggeration, and even to a suggestion of inaccuracy on mat- ters about which he was especially bound to be precisely truthful, Admiral Byron's famous "Narrative" of his ad- ventures on the coast of Patagonia, and his scarcely less famous ".Voyage round the World," are performances of no common merit, and deserved, on literary grounds, to be favor- ite reading with the author's grandson, who, after throwing Don Juan on the sandy fringe of Haid^e's charming island, says of the adventurer's troubles from shipwreck : — "And need he had of slumber yet, for none Had suffered more — his hardships were comparative To those related in my grand-dad's ' Narrative ! ' " Byron's near ancestors. 21 CHAPTEE m. bteon's near ancestors. To argue that a man of the nineteenth century derives the strongest elements of his nature from a man of the eleventh century, because he is known to have descended from one of the knightly "followers of Billy's banners," without making any account of the influence of the twenty and more infusions of blood from other stocks, each of which must have modi- fied, or at least should — in the absence of evidence to the contrary — be assumed to have modified the characteristics of the Norman progenitor ; and to dress up this marvellous inference with much jargon about the " influence of race," is to play the part of a pedant without commffn-sense, or of a fool with just a little learning, and no more. Of two-thirds of the families with which Byron's ancestors in the direct male line intermarried, and from which some modifying influences must have come to the Byron nature, nothing is known or can be known. And even if one could obtain precise information respecting all these families, and more especially of the particular women of them who mated with Byrons, it would be impossible to say how far so many and various influences changed the moral and mental quali- ties vrhich passed to his descendants from a Norman of whom nothing is known beyond his name, the number of his manors, and the fact that he took part in a great military movement. It will contribute more to the purpose of those who would account for the peculiarities of the poet's temper and intellect to examine the natures of his parents, his father's parents, and his grandfather's (Admiral Byron's) mother. In marrying Frances, the second daughter of the fourth Baron Berkeley of Stratton, William, the fourth Lord Byron, 22 THE REAL LORD BYEON. took a wife who seems to have transmitted to his and her descendants tlje vehemence, and impulsiveness and wayward- ness which were characteristics of her race. It is certain that her descendants differed in these qualities from any- earlier Byrons of whose tempers we have sure information. It makes also for the point to which these remarks tend, that Lady Byron's sister, Barbara, married John Trevanion of Caerhayes, Cornwall, and had by him a daughter, Sophia, who, by her marriage with her first cousin. Admiral Byron, became the mother of that brilliant scapegrace, Jack Byron, and grandmother of the poet. It follows that Jack Byron of the Guards, who seduced the Marchioness of Carmar- then, and then despoiled Catherine Gordon of Gight, took the Berkeley blood and nature from both his parents, each of whom was the offspring of a Berkeley. It is more reason- able to refer the impulsiveness and vehemence of Jack Byron and of his son, the poet, to these ladies of the great House of Berkeley, than to account for those qualities of the father and son by reference to the absolutely unknown natures of Emeis and Eadulphus of the eleventh century. Greatly though they differed, in several respects, there was a strong resemblance between Frances Berkeley's two sons, — the fifth Lord Byron and his brother the admiral. In the former the Berkeley vehemence changed to violence, and in his later years degenerated into unsocial moroseness and malignity. In the latter, it was a generous fire that, animat- ing the sailor for a career of adventure, was attended with a sweetness of disposition by no means uncommon in emotional natures. But in both brothers the Berkeley fire showed it- self, burning with poisonous fume in the one, and blazing out cheerUy in the other. Fortunate on shore, John Byron was luckless at sea. It would be an exaggeration to say that he never went to sea without encountering disaster ; for the affair of Chaleur Bay — when with three ships he destroyed three French ships of war, with twenty schooners, sloops, and other armed vessels, — was no less successful than brilliant. His " Voyage of Discovery" accomplished its objects, in spite of unlooked-for difficulties. But on returning to England after his indecisive bthon's near ancestors. 23 engagement with D'Estaing, in which he displayed more in- trepidity than tactical adroitness, the sailor, whose significant nickname in the navy was " Foul-weather Jack," had weath- ered more storms than any other admiral of " the Service." Sailors and ministers being alike distrustful of unlucky men, it is possible the intrepid navigator's proverbial " bad luck " was the reason why he was never employed again in the way of his profession, after his return from the West Indies, in 1779. His biographers erred in supposing the admiral never again desired active service. If he did not seek em- ployment, there is evidence he would gladly have taken another command, and suffered from chagrin at the Ad- miralty's neglect to offer him a ship. He was smarting under this disappointment in the spring of 1782, when the prospect of an immediate peace made him despair of ever again getting employment. Four years later the gallant and luckless sailor encountered a worse enemy to naval ambition than even the longest and most exasperating peace. On the 10th April, 1786, he died in his sixty-third year, leaving two sons, — John, who was the poet's father, and George-Anson, who distinguished himself in the navy, and was the father of the poet's successor in the barony, — together with three daughters , one of whom (Frances) married General Leigh (Colonel of the 20th Regiment of Infantry), whilst another (Juliana Elizabeth) , by her marriage with the fifth Lord Byron's only son, became the mother of the heir-apparent to the barony, through whose untimely death at Corsica, in 1794, the poet succeeded to his place in the peerage. Like his uncle the wicked lord, and like his son the poet, the admiral's eldest son, John — nicknamed " Mad Jack " by his brother-officers of the Guards — was the subject of many scandalous stories that originated in the malice and imagina- tive humor of gossip. As Byron justly remarked in his letter from Genoa to Monsieur Coulmann, "it is not by ' brutality ' that a young officer of the Guards seduces and marries a marchioness, and marries two heiresses." Instead of being remarkable for harshness and grossness as posthumous scandal represented him, "Mad Jack Byron" was a gentle- man of elegant figure, charming address, and winning smile. 24 THE EEAL LORD BTKON. Even to the last of his scarcely honorable days he retained much of the facial beauty that had distinguished him in his youth, and reappeared in the lovely lineaments of his only son. In her frequent fits of fury with her boy, Catherine Gordon used to upbraid him for being a Byron all over ; and in her no less frequent fits of tenderness for him she used to put hysterical kisses on the eyes that reminded her of his father. But though he was irresistible in drawing-rooms, by virtue of his riant beauty and musical joyousness, Mad Jack was from his boyhood a sad libertine, and, after fall- ing into poverty, a pitifully mean fellow. Educated first at Westminster School and then at a French military academy, where he learned to prefer life in France to existence in England, he served with his regiment in America whilst a stripling, and on his return to London lost no time in winning the affection of the Marchioness of Carmarthen, the wife of the heir to the Dukedom of Leeds, to whom she had already given three children. At the beginning of this liaison with a woman whose beauty sur- passed even her rank, and who had not completed her twenty-third year, John Byron was under age ; his years numbering no more than twenty-two when he married the lady immediately after her divorce from her first husband in May, 1778, the year in which she became Lady Conyers (Baroness Conyers, in her own right), on the death of her father, the fourth Earl of Holderness. After resting for a brief while at the lady's house, near Doncaster, where the poet was a visitor thirty-five years later, the young people went to France, to escape from English obloquy and English creditors. Never returning to her native country, after she left it under these painful circumstances, Lady Conyers died abroad in 1784, — from her husband's cruelty, it was whis- pered in May fair ; or, as the poet assured Monsieur Coul- mann, from her imprudence in accompanying her husband to a hunt before she had completed her recovery from the accouchement which gave birth to Augusta (afterwards the Honorable Mrs. Leigh), the second, but only surviving, issue of her father's first marriage. Apart from rumor, there is no evidence that John Byron treated his first wife with byeon's near ancestors. 25 harshness or neglect. Certainly he had good reason to wish her long life, for she had an estate for life that yielded her £4,000 a year, — a revenue that enabled him to pass his time pleasantly in the gayest and, in the last century, per- haps, the cheapest capital of Europe. On her death the young man of luxurious tastes and considerable debts was penniless. Returning to England in search of an heiress whose pos- sessions would extricate him from his pecuniary difficulties, he found one at Bath, — not so rich as he could have wished, but still rich enough for his immediate requirements. In money, in laud, and bank-shares this heiress (Miss Gordon, of Gight, Aberdeenshire) had about £23,000, — a fortune that rumor had doubled. To the widower, only twenty-eight years old at the time of his wife's death. Miss Gordon's actual and un- exaggerated estate would have seemed so inadequate to his necessities that it is difficult to believe he would have em- barrassed himself with so unattractive and uncongenial a companion had he not, at the time of marrying her, been under a misconception as to the magnitude of her posses- sions. Drowning men, however, catch at straws ; and " Mad Jack Byron " may have persuaded himself that £23 ,000 would, with clever management, put him in easy circum- stances. Anyhow, he married the lady in March, 1786, — «o^ at Bath where Moore believed the marriage to have been celebrated ; but in Scotland, whither she waa followed or attended by her suitor from the fashionable resort of idlers and invalids. If there was an elopement in the affair it must have been a merely formal elopement from the Som- erset wells, that was arranged to gratHy the lady's desire for a romantic passage into matrimony, and also to preclude in- convenient demands for a nuptial settlement of her property ; for when she determined to give them to Captain Byron Miss Gordon was mistress of her person and worldly goods. Her father having already committed suicide, there was no guardian with power to stay her on the way to ruin, as she was of age. In Medwin's book, Byron is said to have spoken of his father's elopement with Miss Gordon ; but if the poet did not talk loosely to Medwin, the author of the 26 THE REAL LOED BTRON. " Conversations " was a strangely bad listener and careless reporter. The marriage took place in Scotland, and early- ■ in the summer following the date of the matrimonial con- tract "Mad Jack" carried his bride to Paris and Chantilly, where they soon made away with the £3,000 which the heiress possessed in ready money at the time of the wedding, and the £600 obtained from the sale of her two shares of the Aberdeen Banking Company. Just one year and ten months after her marriage Catherine Gordon Byron, having returned from France to Great Britain, via Boulogne and Dover, was in Holies Street, Cavendish Square, with a babe in her arms, and heaviness at her heart. During her brief stay in that street she was for days together without money in her purse. Since her marriage she had discovered that her husband had married her only for the sake of her for- tune ; and in Holies Street she learned that when the needful arrangements had been made with his creditors she would be left with only a pittance, barely sufficient for the subsist- ence of herself, her husband, the infant in her arms, and his child by Lady Conyers. Hitherto there has been a question whether the poet was born at Dover, or Holies Street, Cavendish Square, London. That his sister believed him to have been born in London is shown by the inscription of the mural tablet which she placed to his memory in the chancel of Hucknall-Torkard Church ; and all the other witnesses to the point, who agree with the inscription, may be presumed to have gained their informa- tion directly or indirectly from her. But Dallas — the author of " Recollections of Lord Byron " (1824) , who might be thought more likely than the Honorable Mrs. Leigh to have known the truth of the matter — had a strong opinion that Catherine Gordon's boy first saw the light at Dover. Mr. Dallas received the lady at his house in Boulogne when she was on her way to England ; and he certainly was not without grounds for his impression that she was taken with pains whilst crossing the Channel, and was delivered of her child at th^e English seaport. It is, however, certain that Dallas was mistaken, for there exists conclusive evidence that the birth took place in London, and that Mrs. BjTon btron's neae ancestoks. 27 was attended at her accouchement by the famous surgeon, John Hunter, who, before her departure from London for Aberdeenshire, gave the young mother instructions respect- ing the kind of shoe her child should wear on coming to need shoes. At a later date (towards the end of 1790, or in an early month in 1791) Hunter wrote to Dr. Livingstone, of Aberdeen, on the same subject ; but either through mis- apprehension on the part of the Scotch doctor, or through the inexpertnesa of a Scotch shoemaker, the result of the directions was so unsatisfactory that it became necessary for Mrs. Leigh (General Leigh's wife) — then living at 39 Brompton Row, Knightsbridge — to call upon the London surgeon for more precise guidance. This application to Hunter for further counsel was in May, 1791 ; and when a shoe had been made in accordance with his orders Mrs. Leigh sent it to her sister-in-law in North Britain. And here it may be remarked that the lameness which occasioned the poet so much discomfort of body and mental distress from his childhood to his last days was due to the contraction of the tendon Achilles of each foot, which, pre- venting him from putting his heels to the ground, compelled him to walk on the balls and toes of his feet. Both feet may have been equally well formed, save in this sinew, till one of them was subjected to injudicious surgery ; the right being, however, considerably smaller than the left. Instead of being congenital, the slight contraction of the left tendon Achilles may have been the result of the patient's habit of stepping only on the fore part of the foot, so as to accom- modate its movements to the action of the other extremity. But though it may not have existed in the earlier years of his childhood, the contraction of the comparatively normal sinew was noticed by Trelawny when he made the post- mortem examination of both extremities at Missolonghi. The right tendon, however, was so much contracted that the poet was never able to put the foot flat upon the ground ; always using for it a boot made with a high heel, and fitted with a padding inside under the heel of the foot. ^This foot was also considerably distorted, so as to turn inwards, — a malformation that may have been caused altogether by the 228 THE REAL LOED BYBON. violence with which the foot was treated by the less intelli- gent of the boy's surgical operators, and more especially by Lavender, the Nottingham quack. It is therefore manifest that Byron's lameness was of a kind far more afflicting to the body and vexatious to the spirits than the lameness of such an ordinary club-foot as disfigured Sir Walter Scott. With a club-foot to plant firmly on the ground, Byron could have taken all the bodily exercise needful for the natural correction of his morbid tendency to fatten. He would have moved about awkwardly, and to the derision of his least generous playmates ; but he would not have been debarred from participation in all of their manlier sports. Instead of musing or moping for hours together on the famous tombstone he would have distinguished himself in the Harrow playing-grounds at cricket, and even at leap-bar. A few years later, instead of standing sadly in the corners of London ball-rooms, eying enviously the young men whirling round with fair part- ners, he would have fatigued himself in the gallopade and delighted in the waltz, which he affected to abhor, as unfit alike for men and women. Better still, instead of taking most of his out-door exercise in the lazy yacht or easy saddle, he would have been a bold climber of mountains. To the question why Byron did not bear his lameness as bravely and cheerily as Scott bore his lameness, one answer is, that whilst the Scotch poet suffered from nothing worse than a club-foot, the author of "ChUde Harold" endured a lameness far more trying to health and spirits. Had Sir Walter been constrained to pick his way through life on his toes, "hopping" about like a bird (to adopt Leigh Hunt's way of sneering at a colnrade's grievous affliction), he would certainly have been less happy. And had Byron been able to walk about like a man, albeit with a club-foot, he would have been less often stricken with melancholy and moved to breathe the fierce breath of anger. MOKE OF "mad jack bykon." 29 CHAPTEK.rV. MORE OF "mad jack BTEON." That Captain and Mrs. Byron returned from France to England without having fully realized the magnitude and urgency of their pecuniary difficulties may be inferred from the character of the quarter in which they took a furnished house, on their arrival in London, for a term of three months, ending on the 8th of April, 1788. Another indication that the lady, on coming to Holies Street, stiU regarded herself as a gentlewoman, who might spend money freely, is found in the engagement of the first surgeon of his time to attend at her accouchement. Before she left the street the poor lady had reason to take a different view of her position. Her land and all its appurtenances having been sold during her residence in France, Captain Byron's creditors clamored for a speedy settlement of their claims on the money coming to him from the sale of his wife's estate ; when, instead of send- ing him the means of pacifying these eager claimants, the Scotch lawyers were even reluctant to remit enough money for his current expenses. Had it not been for his sister, Mrs. Leigh, who gave him more of her pin-money than she could well afford, " Mad Jack " would have been without the guineas needful for his simple amusements about town. On coming from the seclusion of her chamber, poor Mrs. Byron, when she was not nursing her baby, found her principal em- ployment in writing letters to her Edinburgh lawyer. Pos- sibly the writer to the " Signet " was moved by his client's pitifiil epistles to push matters forward to a final arrangement, but to the miserable gentlewoman he seemed to act with ex- asperating slowness ; and, before she received the remittance which enabled her to journey northwards, she had been for the greater part of a fortnight without a penny in her pocket. 30 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Before she returned to her proper country the burden that had come to her from her own want of prudence was light- ened by the Dowager-Countess of Holderness (Captain Byron's whilom mother-in-law) , whose blue eyes and golden hair, with a score of other charms beseeming " the bell of the Hague," had won an English coronet for her nearly half a century since, when Lord Holderness was the British Pleni- potentiary to the States-General of the United Provinces. At Chantilly little Augusta had lived under -her father's roof, and she was one of the party entertained by Mr. Dallas, at Boulogne, when he had occasion to observe that Mrs. Byron would soon become a mother. But as the time neared for her brother's appearance on the scene, little Augusta (in her- fifth year) was packed oiF to stay with her grandmother, who had tender yearnings for the child, though little reason to like the child's father. And now, to Captain Byron's lively contentment, the countess declared her wish to undertake the child's nurture, and to provide for her. Catherine Gordon must also have received the countess' proposal with satis- faction. In justice, however, to the gentler side of a nature by no means altogether lovable it should be recorded of Mrs. Byron that she could not surrender unregretfuUy the child who had been her best companion many a day at Chan- tilly, when her husband was amusing himself in Paris. There was another reason why Mrs. Byron cared for the child whom she had nursed in France with exemplary tender- ness and devotion through a severe illness that for several days promised to end in death. Thirteen years later, when Augusta and her stepmother came together again, there was small need for Mrs. Byron to remind her husband's daughter of this passage of her childhood ; for Byron's sister had never forgotten the service of love. Still it was not in the nature of things for Catherine Gordon to resist the countess' pro- posal. So the brother and sister, whose mutual love is re- corded in deathless song, went different ways — "Baby Byron" (as Augusta used to call him after he had risen to universal celebrity) journeying slowly northwards to the land of mountain and mist, whilst she went to the roof of the countess, who, growing mightily fond of her grandchild, used MOEE OF "mad jack BYRON." 31 to tell her acquaintances, in her own peculiar Dutch-English, that the girl would be her "residee-legatoo." Though she no longer possessed a patch of land in the county Catherine Gordon was "going home" as she trav- elled towards Aberdeenshire ; but to her husband (when a year and a half later he set out to join his wife in Scotland) the journey to Aberdeen, where Mrs. Byron, after staying for a while with some of her relations, had settled herself in lodgings, was a journey into exile. It was a dismal prospect for the man of luxurious tastes, who, more French than English in his appearance and habits, delighted in the sun- shine and mirth and vintages of the land where he received the more important part of his earlier training ; the land that, instead of crying " Fie I " at his naughtiness, had welcomed him all the more cordially for having carried a peeress in her own right away from her lawful husband. In France he had lived intimately with the great Marshal Biron, who hailed him as a cousin. In Paris his elegance, beauty, gallantry, horsemanship, had won the admiration of salons, whose wits, men and women alike, held precisely his own views on ques- tions of religion and morals. The gentleman shuddered at the imagination of what lay before him in Scotland, — a land of bad cookery and worse .manners, of bleak winds and dis- mal skies, of boors and fanatics. He shuddered again as he mentally compared the beauty and cleverness and gayety of Lady Conyers, with the homely aspect, provincial style, and intolerable temper of Mrs. Byron, to whom he was going reluctantly ; the peeress who had £4,000 a year, with the petty laird's daughter whose fortune had dwindled to a pitiful £3,000. The comparison would have been unfavorable to Mrs. Byron had he compared her with a woman of ordinary attractiveness. For though she had royal blood in her vei^is, and belonged to the superior branch of the Gordons, it would not have been easy to find a gentlewoman whose person and countenance were less indicative of ancestral purity. A dumpy young woman, with a large waist, florid complexion, and homely features, she would have been mistaken anywhere for a small farmer's daughter or a petty tradesman's wife, 32 THE EEAL LORD BTEON. had it not been for her silks and feathers, the rings on her fingers and the jewellery about her short, thick neck. At this early time of her career she was not quite so graceless and awkward as Mrs. Cardurcis (in Lord Beaconsfield's "Ve- netia ") , but it was already manifest that she would be cum- brously corpulent on coming to middle age ; and even in her twenty-fifth year she walked in a way that showed how absurdly she would waddle through drawing-rooms and gar- dens on the development of her unwieldly person. In the last century it was not uncommon for matrons of ancient lineage to possess little learning and no accomplishments ; but Miss Gordon's education was very much inferior to the education usually accorded to the young gentlewomen of her period. Unable to speak any other language, she spoke her mother tongue with a broad Scotch brogue, and wrote it in a style that in this politer age would be discreditable to a wait- ing-woman. Though she was a writer of long epistles, they seldom contained a capital letter, or a mark of punctuation, to assist the reader in the sometimes arduous task of discov- ering their precise meaning ; and though she could spell the more simple words correctly, when she was writing in a state of mental placidity, she never used her pen in moments of excitement, without committing comical blunders of orthog- raphy. To Captain Byron, however, the lady's temper was more grievous than her defects of person, breeding, and cult- ure. It should, however, be remembered by readers who would do her justice that Mrs. Byron was by no means de- void of the shrewdness and ordinary intelligence of inferior womankind, and was capable of generous impulses to the persons, whom, in her frequent fits of uncontrollable fury, she would assail with unfeminine violence, and even with un- natural cruelty. On the road to Aberdeen, where, for his own gratification, he could arrive none too late. Captain Byron paid a visit to one or two agreeable houses, and so long as he was the guest of hospitable lairds, who gave him the best wine of their cel- lars and the best sport of their domains, the man of pleasure found Hfe in Scotland endurable, and could pay himself com- pliments on the address and philosophical cheerfulness with 33 which he accepted the usages of a semi-barbarous people, and, like a consummate man of the world, accommodated himself to the habits and humors of his associates. But when the visits had all been paid, and the time came for him to settle down in an Aberdeen lodging, and live on oatmeal and inferior whiskey, in the society of a wife who was perpetually upbraid- ing him for having reduced her in so short a time from afflu- ence to penury, he lost his gayety, and showed his victim the sternest and meanest qualities of his nature. With proper sentiments of pride and honor Mrs. Byron was bent on liv- ing within the income of £150 a year, still coming to her from the £3,000 in the hands of trustees, — the income that was now the only certain means of subsistence for herself, her hus- band, her child, and the single servant, who, whilst acting the part of nurse to the future poet, discharged also the duties of housemaid and cook. Captain Byron decided that, instead of filling himself with "haggis," he would at least dine daily as a gentleman of ancient descent and high fashion ought to dine. " Supplies would soon be coming to him," he said, " from his kindred in the South, and his old friends in France ; and, in the meantime, wine and meat must be bought for him on credit." The altercations and noisier quarrels of such a husband and such a wife may be imagined. To escape from the woman who scolded him from morning till night he withdrew from her lodging at one end of Queen Street and took a lodging for himself at the other end of the same thor- oughfare. Money coming to him soon afterwards from the relative who had already helped him so many times, the cap- tain withdrew for a while from Aberdeen, to the sorrow even more than to the material relief of the wife, who, overflowing with animosity against him when he was at hand, could still love him passionately when he was out of her sight. A few months later, in 1790, he reappeared in Aberdeen, to wheedle his wife out of a little money that would enable him to get away to France. But Catherine Gordon (though she eventually yielded to his importunity ) told him roundly that she had not a penny in her pocket, and that even if she had fifty guineas in her hand she would not give him one of them. Perhaps this answer seemed to him a hint that a single guinea 34 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. might still be squeezed out of her. Anyhow the man actually had the meanness to write to her, imploring her to give him a guinea, — a begging-letter that came in the course of years to the poet, who, preserving it as a curious domestic record, could still think of the writer with tenderness. It is certain that Captain Byron was not wanting in aifectionateness to the little boy, who on one occasion shared his father's bed for a night. Whilst "Mad Jack" and his wife were occupying separate lodgings in Queen Street, Aberdeen, he used to way- lay the child and his nurse in their daily walks, so as to have the pleasure of playing with the little fellow. The poet's memory was very retentive of kindnesses rendered to liim in childhood ; and though imagination had doubtless much to do with his affectionate recollections of his father, there is no rea- son to think them mere fancies. "I was not so young," By- ron said towards the end of his life, "when my father died but that I perfectly remember him." The poet, however, cannot have been more than three years old when he saw his father for the last time ; for Captain Byron withdrew from Aberdeen at least as early as the first month of 1791, on obtaining the means — partly from his wife and partly from Mrs. Leigh — to fly to France beyond the reach of his creditors. A few months later he died at Valenciennes in his thirty-sixth year. Conflicting accounts have been given of his death ; one of them being that he died by his own hand, — a statement that at least accords with the man's character and the desperate circumstances to which he brought himself by numerous acts of imprudence. To Harness, Byron more than once asserted that "his father was insane, and killed himself;" but on coming to grounds for attributing the death to natural causes, Harness came to the astounding conclusion that the poet, in so speaking, said what he knew to be untrue, and, in a mere freak of morbid humor, " calumniated the blood flow- ing in his veins." The information which caused Harness to take this view of his friend's behavior came to him, doubt- less, directly or indirectly, from those members of the Byron family who were of opinion that Captain Byron died, as the phrase goes, "in his bed," and in the ordinary course of MORE OF "mad jack BYRON." 35 nature. Even if Byron told a wilful untruth in this matter, it is extravagant to charge him with thereby " calumniating the blood in his own veins " ; for some of the most amiable and altogether virtuous persons have gone mad and killed themselves. The gloomy misadventure may occur to-morrow to the wisest and mildest and best of living men. Byron's statement, true or untrue, was nothing more than a state- ment that his father died in a peculiarly mournful manner. But what is the evidence that the statement was discordant with fact? At the most, it can have been nothing more than the strong and reasonable opiaion of certain persons that Captain Byron did not die by his own act. But the strongest evidence on such a matter is sometimes illusory, and the reasonable conclusion from it erroneous. Many a man has committed suicide in such a manner that he has expired in his bed, and that his death has been as- signed sincerely to natural causes by his nearest kindred, and all the members of his household, ay, and by a coroner's jury specially appointed to ascertain the cause of death. Lastly, even if it could be shown that Captain Byron was not guUty of suicide, why should Byron be accused of false- hood in the matter ? The poet of strong, at times morbidly strong, imagination, after long brooding over his father's melancholy story, may well have come to a wrong conclusion about his death, and, having once accepted the ghastly fancy for such fact, may have sincerely believed what he certainly said to Harness. The man, who was known throughout life as " Mad Jack Byron," may be presumed to have been a person whose eccentricity bordered upon insanity. This man of vehement feelings had fallen to a condition in which men of strong passions and unsettled faith are apt to meditate on self-murder as a means of escape from their humiliations and exasperating troubles. Going abroad with a few guineas in his purse, — just enough money to keep him for a few weeks, — he died in his thirty-sixth year. That he killed himself in despair was no unnatural opinion for his son to entertain long afterwards. It is a melancholy example of the injustice dealt out to Byron during his life and after his death, alike by his friends and his foes, that so amiable and 36 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. worthy a gentleman as Harness could attribute falsehood to his friend, because his account of his father's way of dying was contradicted by persons who seemed to know the real truth of the matter. Surely Harness might have been con- tent to charge his friend with nothing worse than mere morbid misconception, and to pity him for the sorrow that came to him from so dismal a fancy. It never seems to have occurred to Harness that, as the chief of his house, Byron might have had surer and fuller information about this doleful business than all the members of his family. On the open question, whether "Mad Jack Byron" died by his own hand, no opinion is here offered. At this distance from the event the question is of no great moment to readers. But a very strong opinion is given that the poet did not utf er those words to Harness in mere levity and wickedness, and that one of the causes of the melancholy that ever followed his joyous moods like a shadow was a conviction that the father, whom he recalled lovingly and pitied profoundly, killed himself to get away from his misery. On receiving the news of her husband's death at Valen- ciennes, Catherine Gordon's grief vented itself in screams that were audible to her neighbors in the same street. The poor woman had small cause to weep for the event that stirred her to so characteristic a display of strong emotion. For her, at least, it was well that the libertine, who had wasted her wealth, and with cruel words had whipped her into many a fit of fury, could never again approach her. Even though he had lived to put a coronet on her head, she would have had small reason to thank God for so bad a husband. It was also well for the little boy, already observant and clever enough to think it strange his mother should be so wildly wretched for the death of the man whom she had so often upbraided, in his hearing, for being a prodigy of mas- culine wickedness. Byron was a school-boy, stricken with illness from which he did not expect to recover, when, in one of the most inter- esting and thoughtful of his youthful poems, he wrote the familiar lines, — so touchingly prophetic of the troubles that were soon to come upon him through the want of wise parental control, — MORE OF "mad jack BYRON." 37 " Stern death forbade my orphan youth to share The tender guidance of a father's care. Can rank, or e'en a guardian's name, supply The love which glistens in a father's eye? For this can wealth or title's sound atone, Made by a parent's early loss, my own? " He had endured what these early lines predicted, and was fast moving onwards to the rocks that wrecked him, when, in more strenuous verse, but in the same strain of feeling, he wrote', — " The chief of Lara is return'd again : And why had Lara cross'd the bounding main? Left by his sire, too young such loss to know, Lord of himself; — that heritage of woe, That fearful empire which the human breast But holds to rob the heart within of rest ! — With none to check, and few to point in time The thousand paths that slope the way to crime ; Then, when he most required commandment, then Had Lara's daring boyhood govern'd men. It skills not, boots not step by step to trace His youth through all the mazes of its race ; Short was the course his restlessness had run, But long enough to leave him half undone." To those who have learned from the admitted facts of his youth and earlier manhood how gentle, affectionate, and manageable a creature Byron was at life's outset ; how quick to respond to kindness, and render homage to those whom he respected ; how ready to profit by sympathetic admonition, and sacrifice his self-love to his sense of right ; how full of loyalty to all who had a moral title to his allegiance ; and how devoid of even a leaven of vicious wilfulness, — it appears, at least, more than probable that had he been watched and guarded, from his sixteenth to his twenty-sixth year, by a proud, sagacious, and loving father, he would have been saved from the catastrophe in which he lost his domestic happiness, and everything that was really dear to him, with the exception of his sister's love, a few friendships, the fame that could not be taken from him, and the genius that was destined to make him still more famous. But un- der no conceivable circumstances could " Mad Jack Byron " have sobered down, and mellowed and ripened into such a father. 38 THE EEAL LOKD BTEON. CHAPTER V. ABERDEEN. DuitiNG her residence in Aberdeen, from an early day of 1790 to the end of the summer of 1798, Mrs. Byron had three diflFerent places of abode, — the first in Queen Street, the second in Virginia Street, and the third in Broad Street. In the two first-named streets she had small, furnished lodg- ings, but, on moving to Broad Street, she took an "entire iloor," which she fitted with the furniture that on her migra- tion to England was sold (with the exception of the plate and linen) for £74 17s. 7d. What with her inexperience in the arts by which a little money may be made to go a long way, and what with the consequences of the " captain's wicked extravagance," which so often stirred her to equally reasonable and unreasonable outpourings of indignation, Mrs. Byron found it impossible at first to live within her narrow income of £150 a year. At the time of the captain's second visit to Aberdeen she was in debt at least to the amount of £100. And creditors had put " arrestments " on her modest revenue, when, in the first quarter of 1791, she felt it incumbent on her honor to promise certain of the Aberdeen tradesmen that she would herself pay those several little bills which the captain, of course from pure forgetfulness, had omitted to settle on the eve of his withdrawal from the city. But when she had taken heart to borrow £300 at 5 per cent. , in order to wipe off all claims on her estate and sense of dignity, and to pay the charges of needful furniture for her Broad-Street "flat," — a financial rearrangement that reduced her yearly revenue by £15, — she passed to a more tranquil period of her mone- tary experiences. Henceforth she contrived to live without owing aught to any one ; and, on the opportune death of ABEEDEEN. 39 her grandmother, by the cessation of whose already men- tioned annuity the £135 per annum rose to £l90 a year, Mrs. Byron could face her liabilities as they rose, and, at the same time, lay by enough for those unforeseen occur- rences that are so likely to prevent the ends of a small in- come from meeting. When George suffered from measles, in 1792, there may not have been money in hand for medi- cine and subsequent change of air ; but, in 1796, on his con- valescence from scarlet fever, Mrs. Byron had no occasion to debate with much anxious casting of accounts whether she could afford to carry him forty miles up the Dee to that pleasant farm-house at Ballatrech (near Ballater) , where he would breathe the purest air in all Scotland. It should be borne in mind that a guinea in George the Third's time had a much greater buying power than twenty-one Victorian shil- lings. Whilst Catherine Gordon, who preferred her maiden surname* to the one she had acquired by marriage, was graduating in the arts of domestic economy, and seizing every occasion for impressing on her boy how vastly superior the Gordons of her branch were to the Gordons of any other branch, and how immeasurably inferior English Byrons ( albeit of a noble race) were to every variety of the Scotch Gordons, she maintained a correspondence with the child's London aunt (Mrs. Leigh, of 39 Brampton Row, Knights- bridge) , who seems to have taken a womanly interest in the " little boy at Aberdeen," and from her heart to have com- passionated her sister-in-law. The sisters may not have had many subjects in common, or much to tell one another. But to the widow a letter from England must have been welcome, if it caused her to think of the lordly abbey her boy might some day inherit. Perhaps the ladies were the better friends for the distance between them. As fellow- tourists in France they would soon have fallen out. For whilst Mrs. Leigh pitied " that poor French king," and wept her eyes red over Marie Antoinette's troubles, Catherine Gordon Byron was on the side of " the people " whose suffer- ings in her opinion fully justified the strong measures they were taking to " crush out the tyrants." Whatever else may 40 THE REAL LORD BTEON. be said against her, it cannot be denied that Mrs. Byron had just then the courage of her opinions. Declining to be called Whig or Liberal, or by any other milk-and-water name, she avowed herself " a Democrat," and in the very ears of Aberdeen Tories prayed for the time when kings and all other oppressors would be called to account and punished accord- ing to their deserts. Whilst little George was instructed in theology by Mary, shortened affectionately to "May" Gray (his pious Scotch nurse, the sister and successor of his first nurse), he was taught by his mother to abhor tyrants and regard the poor as extremely ill-used people, who would be as prosperous and virtuous as any philanthropist could wish them to be if despots would but leave them alone. The child, who from the one teacher learned to fear God, was inspired by the other with distrust of kings and a romantic concern for " the people." May Gray was the better teacher, but the mother also had a share in the formation of the child's character. The nurse taught the child his first prayers ; and before he could read he learned from her lips to repeat passages of the Sacred Scriptures ; the first and the twenty-third Psalm being amongst the selections from the Bible which were thus planted in his memory in his earliest infancy. And when one recalls how, in later time, he not seldom listened to the counsel of the ungodly, and stood in the way of sinners, and sat in the seat of the scornful, it is pitiful to think of the little fellow repeating the first Psalm to his attendant ere he bade her " good-night " and lay his curly pate on the pillow. At this tender age the nervous child accepted with the trust- fulness of infancy all the nurse's Calvinistic views on matters of religion. It is more than probable that, had it not been for May Gray's enduring influence on her pupil, Shelley would not have had occasion to extend his arms towards his wife in a way expressive of astonishment mingled with sorrow, and shriek excitedly, "By what he said last night in talking over his 'Cain,' the best of all his un- dramatic dramas, I do believe, Mary — I do believe, Mary, that he is little better than a Christian ! " Whilst the Scotch servant, with her strong Calvinism ABERDEEN. 41 and narrow intellect, was thus mindful for the spiritual wel- fare of her "charge," Mrs. Byron was no less watchful over his morals and deportment. A more exasperating and in- jurious ruler for a sensitive and sometimes violently passionate child cannot be imagined than this vehement and undisciplined woman, who fell daily into as many fits of ill-temper as there are hours in the day, and rarely passed a week without a wild outbreak of hysterical rage. Abundantly lavish of kisses to the child when he was in her good graces, she was no less lavish of blows when he incurred her capricious displeasure. Now covering him with caresses, and now seiz- ing him to give hini a beating, she was no mother for such a child to love, but an equally perplexing and appalling fact for him to study, ponder over, and dread. In a later stage of his infancy, instead of fearing her, he hated and ridiculed her. At least, on one occasion, after pouring half-a-hundred abusive epithets upon him, and even swearing at him, she mocked this issue of her own body for being " a lame brat ! " At this unnatural gibe a fearful light came from the child's eyes, — the light that so often flashed from them in the coming time. The boy's visible emotion was not lost upon the mother who probably expected it to be followed by words no less violent than her own. But the child surpassed the mother in self-control. For half a minute, whilst his lips quivered and his face whitened from the force of feeling never to be forgotten, he was silent ; and then he spoke five short words, and no more. "I was born so, mother! " he said, slowly, before he turned away from the woman who dared not follow him. The words were in the poet's mind when, in his early manhood, he told the Marquis of Sligo the several reasons that made it impossible for him to feel towards Mrs. Byron as a son ought to feel for a widowed mother. The scene which ended with these words came to his mind on his return from Greece (where he had taken the young marquis into his confidence) , when the intelligence came to him of Mrs. Byron's death. At Pisa, just three years before his death, the scene was in his mind when he wrote the first words of "The Deformed Transformed" : — 42 THE EEAL LOED BYEON. " Beriha. Out, hunchback ! Arnold. I was born so, mother 1 " Whilst receiving lessons in religion from May Gray, and lessons in demeanor from Mrs. Byron, the boy acquired the rudiments of other knowledge from one or another of the three pedagogues who successively directed his studies before he was sent to the Aberdeen Grammar School, in 1 794, and for each of whom he had a kindly word, when, in his twenty- sixth year, he put on paper his recollections of his childhood in Scotland ; the first of the preceptors being Mr. Bowers, whose pupils (of both sexes) were pleased to christen him " Bodsy," in reference to his dapperness. Having for the modest fee of one guinea spent a year (from November, 1792, to November, 1793 ) under the tuition of Bodsy Bowers, whose method of imparting knowledge did not save his pupil from having his ears boxed in Broad Street for knowing just nothing, the boy was placed under the charge of Mr. Ross, the " very devout, clever little clergyman," whose " mild manners and good-natured painstaking " rose years afterwards to the poet's grateful memory, when, standing on the heights of Tusculum, he looked "down upon the little round lake that was once RegiUus," and recalled how his imagination had in childhood been taken by the story of the Battle of Lake Regillus. As he " made astonishing progress " under the good minister's care, and had a strong liking for his master, he should not have been removed from so excellent a teacher, and placed under the strictly limited authority of the " very serious, saturnine, but kind young man, named Paterson," who was a rigid Presbyterian, and the son of his pupil's shoemaker. It is not, however, surprising that he was taken from so worthy and efficient a preceptor as Mr. Ross ; for the boy's tutors never pleased Mrs. Byron, who was at all times quick to hold them accountable for his faults or demeanor, and more particularly for his obvious want of affection for herself. In perusing the biographies of the poet, alike in the pages that refer to his earlier time and those that relate to the suc- cessive periods of his manhood, reader sshould be mindful of ABERDEEN. 43 what has been said in this volume of his lameness, or they will be misled by the passages which speak of his excursions up the Dee, and his "solitary rambles," as though he were a fairly good pedestrian. "In early life," says Trelawiw, a sensible writer and the best authority on this subject, " wmlst his frame was light and elastic, with the aid of a stick, he might have tottered along for a mile or two ; but after he had waxed heavier he seldom attempted to walk more than a few hundred yards, without squatting down or leaning against the first wall, bank, rock, or tree at hand, never sit- ting on the ground, as it would have been difficult for him to get up again." Fashioned for strength in his neck, shoulders, and arms, he could at Aberdeen, and afterwards at Harrow, acquit himself well enough in a pugilistic combat, so long as he could hop and spring about on his toes ; but in a long fight he was sure to be worsted, through the weakness of his feet. Fierce and resolute as any of his successive bull-dogs, he won several fights at Harrow, but in every case he won them by rushing at his adversary with tli8 elan of a French foot-soldier, and making a short business of each round by putting in quickly two or three blows with his singularly muscular arms. When he could not snatch suc- cess in this manner he was beaten, and had to bide his time for another opportunity of "paying off" an enemy, as he paid off his schoolmate at Aberdeen on the occasion men- tioned by Moore. In later time he boxed with Jackson (the famous pugilist) and Jackson's pupils in the same manner. During his brief and brilliant career in London it was noticed by his friends that, to hide his lameness, he always entered a room quickly, running rather than walking, and stopped himself suddenly by planting his left (the compara- tively sound) foot on the ground, and resting upon it. On the rare occasions when he was seen walking in the streets it was observed that he moved with a peculiar sliding gait rather than the easy lounge of a fashionable saunterer, — in fact, with the gait of a person walking on the balls and toes of his feet, and doing his best to hide the singular mode of progression. Passages may, indeed, be found in his diaries and letters that do not accord with this account of his pedes 44 THE EEAIi LORD BYRON. trianism. But they must be regarded as the venial misrep- resentations of a writer who wished to divert attention, even his own attention, from the infirmity respecting which he was acutely sensitive. Just as the blind sometimes talk about "seeing things," and even go to picture-galleries to "look at" works of art, the lame are often heard to talk vaunt- ingly of their achievements in walking. It was so with Byron. Rather than reveal his infirmity he would endure serious discomfort. When the sudden shower of rain fell upon the prison garden {vide Hunt's " Lord Byron and his Contemporaries," Vol. I., p. 298), Byron could have run in his peculiar way for the length of the enclosure as fast as Moore, who had left him in the wet ; but as he could not run without revealing his infirmity to a person whom he thought ignorant of it, he continued to move slowly to cover, at the risk of getting wet through. Suffering from his lameness in childhood and youth, no less than he suffered from it in his earlier manhood, the Aberdeen "laddie" was, of course, incapable of taking the amount of exercise on foot that is usual with children of his age. His excursions on the banks of the Dee, and other rambles, were made with the help of a pony, whether he went by himself or with a playmate. His days were nearing the end when, in a note to one of the brightest and heartiest passages of " Don Juan," he recorded his clear recollection of "Balgounie's brig's black wall," and of the fear that thrilled his nerves lest in crossing the river on the back of his pony he (an only son) should fulfil the prediction of the terrifying lines : — " Brig o' Balgounie, wight is thy wa' ; Wi' a wife's ae son on a mare's ae foal, Down shalt thou fa'." There is also a sufficiently attested story that, on approach- ing the same bridge with a companion (another only son), whose " turn " at " riding and tying " had placed him in the saddle, little George Byron insisted on remounting the pony and riding to the other side of the stream, whilst his friend waited behind to see the result of so hazardous an experi- ABERDEEN. 45 ment ; the argument by which the future poet carried his, point being that, whereas he had only one parent to mourn for his death, his friend had both father and mother to weep and wail, should their boy be killed from the falling of the bridge. If it should be proved to be as fictitious as bio- graphical anecdotes are sometimes found, on critical examina- tion, this story would still accord with the way in which the "little boy at Aberdeen" made excursions in the neighbor- hood of the city, and brought himself face to face with the picturesqueness of more northern scenes. It was well for the youthful poet to sing in the "Hours of Idleness," — " I would I were a careless child, Still dwelling in my Highland care, Or roaming through the dusky wild, Or bounding o'er the dark blue wave. " Even when she plays the part of her own autobiographer, Poetry is permitted to be inaccurate in details. The " care- less child" roamed " through the dusky wild" on the back of a Shetland pony, and was no more accustomed to foot it about the Highlands than to " dwell in a cave." If it were safe to trust the biographer (Dallas), who, notwithstanding his connection with the Byrons, certainly was in error as to the poet's birthplace, and even wrote about his " fine black hair," it would be recorded on this page that the boy, whilst living at Aberdeen, acquired the elements of French — a language he never spoke or wrote with correct- ness or facility — at Monsieur De Loyaute's academy. In 1794, the year in which her son entered the Aberdeen Grammar School, Mrs. Catherine Gordon Byron had reason to think her husband's family paid her less attention than she might fairly expect from them. That Mrs. Leigh, who had been her helpful friend in several emergencies, allowed several months to pass without writing to inquire for her nephew, was a circumstance that troubled Mrs. Byron not a little, and filled her with suspicion that enemies had inter- cepted the letters to her which General Leigh's wife, now living at Sandgate, near Folkestone, might be presumed to have written and sent up, in packets of similar notes, to 46 THE REAL LORD BTRON. London, whence they could be " franked on " to Scotland. No coldness to account for Mrs. Leigh's silence seems to have risen between the ladies. This silence was the more remarkable and Yexatious to Mrs. Byron, because it not only prevented her from having the pleasure of surprising her neighbors with a most exciting piece of intelligence, but also exposed her to the humiliation of being indebted to some of them for the information which should have been sent promptly to her from Nottinghamshire or London, and, of course, would have been so sent to her had the Byrons made much account of " the little boy at Aberdeen " and his mother. The fifth Lord Byron's grandson had died in Corsica, and weeks had passed since his kindred in England donned mourning for him, before Mrs Byron, of Aberdeen, knew of the event, which put her little boy next in succession to Newstead and the barony ; and when the intelligence reached her it came in a manner that declared to all Aberdeen how little she was esteemed by her husband's people. For the news, which should have been sent promptly from Newstead, she was indebted to the gossip of a neighbor. If she received the astounding intelligence at a tea-party it is not difficult to imagine the resentment and humiliation that qualified her delight when an eager demand for her informant's authority for the staggering announcement provoked ex- pressions of lively astonishment at her ignorance of a matter that had been known for more than a month to every one else. Such an incident could not fail to ruffle the always emotional lady. But if the way by which it came to her was galling, the intelligence was very gratifying to her pride. It was so good that, to guard herself from bitter disappointment, she tried not to believe it till she should receive confirmatory letters from the South, putting it beyond question that her boy had really and truly become his great-uncle's heir-appar- ent. On learning in due course that the talker at the tea- party had spoken no more than the truth, poor Mrs. Byron began to chatter about leaving Aberdeen, and withdrawing George from the Grammar School which, though a most. ABERDEEN. 47 respectable seminary and quite good enough for the sons of mere lairds and writers to the " Signet," was no fit place for a young gentleman who a few years hence would be a lord of the Upper House. The news, of course, raised Mrs. Byron considerably in the regard of her neighbors in Aberdeen, and revived the waning affection of her kindred throughout the country. Persons who for years had thought lightly of the ruined heiress, and declared her temper insufferable, now discovered in her good qualities, for which no one had heretofore com- mended her. Cousins, who had neglected her ever siace her husband's death, now sent her pressing invitations to visit them, and bring her boy with her. Mr. Ferguson, a lead- ing gentleman of affairs in Aberdeen, who had stood stanchly by her in her darkest hour, was of opinion that Lord Byron might, by judicious treatment, be induced to make her an allowance, or, at least, to pay for the education of his heir at one of the great public schools. Mr. Fergu- son was also of opinion that if her case were submitted to the consideration of His Most Gracious Majesty by the Prime Minister, a pension of at least £300 a year would be granted her on the Civil List. And this last matter was one on which Mr. Ferguson was the more justified in speaking strongly and hopefully, because he had himself been instrumental in procuring from the king's gracious benevolence a pension for a lady of quality, who, like Mrs. Byron, was suffering from straitened circumstances. Knowing the strings to be pulled and how to pull them, Mr. Ferguson would have much pleas- ure in acting for Mrs. Byron in the matter if he could only have Lord Byron's written authority to bestir himself for the accomplishment of his desire. Without authority from the chief of the Byron family it was obvious that Mr. Ferguson could not move effectually or safely in the lady's behalf. Lord Byron was known to be a person of a singular temper ; and it was conceivable that he might denounce for a meddler any person who, without his sanction, should venture to sub- mit a statement of Mrs. Byron's necessities to the minister who at that time enjoyed the sovereign's confidence. The lady was therefore urged to put herself in communication 48 THE KBAL LORD BYEOIf. with Lord Byron on the subject. If she did not like to write to his lordship at once, it was suggested by her discreet counsellor that she should consult Mrs. Leigh, who was be- lieved to enjoy her uncle's favor, and through her get access to the Lord of Newstead. Whether the " wiclied Lord Byron" was ever applied to on the subject there is no evidence. Possibly Mrs. Leigh knew her uncle too well to trouble him with talk about Mrs. Byron and the "little boy at Aberdeen." Anyhow, his lordship contributed nothing to the widow's means, and never author- ized Mr. Ferguson to pull official strings. Instead of offering to send his heir to Eaton or Harrow, the eccentric nobleman made the illegal sale of Rochdale property, which resulted in the long and costly lawsuit that was one cause of the poet's financial embarrassments in the earlier stages of his career, after coming of age. This lawsuit was the prin- cipal legacy for which the author of " Childe Harold " had to remember his great-uncle. In default of the requisite sanction Mr. Ferguson took no steps to introduce the widow to the king's benevolent consid- eration ; but five years later, when her son had become Lord Byron, on the death of his great-uncle (who died on the 19th of May, 1798), Catherine Gordon Byron obtained the long- desired pension of £300 a year on the Civil List ; — an exhi- bition of royal benignity that placed the democratic lady in sufficiently easy circumstances, and perhaps caused her to be more cautious in declaring her disapproval of kings. At the Aberdeen Grammar School Byron " threaded all the classes to the fourth," as he himself states the case in one of his autobiographical journals. But in thus rising from the place appropriate to the " little fellow " of the school to the place where a boy in his eleventh year would be looked for as a matter of course, he displayed neither aptitude nor liking for his lessons. Sometimes, indeed, he was at the top of his class, but on those occasions the top, as an Irish- man might say, was the bottom. To pique the ambition of the superior scholars to recover the places which they had lost without disgrace, and to spur the less apt scholars to re- tain the dignity they had not won, it was the practice of the ABEEDBBN. 49 masters of the school to invert the order of their classes, so that for a moment the knowing boys were placed lower than the ignorant ones. On these occasions Byron, after walking from the bottom to the top of his form, more than once heard his master say in a bantering tone, "And now, George, man, let me see how soon you'll be at the foot." The judgment of the masters about him was the judgment that has been accorded by pedagogues to so many children who have distinguished themselves honorably in later time : " Quick enough, but wanting in application ! " Whilst. he neglected his lessons, the lame boy, though scarcely to be described as studious, was a reader of books (seldom perused by lads of his age) when his mates were at leap-frog. On the margin of a leaf of the elder DTs- raeli's " Essay on the Litefary Character," Byron in his ma- ture age made this memorandum respecting the authors he had read before leaving Aberdeen : " KnoUes, Cantemir, De Tott, Lady M. W. Montague, Hawkins' translation from Mignet's 'History of the Turks,' the 'Arabian Nights,' — all travels or histories, or books upon the East, I could meet with, I had read, as well as Eicaut, before I was ten years old." And, in connection with this account of the desultory studies of his earlier years, it should be remem- bered how much evidence is afforded by his writings that his memory was strongly retentive of the matters picked up from books perused in his infancy. Dr. Moore's " Zeluco " (1789) — a novel in which he delighted in his Aberdeen time — gave the poet his first conception of " Childe Harold." All that is most pathetic in the incomparably beautiful ac- count of the " two fathers in this ghastly crew," in the Sec- ond Canto of " Don Juan," is referable to the impression made upon him by the " Narrative of the Shipwreck of the 'Juno' on the coast of Arracan, in the year 1795," which he read with quickened pulse and tearful eyes in the year following his withdrawal from Scotland, in 1798. In the whole range of literature one would look in vain for a genius of the highest order whose mind was more notably influ- enced throughout life by the food on which it fed in the earliest periods of its development. 50 THK RKAT. LOKD BTHON. At Aberdeen, also, Byron received his first lesson from the greatest and most ennobling of human teachers. One may smile for a moment at the thought of so young a child's first passion for a companion of the opposite sex. But no one who remembers Dante's passion for Beatrice (a love that warmed him in his tenth year) , and Canova's quickness to fall in love at a much earlier age, wUl regard as " mere child's play" the sentiment with which the boy of medita- tive moods and almost morbid sensibility regarded Mary Duff, — the little girl with dark-brown hair and hazel eyes, whose charm of face, and voice, and form, and manner, gave him many a sleepless night, when he was only nine years old. That he " could neither feel passion, nor know the meaning of the word," at the time of this love's warmest fervor, Byron was certain when he recalled the affair and wrote about it in his twenty-sixth year ; but for months together it was happiness to the shy boy to be allowed to gaze at this girl, to attend her in her walks, to sit by her side in the play-room of the old house hard by the Aber- deen Plain-stones, sometimes even to caress her. And aU through the same months it was misery to him to be away from her. Unutterably happy in her presence, he fretted and pined in her absence. This is not playing at love, but the passion itself, so far as a child, incapable of the peculiar desire to which perfect love owes so much of its color and warmth, is capable of the sentiment. It is love, felt per- haps by one child of a hundred thousand, but quite unknown to the others. In Byron this sentiment was so enduring t— or, to speak more precisely, so capable of being revived — that in his seventeenth year he experienced an hysterical agitation, that nearly occasioned him one of those convul- sive seizures to which he was liable throughout his life at moments of supreme emotion, on learning suddenly that his " old flame " was well, though most unromantically, married to an Edinburgh wine-merchant. One of the poet's journals contains a passage which shows that though he could recall his own childhood he was im- perfectly acquainted with the nature of ordinary children. After describing his infantile devotion to little Mary DufF, ABERDEEN. 51 he writes, in his twenty-sixth year, "In all other respects I differed not at all from other children, being neither tall nor short, dull nor witty, of my age, but rather lively — except in my sullen moods, and then I was always a devil. They once (in one of my silent rages) wrenched a knife from me, which I had snatched from table at Mrs. B.'s dinner (I always dined earlier), and applied to my breast . . . just before the late Lord B.'s decease." The " rages " that Byron re- garded as peculiar to himself in his childhood are not un- usual in young people ; and there was nothing very remark- able about the ways in which he displayed his occasional passionateness. It is not surprising that the child, whose mother often vented her fury in his presence by destroying pieces of her wearing apparel, should in one of his earliest fits of fury have torn his new frock to shreds ; and the be- havior of a ten-years-old boy, in seizing a knife, under a sudden impulse of wrath, and threatening to kiU himself, was less extraordinary than the autobiographer imagined. On the other hand, it is certain that, apart from amatory precociousness, little George Byron differed from the major- ity of children in several respects. Especially he differed from them in retentiveness of memory and in intellectual recep- tivity. The knowledge, largely qualified with error, as child- ish knowledge must ever be, that came to him in his infancy, passed into his soul and never left it. When it is remem- bered how needful for their happiness it is that persons who feel acutely should be capable of forgetting their annoyances, Byron's retentiveness of memory may be described as ter- rible. He differed also from the majority of young people in the delicacy of his sensibilities, and also in his morbid shyness, that far exceeded the shyness of proud children, exposed to mortifying circumstances. A story is told of his behavior in his eleventh year which is noteworthy for its evidence that the bashfulness from which he suffered at this time and for several subsequent years — indeed, in some degree throughout life — was less the weak- ness of a sheepish boy than of a timid girl. On being re- quired for the first time to answer to his name in the school roll-call by the title of " Dominus," a robust boy would- have 52 THE EEAL LOED BTKON. answered " Adsum" in a clear voice, and would have replied to the astonishment visible in the countenances of his school- fellows, by looking them proudly in the face, whilst his own glowed with excitement. But Byron was unequal to the ordeal, that certainly would not have tried severely the self- possession of an ordinary child of his age. Overcome by the novelty of the position and the gaze of his staring class- mates, he stood silent and fell into tears. The girlishness of his emotion on this occasi^ was characteristic of the boy, — whom Hobhouse in later wri used to regard as a wayward and irresistibly charming wjman, rather than as man, and whose sister to the 'last used to call him her dear "baby Byron." Notwithstanding the pain that came to him from his mother's capricious harshness and violence, from incidents vexatious to his pride, from the terror begotten in his strongly imaginative mind by May Gray's Calvinistic concern for his spiritual interests, and from the feminine sensitiveness of his highly nervous temperament, it is, however, certain that Byron's childhood was not upon the whole chiefly remarkable for its unhappiness. In many respects the circumstances of his infancy were unquestionably favorable to the health of his peculiar bodily constitution, the formation of his character, and the development of his genius, — or, rather, let it be said, to the development of those germs of feeling and faculty that were destined to result in his genius. It was well for the nerves of the delicate boy that, in his earlier childhood, he breathed the bracing air of his mother's native county. It was well, in later time, for the poet, who was a peer and (without being so foolish about it as his biographers have asserted) prided himself none too little on his rank, that, without having been subjected to the dwarfing and embitter- ing conditions of extreme penury, he could recall a period when he lived in the ways that lie between affluence and poverty. It was well for the aristocrat to have been reared amongst the people, and to have learned from personal ex- perience how closely humble folk resemble the children of luxury and grandeur. If it abounded with trials to his pride and with incidents peculiarly afflicting to his sensitive and ABERDEEN* 53 impetuously affectionate nature, his childhood afforded him pleasures which he remembered no less vividly than its vexa- tions. When his days were speeding onward to the "yellow leaf," the man who had drained a bitter cup to the dregs could still write cheerily and tenderly, — "As Auld Lang Syne brings Scotland, one and all, Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills and clear streams, — The Dee, the Don, Balgounie's brig's black wall, — All my boy's feelings, all my gentler dreams Of what I then dreamt, clothed in their own pall, Like Banquo's offspring ; — floating past me seems My childhood in this childishness of mine : I care not — 'tis a glimpse of 'Auld Lang Syne.' " The heart's music rings out too unmistakably in these lines for any one to question their sincerity. It matters not that he had often spoken of Scotland and her people in a different strain. When the great Jeffrey with his review tried to crush him, the young poet wrote savage things of the critic and his clique ; and, in later times, he visited Scotland with his wrath, because a few of her writers were worrying him. When the saucy girl twitted him with the-Scotch note that was faintly perceptible at times in his musical voice, he could say, pettishly, " I would rather hear that the country was sunk in the sea than believe you to be right." People could, in his careless moods, amuse him by ridiculing Scot- land, and he would take part in the banter, but only with the playful malice which a humorist reserves for his best friends, and delights to pour upon them because they are his best friends. In his heart he loved " the land of mountain and of flood," and was gratefiil to her for the childhood that, without being an altogether joyful one, had left him with many a joyful memory. 54 THE BEAL LORD BYBON. CHAPTEE VI. NOTTINGHAM AND LONDON. In language suitable for his purpose Moore tells how, in the summer of 1798, Lord Byron "left Scotland with his mother and nurse, to take possession of the sea,t of his ancestors," and how on their arrival at the Newstead toll-bar " they saw the woods of the Abbey stretching out to receive them " ; when Mrs. Byron, feigning ignorance, asked the woman of the toll-house to whom the Abbey belonged. On being informed that the late owner, Lord Byron, had died some time since, the proud mother inquired who was the late lord's heir ; — a question that elicited the reply, " They say it is a little boy who lives at Aberdeen " ; whereupon, May Gray, no longer able to control her feelings, ejaculated, " And this is he, bless him ! " at the same moment " kissing with delight the young lord, who was seated in her lap." This pleasant story had probably a foundation of fact ; but the sceptical reader will question whether the young lord — in the middle of his eleventh year, and a rather fleshy boy for his age — entered his ancestral domain sitting on the nurse's knees. Modest truth would have been content to say that Mrs. Byron, with her son and maid-servant, travelled by stage- coaches to Nottingham ; whence, on the day after their ar- rival at the town's best inn, they drove in a post-chaise to Newstead, to look at the place which it was hoped the young lord would some day inhabit, after finishing his education, and marrying a lady with enough money to restore the ruin- ous mansion, and set the spits turning in its kitchens. Though the woods extended its arms to receive the heir, the house was in no state for the entertainment of his mother. Had the house been tenantable, Mrs. Byron (not yet in pos- NOTTINGHAM AND LONDON. 55 session of the Civil List pension, and with no other means than the small income on which she had lived at Aberdeen) , was in no position to dwell in so grand a place. The young lord's estate (already in chancery) was no property from which his mother could hope to get an allowance of three or four thousand a year for the charges of his education at Eton or Harrow, and the maintenance of so stately a home for him during the holidays. The most being made of the rental, and the least of needful expenses, the few farms pertain- ing to the Abbey, yielded a revenue of from £1,200 to £1,500 per annum. At Rochdale there was the property of which the late lord had made an illegal sale. To recover that property would be a work of time and expense ; and on its recovery, should it ever be wrested from the people in possession, it might be worth some twenty thousand pounds. In the meantime, there was no fund for carrying on the law- suit, apart from the few hundreds a-year of the Newstead rental, that should not be needed for the young peer's edu- cation. The most valuable part of the boy's Newstead property was the part that yielded no income beyond what the pasture of the park was let for, and moneys from the sale of timber. The entire property was valued by the land- agents at £90,000. A statelier and more picturesque place of its particular Icind could scarcely be found in the midland shires ; and fortunately there was no entail to preclude the new lord from selling, as soon as he should become of age. But, of course, so long as he should be a minor, all thought of sale would be out of the question. It can be imagined how Mrs. Byron, daily growing stouter, waddled her way, under the guidance of an aged care-taker, through hall and corridor, through galleries and chambers, through neglected gardens and crumbling ruins, speaking querulous at every turn of the wicked old lord who had suf- fered so noble a place to fall into such dilapidation. It can be conceived how, long before the hour appointed for the repast. May Gray was sharply ordered to unpack a certain basket, which the excursionists from Nottingham had brought with them, unless she would see her mistress faint away for want of luncheon and a glass of sherry. It may be imagined 56 THE EEAL LOED BYKON. how the young lord, heedless for the moment of his lame- ness and the pain of walking, slipped away from his mother to the eminence of the park that gave him the best view of the fair domain and venerable pUe, whose beauties he de- scribed some twenty years later in his greatest poem : — " An old, old monastery once, and now Still older mansion, — of a rich and rare Mix'd Gothic, such as artists all allow Pew specimens yet left us can compare Withal : it lies perhaps a little low, Because the monks preferr'd a hill behind, To shelter their devotion from the wind. " It stood embosom'd in a happy valley, Crown'd by high woodlands, where the Druid oak Stood like Caractacus, in act to rally His host, with broad arms 'gainst the thunderstroke ; And from beneath his boughs were seen to sally The dappled foresters — as day awoke. The branching stag swept down with all his herd, To quaff a brook which murmured like a bird. " Before the mansion lay a lucid lake. Broad as transparent, deep, and freshly fed By a river, which its softened way did take In currents through the calmer water spread Around : the wild fowl nestled in the brake And sedges, brooding in their liquid bed : The woods sloped downwards to its brink, and stood With their green faces fix'd upon the flood. "Its outlet dash'd into a deep cascade, Sparkling with foam, until again subsiding. Its shriller echoes — like an infant made Quiet — sank into softer ripples, gliding Into a rivulet ; and thus allay'd. Pursued its course, now gleaming, and now hiding Its windings through the woods ; now clear, now blue. According as the skies their shadows threw. " A glorious remnant of the Gothic pile (While yet the church was Rome's) stood half apart In a grand arch, which once screen'd many an aisle. These last had disappeijr'd — a loss to art ; The first yet frown'd superbly o'er the soil. And kindled feelings in the roughest heart. Which mourn'd the power of time's or tempest's march, In gazing on that venerable arch. NOTTINGHAM AND LONDON. 57 " Within a niclie, nigh to its pinnacle, Twelve saints had once stood sanctified in stone ; But these had fallen, not when the friars fell, But in the war which struck Charles from his throne, When each house was a fortalice — as tell The annals of full many a line undone, — The gallant cavaliers who fought in vain Tor those who knew not to resign or reign. " But in a higher niche, alone, but crown'd. The Virgin Mother of the God-horn Child, With her Son in her blessed arms, look'd round ; Spared by some chance when all beside was spoil'd ; She made the earth below seem holy ground. This may be superstition, weak or wild. But even the faintest relics of a shrine Of any worship wake some thoughts divine. " A mighty window, hollow in the centre, Shorn of its glass of thousand colorings. Through which the deepen'd glories once could enter. Streaming from off the sun like seraph's wings, Now yawns all desolate : now loud, now fainter, The gale sweeps through its fretwork, and oft sings The owl his anthem, where the silenced quire Lie with their hallelujahs quench 'd like fire. " Amidst the court a Gothic fountain play'd, Symmetrical, but deck'd with carvings quaint — Strange faces, like to men in masquerade. And here perhaps a monster, there a saint : The spring gush'd through grim mouths of granite made. And sparkled into basins, where it spent Its little torrent in a thousand bubbles, Like man's vain glory, and his vainer troubles. " The mansion's self was vast and venerable. With more of the monastic than has been Elsewhere preserved : the cloisters still were stable, The cells, too, and refectory, I ween ; An exquisite small chapei had been able. Still unimpair'd, to decorate the scene ; The rest had been reform'd, replaced, or sunk. And spoke more of the baron than the monk." Taking charge of the young lord's estate, chancery committed his person and education to the Earl of Carlisle, said by Moore to have been " connected but remotely with" his ward's " family." A son of Isabella Byron, — scarcely 58 THE REAL LORD BYEON. less famous for eccentricity than her brother, the " wicked lord," — Lord Carlisle was first cousin (one degree removed) to the poet who, had it not been for his mother, would prob- ably hEbve lived on pleasant enough terms with his guardian, instead of quarrelling with him bitterly. Settling herself at Nottingham, where she resided for about twelve months, Mrs. Byron found a sufficient tutor for her eon in Mr. Rogers, a worthy school-master of the town, who without " grounding " the boy in Latin, so as to prepare him for a public school, led him on to construe loosely certain parts of Virgil and Cicero. Of the lad's life at Nottingham little is known save that he conceived an aflfectionate regard for his tutor, suffered much at the hands of the bone-setter. Lavender, and was goaded by an old lady of Swan Green, one of his mother's gossips, into writing the four lines of puerile doggerel which have been noticed seriously by some of the poet's biographers as his earliest effort in satirical literature. On the bonesetter for whom he conceived rea- sonable contempt and aversion, the boy is said to have played a childish trick, that from time immemorial has caused merriment in the nurseries of children. Arranging the letters of the alphabet in gibberish words, he asked his tormentor what the language was, when the pompous impostor declared the words Italian. A more characteristic and agreeable story is told of the sufferer's intercourse at this time with his teacher of Latin. " It troubles me, my lord," said the tutor, pausing in a lesson, "to see you sitting there in such pain." " Never mind, Mr. Rogers," was the answer ; " you shan't see any signs of it again." There is small need to describe the bonesetter's way of treating the foot. Blind to the nature of the case, the man did precisely as any other pretender of his kind would have done. He rubbed the foot with oil, twisted it about with violence, and fixed it tight in a wooden machine, constructed for " screwing " and " torturing " bone and muscle into better behavior. Day after day this barbarous process was repeated ; the result of the treatment, of course, being that the foot suffered more injury from bad art, than unkind nature. In the following year — when Mrs. Byron, on getting her NOTTINGHAM AND LONDON. 59 pension, moved from Nottingham to London, and took a house in Sloane Terrace — the patient was taken, at Lord Carlisle's suggestion, to Dr. Baillie, who, of course, saw at a glance the character of the mischief, for which surgery could do nothing more than what John Hunter had prescribed years since. The foot having been provided with a shoe, made by an expert mechanician on the lines ordered by the famous surgeon, Dr. Baillie told the boy and his mother that it must be left to nature to overcome or modify the unfortunate con- sequences of hurtful treatment. The physician's counsel, that the comfort of the foot should be studied whilst nature was left to her own way of dealing with the distorted bones and injured tissues, was henceforth acted on, with a result that certainly justified the advice, though it scarcely fulfilled the doctor's moderate anticipation of amendment. On going to Harrow, Byron wore a shoe that announced his infirmity to all observers of his costume ; and he had been several years in England, before he could write to his first nurse (May Gray's sister) that he could wear an ordinary boot. Mrs. Byron having moved from Nottingham to London, May Gray returned to Scotland, where she married a worthy man, and died some three years after the death of the famous poet, in the formation of whose character she had been a considerable influence. On her departure for the North the boy, remarkable in later time for kindness to his servants, bade May Gray farewell with characteristic expressions of gratitude for' her care of him during his long affliction, his parting gift to her being the first watch he ever possessed, — the watch that, after the nurse's death, became the property of the kind doctor who attended her in her last illness. The boy had already given his nurse the little full-length portrait of himself " standing with a bow and arrows in his hand, and a profusion of hair falling over his shoulders." As her tide of life ebbed away, the loyal servant delighted in talking to the doctor of the great man, in the drama of whose history she is so characteristic an actor. Whilst his foot was recovering from Lavender's mal-praxis, Byron was a pupil in the excellent preparatory school kept by Dr. Gleniiie, at Dulwich, — a preceptor whom the poet 60 THE REAL LORD BYEON. would have remembered no less affectionately than Mr. Koss, of Aberdeen, and Dr. Drury, of Harrow, had it not been for misunderstandings arising from his mother's foolish behavior. Finding the boy well acquainted with the historical pai-ts of sacred scripture, Dr. Glennie was struck by the intelligence and earnestness with which he spoke on matters of religion. From the doctor's evidence on this subject, it seems that Byron's acceptance of his nurse's doctrine can have been troubled by no sceptical considerations so long as she was his daily companion. There is, indeed, a story that, before he left Scotland, the boy had given his first nurse's husband cause to speak of him as " a particularly inquisitive child, and puzzling about religion." But this goes for nothing against the abundant evidence that it was during his later time at Harrow, or his earlier time at Cambridge, that Byron became a sceptic. At the same time Dr. Glennie's attention was arrested by the boy's fondness for reading good literature, — and at Dulwich Grove the lad had the means of indulging this taste ; for, sleeping in the doctor's library, he was encouraged to amuse himself with certain of its books, that comprised a set of the British poets from Chaucer to Churchill, which he was believed to have read from beginning to end. Whilst there is sufficient evidence that the school-master, a gentleman of no ordinary culture and amiability, was abundantly con- siderate for his pupil's welfare and indulgent to his humors, it is on record to the doctor's honor, that eighteen years later (in 1817, at Geneva) he had the courage and generosity to declare his disbelief of the stories with which society resounded to the poet's discredit. The more, therefore, is it to be regretted that no testimony can be produced of cor- responding good-will on the poet's part. Byron's sUence about Dulwich Grove, where he remained for two years, is significant. Had he remembered the meritorious master with kindness, there would certainly have been some exhibi- tion of the feeling in his pubUshed journals and letters. On the other hand, had there been good reasons for his want of grateful regard for the preceptor, he would have put them on record. The fair inference is that, whilst he could not recall NOTTINGHAM AND LONDON. 01 the doctor pleasantly, a sentiment of justice forbade him to write a word to his discredit. The terms in which Glennie wrote to Moore of Mrs. Byron, whilst he had only the kindest words for her son, would of themselves show that Mrs. Byron was accountable for the disagreement of the master and pupil. "Mrs. Byron," he wrote with an asperity that is the more remark- able because the Scotchman would naturally have been lenient to the lady's northern peculiarities, had she not in- censed him greatly, " was a total stranger to English society and English manners ; with an exterior far from prepossess- ing ; an understanding where nature had not been more bountiful ; a mind wholly without cultivation ; and the peculi- arities of northern opinions, northern habits, and northern accent, I trust I do no prejudice to the memory of my country-woman, if I say Mrs. Byron was not a Madame de Lambert, endowed with powers to retrieve the fortune and form the character and manners of a young nobleman, her son." If these plain words expose the writer to a charge of something like a breach of professional confidence, it can be pleaded in his behalf that he had endured extraordinary provocation from the lady, who treated him as contemptu- ously as it was in the nature of such a woman to treat a gen- tleman who was " only her son's school-master." Of course the disputes and conflicts that arose between Dr. Glennie and Mrs. Byron related to small matters ; for the life of a school, more especially of a preparatory school for quite young gentlemen, is made of small matters. Com- plaining of the slowness of her boy's progress, Mrs. Byron acted as though her chief object was to make the progress slower. Instead of leaving George to his studies, she was constantly driving over to Dulwich to take him out for the afternoon, to carry him off to a theatre or children's party. To the doctor's earlier and milder protests against these inter- ruptions of his young friend's studies Mrs. Byron answered with promises she failed to keep. But when the doctor became firmer and somewhat less conciliatory, the lady's brow clouded. There were scenes in which the school-master showed dis- pleasure, and the lady became angry, — followed by still 62 THE KEAL LOKD BYRON. stormier scenes that ended, on Mrs. Byron's side, with hysterics. Mrs. Glennie tried with her gentle voice to man- age this ungentle and exceedingly troublesome mamma. But Mrs. Glennie succeeded no better than lier husband. Not once or twice alone, but repeatedly, the boy's guardian intervened between the belligerents, at the instance of the tutor, who, of course, knew the earl would be on his side. By the earl it was decided that Mrs. Byron's inconvenient visits to Dulwich Grove should cease, and that George's studies should not be interrupted during the six working days of every week. With due regard for the mother's feelings, and not a little to the school-master's disappointment, it was, however, decided by Lord Carlisle that Mrs. Byron should receive a weekly visit from her son from the Saturday to Monday, on condition he was sent back to school on Monday in time for lessons. When Mrs. Byron had shown her regard for this stipulation by keeping the boy with her till Monday afternoon, tLU the middle of the week, and even on one occasion for an entire week beyond the time appointed for his return to Dulwich, the earl was again entreated to speak in the interest of tutor and pupil. By this time Lord Carlisle's power over Mrs. Byron was at an end. The gentlewoman, whose insolent speech in the the doctor's study and Mrs. Glennie's parlor had often been audible to the servants in the kitchen and the boys in the play-ground, was no gentlewoman to stand in awe of an earl. Of Lord Carlisle's last interview with Mrs. Byron nothing is known, save that he left her presence with a determination to see as little as possible of her in the future. Confessing himself beaten by the virago, with whom he never again con- descended to bandy words, the earl said to Dr. Glennie, "I can have nothing more to do with Mrs. Byron. You must now manage her as you best can." That the guardian had good cause for this resolve no one has questioned ; and it is more than probable that he had reason for extending his displeasure to the boy who, though he is not to be blamed for his mother's bad temper, might have done something to check and moderate its outbreaks. The boy may even have been guilty of impertinence to the guardian, who, from the NOTTINGHAM AND LONDON. 63 time of these rather ludicrous and very unfortunate occur- rences, regarded him with disfavor. " Byron, your mother is a fool ! " one of the boys remarked bluntly to the future poet. " I know it ! " was the gloomy reply. But though he " knew it," Lord Byron wanted the spirit to beg her to behave less unreasonably. Without showing any lack of filial respect, the twelve-years-old boy might have entreated Mrs. Byron, out of her maternal care for his feelings and interests, to have more regard for the wishes of his school-master and his guardian. At least he might have shown both the doctor and the earl, that he was sensible of their goodness in taldng much trouble and enduring many annoyances for his advantage. The boy, who failed to show this feeling by words or manner, seemed of course to be taking Mrs. Byron's part in the unseemly contention. In siding thus far with such a mother, the school-boy was, of course, actuated by no higher motive than a desire for as many hohdays and as much pleasure as possible. Though quick enough to resist his mother when she thwarted his wishes or stung him with bitter speech, it is conceivable that in his girlishness — the girlishness that set him " crying for just nothing " before his Aberdeen school-mates — he shrunk from provoking a conflict with her when she seemed to be overflowing with affection for him. Under these circum- stances it is not wonderfiil that Lord Carlisle thought too unfavorably of the boy of halting gait and clouded brow, heavy features and sullen look, who spoke with his mother's brogue, and could not enter a room without dropping his eyes to the carpet, from a shyness in no way distinguishable from the shyness of rusticity. Indeed, who could have pre- dicted thus early and thus late in the story that this sheepish, awkward, tlymkless little fellow, after almost surviving his Scotch accent, and learning how to conceal his lameness, would, ten short years hence assume a shape of singular ele- gance and a face of peculiar loveliness, and break upon the world almost in the same instant as the greatest poet and brightest coxcomb of his generation ? Is it wonderful that, when the brown bud had changed to perfect blossom, Byron 64 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. iieyer cared to talk of the Dulwich school, which he remeia- bered only as a place where his mother had made herself more than usually contemptible, and he had played the part of a young cub rather than of a young nobleman ? This least satisfactory period of Byron's boyhood — the two years preceding his entrance at Harrow — covered, how- ever, two passages of feeling in which he figures more agree- ably and creditably. The season which a great poet recalls as the time when his feelings first passed into song, and the season when he is known to have been deeply stirred for the first time by the beauties of scenery, are points of interest for his biographers and admirers. Though Dr. Elze attaches some importance to the four lines of satirical doggerel on the old woman of Swan Green, most readers will be content to rest on the poet's assurance that his " first dash into poetry " was made in 1800, from the inspiration of the love — the second of the " grand paesions " of his boyhood — which he conceived in that year for his cousin Margaret Parker, the girl whose dark eyes, long eyelashes, Grecian face, and transparent beauty went to the grave some two years after the poet fell in love with her. In the summer of the follow- ing year (1801), the boy accompanied Mrs. Byron to Chel- tenham, where he found inexpressible pleasure in watching the Melvern Hills "every afternoon at sunset," whilst his foolish mother pondered over the words of the fortune-teller who, after winning the lady's confidence by telling her that her son was lame (a piece of information that of course could only have come to the prophetess through divination), went on to predict that the lame boy "should be in danger from poison before he was of age, and should be twice mar- ried — the second time to a foreign lady." Because he was deeply stirred by the news of Mary DufPs marriage, it does not follow that the lad's passion for his cousin Margaret was nothing more than one of those tran- sient states of feeling that arise in young people from ordinary flirtations. On the contrary, he was terribly in earnest ; and so was the gentle girl, who returned his affec- tion with the fervor and sincerity of a loving and guileless nature. Having declared his worship of her in. the verses, NOTTINGHAM AND LONDON. 65 which he had forgotten, and possibly had done well to forget, before his twenty-sixth year, he honored her when she was no more with the elegy (written in his fifteenth year) begin- ning,— " Hush'd are the winds, and still the evening gloom, Not e'en a zephyr wanders through the grove, Whilst I return, to view my Margaret's tomh, And scatter flowers on the dust I love. " The attachment was so genuine and strong on either side that it is conceivable, if Margaret Parker had lived, the world would never have heard much of the poet's other cousin, Mary Chaworth, or been invited to sit in judgment on the domestic trials of the lady who, to every one's misfortune, became the poet's wife. It does not follow that the poet differed from most other men in being able to love two women passionately at the same time. What is most curious in Byron's personal story before his marriage, and also in his personal story after that lamentable event, will be missed by those who persist in regarding the "passions" of the earlier period as nothing more than so many exhibitions of sentimentalism, and in re- garding the "attachments" of the later period as nothing more Sian so many exhibitions of libertinism. Of the later at- tachments something will be said hereafter, but only enough for the requirements of honest biography, certainly nothing in the way either of defence or palliation. Of those "attach- ments " (there is no need to call them by a harsher name) no Englishman reared in the ways of domestic virtue, and al- together fortunate in his domestic circumstances, can think without feelings of repulsion, to be equally divided between astonishment and disgust. But the real Byron will never be known to readers who cannot be led to see that, even in the most deplorable stages of the later period of his career, he never made a profession of love without being for the moment inspired by it, or without for the moment believing himself to be completely dominated by it. In the domain of the affections he was, from boyhood, till his hair whitened, a man of so acute a sensibility that it may well be termed morbid. To this excessive sensibiUty, and 66 THE REAL LORD BYRON. the various kinds of emotionality that necessarily attended it, must be attributed the quickness with which his "passions" succeeded one another. Fortunately for society such sensi- bility is rare. It is even more uncommon for such sensibility to be united with the singular retentiveness of memory that was another of Byron's most remarkable endowments. Still more unusual is it for so perilous a sensibility and so strong a memory to be found in cooperation with an even stronger imagination. It is only by considering these three several forces, and thinking how they could not fail to act and react upon one another, that the reader will realize how it was that, even in his early boyhood, when they were only nascent, Byron could in two years survive his first love for little Mary Duif, so as to be capable of a stronger passion for Margaret Parker, and yet be so deeply affected on hearing that the ob- ject of the earlier attachment had passed by marriage to another worshipper. That the second love followed so soon on the first was due to the boy's sensibility. His agitation at the sudden announcement of Mary Duff's marriage was due, in the first instance, to the quickened memory that brought before him every one of the child's lovable endowments ; then to the imagination that heightened all the charms which cap- tivated his childish fancy ; and then again to the sensibility that occasioned an instantaneous renewal of the affection, though it had been followed by the stronger attachment to another object. Though two " passions " could not coexist in the breast of a man so exceptionally constituted, it was natural for several ". passions " to occupy it successively, and to follow one another with perplexing rapidity. In a being so swayed by feeling, memory, and fancy, a passion long dead might at any moment revive. And it was because they knew him to be so constituted that a few of the poet's closest friends, knowing little of Lady Byron, even to the last, regarded it as possible that he and she would survive their mutual animosity and resume the affection that for several months unquestionably existed between them. To the same forces may be referred what was most remark- able in Byron's love of beautiful scenery. To afford him all the gratification he was capable of deriving from the study of nature's aspects, it was necessary that a landscape should re- NOTTINGHAM AND LONDON. 67 mind him of scenes that had filled him with admiration and gladness in his childhood. It was at Genoa, when he was almost on the threshold of his life's last year, he wrote no inconsiderable portion of his biography in the lines, — "He who first met the Highland's swelling blue, Will lore the peak that shows a kindred hue, Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face, And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace. Long have I roam'd through lands which are not mine, Adored the Alp and loved the Apennine, Revered Parnassus, and beheld the steep Jove's Ida and Olympus crown the deep ; But 'twas not all long ages lore, nor all Their nature held me in their thrilling thrall The infant rapture still survived the boy, And Loch-na-gar with Ida look'd o'er 'Troy, Mixed Celtic memories with the Phygian mount, And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount, Forgive me. Homer's universal shade ! Forgive me, Phcebus ! that my fancy stray'd ; The north and nature taught me to adore Your scenes sublime, from those beloved before." In this respect the man was faithful to the boy. In the pleasure, which came to him first at Malvern, and afterwards at Cheltenham, in his fourteenth summer, from the hills that reminded him of the Highland mountains, delight at the scenery offered to his gaze was curiously and characteristically blended with delight at the scenery which quickened memory brought before his mental vision. Moore may have been guilty of sentimental extravagance in urging that " a boy gazing with emotion on the hills at sunset, because they re- mind him of the mountains among which he passed his child- hood, is already, in heart and imagination, a poet." Count- less boys — without a single thread of imaginative force, and with no feeling more poetical than the home-sickness that causes the dullest Swiss exile, or any brainless Savoyard organ-grinder of the London streets to pine for his native scenes — have experienced similar emotion under similar cir- cumstances, ^ut it cannot be questioned that, in thus pass- ing in Fancy's freedom from the distant hills to the heights of Lachin-y-gair, this particular boy made a distinct step towards the domain of feeling, in which he was destined to spend his brief and unrestful manhood. 68 THE REAL LORD BYKON. CHAPTER Vn. HARKOW. SooJiT after this visit to Cheltenham, Byron went to Har- row, a school that has been repaid in lustre for its beneficial part in the formation of his character. Entering the school in the middle of his fourteenth year, he was a "Harrow boy" for four entire years, from the summer of 1801 to the sum- mer of 1805, when, after passing the holidays at Southwell, where Mrs. Byron had taken a house (Burgage Manor) in the previous year, he went into residence at Cambridge. A better school than Harrow, or a better master than Dr. Drury could not have been found for the lad of neglected education, undisciplined temper, and unprepossessing man- ners, who, sorely needing the discipline of such a seminary, would have rebelled against any government that was not at the same time firm and sympathetic. The personal characteristics of the " wild mountain colt," in whose eye Dr. Drury detected mental force, and in whose exhibitions of temper the sagacious master discerned a spirit to be more easily led by a silken string than by a cable, dif- fered greatly from the young Lord Cardurcis, whose "long, curling, black hair and large, black eyes " arrested little Vene- tia Herbert's attention on her first survey of his pale face and slender form, when he was still in his twelfth year. Whilst it is improbable that he retained to his twelfth year the curls which are known, from the miniature given to his nurse, May Gray, to have fallen about the shoulders of the Aberdeen child, it is certain that the poet's eyes were blue-gray (though their long lashes were black) , that his chesljiut hair at its darkest period just missed the deepest brown of auburn, and that from infancy to manhood's threshold he was remarkable for the " tendency to corpulence," which he is said by Moore, HARROW. 69 to have " derived from his mother." The boy who was led in his fourteenth year to Dr. Drury's presence by Mr. Han- son (the young gentleman's solicitor) was a decidedly plump youth. To the dissipation of romantic visions of a certain tombstone with a handsome stripling in a recumbent posture upon the moss-grown slab, it must even be recorded that, towards the close of his school-days, the boy whom Dr. Druiy governed so wisely, was a fat boy. The hatefid epithet comes to this page from the pen of a rude writer, but it came to him through an ultra-pohte writer from the lips of the charming gentlewoman, Miss Pigot of South- well, who recalled for Tom Moore's advantage, how the "fat, bashful boy " looked and demeaned himself on entering her mother's drawing-room when he had just finished his third year at Harrow. With cheeks encased in fat, and his hair combed straight over his forehead, the young poet looked such a perfect " gaby " that the narrator, in her girlish sauci- ness, actually told him so. The talk at the poet's first inter- view with the young lady, who was for some years his most familiar friend of the gentler sex, having turned on the character of Gabriel Lackbrain, in the play lately performed at Cheltenham, she responded to the formal bow he made on rising to go, by saying " Good-by, Gaby." To his credit, it should be added, that, instead of blushing and looking wrathfiil at the sally, he acknowledged it with a bright smUe, and stayed for a few minutes longer, to show how well he could talk on getting the better of his shyness. To know the real Byron, instead of the unreal and rather absurd Byron of romantic biography, and realise the difl5- culties under which he fought a painful way to a premature grave, readers should be duly mindful of his morbid pro- pensity to fatten as well as of his lameness, and should also realize how the two afllictions worked together in a curious way for his discomfort. In a later chapter of this narrative, attention will be called to the painful measures he employed to correct this disposition to fatten, which the infirmity of his feet prevented him from fighting in a natural and healthy way. But as he did not become unwieldily corpulent, till he ceased growing in height, it is enough to remark that one 70 THE EEAL LOKD BYRON. could not have found amongst his Harrow school-mates a stouter boy than this young gentleman, who a few years later was remarkable for delicacy of face and elegance of figure. Whilst they are comical for their remoteness from the truth, the mistakes respecting Byron's appearance are interesting to connoisseurs of evidence for showing by turns how soon people may forget the personal characteristics of their famil- iar friends, and how likely people are to be misled in matters of detail — especially on questions of color — by those por- traitures in black and white, on which they rely chiefly for information respecting the semblance of individuals they have never seen. Known only to a few dozens of his fellow countrymen before the morning on which he awoke to find himself famous, and then known to few persons outside the world of fashion, Byron, after shining for a few seasons in London drawing-rooms, left England forever in early man- hood, without having been beheld in the flesh by so many as ten of every thousand English people who, fascinated by the writer, were curious about the man. Wherever he dwelt in foreign lands, his life was one of comparative seclusion — especially of seclusion from natives of his own land. Hence- forth his aspect could only be known to the majority of his readers by the black-and-white portraits, exhibited in the windows of printsellers or in his published volumes ; — the pictures that, whilst affording a more or less inadequate notion of his profile and the beauty of his mouth and chin, tell nothing of the sweetness and gayety of his smiles, — the pictures that caused even his former acquaintance to think of him as a dark man. Since Dallas, who knew him inti- mately during the perfection of his personal attractiveness, was brought by these portraitures to think he had "fine black hair," it is not surprising that the younger Disraeli, who never saw the poet, made the same mistake. From the fantastic things to be found in tlie biographies of the poet about his life at Harrow, one would suppose that the discipline which did him much good, afforded no sharp trials to the proud boy who had never been taught to obey, — the sensitive boy whose Scotch brogue provoked HARROW. 71 derision, — the ill-taught boy who entered the school so badly prepared for its studies that had it not been for Dr. Drury's consideration he would have been placed in a class of little fellows greatly his juniors, — the shy boy whose shyness made him uncouth, — the quick-tempered boy whose " rages " only stimulated his tormentors to worry him more maliciously, — the sullen boy who was ordered about like a servant and then licked for obeying orders sullenly. Is it not written in Mr. Moore's book that his noble friend " rose at length to be a leader in all the sports, schemes, and mischief of the school " ? and does not Dr. Elze follow the lead by applauding the youth "for excelhng in all games and sports " ? There is something pathetic in the commenda- tions thus poured on the poor boy whose lameness debarred him from even participating in some of the games of his comrades. The passages of the poet's journals that speak of his " cricketing," and the line of the " Hours of Idleness " that refers to " cricket's manly toil " as though he had him- self "joined in" it with pleasure, are mere "bits of bounce," to be read betwixt laughter and tears, and ticketed together with the similar passages relating to the poet's pedestrian exploits. These little essays of " make-believe " excepted, Byron him- self is frank and truthful enough about the darker side and sterner experiences of his time at Harrow. Far from pretend- ing that from the ,^rst he enjoyed the school which he loved so cordially at last, he admits that he detested the place for the first two years and a-half, — that is, till time had given him the privileges, and immunities, and authority of an upper- form boy. It is a curious instance of Moore's carelessness, that reduces by exactly two-fifths the period of the poet's dislike of his school. " Accordingly," says the biographer, " we find from his own account, that, for the first year and a-half, he hated Harrow," — a way of misstating the case, in which the Irishman is followed by Dr. Elze. The words equally precise and emphatic of Byron's journals are, "I always hated Harrow till the last year and half, but then I liked it." Elsewhere in the same reminiscences he says, "I was a most unpopular boy, but led latterly." From the 72 THE REAL LOED BTEON. considerable quantity of information about his life on the Hill, it is sufficiently clear that the period of his extreme unpopularity was identical with the period of his hatred of the school and misery in it. As an underling he was pug- nacious, resentful, and in general disfavour ; but when he had risen to a position to give the word of command, and indulge his characteristic and essentially amiable, though slightly vainglorious, taste for protecting little fellows and patronizing his juniors, he ceased to provoke enmities and gained a reputation for kindliness. And it cannot be questioned that as a junior he had reason for disliking the school where even the infirmity, of which he was so sensitive, exposed him to insults. When, in later time, the coarser of his assailants in the press sneered at the bodUy as weU as mental deformity of the wretched rhymester, who not content with maligning Christianity had even presumed to lampoon the Prince Regent, the poet remarked with afiected indifference that he had not gone through a public school without learning that he was deformed. "Unfortunately," Leigh Hunt observes respecting his friend's lameness, "the usual thoughtlessness of school-boys made him feel it bitterly at Harrow. He would wake, and find his leg in a tub of water." Such indignities, which were largely accountable for his long dislike of Harrow, came to an end in 1804, when he was in the proud position to record in one of his note- books : "Drury's Pupils, 1804. Byron, Brury, Sinclair, Hoare, Bolder, Annesley, Calvert, Strong, Acland, Gordon, Drummond." As one of " Drury's Pupils," the youthful poet could be benignant to "juniors," such as his "favorites" Clare, Dorset, C. Gordon, De Bath, Claridge, and J. Wingfield, whom in his loftiness and superabundant lenity he even, to use his own words, "spoilt by indulgence!" His tombstone became a throne, with courtiers regarding him reverentially from a distance. These also were the days of the " cricketing " referred to in his journal with curious self-complacence ; when he could amuse himself for half-an- hour with the bat, whilst juniors did the bowling and field- ing, and a fag made the runs for him. One would like to know what grounds the poet had (if he HAKEOW. 73 had any) for writing in February, 1812, to Master John Co well, on that young gentleman's departure for Eton : "As an Etonian, you will look down upon a Harrow man ; but I never, even in my boyish days, disputed your superiority, which I once experienced in a cricket match, where I had the honor of making one of the eleven, who were beaten to their hearts' content by your college in one innings." Though cricket eighty years since was no such arduous sport as the cricket of this year of grace, it is scarcely credible that Byron, whilst "leading" his school, took the part his words imply in the match. If he did it is not surprising that Harrow was badly beaten in a single innings. His choice of familiar associates at Harrow certainly justi- fies Moore's remark that " it is a mistake to suppose that, either at school or afterwards, he was at all guided in the selection of his friends by aristocratic sympathies." But few persons wiU concur with the same biographer in thinking that he was actuated by pride in surrounding himself with " favorites " who, from being his inferiors in age and strength, looked to him for protection ; the delight in patronizing being referable to vanity rather than to pride. The most remarkable and characteristic features of Byron's intercourse with these " favorites " is the girlishness of the sentiment he lavished upon them and the girlishness of the regard with which they repaid his affection. "L'amitie, qui dans la monde est a peine un sentiment, est une passion dans les cloitres," is an aphorism, that he adopted from Marmon- tel, and put into one of his note-books in his third year after leaving Harrow, — doubtless because it struck him as pecu- liarly applicable to his enthusiasm for his friends at school and afterwards at the university. "My school friendships," he wrote in the journal, that may be called the "Autobiography of his Boyhood," " were with me passions (for I was always violent) , but I do not know that there is one which has en- dured (to be sure some have been cut short by death) till now. That with Lord Clare began one of the earliest, and lasted longest — being only Interrupted by distance — that I know of. I never hear the word ' Olare ' without a beating of the heart even now, and I write it with the feelings of 74 THE REAL LORD BYEON. 1803-4-5, ad infinitum." The record is the more inter- esting, because of the approximate date, given to the commencement of this peculiar development of sensibility- and affectionateness. The friendship for Lord Clare, which began iu 1803 (the poet's sixteenth year), having been "one of the earliest," the Harrow "passions" may be re- garded as the affairs of the later half of his school life. But if they were " passions," these school friendships were the " passions '' of a girl, rather than of a boy endowed with the robustness appropriate to his sex. They were girlish in their tenderness, tearful vehemence, and incontinence of emotion. They were girlish (on both sides — but especially on Byron's side) in the jealousies, suspicions, and piques that attended them. Sometimes it is scarcely less exasperat- ing than diverting to observe the " tiffs " and reconciliations of these tender-hearted Harrovians who, when least girlish, are so many sentimental French lads, wearing their hearts on their sleeves, rather than stout English boys, holding their hearts in their breasts. The misunderstandings of these mutually "loving" and "beloved" youths arose out of the absurdest trifles, which caused them to mope, and shed tears, and write "tiffy" letters to one another because they were not so much " loved " as they ought to be. Byron is in his last year at Harrow, when he is aggrieved by the cruel cold- ness of a school-mate, who has positively had the inhuman hardness to address the poet in a letter as " My dear Byron," instead of "my dearest." At another time the Harrow " leader " is fretting because the same correspondent, instead of loving his dearest Byron more than any one else, seems to care less for him than for John Russell. To another school-mate who has wounded his sensibilities, the Poet of the HUl writes in the following strain of anguish and indig- nation : — " You knew that my soul, that my heart, my existence, If danger demanded, were wholly your own ; You know me unaltered by years or by distance, Devoted to love and to friendship alone. HAREOW. 1 75 "You knew — but away with the vain retrospection, The bond of affection no longer endures, Too late you may droop o'er the fond recollection, And sigh for the friend who was formerly yours." That the poet's influence at Harrow during his last year was considerable, and that he was in a certain way the leader as he afterwards boasted of the school, is shown by the fact that, whilst living in a small set of sentimental wor- shippers — for whose peculiar sentimentalism he was himself altogether or at least chiefly accountable, he was stUl so far acceptable to the majority of the upper boys, as to be made the chief director of their comical demonstration against the election of Dr. Butler to be Dr. Drury's successor. But it cannot be said that the influence, which disposed a consider- able proportion of the cleverer and more sensitive boys to play the part of "friendship-sick maidens," was a wholesome influence. One can readily believe, as Dr. Butler seems to have believed, that it was by no means conducive to the manliness that should distinguish the sons of English gen- tlemen, — and, indeed, the sons of Englishmen of every class. Of course, the influence, so completely resultiug from sympathy with the single boy of an exceptional consti- tution and peculiar temperament, was transient. It was not in the nature of things that, — on the disappearance of the Apostle of Friendship with his power of verse and the set of admirers to whom he communicated his peculiar sentiment- alism, — the boys of a great public school should continue to cherish "passions" of friendship for one another, and turn tearful at being styled " dear " instead of " my dearest " in the heading of a letter. It was not even possible for the boys, whom Byron had infused with his peculiar girlishness, to continue in the way of feeling to which he introduced them. On contact with the w.orld these Byronized school-boys be- came men of common-sense ; and the Apostle of " passion- ate friendship" was deserted by his disciples. All this is told by Harness, where he says of his former patron at Har- row, — "Of his attachment to his friends, no one can read Moore's ' Life,' and entertain a doubt. He required a great deal from them — not more, perhaps, than he, from the 76 THE REAL LORD BYRON. abundance of his love, freely and fully gave — but more than they had to return." But there was another side to the boy's Harrow life, to which it is a relief to turn, after thinking of its girlishness. If they are honorable to the master, the poet's feelings for Dr. Drury throughout his school days and to the end of his life, are no less creditable to the pupil. Nothing more is re- quired to show how gentle, and docile a creature Byron would have been in his childhood under proper management, and how amenable he was in his older infancy to authority, that commended itself to his sense of right and justice, than his consistent and unwavering gratitude to the great school- master, who governed him for four years with sympathy and at the same time with firmness. "Dr. Drury," he eays in the "Autobiographic Journal," "whom I plagued sufficiently too, was the best, the kindest (and yet strict, too) friend I ever had — and I look upon him still as a father." The let- ter, in which the poet announced his acceptance by Miss Mil- banke and his approaching marriage to his old master, is in the same vein of filial confidence and aflTection. Of the other examples of the poet's regard for his famous preceptor, there are two that may not be omitted from these pages. The school-boy had become a man ; and the man had almost in an hour mounted to a giddy eminence of celebrity, and was still in the full enjoyment of his first intoxicating triumphs, when, on being asked by Dr. Drury why he had not sent his old master copies of his works, he answered with unaffected modesty and simple truth, "Because, sir, you are the only man I never wish to read them." Years later, — when he had withdrawn from his native land forever, under the thunder of the loud calumny to which he grew by degrees comparatively indifferent, and the fire of "the speechless ob- loquy," that never ceased to work like poison in his soul, — on putting into the Fourth Canto of "Childe Harold" some lines to the discredit of the system of education that prevails in English schools, he was careful to guard the verses with a note of homage and reverential explanation, so as to spare his dear old master the pain that might come to him through HARROW. 77 misapprehension of the author's purpose. The words of the poem, thus guarded from misconstruction, are — " . . . . not in vain May he, who will, his recollections rake And quote in classic raptures, and awake The hills with Latian echoes ; I abhorr'd Too much, to conquer for the poet's sake. The drill'd dull lesson, forced down word by word In my repugnant youth, with pleasure to record " Aught that recalls the daily drug which turn'd My sickening memory ; and, though Time hath taught My mind to meditate on what it learn'd. Yet such the fix'd inveteracy of thought That, with the freshness wearing out before My mind could relish what it might have sought, If free to choose, I cannot now restore Its health ; but what it then detested, still abhor." The note runs thus, " I wish to express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty ; that we learn by rote before we can get by heart ; . that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advan- tage deadened and destroyed, by the didactic anticipation, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of composition which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish, or to' reason upon. For the same reason we can never be aware of the fulness of some of the finest passages of Shakespeare ('To be, or not to be,' for instance), from the habit of having them ham- mered into us at eight years old, as an exercise, not of mind but of memory, so that when we are old enough to enjoy them, the taste is gone, and the appetite palled. In some parts of the Continent, young persons are taught from more common authors, and do not read the best classics till their maturity. I certainly do not speak on this point from pique or aversion towards the place of my education. I was not a slow, though an idle boy : and I believe no one could, or can be more attached to Harrow than I have always been, and with reason ; — a part of the time passed there was the happiest of my life ; and my preceptor (the Rev. Dr. Joseph Drury) was the best and worthiest friend I ever possessed, 78 THE REAL LORD BYRON. whose warnings I have remembered but too well, though too late — when I have erred, and whose counsels I have but followed when I have- done well or wisely. If ever this im- perfect record of my feelings towards him should reach his eyes, let it remind him of one who never thinks of him but with gratitude and veneration — of one who would more gladly boast of having' been his pupil, if, by more closely following his injunctions, he could reflect any honor upon his instructor." Notwithstanding all this evidence of the affectionate duti- fulness, which distinguis&d Bjrron's conduct to his principal school-master, both during his stay at Harrow and through- out the years of his manhood, there exists a notion that he was chiefly remarkable at Harrow for unruliness and a taste for rebellion. Tiio people, whose ingenuity has especially delighted in drawing indictments against him from scraps of his writings and in dealing with the figures of his poetry as though they were facts of his personal story, have even found testimony of the poet's naughtiness at school in the following lines, of " The Address to the Duke of Dorset," — ' ' Ah ! though myself, by nature haughty, wild, Whom Indiscretion hail'd her favorite child ; Though every error stamps me for her own. And dooms my fall, I fain would fall alone ; Though my proud heart no precept now can tame, I love the virtues which I cannot claim." Evidence of a sensitive conscience and spiritual modesty, rather a strong propensity to evil, evidence especially in- teresting to biographers for showing at how early a date Byron's practice of magnifying his own misdeeds began ^ — these words of an imaginative boy, playing the part of a stern moralist, should scarcely be taken as a culprit's con- fession. The witness against himself should at least be allowed the benefit of his avowal of "loving the virtues." Apart from 'the misdemeanors of which he was unques- tionably guilty towards Dr. Butler, there was as little reality in the "rebelling" as there was in the '.'cricketing," to which the poet refers so jauntily in his journal ; and on examination, HARROW. 79 even those misdemeanors are found altogether insufficient to sustain the grave charge of a propensity for rebellion. The vrhole business of " the Butler Eow " grew out of a trivial affair. When Dr. Drury retired from the Mastership of Harrow in 1805, there were three candidates for the office, — Mark Drury, Evans, and Butler; and naturally enough Byron came to the fore of the boys, who from affection of their old master entertained a strong opinion, that the office which a Drury had filled so honorably ought to descend to a Drury, who, of course, as he was a Drury, would fill it with equal honor. Each candidate had his party of well-wishers amongst the boys, who — of course, without seriously sup- posing their voices would or should determine the issue of the contest — behaved as though the election rested with them. The parties lampooned and hooted one another, and worked themselves into a prodigious excitement about a matter, that was no more their affair than the choice of the next President of the United States. On the election of Dr. Butler, the beaten parties united in imagining themselves very badly treated. In the excitement Byron behaved badly, and was guilty of at least one overt act of rebellion, for which he would of course have been severely punished, had not the new Head Master wisely determined to take a lenient view of misconduct, committed without calm deliberation and in con- sequence of his own success. Byron (a boarder in Dr. Butler's house) pulled down the gratings before some of the Master's windows, and on being called upon to answer for his conduct, had the impudence to say without a word of apology, that he tore down the gratings "because they darkened the hall." On the other hand, the poet ranged him- self on the side of order, when some of his confederates pro- posed to bum down one of the class-rooms, — an outrage from which they were withheld by their leader, who reminded them that ia doing so they would destroy the desks, illus- trated with the names of their fathers and grandfathers. But though he saved the class-room, he persisted to the last in showing disrespect to Dr. Butler ; even going the length of declining at the end of the term to accept the invitation to dinner which the Doctor sent to him as an upper boy, in 80 THE EEAL LORD BYKON. accordance with etiquette of ancient usage. Moore even goes so far aa to assert, on the authority of one of Byron's school-fellows, that on being asked his reason for declining the invitation, the poet replied to his interrogator, "Why, Dr. Butler, if you should happen to come into my neighbor- hood 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." As Dr. Butler, on seeing this story in Moore's " Life," assured the biographer that the anecdote had very little foundation in fact, it may be assumed that the explanation was worded less offensively. Byron's worst act in the whole of this puerile business was the last of his offences. Instead of dismissing his dislike of Dr. Butler on leaving Harrow, he was so wrong-headed as to pubhsh in the " Hours of Idleness " some offensive verses against the Master, who had given him no grounds for enduring displeasure. But though Byron cannot be acquitted of behaving badly in this affair, much may be said in palliation of his misbehav- ior. Devotion to his old master was the cause of his strong feeling about the election, that occasioned so much excitement in the school. Instead of being the originator of the riotous movements, that arose in the school immediately after the election, he was actually holding aloof from his party when he was entreated to command it. Indiscretion is venial "even in an Upper Boy," whose pride is tickled by an invitation to "lead his comrades." There is no doubt he believed the new Master to be unworthy of his office, and conceived he was under no moral obligation to accept the ruler who had been imposed upon him. His most mutinous acts resulted from the heats of contention. The sensitive and quick-tempered boy imagined he had been insulted by a chief, who in order to humiliate him had exceeded the limits of his authority. The offensive verses were inserted in the " Hours of Idleness," when the poet was under the exasperating im- pression that the Master was in the habit of holding him up to the reprobation of his former school-mates, as a dangerous companion and a discredit to the school. Under these cir- cumstances the indignant boy may be pardoned for behaving for a while with the perversity and vehemence of youth. HAEEOW. 81 Anyhow, to wipe out every speck of the discredit put upon his character by the affair, it was only needful for Dr. Drury's tractable and loyal-hearted pupil to repent of his folly, and express the feeling to Dr. Drury's successor. Byron did both. On coming to his right mind, the young poet hastened to Dr. Butler and made him an ample apology. Before leaving England the poet was on good terms with his former enemy ; and he started for Greece with the purpose of withdrawing the offensive lines from the " Hours of Idle- ness " in the next edition of the poems. In the same spirit, on coming to review his life in his twenty-sixth year, he wrote in the "Journal of Reminiscences," "I was a most unpopu- lar boy, but led latterly, and have retained many of my school friendships, and all my dislikes — except to Dr. Butler, whom I treated rebelliously, and have been sorry ever since." These are the facts of Byron's misbehavior — - a passage of boyish effervescence, followed by ample atone- ment and generous repentance — to which some of his ca- lumniators have pointed in evidence that he was from his youth an ill-conditioned fellow. Note 40 to the 4th Canto of "Childe Harold " tells how lit- tle Byron profited by the classical instruction of the school, that is so largely indebted to him for its celebrity. Had he come to the school at an early age and after better preparation the note would probably never have been written, and the poet would probably have taken a more favorable view of the educational method of England's public schools. He might not have entertained the ambition of editing Greek and Latin classics, but it is more than possible he would have been de- lighted to : — . . . quote in classic raptures, and awake The hills with Latian echoes. Coming to the school in a state of ignorance, that put him at a disadvantage with class-mates, greatly his inferiors in natural quickness, he never had the heart for the steady labor that could alone enable him to compete with them for the honors of the term. Perhaps no boy ever brought less Latin 82 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. and Greek to Harrow, or after rising to the highest form car- ried less of those learned tongues away with him to his uni- versity. The very volumes of Greek plays, which he gave to the library on his departure for Cambridge, afford evidence in his own handwriting of the insignificance of his " classical attainments" at the time when, in the technical and strictly scholastic sense of the words, they were at their highest. To mathematics he had a strong repugnance ; — his natural inap- titude for even the most familiar processes of arithmetic being so unusual that, in the later period of his life when it was his humor to watch his domestic expenditure with a jealous eye, he experienced no little difficulty and distress of brain in "auditing" liis "weekly bills." Had he distinguished him- self in the Latin and Greek classes, it would have been less remarkable that he went to Cambridge without having ac- quired facility and exactitude in the spelling of his mother- tongue ; for in the earlier years of the present century, it was almost a point of honor with a public-school boy, who knew Homer well, to spell his own language indifferently. The bad spelling of the Harrovian, who prided himself on his con- siderable knowledge of English literature, deserves notice ; for wlulst it may be regarded as indicative of the literal carelessness with which he perused the pages of his favorite authors, the deficiency may also be regarded as evidence that he was not altogether free from the particular kind of intel- lectual indolence, that is often united with mental spright- liness and seldom fails to characterize in some degree the poetic dreamer. But if he was weak in his Latin and still weaker in his Greek, Byron distinguished himself at Declamations, — a scholastic exercise in which the elder boys of the school de- livered as orations, in Dr. Drury's presence, the essays which they had previously written on given subjects. In these ex- ercises, so excellently designed to qualify the youthful orators for one department of public life, Byron was successful in attitude, gesture, and vocal address ; and on one occasion he distinguished himself in a way that greatly impressed his most critical hearer. After delivering the earher part of his composition with his usual address, he suddenly broke away HAEEOW, 83 from the restraint of the written words, and no less to the Doc- tor's surprise than sympathetic apprehension for the boy's failure passed to extempore utterances that, without any kind of im- pediment, flowed through well-balanced periods to a felicitous conclusion . "I questioned him , " Dr . Drury told Moore , " why he had altered his declamation ? He declared he had made no alteration, and did not know, in speaking, that he had devi- ated from it one letter. I believed him ; and from a knowl- edge of his temperament am convinced, that, fully impressed with the sense and substance of the subject, he was hurried on to expressions and colorings more striking than what his pen had expressed." Byron had probably displayed this power of strenuous speech, when Dr. Drury said of him to Lord Carlisle, "He has talents, my Lord, which wiU add lustre to his rank ; " praise that, to the Doctor's disppointment, only drew from the Earl a look of surprise and a significant "Indeed!" 84 THE EEAi LOED BYEON. CHAPTER Vm. HAEEOW HOLIDAYS. HowEVEE good his school may be, and however efficient his tutors, they are seldom the most important, never the only, forces of a boy's education. To observe the influences that are usually more powerful over his nature than his official and recognized teachers, one must follow the lad of quick feelings and lively intelligence from the class-room and the play-ground to his home, and be the sharer of his holidays. In Byron's case it is the more necessary to do this, because the pleasures of his Harrow holidays were more influential in the development of his affections and genius, than they would have been, had the shy, sensitive, meditative boy been strong- ly interested in the severer pursuits of his school. In those holidays he learned to love his sister, and conceived his passion for Mary Chaworth. In those holidays he ex- plored (in the saddle — not on foot, as his biographers suggest) some of the loveliest parts of Nottinghamshire, and during hours of solitary gladness studied the tranquil beauties and stately aspects of Newstead. In those times of vacation he had also larger opportunities for reading novels, — those toys of the frivolous, those comforters of the aged, and those powerful teachers of the young. Immediately after her son's departure for his first term at Harrow, Mrs. Byron went to Brighton for several months. She was still breathing by turns the sea-air and the breezes from the downs, when, on the old Countess of Holderness' death, she came to the opinion it would be well for her boy and his sister to come together. So long as he remained at Aberdeen, no painful question arose respecting the sepa- ration of the children But it was otherwise when on coming HAKEOW HOLIDAYS. 85 to Sloane Terrace, Mrs. Byron discovered that, though the Countess had no disposition to refuse Mrs. Byron's boy oc- casional access to his sister, she had no wish for Mrs. Byron's acquaintance. It is not surprising that the aged lady, with little cause to think tenderly of Mad Jack Byron, had no in- tention to be troubled with visits from his second wife, whose least agreeable qualities were not unknown to the dame of high degree. And had Mrs. Byron been a sensible woman, and more thoughtful for her child's welfare than her own dig- nity, she would have waived a few points of social etiquette, in consideration of the Dowager's age and infirmities, and have allowed the boy the pleasure and benefit of associating with his sister on terms, to which the Countess could consent. But Mrs. Byron, after speaking proud words of the Gordons and scornful words of the Dutch woman's presumption, de- termined to keep the children asunder. This state of things, however, came to an end in 1802 ; and henceforth Byron had, in his holidays, suflicient though by no means frequent op- portunities of associating with his sister, who during their separation had never ceased to think of him as " the baby " that he was when she last kissed him in Holies street, and who for that reason, as well as from a humorous perception of the poet's least manly though by no means least agreeable qualities, used to call him "Baby Byron" after he had be- come famous. When the fourteen-years old boy began to know and love his sister (the only person of her sex, whom he ever regarded for any considerable period, with deep, steady and unchanging affection) , she was eighteen years of age, and it is probable that he was at their first interview disappointed by her appearance, which cannot in a single particular have accorded with his boyish conceptions of fem- inine loveliness. For, even at the age when girlish charms are most apparent, the Honorable Augusta Byron would have been rated as a decidedly plain girl, or overlooked al- together on account of her insignificance. Notably wanting in beauty of feature, her appearance — from the day of her presentation at Queen Charlotte's court, to which she was in later time officially attached — was chiefly remarkable for the want of " style " and of taste in dress, that made her (to use 86 THE EEAL LORD BYKON. Mrs. Shelley's well-chosen expression) " the Dowdy-Goody * of all her acquaintance. It speaks not a little for Byron's affectionateness that, from the first hour of his intercourse with her, he was the fond brother of so unattractive a sister. In one respect only was Augusta Byron fortunate in her personal endowments. Her not unintelligent countenance had an expression altogether accordant with the sweetness of disposition, the womanly goodness and the unaffected piety, that, unaided by any kind of cleverness, made her from first to last the chief influence for good in her brother's life. From Brighton Mrs. Byron moved to Bath, where she was joined by her son during the summer holidays of 1802 ; when in the costume of a Turkish boy, with a diamond cres- cent in his turban, he attended her to Lady Riddle's mas- querade. Returning soon after the Bath season to Notting- ham, where she resumed her former lodgings, Mrs. Byron resided there tUl she moved to Southwell in the later half of 1804, and established herself at Burgage Manor, a pleasant roomy house on "the Green," and drew about her the neigh- bors, amongst whom the poet made several congenial acquaint- ances. A better place of abode could not have been found for a gentlewoman in Mrs. Byron's rather peculiar circum- stances than this pleasant little town, with its collegiate church and picturesque vicinity, its public coffee-room with papers and gossip for the gentlemen, its assembly room for concerts and dances, and its coterie of clergy and other local gentry — such as the Pigots, the Leacrofts and the Housons — who, in their simple contentment at finding the youthful peer within their borders, were lenient to Mrs. Byron's want of refinement, and concealed their disapproval of her vagaries. Near enough to Newstead, for its story and beauties to be known to every inhabitant of the town, the Byrons enjoyed at Southwell all the homage due to their patrician quality and territorial greatness. Before his Cambridge career, Byron had of course seen enough of the town's provincial pettiness, and spoken sharp words of its dulness and delight in scandal ; but after his return from Greece, when needy Mr. Dallas was look- ing for a place of cheap and agreeable seclusion, the poet wrote to him from Newstead Abbey (Oct. 11th, 1811). "Now I HARROW HOLIDAYS. 87 know a large village, or small town, about twelve miles off, where your family would have the advantage of very genteel society, without the hazard of being annoyed by mercantile affluence ; where you would meet with men of information and independence ; and where I have friends to whom I should be proud to introduce you. . . . My mother had a house there for some years, and I am well acquainted with the economy of Southwell, the name of this little common- wealth." Mrs. Byron, however, was stQlin the lodgings at Notting- ham, when, in the summer of 1803, her son came to her from the school, which he had not yet ceased to " hate." How the boy must have enjoyed his solitary ride about Not- tinghamshire on his clever horse, — in the fleckered shade of green lanes, and in the sun that never was too hot for him ; far away from those ungenerous enemies to his peace of mind, who thought meanly of him for his lameness and imperfect ac- quaintance with the Greek irregular verbs I It was a mem- orable vacation (this year) for the boy who, in its course, put himself on pleasant terms with Lord Grey de Ruthen, the tenant under chancery and occupier of Newstead, tUl the heir was on the point of "coming into his own." That the school-boy might have some present enjoyment of the prop- erty, that would be in his hands six years hence. Lord Grey de Euthen gave him a standing invitation to the Abbey, and even assigned him a room in the mansion, for his use at pleasure. At the same time the doors of Annesley Hall, the home of his cousins — the Chaworths, were thrown open to the young peer, who had already seen the heiress of the fair domain in London. Little thinking what trouble would come of it. Miss Mary Chaworth — with her sweet voice, piquant air, strangely beautiful face, and all the gayety of girlhood in its eighteenth year — covering the boy with kindness and fiUing him with gladness, inspired him with his third grand passion. She was all the more benignant to him, on the first occasion of his crossing her threshold, in order that he should be the less likely to remember that hideous duel which had now for nearly half a century kept Chaworths and Byrons asunder. 88 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. A bed at Annesley was put at the service of the visitor, who was already provided with a sleeping apartment at Newstead. So the young peer passed the hours pleasantly between the two houses, spending however less time under the shadow of the ancestral ruins, than in the drawing-room where the young heiress sung again and again, for his particular delight, the song (with a pleasant air) of "Mary Anne," — a name of witchery and music, surely, to any poet loving a particular Mary Anne. The heiress made up a party for a trip to Matlock and Castleton, and invited the school-boy to join it. Of course he joined it ; and the young people — four girls, two gentlemen, the young lord from Harrow, with a chaperon of suitable years and complaisance — went off to the Derbyshire springs, and did as people used to do at Matlock and Castleton, and at the delightful spots around about them. At Matlock there was much dancing that afforded the lame lad poignant misery ; for in his inability to dance, he could only stand or sit in the corner of the ball-room, whilst his goddess danced with the partners who were eager to lead her out. Still he would rather endure anguish in the corner of the hot room, than vainly seek happiness where she was not. For he was possessed with a passion, — the third and great- est of all his grand passions. On her return from Derbyshire, Miss Chaworth was attended by the school-boy, who, having slept at Annesley before the trip, resumed the room, which had been assigned to him. Instead of availing himself, at first, of the permis- 'sion to pass the nights under his cousin's roof, he preferred to sleep at Newstead, because of a fancy that the portraits of the departed Chaworths would in the hours of silence and darkness descend from their frames, and as restless ghosts disturb the slumber of the Byron, who had ventured to enter the house long closed to the bearers of his name. But after encountering " a bogle " on his darksome wry from Annesley to Newstead, he thought he might as well speak with ghosts at home as with ghosts at large. Though trivial, this story deserves notice, as it points to a nervous weakness that attended Lord Byron throughout life. In his weaker and more indolent moods, Byron was superstitious. A believer HARROW HOLIDAYS. 89 in presentiments and unlucky days, in apparitions and ghostly warnings, he would sometimes discover prophetic significence in strange coincidences, and refer to supernatural agency what he should have referred to indigestion. It is not surprising that Miss Chaworth was slow to detect her young visitor's "passion," and that for a moment she found it difficult to refrain from laughter, when the shy boy, of "rough and odd" manners (if Moore may be trusted) , blurted out his staggering proposal for the union of their hearts and their "lands rich and broad." In their pity for the boy, who suffered so long and acutely from his entertain- ment of a preposterous hope, people have felt less than proper concern for the feelings and embarrassment of the young heiress, on finding herself with so strange a suitor on her hands. Divided between the fear of giving pain by treating the affair too lightly, and the fear of causing the boy deeper and more enduring distress by treating the affair too seriously, she may well have been perplexed, and in her perplexity must more than once have wished the lad at — Harrow. The care she had for his feelings is the more com- mendable, as there was nothing in his appearance to win from her even the kind of favor — with which bright and well-look- ing school-boys are usually regarded by grown women. If his countenance, " notwithstanding the tendency to corpulence derived from his mother," already "gave promise of that peculiar expression into which his features refined and kindled afterwards," the faint indications were accompanied with an air that betrayed he was more than duly conscious of them. Moore learned from several quarters that, at this point of his boyhood, the young Lord of Newstead was " by no means popular among girls of his own age ;" and it was less due to his want of personal comeKness than to his self-conscious- ness and vanity that the young ladies found him " insuffer- able " and a " perfect horror. " In truth, the lad who appeared a laughable gaby to Miss Pigot in the summer of 1804, must have seemed an egregious gaby to Miss Chaworth in the summer of 1803. The very devices, by which he sought to plant himself in the heiress' affections, were more likely to offend than to conciliate a young woman with a proper sense 90 THE REAL LORD BYEON. of her own dignity, and a fairly quick sense of the ridiculous. In his egregious vanity, he tried to play the part of a lady- killer, and to pique his coldly benignant mistress into loving him by a boastful exhibition of a locket, given him by a fair adorer, whom the heiress of Annesley was thus invited to regard as her rival. If this locket was given him, as Moore suggests, by his cousia Margaret Parker,. the use to which he now put it shows how completely his latest passion had for the moment driven from his breast all generous tenderness and chivalric regret for the girl, whose elegy he had written some eight or nine months since, — and whose image some eight years later became the chief, if not the only, inspiring force of the " Poems to Thyrza." But however droU and amusing they may be to cynical spectators of his proceedings, the absurdities of a boy's fierce love, whether it be for the high-born heiress of a great estate or for an obscure actress of a provincial theatre, are little calculated to assuage the first anguish or lessen the subset quent annoyances of the failure of his suit. It did not com- fort Arthur Pendennis for losing the fair Fotheringay, to think how his uncle was chuckling in his sleeve, and to know that even Emily's papa thought him a simpleton. Though he may be presumed to have ordered his pony and ridden off to Newstead, instead of " darting out of the house " and making at full speed for the Abbey on his feet, in the fashion described by half-a-dozen different historians, no one with sympathy for the griefs of beardless boys — certainly no man who can recall how he himself sickened long syne and all but died of " calf-love '' — will suspect the biographers of exaggeration in recording that the fifteen-years' old peer carried away from Annesley a heart full of scalding anguish, after hearing either from the yotmg lady's lips, or from the tongue of a spiteful tale- bearer, those torturing words — " Do you think I could care anything for that lame boy?" The disappointment was followed quickly by clear and agonizing recognition of all the foUy of his futile suit, as well as of the madness of his bafHed hopes. Quick to wound its possessor long before it taught him how to wound others, the boy's sense of the ludicrous, acting like acid on the etcher's plate, helped to bite HAEEOW HOLIDAYS. 91 Mary Chaworth's picture deeper into his memory. The recollection of his ignoble hunger for her " lands broad and rich " and the gold that could restore the ruinous mansion in his park, intensified the torture of reflecting on his brief, insane, ennobling desire for her beauty and love. Turning his pale cheels scarlet, and in an instant covering his brow with cold beads of wetness, as it came to his mind, that mean desecration of Margaret Parker's love-token, gave sharper point and surer poison to the stinging words — "Do you think I could care anything for that lame boy ? " Possibly this cruel misadventure waa largely, if not altogether, ac- countable for the fervor with which the boy, on his return to Harrow, in his strong yearning for sympathy and in his despair of being loved by womankind, threw himself into those " friendships " that were so curious a feature of his later time at school. In the ensuing summer — the holidays of 1804, which he passed chiefly at Southwell — the boy visited Annesley, and wrote in one of Miss Chaworth's books the set of verses, for which he was indebted to another poet, — " Oh Memory, torture me no more, The present's all o'ercast ; Jly hopes of future bliss are o'er, In mercy veil the past. Why bring those images to riew I henceforth must resign? Ah ! why those happy hours renew, That never can be mine? Past pleasure doubles present pain, To sorrow adds regret, Begret and hope are both in vain, I ask but to — forget." Soon after he transferred these verses from a printed book to the leaf, that would be almost certain to come again under her gaze, Byron (now in the middle of his seventeenth year) bade Miss Chaworth farewell on the hill (near Annesley) , to which " The Dream " had given the twofold interest of poetry and history, — "the hill . . . crown'd with a peculiar diadem Of trees, in circular array, so flx'd. Not by the sport of nature, but of man." 92 THE REAL LORD BYRON. It can readily be believed that, thougli his countenance was calm, the feelings which he held well under control at this interview were feelings of unutterable misery and hopeless- ness. "The next time I see you, I suppose you will be Mrs. Chaworth ? " he said at the moment of parting. "I hope so," was the lady's only answer. In the August of the following year (1805), when Byron — no longer a Harrow boy, but a man who had already chosen his university and college — was staying at his mother's house on Southwell Green, Mary Anne Chaworth was married to Mr. John Musters, a handsome man and nota- ble sportsman, who after taking the bride's name on the occasion of the marriage and bearing it for a few years, re- sumed his former surname. Perhaps a more foolish story never passed from a mendacious prattler to a serious biogra- phy than the anecdote told by Moore of the manner in which Byron was informed that this marriage had taken place, and of the self-possession he displayed on the unexpected an- nouncement. It runs thus, on the authority of some person who was of course present at the scene that can hardly have taken place : — " His mother said, 'Byron, Ihave some news for you.' — 'Well, what is it? ' 'Take out your handkerchief, I say.' He did so to humor her. ' Miss Chaworth is married ! ' An expression very peculiar, impossible to describe, passed over his pale face, and he hurried his handkerchief into his pocket, saying, with an aiFected air of coldness and nonchalance, ' Is that all ? ' — ' Why, I expected you would have been plunged in grief.' He made no reply, and soon began to talk about something else." Is it credible that even Mrs. Byron (with clear recollection of the painful agitation she had in former time caused her son by an abrupt announcement of Mary Duff's marriage) behaved in so cruel a fashion to her boy, whilst he was still suffering from the disappointment of his passion for Mary Chaworth ? A woman must be far worse- tempered and worse-bred even than Mrs. Byron to behave so brutally to a love-stricken son. The woman, who, in a fit of passion with the child, could swear at him, and caU him " lame brat ! " could not amuse herself thus malignantly with HAEEOW HOLIDAYS. 93 the bitter anguish of the man. Even when full account is taken of the propensity, which made Mrs. Cardurcis so eager for just "one glass of" Lady Annabel Herbert's "mountain," there is no evidence to justify even a suspicion that Catherine Byron could without provocation act so atrociously. Again is it conceivable that the news of Mary Chaworth's marriage came in this fashion as a surprise to the young lord, who was living within twelve miles of her park-fence. The heiress had been engaged to Mr. Musters for two years : Mr. Musters had obtained Letters of License to take the name of Chaworth before the marriage ; all Nottinghamshire had been talking for weeks over the arrangements for the ap- proaching wedding ; the Byrons themselves would have been at their kinswoman's marriage, had not deUcacy forbidden Miss Chaworth to invite her discarded suitor to the celebra- tion. In the name of whatever little common-sense may be found in this mad world, outside lunatic asylums, is it con- ceivable that under all these circumstances Byron can have first heard of the wedding in the alleged manner ? The whole story is nothing more than a clumsy reproduction (with va- riations) of the story of the way in which Byron was sud- denly informed of Mary Duff's marriage, — which took place in the year before Miss Chaworth's marriage. Either the narrator who was present at the scene " mixed the two Marys," so as to substitute the wrong one for the right one ; or Moore was himself the maker of the mistake. It is quite conceivable that Moore muddled the story, which "the narrator" told correctly. Byron did not see his cousin Mary Chaworth after her marriage, tiQ he dined with her at Annesley, at her hus- band's invitation in 1808 ; when he was deeply stirred by the appearance of her little girl, — the infant and the inci- dent alluded to in the lines, dated from Newstead on 11th October, 1811, — " I've seen my bride another's bride, — Have seen her seated by his side, — Have seen the infant which she bore, Wear the sweet smile the mother wore, When she and I in youth have smiled, As fond and faultless as her child : — 94 THE REAL LOKD BYEON. Have seen her eyes, in cold disdain, Ask if I felt no secret pain ; And / hare acted well my part, And made my cheek belie my heart, Return'd the freezing glance she gave, Yet felt the while that woman's slave ; — Have kissed, as if without design. The babe wliich ought to have been mine, And show'd, alas ! in each caress Time had not made me love the less." And now comes the question who was Thyrza, — to whose epirit in heaven Byron penned the five poems (to be found ia the " Occasional Pieces ") , during the deepest gloom of the sorrow, that covered him in the closing months of 1811, and the earlier months of 1812? Moore says that Thyrza was a creation of the poet's imagination, and that the poems addressed to this " imaginary object " of the poet's affection "were the essence, the abstract spirit, as it were, of many griefs." On the other hand, the Editor of Mr. Murray's "one-volume edition" of Byron's works is of opinion that Thyrza was the person, to whose death the poet referred in a letter, dated October 11th, 1811, (the exact date assigned to the first set of verses to Thyrza) , in the following words, "I have been again shocked with a death, and have lost one very dear to me in happier times ; but ' I have almost forgot the taste of grief and 'supped full of horrors,' till I have become callous ; nor have I a tear left for an event which, five years ago, would have bowed me to the earth." Surely the death (just heard of) , for which Byron had not a single tear left, cannot have been the death of the person to whom the first poem to Thyrza — a poem written in tears and not to be read with tearless eyes — was addressed. The identity of the dates is not important : — for the dates assigned to their performances by writers may not be taken too precisely. The same date (October 11th, 1811) is also given to the " Epistle to a Friend," containing the last quoted verses about Mary Chaworth. But it can scarcely be supposed that the " Epistle to a Friend," the first poem to Thyrza, and the long letter to Mr. Dallas were written on the same day. Moore speaks so confidently on the question, which had for years stirred the curiosity of Byron's admirers, that he HAEEOW HOLIDAYS. 95 may be presumed to have good reasons, possibly even Byron's own assurance, for the statement that Thyrza was an imagi- nary being. But even if Byron was hiriiself the authority for the biographer's statement, it does not follow that Thyrza was mere creation. If she was the offspring of the poet's tender recollections of two separate objects of his affection in former times, — say of two girls, each of whom had died after inspiring him with love, — he would be justified in speaking of the heroine of the poems as a thing of imagina- tion, and certainly would not be justified in speaking of her as the poetical portraiture of a single individual. In that case Thyrza, though a creation, would not be a mere con- ception ; and the question would remain, — of whom was the poet thinldng alternately or together when he wrote the suc- cessive sets of verses ? In one of Byron's journals reference is made to " a violent, though pure love and passion" that possessed him in the simimer of 1806, the summer of his first year at Cambridge, and coexisted vnth his vehement friendship for Edward Noel Long, who three years later was drowned on his voyage for Lisbon with his regiment. After speaking of the pleasant hours he spent with Long at Cambridge, the poet says, ^' His friendship, and a violent, though pure, love and passion — which held me at the same period — were the then romance of the most romantic period of my life." Nothing more is known of tliis passion. Its cause and object may have survived the sentiment, and also the man whose pulses it quickened. It is not known whether Byron had on his departure for Greece survived the passion — in so far as a young man so strangely constituted could survive any vehe- ment affection. It is, however, conceivable that the love was fervid when he started for the East, that he thought of this (to history nameless) girl often during his travels, and that she died in England during his pilgrimage. But even if all this and other things could be shown in a way to make it obvious that she was an inspiring force of the poems to Thyrza, it would still remain certain that Margaret Parker was also an inspiring force of the same unutterably tender and pathetic poems. 96 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. Thyrza is dead ; so is Margaret Parker. Thyrza died when the poet was far away from her ; so did Margaret Parker. Thyrza had been the poet's companion in these deserted towers of Newstead ; Margaret Parker had also been his companion there. The mutual love of Thyrza and the poet was known only to themselves, their smiles being "smiles none else might understand : " so it was with Byron and Margaret. When "Margaret colored through the paleness of mortality to the eyes " at the casual mention of her lover's name, Augusta (his sister) " could not conceive," says the poet in his journal, "why my name should affect her at such a time." Thyrza and the poet exchanged love-tokens : Byron and Margaret Parker did the same. The poet wore Thyrza's love-token ; Byron wore Margaret Parker's locket next his heart. He is said to have shown the locket with vile vanity to Mary Chaworth ; but he valued it enough to wear it next his heart in Italy, towards the close of his career. The mutual affection of Thyrza and the poet was the sentiment of young people, so innocent of desire, that " even Passion blushed to plead for more." So was the mutual devotion of Margaret and her cousin. In her peculiar beauty, alike delicate and evanescent, " A star that trembled o'er the deep, Then turn'd from earth its tender beam," Thyrza resembled Margaret Parker, who is styled "one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings " by her lover, who adds in the autobiographic memoir, " I do not recollect scarcely anything equal to the transparent beauty of my cousin. . . . She looked as if she had been made out of rainbow — all beauty and peace." Besides dying at a distance from her lover, Thyrza dies before the poet has heard of her illness. In like manner Margaret died before Byron had even a hint of her danger. "I knew," he says, "nothing even of her Dlness tiU she was no more." HARROW HOLIDAYS. 97 On the other hand the poems contain lines that seem to point to some other person than Margaret. At the time of her death, she and her youthful lover (at Harrow) were not "by many a shore and many a sea divided." Margaret hav- ing been dead for some years, Byron, " when sailing o'er the -^gean," can scarcely have thought of her as being alive, and gazing at the moon. And, for the same reason, whilst he was lying ill of fever at Patras, he cannot be imagined to have found comfort in thinking that Margaret knew nothing of his pain. Though some license is permitted to interpreters of poetry, as well as to poets, these touches cannot be con- strued as pointing to the poet's cousin. They may have no historical significance, and have been introduced only for pathos or mystification. But if they point to a girl, whom he hoped whilst in Greece to see on his return to England, the girl so pointed at cannot have been his cousin Margaret. None the less certain however would it be that the poems point to Margaret Parker, and that she was at least an in- spiring force of the verses. All the points of similitude be- tween Margaret's story and Thyrza's story being taken into consideration, it cannot be questioned that, if the course of the Cambridge " passion " resembled in any great degree the course of the poet's passion for Thyrza, its object would be inseparably associated in his mind with the girl whom she resembled so closely in beauty and fate. The two loves would be so linked and blended in his memory that it would be impossible for him to think of the one without thinking also of the other. The poems inspired by either of the dead girls would be inspired by both. In that case the girl, whose name is unrecorded, would be no less accountable than the girl whose name we know, for the strains of love and desol'&/- tion. On the other hand, to show that Byron after Margaret's death never loved a girl, whose fate resembled hers, would be to prove that she alone was Thyrza. It yet remains to state the strongest piece of evidence that Margaret was the sole inspiring force of the famous series of poems. One of those curious personal revelations, which escaped the poet during the last months of his existence, was the revelation that the original of Thyrza was one of his cousins who died 98 THE REAL LOED BTKON. of consumption. On the voyage from Genoa to Cepialonia (1823), Byron said to Trelawny, "When I first left Eng- land I was gloomy. I said so in my First Canto of ' ChUde Harold.' I was then really ia love with a cousin." [Thyrza, he was very chary of her name] , Trelawny observes, " and she was in a decline." Byron's cousin Margaret Parker died of a decline, and was the only one of his cousins to die of that malady after inspiring him with love. True that she died long before he left England ; but to his poetic fancy she was still living and fading away when he thought of her on his travels. The mystification and historic inaccuracy of the poet's statement do not weaken the evidence afforded by the words, that Margaret and Thyrza were the same person in Ms mind. And now, after passing his eyes over a few dates, the reader must consider a remarkable fact which, though pointed to in a previous chapter, has been withheld from prominence, tUl his mind should have been ftilly prepared to accept so strange a matter. In 1797, when he was only niae years old, Byron fell in love with Mary Duff", — his love for her being no ordinary childish fondness for a congenial playmate, but a consumiag passion. In the summer of 1800, when he was twelve-and-a-half years old, he conceived a stronger passion for Margaret Par- ker, who nine years after her death became a chief (if not the only) inspiring force of the poems to Thyrza. In November, 1802, he wrote Margaret Parker's elegy, just about two years and four months after falling in love with her. In the summer of 1803, when he was in the middle of his sixteenth year, he fell in love with Mary Chaworth. In 1804 — (and here is the marvellous fact) — when he was stm in an early stage of the long-enduring anguish caused by the disappointment of his passion for Mary Chaworth — the news of Mary Duff's marriage, coming too suddenly upon him through his mother's defective sensibility and want of caution, moved him so strongly that he was within an ace of falling into convulsions " My mother," Byron says in the HAEEOW HOLIDAYS. 99 autobiograpliic memoir, so often referred to in previous pages, " used always to rally me about this childisli amour ; and, ct last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me one day, ' O Byron, I have had a letter fi'om Edinburgh, from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to a Mr. Co .' 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 her- self with teUing it to all her acquaintance." Out of this in- cident, and Mrs. Byron's habit of talking about it, arose the absurd cock-and-bull story of Byron's behavior at Southwell on hearing of Mary Chaworth's marriage. Hence it appears that Byron had not only survived his first great love sufficiently to entertain a still stronger love for another object, but had also survived the second passion sufficiently to conceive a stUl more vehement passion for a third object, and was even yet in the anguish consequent on the disappointment of this third passion, when the memory of the earliest of the three precocious attachments so nearly overpowered him. It will be said by many a reader that all this is very strange, — so unusual and unlike ordinary human nature, as to be almost incredible. Byron's nature, vdth its feminiQe sensi- bihty and masculine combativeness, was far outside the hues of ordinary human kind. " ChUde Harold," " Cain," and "Don Juan" could not have come from a mind constituted in the usual way of human nature ; and to understand and know the poet, people must be able to accept unusual things, that are not in accordance with their personal experience of human feelings and actions. The reader knows how to account for the strong emotion , that was inexplicable to Byron himself, by referring it to the strongly retentive memory, lively imagination, and quick sensibility of the mind that, after heightening the beauty of its recollections by the exercise of poetical fancy, made no distinction between the remembered facts and the loveliness imparted to them by its own action, but with all the results 100 THE EEAL liOBD BYEON. of quickened sensibility de|lt with the remembrances, that were partly fictitious, as though they were altogether real. Memory, fancy and feeling were the three forces that en- abled the poet to derive a far larger measure of gladness from the remembrances of his native hills than the joy that had come to him in childhood from the sight of the lulls them- selves, — and rendered the sorrows of former time even more afflicting to his sensibility, when he reflected upon them, and by reflection intensified them, than they were in actual ex- perience. They were the three prime forces of a machine which, though often — perhaps most often — set in action by circumstances independent of its possessor, could also be put in motion, and certainly sometimes was put in motion by his own will. Washington Irving was right in suspecting that the poet in dealing with his memory was the cunning farmer of a fertile soil, and deliberately brooded over the past for the sake of the stimulus which came from the process to his sensibility and creative energy. Whilst thus reviving the past, for the uses to be had of its joys and sorrows, Byron could rearrange and modify his recollections in order to turn them to better poetical account, and could even weave pieces of pure fiction into them. Examples of the way, in which he would thus manipulate his tenderest and saddest recollections, even to the falsifica- tion of his own personal history, may be found in the poems and the passages of poems, which readers are most ready to regard as so many passages of autobiography in verse. To those who, instead of regarding the poet's marriage as a .mere affair of convenience, believe that his regard for Miss Milbanke was one of genuine affection, it must appear more than probable that even the most touching of all the unutter- ably pathetic pictures of " The Dream," — the picture which Moore thought himself "justified in introducing historically" into his account of the wedding — owes quite as much to the writer's imagination as to his memory : — " I saw him stand Before an altar with a gentle bride ; Her face was fair, but was not that which made The starlight of his Boyhood ; — as he stood HAEROW HOLIDAYS. 101 Even at the altar, o'er his brow there came The self-same aspect, and the quivering shock That in the antique Oratory shook His bosom in its solitude ; and then — As in that hour — a moment o'er his face The tablet of unutterable thoughts Was traced, — and then it faded as it came, And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke The fitting vows, but heard not his own words. And all things reel'd around him ; he could see Not that which was, nor that which should have been — But the old mansion, and the accustom'd hall. And the remember'd chambers, and the place. The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade. All things pertaining to that place and hour. And her, who was his destiny, came back And thrust themselves between him and the light : — What business had they there at such a time ? " And how about the account of the wedding in the poet's memoranda, with which these doleful verses are said by Moore to correspond "in so many of its circumstances." From the biographer's abstract of the prose account, it appears that on waking on the nuptial morning the poet was held by the "most melancholy reflections, on seeing his wedding suit spread out before him ;" that befoire the cere- mony he " wandered about the grounds alone ;" and further it is told — " He knelt down, he repeated the words after the clergyman ; but a mist was before his eyes, — his thoughts were ielsewhere ; and he was but awakened by the congratula- tions of the bystanders, to find that he was — married." This is all. Hence, the account in the poet's note-book agrees with the picture of the poem, in some of the unimportant, but in none of the important particulars of the latter. The whole affair was over before the bridegroom could collect his wandering thoughts, and he had a vague feeling of surprise at finding himself married : — The same may be said of fifty out of every hundred bridegrooms. He knelt down and re- peated the words after the clergyman : — and he was quite right in doing so. What bridegroom does otherwise ? He walked about the garden till he was summoned to the celebra- tion of the marriage : — What better place for walking can be imagined ? or what better way of whUing away the time tiU the bride should be dressed? He was low-spirited at the 102 THE KEAL LORD BYKON. dawn of the eventful day : — it is not unusual for a bride- groom to be so, if he is a nervous man. Though he has decided on it deliberately, and may be confident he is about to take a wise step, a nervous man is apt to have misgivings when he is on the point of doing a momentous and irrev- ocable act. But in what important points does this account resemble the passage of the poem ? The prose account had no single word of reference to Annesley and its well-remem- bered chambers, to the old mansion or to " her, who was," the poet's "destiny." From the memoir, of which Moore talks so absurdly, it does not appear that Byron, either before or at or after the ceremony, had a single thought about Mary Chaworth on his wedding-day. And, as readers will see shortly, there are grounds for a strong opinion that she never approached his mind, to trouble it, at any moment of the honey-moon. Readers of " The Dream " should bear in mind that it was written at Geneva, just a year and half after the marriage, and about six months after Lady Byron left her lord for ever. It was written (in July 1816) when the poet was in a mood to persuade himself that after all he had never really cared much for the lady, who had dismissed him so unceremoniously ; — and when he was also in the humor to slap the lady's face with a poem, which should tell her and all the world that another woman had years before and all through his matrimonial time possessed his heart. The labor of writing " The Dream " was an effort of art ; the poem is a wark of an incomparable art ; the publication of it was an act of revenge. And after the wont of acts of vengeance, the deed of spite recoiled on the doer's head, — by making the world believe he had never loved his wife, and confirming the world in its opinion that he had treated her very badly. Byron is believed never to have seen Mary Chaworth after dining with her in 1808. Once (whilst he and Lady Byron were on loving terms) he thought of visiting her, but was saved from the false, and perilous step by the advice of his good sister — ever his guardian angel. But though he never again saw Mrs. Musters (Mr. Chaworth had by this time returned to his old surname) , Lady Byron — when she HARROW HOLIDAYS. 1Q3 and her husband were still a mutually loving couple — met the heiress of Annesley in society. How the two women eyed one another, what they thought of each other are matters for the imagination. Men's wives are apt to think lightly and suspiciously of their husbands' " old flames." On seeing his bride for the first time, a woman seldom fails to discover her former suitor has made a poor choice. 104 THE BEAL LORD BYEON. CHAPTEE IX. LOED BTEON OP TEINITT. Going up to Cambridge reluctantly in October, 1805, Byron left the University in the beginning of 1808, after taking the honorary degree to which, as a nobleman, he was entitled. To account for the heaviness of heart with which he ap- proached the seat of learning and passed his first terms in it, he says that it pained him to quit Harrow, that he had wished to go to Oxford, that his sense of loneliness in the world op- pressed him, and that it made him miserable to thiol? he was no longer a boy. The gayety of his companions only deep- ened the melancholy of the freshman, who wanted the homage of his Harrow " favorites," and was still pining for the bride who was another's bride. Holding aloof from most of the undergraduates, who offered themselves to his acquaintance, as soon as he had taken possession of a set of rooms appro- priate to his dignity, the young peer, during his first year at Trinity, spent much of his time in solitude, and most of his other time in the society of his former school-fellow. Long, or in communion with the sweet-voiced chorister, for whom he conceived a regard that may not be referred altogether to that vulgarest kiad of amiable insolence, — the delight of patron- izing one's social inferiors. Probably it flattered the young lord's self-esteem to take so humble a person under his pro- tection ; and doubtless the fortunate youth, of whom Byron wrote to Miss Pigot, " I certainly love him more than any other human being," was at much pains to retain his patron's favor. But arrogance on the one side and obsequiousness on the other would not of themselves have sustained the curious friendship that endured, without any apparent dimi- ution of fervor and steadiness, tOl Eddleston's death in 1811. LOED BYEON OF TEINITY. 105 Being to an hour two years younger than the poet, this well- mannered and affectionate boy was still in his sixteenth year, when he iirst won Byron's regard. Had Byron brought from Harrow enough Latin and Greek to place him creditably with the studious men of his year, he would possibly have come to Trinity with a lighter heart, and left Cambridge on better terms with its professors. In every race so much depends on "the start," it is not surprising that the young peer — who with better preliminary training and a fairer prospect of success might have entertained a desire for academic honors, and justified the ambition by winning them — determined to avoid the course, in which, at the outset of the running, he would have competed under vexatious and humiliating disadvantages with young men, inferior to him alike in rank and natural ability. To his tutor it was soon apparent that the young nobleman, who lived chiefly with an old Harrow school-fellow and one of the youngest of the col- lege choristers, meant to attend as few lectures as possible, and to hold aloof from the more serious pursuits of the Uni- versity. After the long vacation of 1806, when he had grad- ually become less shy and more sociable, the peer displayed a purpose of running the iisual career of a Trinity nobleman. As they seem to have heard nothing of his two previous volumes of verse, printed by a Nottiaghamshire bookseller for private circulation, it was not surprising that, till he published, for sale to all who cared to buy it, a third book of poetry, containing some equally feeble and saucy satire on his Uni- versity, Lord Byron of Trinity was mistaken by the Master (Dr. William Lort Mansell) and the tutors of his College for a young man of ordinary endowments, who differed in noth- ing more important than his lameness from the other lads of birth and affluence, who thought it good fun to make night hideous by roaring in chorus under the Master's bedroom win- dow, "We beseech thee to hear us, good Lort ! Good Lort, deliver us ! " Like other young nobles and fellow-common- ers, with whom he cooperated in equally riotous and com- mon-place exhibitions of puerile hilarity. Lord Byron occupied luxuriously furnished rooms, gave "breakfasts" and "wine- parties," and "suppers," and was waited on by a valet instead 106 THE REAL LOED BYEON. of a college "gyp." The proprietor of two big dogs, — the superb Newfoundland (Boatswain) and the ferocious buU-dog (Nelson), — Lord Byron of Triuity kept a couple of horses ( one of them a large-boned gray animal) on which he rode fairly well, and a coronetted carriage in which he posted to and fro between Cambridge and London, London and South' well. On returning to the University after the Long Vacation of 1807, he brought up "the bear," destiaed (as he averred with appropriate seriousness) to compete for a Trinity fellow- ship, — the same bear that two years later guarded one pillar of the chief entrance to the mansion at Newstead, whilst a wolf kept watch at the other post of the stately portal. Of course, at a time when all modish gentlemen were duellists, and the use of deadly weapons was a part of every young nobleman's education, pistol-cases and fencing-foils were always conspicuous in Lord Byron's rooms ; and it being understood at the beginning of the present century that a gentleman should know how to use his fists, as well as "the hair-trigger" and "small sword," it was needless for his lord- ship's visitors to ask whether he could provide them with "the gloves," when it was their humor to have a sefr-to at boxing on his Turkey carpets. In these and a score other matters Lord Byron of Trinity did lUce the other young gentlemen who had the entree of his college-rooms. He may, perhaps, have been a little more ostentatious of his fire-arms, and rapiers, and boxing-gloves, — for even in his early boyhood he made a favorite toy of the pistol, which he liked to think would put him with his lameness on equal terms with adver- saries of the steadiest footing ; and in his constant desire to divert attention from the infirmity, which telling heavily against him in sword-exercise placed him even more at the mercy of competent "bruisers," the lame poet was sometimes comically boastful of his prowess with the blunt sword and "the gloves." The unquestionable excellence of his swim- ming was a matter in which he diifered from most of his associates at the University. And whUst he was distinguish- able from the other mounted "gownsmen" by the color of his large-boned gray steed, he was still further distinguishable by the eccentricity of his riding costume, — the "white coat" LORD BYBON OF TRINITY. 107 and " white hat," that made Hobhouse regard the poet with hot dislike, and even brought the two young men to arrange- ments for a duel, before they joined hands in a friendship that survived even the poet's death. But these trivial shades of difference could not be expected to affect the judgment of the college tutors who, having good reason to regard Byron as a common-place Trinity lordling and still better reason (after the publication of "The Hours of Idleness") for deem- ing him a lordling with no very strong genius for satire, had the best reason for astonishment on finding he "had it in him" to produce such keen, strenuous, scorching and irresist- ibly comical verse as the best things of the "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." But whilst playing, ia this common-place way, the part of a conventional "Trinity tuft," and associating with Fellow- Commoners whose chief distinction throughout life was the honor of having been Fellow-Commoners of so famous a col- lege, Byron had a small circle of peculiar friends, who would never have cared to know him intimately had his rank been his strongest note of introduction to their favor, and whom he would never have conciliated so studiously and drawn so closely to his heart had he valued men chiefly for their heredi- tary distinctions. Instead of being the "snob" of noble de- gree that biographers have represented him, valuing himself less on his deeds than his descent, and overflowing with secret disdain for people of ordinary origin, Byron throughout life chose his familiars from considerations altogether pure of the petty patrician insolence, that has been attributed to him on no better grounds, than the boyish verses to the gloriflcation of his Norman progenitors and his occasional exhibitions in later time of an altogether reasonable and wholesome respect for for his ancestral dignity. After Long's withdrawal from the university, the poet's most intimate friends at Cambridge were — Charles Skinner Matthews, a man of infinite humor and an intellect of the highest order, who was regarded by all his contemporaries as a person designed by nature for a career of high achievement ; Scrope Berdmore Davies, a man no less remarkable for elegance of taste than for a generous high- mindedness ; Francis Hodgson, the exemplary Latinist and 108 THE EEAL LORD BYKON. future Provost of Eton ; William Bankes, whose letters and enduring attachment to his former school-fellow are matters of history ; and John Cam Hobhouse (Lord Broughton) , who after holding firmly to his "fellow-traveller in Greece," through good report and evil report, with undiminished affec- tion and admiration for him from this time of their riper boy- hood to the hour that made Missolonghi a name of mourning throughout the whole world, stood forth the vindicator of his memory, when twice ten years had passed over thepoet's grave. After declaring that truth was more precious to him than even his friend's honor. Lord Broughton delivered himself of these words, "Lord Byron had failings — many failings certainly, but he was untainted with any of the baser vices ; and his virtues, his good qualities were all of a high order." The reader should take to heart the words, thus transferred to this page for a definite purpose. From his early manhood to his premature death, Byron was known more fully and precisely to Lord Broughton than to any other person. His familiar at Cambridge, his guest at Newstead, his comrade in Greece, his constant associate in London, his "best man" at his wedding, his confidant at every point and turn of his domestic troubles, John Cam Hobhouse was at the poet's side from the commencement of their friendship at Cambridge to the moment of Byron's withdrawal from England. A few months later Hobhouse joined Byron at Geneva, and after accompanying him on the Swiss trip went with him to Italy. In the years of Byron's exile Hobhouse was with him repeat- edly. Every incident that contributed to the poet's estrange- ment from his wife was known to Hobhouse. With every opportunity for Itnowing him thoroughly, in every minutest particular of his character and career, it is not conceivable that Hobhouse was uninformed or deceived respecting his friend's nature or respecting any important matter of his friend's conduct up to the time of his withdrawal from his native land ; for whilst the poet's friend was a shrewd, dis- creet, judicious man of the world, — an excellent man of business, as Byron always called him ; a man, moreover, of the strictest honor and truthfulness, as all his acquaintance knew, — Byron was frankness itself, incapable of keeping LOED BYEON OF TEINITY. 109 either his own secrets or even the confidences of a friend, and ever blabbing to gossip-mongers of whom he knew scarcely anything the matters which his own interest required him to keep strictly to himself. Is it likely that the observ- ant man of the world would not know everything of the affairs and temper of the friend, one of whose most charming characteristics was his absolute incapability of reserve. "Part .of this fascination," Lord Broughton remarked, when Byron had been dead twenty years, "may, doubtless, be as- cribed to the entire self-abandonment, the incautious, it may be said the dangerous, sincerity of his private conversation ; but his weaknesses were amiable ; and, as has been said of a portion of his virtues, were of a feminine character — so that the affection felt for him was as that for a favorite and some- times froward sister." Hobhouse was by no means blind to the serious nature of some of his friends failings. He often had occasion to observe and took occasion to deplore the selfishness, which he regarded as the dark blot and doleful blemish of the poet's character. There are occasions, when Lord Broughton referred sorrowfully to this serious and in- corrigible defect of an otherwise noble nature after the poet's death ; one of the persons to whom he sometimes ventured to express the regret being the poet's sister Augusta, whose love of her father's son never blinded her to his failings. Of this defect more will be said hereafter. Eighteen long years hence, — eighteen long years, during which so many of those who are now living will have gone from this life, — the world will have under its eye the book which win afford the proofs, that Byron's college friend was more thanjustified in saying what he said well-nigh forty years since, in the poet's defence against the charges preferred against him in the House of Lords by the Bishop of London . If eight- een long years were no more than eighteen short months, this book would not have been written. But why should hun- dreds of thousands of people during the next eighteen years be required to live and die under false, hideous, and de- praving notions of what is possible in Christian human nature in this nineteenth century, — and all because the evidence, left by Lord Broughton for a happier century, is 110 THE KEAL LOED BYEON. withheld from them? The time must, however, be waited out ; people in the meanwhile comforting themselves as they best can with Lord Broughton's assurance that though " Lord Byron had failings — many failings certainly, he was un- tainted with the baser vices ; and his virtues, his good qualities, were all of the higher order." Let it not, however, be inferred from what appears on a former page that, in associating hiinself so closely with the five other members of his particular "Trinity set," the young peer can be credited with any sort of condescension, or that it could possibly have entered into the head of any- one of those five gentlemen to think of himself, even for a moment, as being honored by the peer's regard, because he was a peer. By birth and circumstances as well as by scholarly attainments and refinement the five men were gen- tlemen, who would have smiled at the notion that their friend's rank could affect either their opinion of him, or their disposition to be intimate with him. Had it been otherwise, the fact of Byron's "set" of six containing no other nobleman would be less satisfactory evidence that he selected his college friends from motives and for considera- tions altogether disconnected from aristocratic sympathies. For had they been persons of Eddleston's social condition, it might be suspected that, whilst the young nobleman's con- duct in the matter was determined by the delight of con- descending to his inferiors, the others repaid his condescen- sion with complaisance. The social condition no less than the intellectual quality of the five men precludes either sugges- tion. It was not in the nature of things for Byron to imagine he was descending from his nobility in attaching himself to them. On the other hand it was not in the nature of things for his rank to be any considerable attrac-: tion to them. They joined hands with him because they liked him ; and he chose them for his familiars because as men of taste and literary discernment they were congenial to him. Towards the end of June, 1807, when Cambridge was bright with girls from country parsonages, and Cantabs were on the point of " going down for the Long," Byron, having liOED BYEON OF TRINITY. Ill kept the terms for his honorary degree, bethought himself whether he should " come up " again for further residence in a place of which he was growing weary. Several of his friends were " going down " with no intention of " coming up" again . Eddleston — the well-looking and well-mannered young chorister, whom Byron had christened Cornelian, in reference to the cornelian heart which the lad had given to " his patron ! " — was no longer a member of the Trinity choir, having obtained through his patron's influence a clerkship in a house of business in London. Under these circumstances it is not wonderful that the poet thought of giving up his handsome rooms, and of withdrawing from the University tiU the be- ginning of the year, when he would run up for his degree, and after taking it would bid Alma Mater adieu forever. " I am almost superannuated here," he wrote to Miss (" Good-bye, Gaby") Pigot, of Southwell, dating from Cambridge, 30th June, 1807. " My old friends (with the exception of a very few) have aU departed, and I am preparing to follow them, but remain tiU Monday to be present at three Oratorios, two Concerts, a Fair, and a Ball I quit Cam- bridge with little regret, because our set are vanished, and my musical protege befo];e mentioned has left the choir, and is stationed in a mercantile house of considerable eminence in the metropohs. You may have heard me observe he is exactly to an hour two years younger than myself. I found him grown considerably, and, as you will suppose, very glad to see his former Patron. He is nearly my height, very thin, very fair complexion, dark eyes, and light locks. . . . The University at present is very gay from the f^tes of divers kinds The Masters and Fellows are very pohte, but look a little askance — don't much like lampoons — truth always disagreeable." The lampoons, which caused the Trinity dons to look askance at the young poet, were the pieces of by no means strenuous satire on the University, her system of education, her professors, and the Trinity choir, that had recently appeared in " The Hours of Idleness," — published by Eidge, the Newark bookseller, with a dedicatory inscription to the Eight Honorable Frederick Earl of Carlisle, by " His 112 THE EEAL LORD BTEON. Obliged Ward and Affectionate Eansman, The Author." Probably the boyish " lampoons " of this far from contempt- ible collection of youthful poems were not more to his guardian's taste than to the taste of the dons, who cannot have felt themselves treated with fairness or civility in the following lines, — " The sons of science these, who, thus repaid, Linger in ease in Granta's sluggish shade ; Where on Cam's sedgy banks supine they lie, Unknown, unhonor'd live, unwept for die : Dull as the pictures which adorn their halls. They think all learning fix'd within their walls : In manners rude, in foolish forms precise. All modern arts affecting to despise : Yet prizing Bentley's, Bruuck's, or Person's note. More than the verse on which their critic wrote ; Vain as their honors, heavy as their ale, Sad as their wit, and tedious as their tale : To friendship dead, though not untaught to feel "When Self and Church demand a bigot zeal. "With eager haste they court the lord of power, Whether 'tis Pitt or Petty rules the hour ; To him, with suppliant smiles, they bend the head, While distant mitres to their eyes are spread. But should a storm o'erwhelm him with disgrace, They'd fly to seek the next who flU'd his place. Such are the men who learning's treasures guard ! Such is their practice, such is their reward I This much, at least, we may presume to say — The premium can't exceed the price they pay." But if Lord Carlisle regarded such satire with disapproval, he never told the author so. Acting on Sir Walter Scott's weU-known rule for the acknowledgment of " presentation copies," and acting on it probably from a presentiment that after reading the poems he would find it more difficult to write civilly to the author, the Earl hastened to thank his ward for the copy and the dedication, before perusing the volume, in a letter which, though not devoid of pohteness or cordiality, failed to satisfy the poet, who wrote to Miss Pigot of Southwell from London on 13th July, 1807, "Lord Car- lisle, on receiving my poems, sent, before he opened the book, a tolerably handsome letter : — I have not heard from him since. His opinions I neither know nor care about : if he is the least insolent, I shall enrol him with Sutler and the LORD BYEON OF TRINITY. 113 Other worthies. He is in Yorkshire, poor man ! and very ill ! He said he had not time to read the contents, but thought it necessary to acknowledge the receipt of the volume immedi- ately. Perhaps the Earl " bears no brother near the throne," if so, I will make his sceptre totter in his hands." The poet's purpose of leaving Cambridge " for good," and visiting it again only to take his degree, was relinquished within aweek after its announcement to Miss Pigot. " Since my last letter," he wrote to that young lady from Trinity, on 5th July, 1807, "I have determined to reside another year at Granta, as my rooms, etc., etc., are finished in great style, several old friends come up again, and many new acquaint- ances made ; consequently my inclination leads me forward, and I shall return to college ia October if still alive." On returning to the rooms, which upholsterers had " finished in great style," Lord Byron of Trinity was in the gayest spirits, and in the humor to " lead " the modish undergraduates till next July, just as he had " led " the boys at Harrow during his last year upon " the hiU." Bringing with him " the bear," destined for a college fellowship. Lord Byron had also brought up with him the sense of dignity appropriate to a nobleman of wit, whose poems had been praised in critical reviews and bought by duchesses, — at least, by " Her Grace of Gordon," who(as the happy youngster wrote to his fair correspondent at South- well) " bought my volume, admired it exceedingly, in common with the rest of the fashionable world, and wished to claim her relationship with the author." A nobleman of wit and fashion. Lord Byron of Trinity had now only to achieve a reputation for rakishness, to be as famous as he desired. Hazard being a favorite pastime just then with the "jeunesse doree " of the University, Lord Byron of Trinity seized the dice-box, and played away night after night till four in the morning. " I have thrown as many as fourteen mains running," he recorded at a later period in one of his journals, " and carried off all the cash upon the table occa- sionally ; but I had no coolness, or judgment, or calculation. It was the delight of the thing that pleased me. Upon the whole, I left oif in time, without being much a winner or loser. Since one-and-twenty years of age, I played but 114 THE REAL LORD BTEON. little, and then never above a hundred, or two or three." When a gamester prates of having " left off in time, without being much a winner or loser," it may be taken for certain that he did not leave off in time, or without losing much more than he won. Byron's losses at hazard were doubtless largely accoimtable for the enormity of the debts that weighed upon him and harassed him painfully on his coming of age. ^' Entre nous," he wrote to his always sympathetic and judicious counsellor, the Rev. Mr. Becher, of Southwell, on 28th March, 1808, when only twenty years and two months old, " I am cursedly dipped ; my debts, every thing inclusive, will be nine or ten thousand pounds before I am twenty-one." The twelve or fifteen hundred a year from the Newstead property after paying some of the charges of the long suit (still in progress) for the Eochdale property, of course, could not afford the young peer a sufficient allowance for what may be called his legitimate expenses. A youngster, continually posting in his own carriage to and fro between Cambridge and London and between London and Southwell, keeping two riding-horses, a groom, and a valet, and spend* ing money on two editions of poems printed for circulation amongst his friends, and another collection of poems for public sale, — could not be expected to live within an allow- ance of perhaps a thousand a year. But to account for the £10,000 of debt contracted in two years, one must suppose that Lord Byron of Trinity lost more at hazard than he cared to confess in a journal made up for his biographer's convenience. If rumor of the high play, that went on in his rooms and in the rooms of his more reckless friends, came to the ears of the dons, it may well have made them continue to " look askance " at the young peer, who wrote to Miss Pigot on 26th October, 1807 : " We have several parties here, and this evening a large assortment of jockeys, gamblers, boxers, authors, parsons, and poets sup with me, — a precious mixt- ure, but they go on well together ; and for me, I am a spice of everything except a jockey." The social gayeties of undergraduates are seldom remarkable for orderliness and freedom from noise ; and it may be imagined that when the LORD BTBON OF TRINITY. 115 cheers and uproar of the jolly good fellows in Lord Byron's rooms broke in upon the studious hours of serious students, with no turn for joUity and no admiration for the kind of goodness that is best described in the small hours of the morning by " three times three — and one more ! " they must have wished his lordship had not " come up " for another year. And in this feeling the dons and other grave person- ages of the learned society must have been confirmed by re- port, which passed from gownsman to gownsman in the later days of October, that this troublesome and audacious lord- ling, who had sneered in verse at the Master's " ample front sublime," and most irreverently called the coUege-choir " a set of croaking sinners," was already at work on another satire, — and had in fact already turned oif three hundred and eighty lines of the new poem, which would exhibit to public ridicule the worthiest of living men. It was thus Lord Byron's friends, and his friends' friends whispered of the poem that would put an end to Walter Scott's popu- larity, and make Southey rue his rashness in becoming an author by profession. For though the " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers " was Byron's answer to the article which did not appear in the "Edinburgh Review" till January, 1808, and doubtless owed the greater part of its force and most vicious stabs to the anger stirred within the poet's breast by the ludicrously insufficient assault on his reputa- tion, the groundwork of the satire was laid weeks before he received his " early intelligence " of the rod that had been pickled for his back. Left to himself, Lord Byron of Trinity would have produced a satire, something stronger than the satirical stuff of the "Hours of Idleness," something weaker than the satire of the " Hints from Horace," that might have caught the public attention for an hour, on its way to the oblivion that claims all satire that does not rise to a high standard of excellence. Fortunately for the. poet, and no less fortunately for countless later sufferers from unjust criti- cism, the " Edinburg Review" came to his aid with an article that stung him to an exhibition of strength that placed him, boy though he was, amongst the masters of a kind of litera- ture, in which the young so often try to distinguish them- selves, and so rarely excel. 116 THE BEAL LOBD BYRON. It is not easy to sit in judgment on the notorious article, which has proved so prejudicial to the authority and influence of professional critics, without thinking of the satire which gave it enduring notoriety. And to remember the boyish daring and malicious sportiveness and irresistible humor of the "English Bards," is to lose the power of regarding im- partially the outrage that stirred the youngster's wrath. But when the satire is put as much as possible out of recollection, and the attention confined as strictly as possible to the fail- ings of the " Hours of Idleness " and the faults of the review, there is little to be urged in palliation of the intemperance and excessive harshness of the latter. When all reasonable ex- cuses have been made for the reviewer, it remains that he was signally deficient in good feeling, good judgment, and good taste, — that this article is alike reprehensible for its want of kLndliness, its want of critical discernment, and its vulgarity. In sneering at the young lord for being a young lord the reviewer at least showed a curious want of breeding. In -striking a youngster so heavily, and at the same moment deriding his modest appeal for consideration on the score of his youth, the censor showed, to put the case mildly, a dis- creditable lack of sympathy for youthful ambition. In loftily bidding the young aspirant to " forthwith abandon poetry," as a field for which he had not a single natural qualification, the critic showed a singular unfitness for his office ; for though they comprised many weak verses, and several exhibitions of boyish, even childish, indiscretion and inexpertness, the poems afforded numerous indications of poetic feeling, and several passages of thoughtful and strenuous writing. Walter Scott, who had already looked through the poems, might well be astonished at the " undue severity " of the " offensive article," which caused him to protest to Jeffrey against its scandalous harshness, and even' to think of writing a note of sympathy and consolation to the author. And Scott was not the only reader of " The Edinburgh " to regard with equal surprise and disapproval its treatment of a book of poems, which " con- tained some passages of noble promise," though "they were written like all juvenile poetry, rather from the recollection of what had pleased the author in others than what had been suggested by his own imagination." LORD BTKON OF TEINITr. 117 It Still remains a question with many persons whether Jef- frey or Brougham wrote this unfortunate review ; it being assumed by the questioners that the article proceeded from the pen of the one or the other. As it rests on the assump- tion that, if the article had not been of his own writing, he would, sooner or later, have disassociated himself from the discreditable performance by revealing the real blunderer or at least disclaiming the authorship of the essay, the case against Jeffi-ey is so weak that it should not injure his reputation. Jeffrey had his failings ; but he was not the man to betray a coadjutor, or sneak out of an editorial scrape under cover of an imdignified avowal. Moreover, if Medwin's book may be trusted (and on such a matter the " Conver- sations " are trustworthy in some degree) , Jeffrey disclaimed the authorship in so far as he could do so with dignity, by assuring Byron in confidence that though responsible for the deed he was not its doer. That Jeffrey ever prom- ised (in the manner alleged in the " Conversions " ) to put Byron in the way to discover his aggressor is more than improbable. The case against Jeffrey must be allowed to perish. Discredited by various circumstances, the notion that Brougham wrote the article is nothing more than a suspicion, hugged to the last by Byron, who, with several good reasons for hating the lawyer, was not unwill- ing to strengthen them with a poor one. " I have no loves," Byron said to Trelawny, as they were sailing to Cephalonia, " I have only one friend, my sister Augusta, and I have re- duced my hates to two — that venomous reptile Brougham, and Southey the apostate." The poet's opinion that the re- view proceeded from the venomous reptile, because it con- tained some legal jargon about " minority pleas " " plaintiffs " and " grounds of action," was mere childishness. If Brougham wrote the offensive stuff, he wrote it when he was half asleep. It is possible the article — so unworthy of " The Edinburgh," and so significantly different in tone and style from the ac- knowledged compositions of the " Review's " principal and regular writers — was the production of an occasional con- tributor, who, as a resident member of the University of Cam- bridge, seized a tempting opportunity for administering a 118 THE REAL LORD BrEON. seasonable chastisement to the young satirist of college tutors. The " dons," who looked askance at Lord Byron of Trinity before the long vacation, may well have come to a strong and unanimous opinion in the ensuing November that the young nobleman's presence at the University was neither for his own advantage, nor the good of the young gentlemen who gathered about him. On hearing of the " new satire " al- ready on the stocks, the tutors may well have wished for some one, enjoying the confidence of a powerful editor, to give his lordship a lesson in the art of saying unpleasant things of one's neighbors, and to show him with equal promptitude and energy that satire, like stone-throwing, was a game at which two persons could play, — a game ia which no one should be allowed to have all the play to himself. And as this view of what would be best for Lord Byron of Trinity and also for his academic superiors grew more general and strong, at the high-tables of the colleges, it would natur- ally occur to any one of the Fellows, who had friendly rela- tions with the " Edinburgh " editor, that he would do a good turn to his University and more especially to its junior mem- bers, by paying Lord Byron off in his own coin, and showing all undergraduates of a froward and malapert temper that even a young peer of the realm could not ridicule " dons " and other duly constituted authorities with impunity. Whilst all- this appears alike natural and probable, the tone and very structure of the article point to the same conclusion. Written throughout in a vein of supercilious " donnishness," the re- view remiads one alternately of a college-tutor who regards sarcasm as the most effective veliicle of instruction, and of a school-master who more in sorrow than in anger condescends to chastise a naughty boy with an implement of torture far larger and more terrifying than the author's goose-quiU. After administering the flagellation to the last cut, the peda- gogue forbears to dismiss the humiliated culprit till he has pointed the moral of the incident, for the edification of youth- ful listeners, by reading aloud some of the weakest verses of his never fehcitous satire on academic persons and practices. With this cue to the possible origin and purpose of the re- view, which caused the poet to drink three bottles of claret at LORD BYRON OF TRINITY. 119 a single sitting, most readers of its insolent phrases will perhaps be inclined to think with the present writer that, though the blow was delivered from Edinburgh, the im- pulse of the blow came from Cambridge. If the offensive article proceeded from a Cambridge tutor, chiefly desirous of driving Lord Byron from Trinity before the summer terms, the reviewer had reason for a brief while to congratulate himself on the success of his essay. In London, where he hastened from his punishment to Ms claret, Lord Byron was in no humor to pass another term at Cambridge, where for the moment the laughter was all on the side of the reviewer and the dons. The poet, who in later time could not endure with calmness the speechless obloquy of London drawing-rooms, had not the heart to face the Masters and Fellows who, instead of merely eying him askance as they passed him in Hall or Quadrangle, were now prepared to confront him with faces brightened with smiles of triumphant malice. So far as his university career is concerned, the " Edinburgh Review " snuffed out the poet, who had meant to stay on at Trinity till the following Midsummer. From the date of that number of the "Edinburgh Eeview," Lord Byron ceased to be Lord Byron of Trinity. He "went up" indeed to take his degree in 1808 ; but having taken his grade amongst the graduates, he withdrew immediately from the University, to nurse his wrath and bitterness in London and at Newstead, — till he should find verse for their ade- quate expression. Referring to his wilder time at Trinity, towards the close of his time on earth, Byron said to Medwin, " I had a great hatred of college rules, and contempt for academical honors. How many of their wranglers have ever distinguished them- selves in the world ? . . . I believe they were as glad to get rid of me at Cambridge as they were at Harrow." Though they come to us through a no more reliable reporter than Medwin, it can be readily believed that Byron spoke these words, and that they fairly represent the feeling of the Trinity tutors, in finding themselves well rid of so trouble- some an inmate of their college. But though his time at Cambridge ended thus abruptly and 120 THE REAL LORD BTEON. ingloriously, Byron bore his university no ill-will. On the contrary in the darker periods, and also in the brighter peri- ods, of his life he held Alma Mater in tender recollection, thanking her in his affectionate heart for the friends she had given hun. Towards the close of October, 1811, little more than three months after his return from the East, he roused himself from the sorrow of the preceding weeks, and went to Cambridge to pass a few days with Hodgson. Four months later, when he and Hobhouse were thinking of running from liondon to Cambridge, to look round the old familiar haunts and exchange greetings with the few of their former friends, still lingering in them, the poet — now in the morning of his fame — wrote sadly to Hodgson, " Cambridge will bring sad recollections to him, and worse to me, though for very differ- ent reasons. I believe the only human being that ever loved me in truth and entirely was of, or belonging to Cambridge, and, in that, no change can now take place." And whilst Byron loved the University which he left at the moment of his discord with her chiefs, even as he loved the school which he quitted under somewhat similar circumstances, the younger Cantabs were quick and the older Cantabs by no means slow, to haU him as one of the brightest ornaments of their seat of learning. When Byron went to Cambridge in October, 1814, to vote for Mr. Clarke, the Trinity candidate for Sir Busick Harwood's Professorship, his appearance in the Senate House was the occasion of an outburst of applause from the under- graduates, that brought tears of joy to his strangely lustrous eyes and the crimson of sudden gladness to his pale face. And just upon thirty years later, Trinity College conferred honor on herself and rendered meet homage to the poet, as one of her own great sons of genius, by placing in her library the statue of Thorwaldsen, which would not have found a fitter or more honorable home had it been admitted to Westminster Abbey. CAMBEIDGE VACATIONS. 121 CHAPTER X. CAMBEIDGE VACATIONS. Whilst keeping his terms at Cambridge, first as a shy, retiring undergraduate, then as a lad of lively humor and sociable disposition, and, lastly, as one of the most hilarious and unruly men of his year at Trinity, Lord Byron enlarged his knowledge of human nature and human manners by visits to London, where he saw life much as Tom and Jerry saw it, from points of view best known to gentlemen about town, and sometimes with companions whose society was not calcu- lated to inspire him with a generous admiration of his species. Not that he had a morbid preference for unworthy associates, or a keen appetite for any of the grosser vices. On the contrary, eating less than a squeamish school-girl, and seldom drinking more wine than he could carry with composure on his naturally unsteady feet, he found his chief daily enjoyment in reading the best poets and in writing such poetry as may be found in the " Hours of Idleness." But though his favorite drink was soda-water, in days when sot- tishness ranked with the fine arts and it was a point of honor with nine out of every ten Enghshmen to fuddle them- selves with strong wines and stronger spirits at least once in every four-andrtwenty hours, Lord Byron went about town with merry fellows who, instead of emulating their friend's abstemiousness, bantered him on not caring to " drink like a lord." In their wanderings about town — wanderings made almost whoUy upon wheels, on account of the poet's inability to walk far and freely — Lord Byron and his friends went of course to the theatres, and afterwards to places where the play was high or the dancing wUd, and doubtless to other places into which the readers of this page would not care to follow them. In simple truth, they went about and saw life, 122 THE EEAL LORD BYEOIT. as young gentlemen of all the social grades from peers to law students, were expected and even admonished by their fathers to go about and see it, in the earlier decades of a. century that has grown more virtuous and much more deco- rous, as it has grown in years. One of the circles they often attended was the gathering of fops and dandies to be found every afternoon at Jackson's (Angelo and Jackson's) School of the Noble Art of Self-Defence. The friend and correspondent of royal princes, and of dukes who, without being of royal degree, were august per- sonages, Mr. Jackson had too many lords on his visiting list to feel himself greatly honored by the civilities lavished upon Mm by the nobleman from Trinity College. But the great Professor of Pugdism had too genuine and warm an admira- tion for "pluck" and "bottom," whenever they came under his observation, not to be touched to the heart by the spirit and address with which the lame peer (who was said to write as fine poetry as " any man who did it for a living ") handled the gloves — striking out from the shoulder, and " coming up " on his tottering pins for round after round with the best " millers " of the school, till he was forced to give in from the unendurable pain that came to his right foot from the violent exercise. And in truth, for a beholder to be stirred with generous emotion at so pathetic an exhibition of cour- age and resoluteness it was not needful for him to be either a professor or connoisseur of " the noble art." Byron, still in his minority, and Jackson, still at the highest point of his professional eminence, became close friends ; and for a while Eddleston, if the gentle youth was capable of jealousy, must have been troubled to see how much the young lord, who delighted in a chorister's affec- tion, could also delight in a prize-fighter's friendship. When the one was in London and the other in the country, the poet and pugilist wrote letters to one another ; the pro- fessor of " the noble art " being styled " Dear Jack " by his noble correspondent. Jackson was one of the few greatly eminent persons to visit Byron at Newstead; and, at 1808, when the poet stayed for several weeks at Brighton, the Professor made a weekly journey to the Sussex coast, for CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 123 the purpose of carrying on his young patron's pugilistic edu- cation. In the previous year (August, 1807) when Leigh Hunt saw the author of the " Hours of Idleness " swimming for a wager from Lambeth to Blackfriars Bridge, he "noticed a respectable-looking manly person, who was ey- ing something in the distance." The something in the distance was the poet's head, bobbiiig up and down, as he rehearsed the part of Leander in the London river; and the "respectable-looking manly person" was Mr. Jackson, the prize-fighter, who took occasion to inform the by- standers who the swimmer was, and to expatiate on the virtues of his noble pupil. "Last week," Byron wrote to Miss Pigot on 11th August, 1807, "I swam in the Thames from Lambeth through the two bridges, Westminster and Blackfrairs, a distance, including the different turns and tacks made in the way, of three miles." But though he spent much of his Cambridge vacations in London, Lord Byron of Trinity passed the greater part of the successive holidays at Southwell, where he was singu- larly fortunate in the neighbors with whom he associated on terms of the closest intimacy. If it was well for the poet that in his infancy he made the acquaintance of people placed only a few degrees above the poor, it was even better for him that, instead of being brought so soon into the liiffher world as he would have been had it not been for his mother's peculiarities and Lord Carlisle's consequent distaste for her, he was on the threshold of his manhood placed into familiar relations with persons of the gentle middle class, — a class that is generally too little known to people of noble rank. In the drawing-rooms of the modest homes of South- well, which he entered almost daily to sing songs and gossip with young ladies, who probably in their whole lives never exchanged words with another peer of the realm. Lord Byron learned more of the finer qualities of human nature, and more particularly of feminine character, than he learned a few years later in the London salons, where dames and maidens of the highest birth and fashion thronged and pressed towards him, to scan his features and catch his lightest words. It was in those country-town parlors and in 124 THE REAL LOKD BYRON. the gardens on which their windows opened, that the young Byron, excluded by more benignant than cruel circum- Btances from the homes of his social equals, encountered men and women whose conversation weaned him from his shyness, relieved his manners of their rusticity, and taught him the art of pleasing. And it speaks no little for the refinement and efficiency of his teachers that on passing from them, after a brief interval of foreign travel, into the brightest and stateliest circles of the English aristocracy, he was not more applauded for his genius than for his^ noble air and perfect breeding. At Southwell Byron lived almost wholly with the gentry of the little town. Once in a while he received a call from a gentleman of "the county," or an invitation to a "county house." But partly from the knowledge that his pecuniary circumstances would not permit him to visit the territorial families of his ancestral shire on equal terms, and partly from a feeling that his mother would be less acceptable to the ladies of the county than to the gentlewomen of the Green, the poet declined the invitations, and sometimes omitted to return the calls, — alleging, in excuse of 4;he incivility of such negligence, either that the calls had been too long deferred, or that the callers should have brought their womankind to see Mrs. Byron. The young man's shyness was also largely accountable for his disinclination to make the acquaintance of his county-neighbors. To Mr. Becher's sensible advice that he should go more into the world, and seek friends beyond the boundaries of his mother's parish, he replied, — " Dear Becher, you tell me to mix with mankind, — I cannot deny such a precept is wise ; But retirement accords with the tone of my mind, And I will not descend to a world I despise. " Did the Senate or Camp my exertions require, Ambition might prompt me at once to go forth ; And, when infancy's years of probation expire, Perchance, I may strive to distinguish my birth. " The fire, in the cavern of Etna concealed, Still mantles unseen, in its secret recess ; — At length, in a volume terrific revealed, No torrent can quench it, no bounds can repress. CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 125 " Oh thus, the desire in my bosom for fame Bids me live but to hope for Posterity's praise ; Could I soar, with the Phoenix, on pinions of flame, With him I would wish to expire in the blaze. " For the life of a Fox, of a Chatham the death, What censure, what danger, what woe would I brave ? Their lives did not end when they yielded their breath, — Their glory illumines the gloom of the grave ! " But wMlst Byron's intercourse with his neighbors of the Green was alike social and salutary, the Burgage Manor- house was too often the scene of ludicrous disputes between the mother, who had not the good sense to relax the reins of maternal authority as her offspring neared the time for be- coming his own master, and the son who, having never submitted graciously to his mother's violent temper, became less tolerant of her vexatious conduct on ceasing to be a school-boy. With down darkening his lip, and with a growing sense of what was due to his dignity as a man and a peer of the realm, it was not to be expected that Lord Bjrron of Trinity, who had fought Dr. Butler at Harrow, would consent any longer to be rated by his mother in the hearing of her servants, as she used to rate him in his child- hood. On the other hand Mrs. Byron was resolved to forego none of the enjoyment that came to her from the exercise of the most congenial of her maternal privileges. The scandal of this state of things of course spread beyond the walls of Burgage Manor. Even if the servants of the manor-house had refrained from telling what they naturally told to all the other servants of the Green, the Pigots and Leacrofts and the other gentlefolk of the town would have known no less of the unseemly quarrels of the mother and son. For whilst Mrs. Bjrron hastened with tears in her eyes,' after every battle, to tell her neighbors what a wretched woman she was to have so undutiful a boy, Byron — like the Byron of later time — laid his domestic troubles before the world, and entreated society to join with him in weeping over them. An equally farcical and truthful story is told of the way in which one of the Southwell apothecaries received early intelligence of a more than usually vehement combat, from which each 126 THE REAL LORD BYEON. of the two belligerents withdrew with a strong feeling that the other would commit suicide before the morning. Having good reason to think his mother violent and mad enough to do all her words implied, Byron went off to the apothecary the same night, and begged him on no account whatever to supply Mrs. Byron with the means of putting an end to herself. And the apothecary had scarcely dismissed his patron with an assurance that his wish should be respected, when he received a nocturnal visit from Mrs. Byron, who had come — not to buy poison, but to beg that no kind of deadly stuff should be sold to her son. Soon after this comical incident, the Pigots were sitting late one evening in their drawing-room — debating possibly what would be the end of these wretched disputes — when Lord Byron came in upon them with a petition that they would give him a bed for the night, as he had resolved to go up to London in the morning, without bidding his mother farewell, and to stay away from Southwell till she had with due expressions of penitence promised to amend her faulty manners. Only a few minutes earlier a stormy altercation between the two habitual disputants had ended in a manner that occasioned Lord Byron the less surprise as Mrs. Byron had in former times thrown the fire-tongs at his head. On the present occasion the eccentric gentlewoman, stirred probably by " mountain " as well as maternal indignation, had attempted to silence her adversary with the poker. Hence the young nobleman's determination to keep away from Southwell, till his mother should promise never again to have recourse to so dangerous and objectionable a form of argument. In the morning, before Mrs. Byron had a suspicion of his purpose, Byi'on was well on his way towards London, having left Southwell under circumstances that caused him to write to Miss Pigot on 9th August, 1806, from his lodgings at 16 Piccadilly, " seriously, your mother has laid me under great obligations, and you, with the rest of your family, merit my warmest thanks for your kind connivance at my escape." It was the fugitive's desire that his place of retreat should not be revealed to Mrs. Byron, to whom he sent word, through CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 127 Miss Pigot, that should she venture to pursue him she would do so at the risk of driving him " immediately to Portsmouth," — a sufficiently plain hint that to avoid her, till she should haye come to a proper \'iew of her behavior, he was prepared to go abroad. But the young man's wish was disappointed. On learning her son's address (probably through the dis- loyalty or indiscretion of the groom who was ordered to go to London with the peer's horses), Mrs. Byron went up to town at fullest posting speed, and in due course had an interview with him at his Piccadilly lodgings, from which she retired with a clear perception that her lame brat of a boy had passed out of her government. " I cannot exactly say with Caesar, ' Veni, vidi, vici,' " the poet wrote to young Pigot, — Miss Pigot's brother, an Edinburgh medical stu- dent ; " however, the most important part of his laconic account of success applies to my present situation ; for, though Mrs. Byron took the trouble of 'coming' and 'seeing,' yet your humble servant remained the victor." Henceforth, so far as his lamentably incompetent mother was concerned. Lord Byron of Trinity was his own master. " The enemy," as the conqueror undutifully styled his parent, having retired to her entrenchments in Nottingham- shire, Lord Byron with his servant and horses made a trip to Worthing and Little Hampton on the Sussex coast ; whence he returned in two or three weeks' time " with all the honors of successful war " to Southwell, for a brief visit of courtesy to the vanquished " enemy," before he set out for Harrow- gate, with young Pigot for his companion. At Harrowgate, — whither they posted in his lordship's car- riage, and were preceded by his lordship's saddle-horses — the young men found little diversion in the gayetiesof an unusually " gay season." Whilst the student was thinking more of his Edinburgh studies than of the amusements of the water-drink- ers, the poet thought chiefly of his verses when he was not playing with his big dogs. " Harrowgate," Mr. Pigot wrote to his sister at Southwell, " is still extremely full ; Wednesday (to-day) is our ball-night, and I meditate going into the room for an hour, although I am by no means fond of strange faces. Lord B., you know, is even more shy than myself." 128 THE REAL LORD BYROTT. Twenty years later, on being asked for particulars of the visit that might be serviceable to the poet's authorized biographer, Dr. Pigot wrote, " We were at the Crown Inn, at Low Harrowgate. We always dined in the public room, but re- tired very soon after dinner to our private one ; for Byron was no more a friend to drinking than myself. We lived retired, and made few acquaintances ; for Jie was naturally shy, very shy, which people who did not know him mistook for pride." On their homeward journey from the Yorkshire springs, whilst his friend maintained the silence that was asked of him, Byron — as the post-horses covered the distance be- tween Chesterfield and Mansfield, " spun the prologue for our play " (published in the " Hours of Idleness ") , that was delivered in due course at the dramatic entertainment that took place in. Mr. Leacroft's drawing-room towards the end of September ; the entertainment at which the poet, in his delivery of the epilogue by Mr. Becher, distinguished him- self, more perhaps to the surprise than the delight of some of the audience, by an exhibition of the talent for mimicry that in later time enabled him to play the part of a racy and irre- sistibly comic raconteur. Towards the close of November, copies of the volume of poems, which the young man had been seeing through the press during the summer and autumn of 1806, were sent to Mr. Becher of Southwell and Mr. Pigot at Edinburgh ; but these copies had no sooner passed from his possession, than the author was induced to bum all the remaining volumes of the edition, by Mr. Becher's equally prompt and judicious expression of his opinion that the sixteen stanzas " to Mary " were disagreeably animated with the spirit of Little's amatory verses. That the clergyman had good reason for the protest may be ascertained by a perusal of the single extant copy of the poem ; but the justice of the censure detracts in no degree from the praise due to the poet for the graceful docility and good temper with which he accepted it. Had he declined to profit by the good counsel, and laughing at his friend's squeamishness persisted in sending out the books on which he had expended so much care, Byron would only have acted OAMBEIDGE VACATIONS. 129 like a youngster of ordinary wilfulness and self-sufficiency. But in yielding so readily to the clergyman, whose judgment he respected and whose affection he valued, Byron at least justified Dr. Dniry's testimony to his manageableness, and showed that, however quick he might be to pull against the cable of harsh and tyrannical government, he was still to be led by the silken thread of wise and sympathetic authority. In truth his behavior in a matter, so likely to provoke the pride and obstinacy of youthful nature, is no slight evidence that his insubordiaation to Drury's successor was more due to the master's want of tact than the pupil's want of temper, and that the Cambridge " dons " would have found him less unruly if they had been better qualified to govern him. That the young man's submission to Mr. Becher's judgment in- volved a considerable sacrifice of his inclination appears from the quickness with which he brought out the second collec- tion of verses for the amusement of his friends, and for the gratification of his eager appetite for the distinction of " being an author." The proofs of this second volume of poems, printed for private circulation, were undergoing revision, when Byron, stiU in his nineteenth year, wrote " The Prayer of Nature," — a composition that shows with interesting clearness the character and limits of the religious scepticism, which made the young poet an object of mingled terror and pity to many, perhaps the majority, of his acquaintance : — "THE PEAYEE OF NATUEE. " Father of Light ! great God of Heaven I Hear'st Thou the accents of despair? Can guilt like man's be e'er forgiven? Can vice atone for crimes by prayer? "Father of Light, on Thee I call ! Thou see'st my soul is dark within ; Thou who can'st mark the sparrow's fall, Avert from me the death of sin. " No shrine I seek, to sects unknown ; Oh point to me the path of truth I Thy dread omnipotence I own ; Spare, yet amend, the faults of youth. 130 THE EEAL LORD BTRON. "Let bigots rear a gloomy fane, Let superstition hail tlie pile, Let priests, to spread their sable reign, With tales of mystic rites beguile. " Shall man confine his Maker's sway To Gothic domes of mouldering stone? Thy temple is the face of day ; Earth, ocean, heaven. Thy boundless throne. " Shall man condemn his race to hell Unless they bend in pompous form ; Tell us that all, for one who fell, Must perish in the mingling storm? " Shall each pretend to reach the skies, Yet doom his brother to expire, Whose soul a different hope supplies, Or doctrines less severe inspire ? " Shall these, by creeds they can't expound, Prepare a fancied bliss or woe? Shall reptiles, grovelling on the ground. Their great Creator's purpose know? " Shall those, who live for self alone. Whose years float on in daily crime — Shall they by Faith for guilt atone, And live beyond the bounds of Time? " Father ! no prophet's laws I seek, — Thy laws in Nature's works appear ; — I own myself corrupt and weak. Yet will I pray, for Thou will hear ! " Thou, who canst guide the wandering star Through trackless realms of Other's space ; Who calm'st the elemental war. Whose hand from pole to pole I trace : "Thou, who in wisdom placed me here. Who, when Thou wilt, can take me hence, Ah ! whilst I tread this earthly sphere, Extend to me Thy wide defence. " To Thee, my God, to Thee I call I Whatever weal or woe betide, By Thy command I rise or fall. In Thy protection I confide. " If, when this dust to dust restored. My soul shall float on airy wing. How shall Thy glorious name adored, InBplie her feeble voice to sin?! CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 13] "But, if this fleeting spirit share With clay the grave's eternal bed, "While life yet throbs, I raise my prayer, Though doomed no more to quit the dead. " To Thee I breathe my humble strain, Grateful for all Thy mercies past, And hope, ray God, to Thee again This erring life may fly at last. " In the following year (1807), at a time when he was an- ticipating speedy death, Byron, in his twentieth year, wrote, " Forget this world, my restless sprite, Turn, turn thy thoughts to Heav'n ; There must thou soon direct thy flight, If errors are forgiven. To bigots and to sects unknown. Bow down beneath the Almighty's throne : — To Him address thy trembling prayer; He, who is merciful and just. Will not reject a child of dust, Although his meanest care. " Father of Light ! to Thee I caU, My soul is dark within ; Thou, who can'st mark the sparrows fall. Avert the death of sin. Thou who can'st guide the wandering star, Who calm'st the elemental war. Whose mantle is yon boundless sky, My thoughts, my words, my crimes forgive ; And, since I soon must cease to live. Instruct me how to die." Had it been compoeed a few months later, when Byron was living under the influence of Charles Skinner Matthews, " the Prayer of Nature " would probably have contained more to shock orthodox readers. Written in the Christmas- tide of 1806, the poem gave utterance to a scepticism that differed in no important particular from the religious opinions he professed less precisely at Harrow, where he fought Lord Calthorpe for accusing him of atheism. Exhibiting abundant faith in the existence of a personal Deity, vigilant of the actions and attentive to the prayers of human beings, and showing no disposition to question the doctrine of man's per- sonal existence after death, the Prayer, in its heterodoxy, is but a cry of revolt against certain of the doctrines imposed 132 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. on the writer's mind in its infancy, — doctrines that had become intolerable to a mind so sensitive and imaginative. Diifering from the infidelity of Hume and Gibbon and Vol- taire, with whose writings he had already a slight acquaint- ance, almost as widly as it diifers from the devout unbelief of Darwin, this scepticism, whose single aim is to escape from agonizing imaginations, has little in common with the cold doubt of the philosophic thinkers of the poet's own period, and scarcely anything at all with the free thought of recent scientific inquirers. And it will be seen by and by that these remarks are not more applicable to Byron's infi- delity in its earlier than to his infidelity in its later exhibitions. The scepticism of " Childe Harold " difiers notably from the scepticism of " The Prayer of Nature ; " the scepticism of the second instalment of the poet's first great poem is in many particulars out of harmony with the scepticism of the earlier cantos ; and the bolder and cynical scepticism of "Don Juan" is in several respects strangely unlike the scepticism of the " Pilgrimage." Although Shelley believed himself incapable of influencing his friend in respect to re- ligious questions, the man who had held daily communion with 80 fearless and subtle a reasoner was other than the Byron who loitered with so sober and matter-of-fact a scholar as Hobhouse through the ruins of ancient Athens. In like manner the pilgrim of the Eastern tour, with Hob- house at his elbow, was other than the Byron who delighted at Cambridge and Newstead to talk with Charles Skinner Matthews on the mysteries of existence and the perplexities of faith. And the Byron, with whom Matthews talked, was other than the Byron who, in 1806, wrote "The Prayer of Nature." But in all the variations of his unbelief, Byron is always the sceptic of emotion, — never the cold and calmly speculative free-thinker. More referable to the feminine than the masculine forces of his nature, his scepticism is an afiair of sensibiMty and passion, instead of logic and conviction. Whether he rails in boyish verse at " priests " and " bigots," or in a loftier strain compassionates the " poor child of doubt and death, whose hope is built on reedg," or exclaims with cynical vehemence. OAMBKIDGE VACATIONS. 133 " For me, I know nought ; nothing I deny, Admit, reject, contemn ; and what know you. Except perhaps that you were born to die? And both may after all turn out untrue " ; he is the sceptic of feeling and excitement, whose profoundest reasonings are familiar arguments of "common sense," and whose confidence in his own conclusions sinks as his pulse subsides. Begotten of anxiety for himself and sympathy for human kind, — the selfish fear being far less powerful in his generous breast than the concern for others, — this feverish, impulsive, timorous scepticism was fruitful of repudiations of unendurable dogmas ; but every repudiation was attended by an uneasy feeling that the rejected doctrine might in the end prove a true one. In the agitation which followed his death, people perplexed themselves with the question, whether he had in his later time been a Christian ? Answering this question in a way that left the question unanswered, Leigh Hunt remarked, " He was a Christian by education : he was an infidel by reading. He was a Christian by habit : he was no Christian upon reflection." But Byron, with his keen sensitiveness and strong memory, was so constituted that his later reading (never severe) could not altogether overcome the influence of early education. Shelley was less powerful over him than May Gray. Hovering and oscillating even in the periods of his boldest scepticism, between Christianity and disbelief, he never, after his boyhood, rested either on the one or the other. There were moments when he could speak and write as though he had passed altogether from his early faith ; but to the last he was an anxious and hesitating unbeliever, and the reUgious opinions of the man, who in Italy and Greece was an habitual reader of the Bible given him by his sister on the eve of his withdrawel from England, resembled the religious opinions of the boy who wrote " The Prayer of Nature." The period of the production of this religious poem was also the time at which the young man first set himself ear- nestly to combat the tendency to corpulence of which Moore speaks so daintily. It was no mere disposition to inconven^ ient stoutness, but a burdensome and disfiguring grossness 134 THE REAL LORD BYRON. of which Byron resolved to rid himself at the commencement of his twentieth year ; and as he had been unfairly ridiculed and persistently exhibited to contempt for the vanity, which caused him to sacrifice bodQy health to personal appearance, it is but fair to display in aU its repulsiveness the extrava- gance of the disease that made him employ such violent measiu-es for its abatement. The matter is the more deserv- ing of consideration, because the regimen, in which he per- sisted with a resoluteness and perseverance that may almost be called heroic, aflFected his temper and happiness, his character and even his genius. So long as he continued to grow in stature, this vicious habit of body was fruitful of no serious inconvenience. Nor was it attended with humiliatins; and embittering results. But as soon as he ceased to grow higher, the youth who had been a thick-bodied, heavy-featured lad, expanded with fat tUl he became ludicrous and repulsive to beholders, — es- pecially to those beholders, the young and lovely of the gentler sex, of whose approval he was most keenly desirous. Let it be remembered that on attaining its fuU measure his stature barely escaped shortness. It was his humor and weakness to maintain that he stood five feet and eight-amc?- a-half inches high. In questions of height, it may be laid down as a sure maxim that the man who claims credit for the extra half-inch, claims credit for what he does not possess. In his boots Byron stood a trifle over five feet eight inches ; but this was the height of a man — standing on his toes, with heels raised by boots of peculiar make. His actual height was midway between five feet seven inches and five feet eight inches. And on the nineteenth anniversary of his birthday this young man of barely average height weighed fourteen stone and six pounds. Of this burden of flesh more than an average proportion pertained to the trunk and superior limbs, as his inability to take much walking exercise was unfavor- able to the development of the legs. The young man, of abnormal girth and large shoulders, tottering unsteadily on spindle limbs and small, distorted feet, had a face swollen to unsightliness with fatty tissue. Is it wonderful that his vis- age was disgustful to him ? and that he resolved to mortify CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 135 his keen appetite for food, to abstain from fattening drinks, to weaken himself by the daily use of drastic medicines, to quicken his skin's action with hot baths, and to deny himself several of the most important pleasures of sense, in order to escape such hideous disfigurement and to look like other young men? Surely it was more honorable than contemp- tible in him that he -could make such a daily and hourly sacri- fice of bodily indulgence and delights for which he had keen zest, in order to emerge from such a swinish state of physical depravity ? It is best for a man to be natural in his habits and outward show. But when a man cannot be natural without looking like a hog, he does well to be unnatural for the sake of looking like a man. Let it be granted that the motive was vanity, and that vanity is no heroic quality, — albeit, a quality that is seldom wanting in heroes, and often contributes not a little to their heroism. Still the fact remains that, his only choice lying between the part of a pig and the part of a peacock, it is creditable to him that he declined the part of the pig. In the April of 1807 he wrote from Southwell to his friend Pigot at Edinburgh, " Since we met, I have reduced myself by violent exercise, much physic, and hot bathing, from fourteen stone six pounds to twelve stone seven pounds. In all I have lost twenty-seven pounds. Bravo ! " On going up to Cambridge he was so changed in shape and show that even his familiars of Trinity did not recognize him at first sight. "I was obliged," he wi-ote to Miss Pigot from Cambridge on 30th June, 1807, "to tell everybody my name, nobody having the least recollection of my visage or person." The mild-mannered Eddleston was " thunderstruck " at the change in his patron. A fortnight later the poet wrote to Miss Pigot from London, " Though I am sorry to say it, it seems to be the mode amongBt getitlemen to growya^, and I am told I am at least fourteen pounds below the fashion. However, I decrease instead of enlarging, which is extraor- dinary, as violent exercise in London is impracticable." Violent exercise, however, can at no time have been a chief factor of the regimen, which owed most of its efficacy to starvation, Epsom salts, and the sweating bath. Such exer- 136 THE EBAL LOKD BYEON. cise as he could take, he took. In the summer and in the cold seasons he swam for long distances daily ; but that is no exercise for the reduction of fat. He was daily for hours in the saddle ; but as soon as the muscles, which it affects especially, have accommodated themselves to the strain, horse exercise ceases to be either a violent or a reducing exercise. Were it a remedy for grossness of bodily habit, one would not see so many pot-bellied troopers and hunting- men who ride sixteen stone. At Cambridge in these later days such a man, if he could bring himself to sacrifice the beauty of his hands, would sweat the fat from his ribs in an outrigger, and Byron, with his broad shoulders, muscular neck and thewy arms, would have been a superb oarsman, and led the Cam in a sport where his lameness would have put him at no disadvantage. But in Byron's days at Trinity, the Cam knew nothing about eight-oars, and four-oars, and sculling matches. The only violent exercise to be of much service to him in his war against fat was long-continued exercise on foot ; — and that exercise was impossible to him. He could rush about for a few minutes at a time in Jackson's boxing-room ; but he could maintain the exertion only for short spurts, and at the cost of intense pain. For the sacrifices which he made for the attainment of his object, Byron was repaid nobly. He submitted to star- vation and physic, in order to escape loathsome unsightliness ; and besides relieving him of the repulsive aspect, the regi- men — to his astonishment and delight — endowed him with the beauty of loveliness, — beauty that became proverbial. No longer big and puffy, his eyelids and cheeks became fine, and firm, and deUcate, with curves as clear in outline as the curves of sculpture. Ceasing to be thick and heavy, his lips and chin assumed the peculiar sweetness and softness that made him in the lower part of his countenance a bewitchingly charming woman rather than a handsome man. The nose — even in his comeliest period something too broad, and having (as Leigh Hunt spitefully remarked) the appearance of hav- ing been put upon the face, instead of coming out from it-^— was relieved of its clumsiness, and refined into harmony with the rest of a profile singularly suggestive of high breeding. CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 137 At the same time the blue-^ay eyes, fringed with dark (almost blacls) lashes, acquired a brightness and subtlety of expression that had never before distinguished them. His complexion was purified to transparency, and his auburn hair, playing over his brow in short, feathery curls, became richly lustrous. The man, who with the fine touch of a delicate and naturally sensitive hand takes in his fingers a lock of Byron's hair for the first time, experiences a curious surprise from the feather-like softness of the filaments. Thus much starvation and medicine did for the aspect of his face. The transformation of his figure was no less strik- ing, — a body of grace and dignified elegance being substi- tuted for a body of almost loutish clumsiness. At the same time, the regimen was even more beneficent to his sensations than to his appearance. Kelieved of the burden of his super- fluous flesh he could walk with comparative ease and security. The body, that had oppressed him, was no longer unwieldy and unmanageable. Obeying his wdl, it filled him with delight. And what is even more noteworthy thaft all the other results of the regimen taken together, is that this dis- cipline of starvation and drastic depletives quickened his brain to such a degree that the man of intellect for the first time knew himself to be something far higher than a man of mere intellect. The goads and whips of the regimen had affected the nervous system, so that he had become a man of genius. He had gone to drugs and starvation at the instiga- tion of personal vanity. Henceforth he persisted in using them for the sake of the delights of that highest life to which they had raised him and from which he soon sunk surely and quickly without their assistance. It is not difficult to show how it was that starvation and medicine affected Byron in so remarkable a manner. Though he may not be aware of the process by which it operates for his immediate gratification and ultimate injury, the absinthe- drinker takes his pernicious beverage for the sake of the mechanical irritation it causes to the lining membrane and nerves of the stomach, and the consequent sympathetic ex- citement of the brain. Byron with Epsom salts and starva- tion did for his stomach and brain what the absinthe-drinker 138 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. accomplishes by means of the essence of wormwood. He kept the mucous membrane of the stomach in constant irrita- tion, and the nerves of the stomach in constant and abnormal activity, the immediate effect of their excitation being a sympathetic action of the brain, alike agreeable to his whole nervous system and conducive to mental sprightliness. The state to which he thus brought himself was attended with the pleasurable sensations of intoxication, and indeed differed chiefly from vinous exhilaration in being followed by no serious depression. "A dose of salts," Byron remarks- in one of his journals, " has the effect of a temporary inebriation, like hght champagne, upon me." Wine made him gloomy and savage, as soon as the momentary exhilaration had passed ; the irritation of the medicine affected his brain as alcohol affects men whose nerves suffer no painful conse- quences from it. And to the last, starvation and medicine operated in the same way on his mental forces. " By starv- ing his body," says Trelawny, speaking from his observation of the poet in his closing years, " Byron kept his brains clear ; no man had brighter eyes or a clearer voice." The sacrifices which Byron thus made for quickness of brain and freedom from bodily grossness were too heavy and grievous to be made daily throughout successive years, without reluctance and with no occasional relaxations of the stern discipline. But as soon as he wavered in this ascetic course, so far as to eat and drink like other men, he began to fatten and (in his earlier manhood) wax dull ; and it was only by returning to the severe regimen that he could recover his vigor and intellectual brightness. What it cost him in discomfort and effort thus "to clap the muzzle on his jaws " (to use his own words) , " and lilie the hybernating animals consume his own fat," he alone knew. He spent the great part of his manly time under the goads of keen hunger, living for days together on biscuits and soda^ water, till overcome by gnawing famine he would swallow a huge mess of potatoes, rice and fish, drenched with vinegar, and after recovering from the indigestion occasioned by such fare would go in for another term of qualified starvation. For- tunately for the man who was constrained to take this ascetic CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 139 course, the desire for food was not sharpened by an epicurean yearning for delicate flavors. Like Walter Scott, Byron had a strangely insensitive palate. Sir Walter preferred whiskey to wine, and could not distinguish one kind of claret from another ; and Byron thought no dinner of the rarest viands could surpass a meal of poached eggs and bacon and bottled beer. In other matters besides food he was strangely abstinent. From a few boastful passages of his journals, it might be thought that Byron's practice was to drink freely. But the evidence is conclusive that, whUst his excesses in wine were rare and exceptional incidents even in his times of indulgence, his usual moderation in alcohol would be thought exemplary even in these days when sobriety is the fashion. The gin-and- water, of which he spoke whimsically as the source of the wit of "Don Juan," was a single glass of weak — sometimes very weak — toddy on nights of unusual weariaess and ex- haustion. Once LQ a long while he smoked a cigar, to see if he liked it ; but at no time was he " a smoker." Drinking laudanum, he used also (at times) to chew tobacco, to stay the pain of hunger biting at his vitals. In Italy he was often seen with his tobacco-box in his hand and a quid in his mouth. But all through life, from Southwell to Missolonghi (with the exception of two exceptional periods of excess), his rule in regard to meat and alcohol was to "live low" that he might "think high." "The regimen" of starvation and physic answered well for a time, but ill in the long run, like absinthe-drinking, which, operating pleasantly for a time, results in ruined stomach, shattered nerves, and all the dis- tresses of mind and body that attend failure of the digestive powers and the nervous forces. For some months in 1816 — the months of his heaviest domestic troubles — he took brandy in excess, and was at the same time a laudanum-drinker. And at Venice — during his period of depravation — he was for' several months even sottish in his use of spirits. But these passages of intem- perance contrast strongly with the temperance for which he was at other times remarkable. His most vicious and bane- ful habit in the way of drinking was the use of laudanum. 140 THE REAL LORD BYEON. The abundant evidence of his journals and letters that it was his practice to consume opium in this form is not the only- extant evidence that, like De Quincey and Coleridge and several other chiefs of our nineteenth-century literature, he was so much addicted to laudanum that he may without ex- aggeration be said to have been a laudanum-drioker. PEER AND PILGRIM. 141 CHAPTER XI. PEEK AND PrLGEIM. "Whilst he was spending money during his minority at the rate of five or six thousand a year, Byron looked to the Eochdale property to pay his debts, put the Newstead man- sion in habitable condition, and stiU give him ten, twenty, thirty, or forty thousand pounds, to begin house-keeping with in the seat of his forefathers. Whenever he meditated gloomily on his growing embarrassments, Rochdale with its coal was the mine of wealth that, on the termination of the Chancery suit next year, or at the furthest two years hence, would free him from his little difficulties, enable him to dis- miss the money-lenders, and put him in easy circumstances. His notions of the value of this charming property wete elastic ; its worth growing with the difficulties it was to dissipate. In August, 1806, immediately after a favorable finding at Lancaster Assizes, the property was worth £30,- 000 ; in February, 1807, the value of the estate had risen to £60,000. Fourteen years later, when the young lord's hair was beginning to turn gray, he said to Medwin, " The Lan- cashire property was hampered with a law-suit, which has cost me £14,000, and is not yet finished." The Rochdale property may therefore be left out of the calculation, when the reader is considering his lordship's sources of income from the attainment of his majority tUl his residence at Pisa, when Medwin made his acquaintance. On coming of age, the poet was more than £10,000 in debt, whilst his income from Newstead — his sole revenue — was less than £1,500 a year. It was, however, in his power to seU Newstead, — the picturesque , property for which he was offered a few years later £140,000 by a gen- tleman who forfeited £25,000 on his failure to complete the purchaae, and which was eventually sold for £94,000. 142 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. Mr. Hanson (the poet's solicitor) told his client that he should not think of selling the Eochdale property, which, pending the litigation, would not bring in a good price, but should lose no time in parting with Newstead, where he could not live in any style whatever. But the young peer would not entertain, still less act upon, the judicious advice. His honor was concerned iu keeping Newstead ; and for once he and his mother were of one mind. Mrs. Byron was longing to move from Southwell to the Abbey. Her son also was pining to dwell in his ancestral haUs. And in Ms desire to live there, he was so imprudent as to repair some rooms of the dilapidated mansion at a considerable expense, and then to furnish them at great charge (on credit) of £1,500, when he was still in his minority. Taking up his abode at New- stead in September, 1808, when he was four months under age, he spent much of his time there till the June of the next year, when he started for Greece. As he woidd not allow Mrs. Byron to live with him at the Abbey, his establishment was settled for the needs of a bachelor ; but though it was fixed on a modest scale, the household, consisting of an old butler, a valet, the groom, and three or four female servants, was an establishment far beyond his means. Nearly every requisite for this establishmert was obtained on credit from tradesmen, who in consideration of risk were entitled to charge their cus- tomer at high rates. The wine was sent in on credit ; the coals were supplied on credit ; the money needful for the young lord's current expenses was obtained from lenders at usurious interest ; and soon after coming of age, his lordship borrowed of the Jews — to whom he referred long afterwards in " Don Juan " — the considerable sum of money for the charges of his Eastern tour, which he made in a style more in harmony with his rank than his means. In the earlier months of 1808, before going into residence at Newstead, he had spent money freely in London on the ordinary pleasures of a young gentleman of quality ; a chief cause and object of his profuseness being the girl who, living with him in lodgings at Brompton, used to ride about town with liim, habited in male attire. Dressed like a boy, this person accompanied him to Brighton, where he had the folly PEER AND PILGRIM. 143 to introduce her to his acquaintance as his " brother Gordon " ; and a few months later she was at least for a short time an inmate of Newstead. And it shows the difference in certain matters of taste and morality between English society in this year of grace, and English society at the beginning of the present century, that instead of provoking loud censure by this display of his intimacy with a saucy " fille de joie," young Lord Byron was thought to be amusing himself quite within the lines of permissible Ucense, and was even com- mended for his address in giving an air and flavor of piquant eccentricity to an otherwise uninteresting arrangement. In- stead of passing the young peer and " his brother " on the Brighton parade without appearing to notice ihem, the lady of rank and fashion, to whom Moore refers, entered freely into conversation with "the .brothers," and was vastly amused when , in answer to a complaisant speech about the beauty of her horse, the girl in boy's clothes remarked, "Yes, it was gave me by my brother." A still more remarkable illustration of the same difference in taste and morality between the English of to-day and the English of seventy years since is found in the affectionate interest and absolute freedom from dismay with which the first readers of " Childe Harold " accepted au pied de la lettre the poet's " revelations " of his way of living at New- . stead before he set out for his travels. It shocks the nerves to conceive what thunder-bolts of reprobation would be hurled by every newspaper of the land at the young gentleman who, in a book of verse or prose having every appearance of auto- biographical sincerity, should nowadays assure the world that, in chagrin at his refusal by a young lady on whom he had set his affections, he filled his country house with loose women and well-bred mauvais suj'ets, and spent several weeks with them in drunkenness and voluptuous enjoyments, till sated and exhausted with debauchery he came to loathe himself for his abandonment and excesses. But Byron said all this of himself in a way that caused the whole world to take his statements literally ; and instead of being horrified by his evidence against himself, the only regret of his readers was that the confessions were not more full and particular. 144 THE REAL LORD BYEON. Byron's avowals of surprise and displeasure at his readers' perverseness in taking " ChUde Harold " for himself, and in regarding the ChUde's career at home and on his travels as the author's career, are merely so many laughable examples of the way in which a writer, after describing himself or his friends in a work of fiction, is always blind to his achieve- ments in portraiture. The Childe is a young spendthrift of lineage long and glorious ; the Childe has sighed in vain to the heiress of goodly lands ; the Childe's ancestral hall is a vast and venerable pUe, where superstition once had made her den ; the ChUde has a mother and a single sister ; the Childe visits the same places as the author visited ; to fix the Childe's personality yet more closely on himself, Byron had christened the poem " Childe Burun," and was not easily persuaded to substitute Harold for his own surname ; — and yet, when he had taken all these pains to identify himself with the hero of the poem, the author was at a loss to under- stand why he was universally supposed to have been writing about himself. But the disavowals of the identity of the author and the hero do not touch the point to which the readers of this page are asked to give ther attenton, — that Byron's contemporaries were universally of opinion that his doings at Newstead resembled the ChUde's riotous excesses in his "father's hall," and that far from causing them to revolt from him or- regard him with disapproval, the opinion disposed most of them to think of him with favor and even with admiration. The comedy of the whole business is heightened by the slightness of the poet's grounds for the supersensational de- scription of his naughty behavior in his own house. The only " Paphian girls ... to sing and smile " at New- stead for the delight of a master " sore given to revel and ungodly glee " were the cook and housemaid of the bache- lor's staff of servants, and the girl whose boyish dress and horsemanship had a few weeks earlier made a stir on the Brighton cliff. Dallas indeed was so completely possessed by the fictions of the poem, as to write seriously of the con- siderations which determined the young lord to " break up his harams " ; but in sober prose die " harams " of Byron's PEER AND PILGEIM. 145 worst biographer were the young woman who cooked the poet's frugal meals, the young woman who kept his rooms tidy, and the girl from Brompton who came and went in the garb and under the name of "brother Gordon." The " revellers from far and near " were three or four of the neighboring clergy, half-ardozen of the poet's old friends at Southwell, and his former chums at Cambridge — Matthews, Scrope Davies, Hodgson, and Hobhouse ; the last of these "heartless parasites of present cheer" being the tnie and trusty comrade, with whom the poet had already arranged to travel for a couple of years. Unless he had his eye on some of the Southwell folk, who may be suspected of treating him somewhat reverentially when they came to look over the Abbey, it is impossible to conceive who were the " flatterers of the festal hour," of whom the Childe speaks so disdainfully. For a week or two the poet thought of having " private theatricals " in the great hall, and of inviting a lot of people to see the performances ; but if he had not relinquished the project, the young lord would have been compelled to invite his tenants and their children and the villagers from Huck- noll-Torkard, in order to escape the shame of playing to empty benches. For till he went abroad, he could have counted on his fingers all the persons he knew of Notting- hamshire " county families." Once only was there any serious effort in the way of hos- pitality on a large scale. On the twenty-first anniversary of his lordship's birthday, Newstead was stirred " by such fes- tivities as his narrow means and society could furnish." An ox was roasted for the farmers and their families and the humbler peasantry of the estate ; and in the evening there was something of the nature of " a ball." But the dance must have been a sorry affair, as Moore was unable to discover that any one of greater importance than Mr. Hanson (the solicitor) figured amongst the dancers. This ball, without ladies and gentlemen of quality, or a single carriageful of county neighbors, was, in truth, a dance for the farmers and servants ; and it seems to have been the sole realistic founda/- tion for the lines about " concubiues and carnal companie, and flaunting wassailers of high and low degree." 146 THE EEAL LORD BTEON. When the poet entertained four of his Cambridge fi-iends at his Abbey, in May, 1809, shortly before his departure for foreign lands, the life of the old mansion went merrily, with good stories and songs over champagne, and just the faintest possible flavor and savor of profanity in the monastic mas- querades and mummery with which the young men amused themselves. Rising late from their beds, they breakfasted at noon, and whiled away five or six hours with reading, fencing, singlestick, shuttlecock, pistol-practice, riding, walking, and sailing on the lake, till the time came for the host and his guests to array themselves for dinner, — a re- past that always ended with the " loving cup " of Burgundy ; the wine being passed round in the big skull which Byron had exhumed from the burial-ground of the monks of olden time and put to this rather profane use. At dinner Byron with exquisite humor played the part of my Lord Abbot in fuU abbatial costume, whUst his friends played the fool no less cleverly in their monastic dresses, with a fitting show of crosses, beads, and tonsures, as monks of inferior degree. Doubtless wild things were said and done in the small hours of the morniDg ; but the party of five young men (" now and then increased by the presence of a neighboring parson ") dispersed after a few days of these humorous " high jinks," without doing anything to justify the extravagant rumors that went about the country of their impious usages and wild orgies. Men of culture and refinement, these "heartless parasites of present cheer " may once and again have " vexed with mirth the drowsy ear of night," but the recollection of all their wildest pranks and extravagances would not have plunged the poet in remorse for associating so closely with such a crew of tippling reprobates. Even when he plied his pen in obedience to the stern requirements of his muse, the poet thought of them far better than he ventured to write of them. In the absence of his few guests, whose visits were rare and brief and at considerable intervals, Byron's life at New- stead was a life of study, meditation, and strenuous labor. Pope had long been his favorite poet, and now he studied the great artist of words and malice, to extort from him the PEEK AND PILGKIM. 147 secret of hia peculiar department of literary art, — to learn how to produce verse that should inflict the acutest pain on his enemies, and at the same time afford the keenest delight to the witnesses of their suiferings. He was hard at work — working passionately and yet at the same time calmly — on the satire that was destined to fill his foes with silent fury, and put him in the front rank of the new generation of men of letters. On an early day of 1809 he went up to London with his satire, polished and pointed and poisoned for the press ; his guardian being one of the few persons for whom it contained an expression of homage or courtesy. In the author's " copy " the Earl was down for this comphment, — "On one alone Apollo deigns to smile, And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle." But when the poem came to public view, for this graceful and not undeserved couplet the poet had substituted, — " Lords too are bards, such things at times befall. And 'tis some praise in peers to write at all. Yet, did or taste or reason sway the times. Ah ! who would take their titles with their rhymes? Koscommon ! SheflBeld ! with your spirits fled, No future laurels deck a noble head ; No muse will cheer, with renovating smile. The paralytic puling of Carlisle. The puny school-boy and his early lay Men pardon, if his follies pass away ; But who forgives the senior's ceaseless verse, Whose hairs grow hoary as his rhymes grow worse? What heterogeneous honors deck the peer ! Lord, rhymester, petit-maltre, pamphleteer ! So dull in youth, so drivelling in his age. His scenes alone had damn'd our sinking stage ; But managers for once cried, " Hold, enough! " Nor drugg'd their audience with the tragic stufE. Yet at their judgment let his lordship laugh. And case his volumes in congenial calf; Yes ! doff that covering, where morocco shines, And hang a calf-skin on those recreant lines." One peculiarly offensive line of this attack would not have been penned had the writer known that his former guardian was suffering from a nervous malady. What had happened 148 THE EEAL LORD BTEON. since the beginning of the year to account for the change of feeling towards the Earl, to whom the poet was required by respect for himself, and by regard for his own action in the Dedication of the "Hours of Idleness," to wear at least a front of formal civility? On going up to town to publish his satire, Byron also went thither to take his seat in the House of Lords ; and whilst under the misconception that the etiquette of the House re- quired that a peer on taking his seat should be introduced to the chamber by one of its members, he wrote to Lord Car- lisle that he should be of age at the opening of the next parliamentary session. Instead of evoking from the Earl a cordial oiFer to introduce his young kinsman to the House, this letter only drew from its receiver a cold epistle of informa- tion respecting the course the poet must take in the business. The Earl's young kinsman was nettled, — construing the for- mal note as an intimation that the writer had no wish to be closely associated in the world's regard with the author of the " Hours of Idleness . " This annoyance was followed quickly by a more serious vexation. On finding that, in order to take his seat, he would have to produce evidence of his grand- father's (Admiral Byron's) marriage with Miss Trevanion of Caerhayes in Cornwall, Byron directed his solicitor to get the needful evidence at once. But it is sometimes more difficult to obey an order than to give it. At first it was uncertain where the marriage was celebrated ; and when after some delay it was discovered that the Admiral's wedding had been solemnized in a private chapel at Caerhayes, Byron was informed to his dismay that it was necessary to discover the record of the event. Before Lord Hardwick's Marriage Act the records of irregular marriaores, and also of regular mar- riages celebrated inine"^ pnvate chapE^rere kept so carelessly, that it was no unccv far"V?°° *hi°g fojple to be. without legal evidence of their w^ i°? ^^^ evidence of the Admi- ral's marriage shouloiew , "^ obtaineoord Byron could not take his seat. Shoula\ble x™®_ evide be irrecoverable, he would be in a position of^ed. aiscredi For the world would not beheve the marriage halite' t^kerace, and Byron, so far as his peerage was concemeoia^trtild be accounted as a pre- PEER AND PILGRIM. 149 tender claiming to enter the House of Lords through a sire of illegitimate birth. The case was so alarming, that the nervous, sensitive, excitable Byron, who never attained the calmness of philosophy or the saAg-froid of patrician breed- ing, may be pardoned for showing extreme agitation. Whilst the hunt was going on for the missing evidence, Lord Carlisle was applied to for information about his mother's family, — information which he wouldn't give or couldn't give. To Byron's heated imagination it seemed that he was the victim of his former guardian's cynical insolence and malignity. The Earl was chuckling in his sleeve at the thought that the young man, whom he had disliked from his early boyhood, would be shut out from the House of Lords, and be degraded from the highest place of his ancient family. Thinking all this of the Earl (who doubtless would have given every information in his power to the point, though he may have declined to give information that was beside it) Byron, white with rage, seized his pen for vengeance. Hence the withdrawal of the civil couplet, and the substitu- tion of the abusive verses. If he was altogether in the wrong, Byron could at least plead in palliation of his mis- behavior the fierce and torturing excitement caused by his painful position. That he was very much in the wrong may be inferred from the fact that his sister Augusta thought him so and had the courage to tell him so. With all her devotion to and admiration of her brother, and all her consequent readiness to humor him in matters that in- volved no sacred principle, the Honorable Mrs. Leigh never shrunk from telling him the truth. She had the daring of goodness, and she displayed it in opposing him when he did ill, no less than in clinging to him when he suffered ill. And in this business of the Carlisle quarrel — on which he felt so bitterly and hotly — she never ceased to tell him that he ought to make the generous amende to the Earl. It was long before Augusta succeeded on this point. But at length the amende was made nobly in the tribute of affection- ate homage to "young gallant Howard," with its line, — " And partly that I did his sire some wrong," 150 THE REAL LOKD BYKOST. penned by the baffled exile, when all his kindred had turned against him, with the exception of the brave woman who demanded the atonement to the man he had wronged. Byron was still in the first fierceness of his rage against the Earl of Carlisle when, the evidence of the Caerhayes marriage having been obtained, he took his seat in the House of Lords on the 13th March (within a few days of the appearance of the famous satire), going thither for that purpose with his friend Dallas. Had not Dallas called on him accidentally at an opportune moment, Byron would have driven from his lodgings in St. James Street to Westminster without a companion. It shows how completely he had lived outside the lines of his " order " that, when Lord Car- lisle failed him, there was no other peer to whom he could look to introduce him to the House. Dallas has recorded how frigidly the young peer touched the Lord Chancellor's (Eldon's) proffered hand, and how on leaving the House he said, " If I had shaken hands heartily, he would have set me down for one of his party — but I will have nothing to do with any of them on either side." At Cambridge, Bjrron had played at being a Whig, and there can be no question that his mind and temperament qualified him for action with the more popular of the two aristocratic parties. Possibly disgust at his treatment by the " Edinburgh " was the chief cause of his present coldness to the Whigs. Possibly he was only actuated by a prudent feeling that he had better hold aloof from both parties till he knew more of politics and of himself. Anyhow, the words he spoke to Dallas on leaving the House after taking his seat accorded with words spoken by him on the same subject to other people in the earher months of 1809. To a gentleman, who sounded him as to his political sentiments and purpose just a week before his coming of age, the young peer said decidedly that, having no predilection for either party, he would neither run headlong into opposition nor into the arms of the ministry. Speaking on the one hand contemptuously of the underlings of Pitt, who possessed all his ill fortune without his talents, he spoke on the other hand no less dis- trustfully of the ill-assorted fragments of a worn-out minority, PEER AND PHiGEIM.. 151 — Mr. Windham with his coat twice turned, Mr. Grenville with more sense than he could turn to good account, the shuttlecock Sidmouth, and general football Sir F. Burdett, kicked by all and owned by none. At the same time he declared significantly that if he were involved with a party, he would take care not to be the last or least iu the ranks. Nothing was further from Byron's forecast at this time than that literature would be his vocation.. Dr. Drury's high opinion of his declamatory address was iufluential with the young poet, who looked to public life as the arena in which, after a few years of foreign travel, he would achieve great- ness. Having entertained his Cambridge friends at Newstead in the manner set forth on previous pages, dropped a parting tear on Boatswain's grave, gathered together the portraits of his Harrow "favorites," signed his will, settled his mother in the Abbey mansion, shaken hands with Dr. Butler, seen his satire into a second edition, and made inadequate arrange- ments for remittances to foreign bankers, the young lord, whose whole income was by this time insufficient for the pay- ment of the interest of his debts, sailed for Lisbon at the end of June, 1809, with a suite of three men-servants and a wardrobe of gorgeous and costly clothing, — one of the brave habiliments being the " scarlet coat, richly embroidered with gold, in the style of an English aide-de-camp's dress uniform," which he wore on occasions of state, and at least once in the bazaar at Constantinople. Leaving England in the summer of 1809, he was back again in his native land in the summer of 1811, after an absence of two years and three weeks. From Lisbon he rode on horseback through Portugal and the corner of Spain to Cadiz, whence he journeyed leisurely and luxuriously to Malta, Previsa, through Albania to Tepalsen and back to Previsa. Thence to Missolonghi, Athens, Smyrna, Con- stantinople, and back to Athens, where he had his head- quarters in a Franciscan convent, whilst making excursions through Attica and the Morea. With plenty of time and, during the earlier period of his travels, enough money at his disposal, he moved hither and thither by routes not easily 152 TgE REAL LOED BYEON. traceable from his letters and memoranda ; but the above- given names indicate with sufficient clearness his way-bills and devious wanderings till he reappeared at Malta, whence he set sail for England on the 3d of June in the " Volage " frigate. In these days of railroads and steamships and sure postal intercommunication, when tourists can name almost to an hour the time for their arrival at any point of their jour- neyings, and never need to linger for days and weeks at a single place, waiting for more money, the whole tour, with all its supplementary trips and- minor excursions, seems a strangely matter-of-course and hazardless business to desig- nate a pilgrimage. Nowadays it would be the aiFair of a law- yer's long vacation, and be made at a tenth or twentieth of the money it cost this Pilgrim of the English peerage. Every month of the year young ladies by the score set out from London on travels of greater distance, interest, and advent- ure ; and on returning to their English homes they do not look to be credited with having done something remarkable. In these matters the world has changed greatly since Byron went on board " the good ship, Bristol packet." The long wars of the Napoleonian period, and the revolutionary troubles which preceded them, had disposed out great-grand- fathers and great-grandmothers to prefer security and ease at home to the diversions of roaming ; and the ChUde's " pil- grimage," made though it was in the easiest and most enjoy- able manner, with congenial comrades and obsequious ser- vants, was sufficiently daring and venturesome to entitle the pilgrim of lordly condition to a modest measure of approval, even if he had not produced so fascinating a memoir of his travels. To tell again how his intellect and fancy were quickened and delighted by the scenes he visited would be to reproduce in ordinary prose the finest passages of " Childe Harold." But the tour was attended with one or two incidents of bio- graphical value, to which passing reference may be made in these pages, as the poet omits to mention them in the "Pilgrimage." Whilst journeying from Patras in the Morea, he fired at an eaglet and brought it down on the shore of the Gulf Lepanto, near Vostizza; when the PEER AND PILGRIM. 153 brightness and beauty of its eyes filled him with pity for the wounded bird, and made him anxious to save it. " But," he remarks, with characteristic sensibility in his brief note of the occurrence, " it pined and died in a few days ; and I never did since, and never will, attempt the death of an- other bird." At Patras, near the end of September, 1810, he was struck down by a sharp though short attack of marsh fever, — the malady that assailed him so often in later years, and was no less accountable than the regimen against fat- ness for his premature death. And during his second stay at Athens he conceived an aifection for a poor Greek boy, that resembled in vehemence and condescending benignity the friendship he hoped to renew on his return to London with Eddleston, and the friendship he had entertained for the farmer's boy at Newstead. The object of this third outbreak of affectionateness to a youth so far beneath him in rank was Nicolo Giraud of Athens, to whom he made a handsome gift of money, on bidding him farewell at Malta, and a few months later bequeathed a legacy of £7,000. Having left home with the hope of seeing Persia and India during the course of his travels, Byron, while staying at Athens, in 1811, took measures for an excursion to Egypt ; but, like the schemes for visiting Persia and India, this later and less ambitious project for the extension of his wanderings was given up for want of money. Instead of the needful remittances the pilgrim received letters from England, which made him see clearly that he must take prompt steps to satisfy his more importunate creditors, and that to satisfy them he had better sell the Rochdale coal-pits or even the Newstead ruins than go to the usurers for another large loan. Writing to his mother in February, 1811, he said, "If it is necessary to sell, sell Rochdale." Seven months earlier he had written to the same lady, "I trust you like Newstead, and agree with your neighbors ; but you know you are a vixen, — is not that a dutiful appellation? Pray take care of my books and several boxes of papers in the hands of Joseph ; and pray leave me a few bottles of champagne to drink, for I am very thirsty ; but I do not insist on the last article, without you like it." From the "Volage frigate," 154 THE REAL LOED BYKON. when lie hoped with a fair wind to arrive at Portsmouth on the 2d of July, the poet wrote to Hodgson, "Indeed, my prospects are not very pleasant. Embarrassed in my private aifairs, indifferent to the public, solitary without the wish to be social, with a body enfeebled by a succession of fevers, but a spirit, I trust, yet unbroken, I am returning home without a hope, and almost without a desire. The first thing I shall have to encounter will be a lawyer, the next a creditor, then colliers, farmers, surveyors, and all the agreeable attachments to estates out of repair, and contested coal-pits." The home for which Byron saUed in this melancholy temper was the house in which there had been an execution in the previous year for the upholsterer's bill of 1,500?. It was the home of the mother who was a vixen, with a thirst for champagne. 'OHILDB HAROLD." 155 CHAPTER Xn. "CHILDE HAEOLD." KETUENmo to England, with the first two Cantos of " Childe Harold " and the " Hints from Horace " almost ready for the press, Byron reached Portsmouth none too soon for •the exigencies of his affairs, and so late that he might have been met on landing from the " Volage " with dismal news. Young Eddleston, on whom the poet had lavished such affection as his nature would under other circumstances have expended on a younger brother, was no more. Dead also was the poet's former school-mate, the Honorable John Wing- field of the Guards, who had perished of fever at Coimbra, meeting a soldier's death but missing its glory. The choris- ter and the peer's son had died in the same month. The loss of the former touched Byron more acutely than the death of his Harrow friend, whose fate inspired the stanzas of " Childe Harold," — " And thou my friend — since unavailing woe Bursts from my heart and mingles with the strain, — Had the sword laid thee with the mighty low, Pride had forbid e'en friendship to complain ; But thus unlaurel'd to descend in vain, By all forgotten, save the lonely breast, And mix unbleeding with the boasted slain, While Glory crowns so many a meaner crest I "What hadst thou done to sink so peacefully to rest I " Oh, known the earliest, and esteem'd the most ! Dear to a heart where nought was left so dear ! Though to my hopeless days forever lost, In dreams deny me not to see thee here ! And Morn in secret shall renew the tear Of Consciousness awaking to her woes, And Fancy hover o'er thy bloodless bier. Till my frail frame return to whence it rose. And mqurji'd and mourner lie united in repose." 156 THE REAL LORD BYEON. Of the spirit in which the young man of fervid but placa- ble temper had come by this time to regard his satire and the provocation that had occasioned it, a noteworthy indication may be found in the letter he wrote Dallas, dating from the " Volage Frigate, at sea, June 28, 1811." " My satire," he said, " it seems is in a fourth edition, a success rather above the middling run, but not much for a production which, from its topics, must be temporary, and, of course, be successful at first, or not at all. At this period, when I can think and act more coolly, I regret that I have written it, though I shall probably find it forgotten by all except those whom it has ofl^ended." Twelve months later, when he was receiving civilities and expressions of their generous admiration of his genius from the very persons who had most reason to resent the satirist's wrath and injustice, this regret grew so strong that he stopped the sale of the " English Bards " when the fifth edition was going off steadily, and took every occasion to make the amende to individuals whom it had outraged. Calling it one of the " evil works of his nonage," he wrote to Walter Scott, on July 6, 1812, " The satire was written when I was very young and very angry, and fully bent on displaying my wrath and wit, and now I am haunted by the ghosts of my wholesale assertions." That Byron thought more highly of the "Hints from Horace " than of " Cliilde Harold " is less perplexing than curious. When the fever of composition has subsided, it is not unusual for the writer of lively satire and fine sentiment to prefer the smart writing that flatters him by its cleverness to the pathetic writing that only commends him for right feeling. Moreover, the adverse judgment of the first critical reader of the greater of the two works was quite enough to put so sensitive and difiSdent an author out of conceit with the performance, that, quickening the heart by its emotional fervor, and charming the ear by language alike strenuous and musical, stirred the earliest generation of its readers to a de- gree not to be easUy realized or accoimted for at this distance of time. On the other hand, it is no less perplexing than strange that the first critical peruser of the manuscript should have failed to see that the poem was peculiarly qualified to "CHILDE HAEOLD." 157 seize the world's attention and cause what is termed nowa- days " a sensation." Dallas certainly was no prophet ; but the novelist and poetaster (to whose hands Byron committed the MS. of the "Hints from Horace" on 15th July, 1811, and the MS. of "Childe Harold," on the following day, at Eed- dish's Hotel, St. James' Street) had enough literary feeling and discernment to see at once that " Childe Harold," the work of a writer in his 23d year, would prove one of the memorable poems of its period. Talking about the poems with Dallas, discussing less agreeable matters (one of them being the prosecution of the editor of the " Scourge " for two libels on himself and his mother) with Mr. Hanson, and receiving visits from callers especially uncongenial to the man who described himself as "hating bustle as he hated a bishop," Byron remained at Eeddish's Hotel, in St. James' Street, London, for a fort- night, when, just as he was on the point of leaving town with his solicitor (Mr. Hanson) for Lancashire, with the intention of caUing at Newstead en passant, alarming intelligence came to hiTin from the Abbey. His mother was seriously Ul. The next day (August 1, 1811), before leaving town he received the announcement of her death. On the morrow (August 2), on the road from town to Nottinghamshire, he wrote a brief letter from Newport PagneU to his friend Pigot (now Dr. Pigot) , giving the intelligence of his mother's death, and saying that the sad event would not aifect the measures for punishing the libellous editor of the " Scourge." "I am told," said the writer, " she was in little pain, and not aware of her situation. I now feel the truth of Mr. Gray's observa- tion, ' That we can only have one mother ! ' Peace be with her." The right feeling of these words is moderately expressed ; but there was no moderation in the grief to which Byron gave way at Newstead for a brief hour, after hearing the particu- lars of his mother's death ; which was the result of apoplexy, caused by a fit of violent rage at the magnitude of an uphol- sterer's bill. In the middle of the night, hearing a noise in the chamber of death, Mrs. By, the waiting-woman of the deceased lady, entered the apartment, where she found Lord 158 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Byron sitting by the side of his lifeless mother. " O Mrs. By," he exclaimed, bursting into tears, "I had but one friend in the world, and she is gone." To account for the vehe- mence of this grief for a mother whom he had regarded with an aversion at the same time natural and most unnatural, — the mother of whose cruelty he had spoken with passionate repugnance to the Marquis of Sligo, as they were dressing after swimming in the Gulf of Lepanto, — readers must re- member what was said in a former chapter of the way in which Byron's memory, sensibility, and imagination acted upon one another. Coarse, harsh, violent creature though she was, the woman, who had nursed her little step-daughter Augusta with affectionate devotion in France, had not been wanting in the same womanliness to her own child in his times of infantile sickness. In a certain way, she had loved him ; and now the recollection of long unremembered and re- mote exhibitions of maternal tenderness rose to his mind and unmanned him. Grief is no precise measurer of its own intensity, — a fact to be remembered in considering Byron's grief by those who would not do him the injustice of questioning the sincerity of its extravagant exhibitions. What he said truly of his early friendships, he could no less truly have said of all the move- ments of all his affections. They were passions. His loves, hatreds, friendships, griefs were so passionate that as long as any one of them was in full force and activity it possessed him completely, and caused him for the moment to imagine he had never loved or abhorred any one else. Touched by grief for the death of his Newfoundland dog, the young man, who could not go abroad for a couple of years without taking miniatures of his Harrow "favorites" with him, wrote of the animal : — " To mark a friend's remains these stones arise; I never knew hut one, and here he lies." Stirred by sudden tenderness for the mother whom he had regarded with excusable dislike, he discovered in a moment, not that, after all, he had a lingering fondness for her, but that he never " had hut one friend in the world, and she "CHILDE HAEOLD." 159 was gone." For the moment, whilst thinking of him with tearful eyes, he took the same view of John Wingfield : — " Oh, known the earliest, and esteem'd the mostl Dear to a heart where nought was left so dear ! " The ink with which these lines wei-e written was not dry — in truth, they had not been penned (the sentiment of the written words being only recollected emotion) — when the poet's grief for Wingfield's death becomes trivial in compari- son with his grief for some one far dearer. "In Matthews," he writes to Dallas on September 7, 1811, "I have lost my 'guide, philosopher, and friend' ; in Wingfield a friend only, but one whom I could have wished to have preceded in his long journey." It is notable also how, in the extravagance of passionate sorrow for the loss of a friend, Byron used to tell his surviving friends that their regard for him was some- thing far inferior to real friendship. " I, believe," he wrote to his true, loving, and grateful friend Hodgson, — thinking probably of Eddleston, when he penned the words, — "the only human being that ever loved me in truth and entirely was of, or belonging to, Cambridge, and, in that, no change can now take place." The violence of his grief for his mother was naturally of no great duration. Instead of following her coffin to the grave, he watched the hearse and train of mourners from the Abbey door, and, as soon as they were out of sight, ordered his servant (young Eushton) to fetch the " gloves." While the service was being read over Catherine Gordon Byron, her son was sparring with the servant, — throwing, as the boy noticed, unusual force into his blows. Doubtless in the exercise he sought escape from mental distress, due in some degree to filial affection and also in some degree to uneasiness at feeling so little regret for his mother's departure. In a few minutes, as though the exercise failed in its object, he sud- denly threw down the gloves, and went from the servant's sight. Byron had scarcely received the news of his mother's death, when Charles Skinner Matthews was drowned whilst bathing in the Cam on August 2, 1811, close upon the very 160 THK EEAL LOED BYEON. time at which the poet was writing from Newport Pagnell to Dr. Pigot. A man of brilliant academic distinctions, Mat- thews was intending to offer himself at the next election, as a candidate for the honor of representing his University in Parliament, when an attacTs of cramp ended his career in all the brightness of its promise. The second of Byron's Cam- bridge friends to die of drowning, Charles Skinner Matthews had on the day before his death written the poet a letter, that, forwarded from London, reached Newstead on the 5th, whither it was speedily followed, if indeed it was not pre- ceded, by the intelligence that its writer was no longer with the living. " Some curse," Byron wrote from Newstead to Scrope Davies on August 7, 1811, "hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house ; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch." Exactly a fortnight later he wrote to Dallas, " You did not know Matthews : he was a man of the most astonishing powers, as he sufficiently proved at Cambridge, by carrying off more prizes and fellow- ships, against the ablest candidates, than any other graduate on record; but a most decided atheist, indeed noxiously so, for he proclaimed his principles in all societies." To realize fully the quickness with which these successive blows by death's cold hand fell on Byron, the reader should know that the poet received the confirmation of the intelli- gence of Wingfield's death in Coimbra, only a few hours before he left town. "You may," he wrote to Hodgson on August 22, 1811, "have heard of the sudden death of my mother, and poor Matthews, which, with that of Wingfield (of which I was not fiilly aware till just before I left town, and, indeed, hardly believed it), has made a sad chasm in my connections." The news of his mother's Ulness came to him on July 31st ; the confirmation of the report of Wingfield's death and the intelligence of his mother's death reached him almost at the same hour on the night of August 1st, or early in the following morning ; on the 7th of August, probably sooner, he knew that Skinner was dead. He was already mourning for his proUgi, Eddleston ; and it has been told how, in October, 1811, he wrote to a friend that, between the beginning of May and the end of August of that year, he had lost by death six of his nearest associates. "CHILDE HAROLD." 161 It can cause no astonishment that, after so remarkable a series of bereavements, which would have shaken the forti- tude and stirred the feelings of the hardest and coldest nature to transient sadness, Byron was for several months the prey of sorrow that alternated between the agitations of hysterical vehemence and the gloom of profound melancholy. The man of feminine softness and emotionality was not the man to walk with firm step and stoical composure through the ter- rors and darkness of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. He was still in an early stage of this appalling journey when, in the week immediately following his mother's interment, he gave instruction for the will, — with its legacy of £7,000 to the Greek boy (Mcolo Giraud), and its provision for his own interment by the side of his dog. Boatswain, " in the vault of the garden of Newstead, without any ceremony or burial-service whatever ; and with its codicil enjoining that his body should on no account be removed from the vault, and providing that " in case any of his successors within the entail (from bigotry or otherwise) should think proper to re- move his carcass, such proceeding should be attended by for- feiture of the estate, which, in such case, should go to the tes- tator's sister, the Honorable Augusta Leigh and her heirs on similar conditions." The day on which he gave the first instructions for this wUl was the day on which he wrote to Dallas, "It is strange that I look on the skuUs which stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, but I cannot strip the features of those I have Imown of their fleshy covering, even in idea, without a hideous sensa- tion ; but the worms are less ceremonious." Two months later he is dating the first of the poems to " Thyrza" (Octo- ber 11, 1811) ; and the dolefiil letter to Dallas (October 11, 1811) ; and the Epistle to a Friend (beginning "Oh, banish care" — October 11, 1811), with the frantic threats and hysterical foolishness of its concludiug verses ; and the six concluding stanzas of the second canto of the "Pilgrim- age," the last of them being also dated October 11, 1811, whilst the third and fourth of the same stanzas (Stanzas xcv. and xcvi., of Canto H.) are part of the outpouring of song to Thyrza, — 162 THE EEAL LORD BYKON. " Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one I Whom youth and youth's affections bound to me ; Who did for me what none beside have done, Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee. What is my being? thou hast ceased to be ! Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home. Who mourns o'er hours which we no more shall see — Would they had never been, or were to come ! Would he had ne'er returned to find fresh cause to roam ! " Oh ! ever loving, lovely, and beloved ! How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past. And clings to thoughts now better far removed 1 But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last. All thou could'st have of mine, stern Death ! thou hast : The parent, friend, and now the more than friend ; Ne'er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast, And grief with grief continuing still to blend. Had snatch'd the little joy that life had yet to lend." Why Byron selected the 11th of October in preference to any other day for the date to be assigned to the letter and sev- eral pieces of song, the writer of this page can offer no sug- gestion unless it may be assumed that the 11th of October was chosen because it was the last day of his hterary labors at Newstead, — the day of drawing together the threads of sorrowful thought and solitary effort — before he went to Cambridge and London. It is not to be supposed that so much work of brain and heart and pen was accomplished on one day. It is, however, only reasonable to suspect that lit- erary mystification — a game in which Byron deHghted — was one, if not the only, object of the fictitious dating. After spending something more than ten weeks at New- stead in sad seclusion, Byron went to Cambridge, where (on the 29th of October) he wrote Tom Moore a letter on the subject of the Irish poet's reasonable demand for some Mnd of satisfaction for the ridicule put upon him in the " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." From Cambridge he went to St. James' Street, London, and stayed there tiU he re- turned to Newstead for the Christmas holidays, when he entertained Hodgson and Harness in the rooms, whose crim- son hangings and cheerful fires caused Harness soon to lose " the melancholy feehng of being domiciled in the wing of an extensive ruin." Of the weeks spent in London (where "CHILDE HAROLD." 163 Byron used his club, " The Alfred," to which he had been elected during his absence in Greece) the most memorable incident was the dinner (a par tie carree) at Sam Rogers' table, where the author of " Childe Harold " met his host, Moore and Thomas Campbell for the first time ; — the dinner at which Byron, to the surprise of his three companions who had heard nothing of his eccentric diet, declined the banker's fish and meat and wine, and, in default of biscuits and soda- water, stayed his hunger with potatoes and vinegar. At Newstead the poet and his two guests, Hodgson and Harness, spent the hours of their intercourse chiefly indoors, in literary work and literary chat, the weather of the singularly dark and dreary season affording them no inducement to leave rooms ample enough for the mild exercise of carpet-walking. Ris- ing late the trio went to bed late ; and after a lapse of more than half a century, Harness remembered how on several occasions their more serious conversation, turning on ques- tions of religion, gave him opportunities for observing how strongly and lamentably the extreme Calvinism of the poet's early religious training in Scotland had affected his regard for the principles of Christianity; — the chief result of the discipline being " a most miserable prejudice, which appeared to be the only obstacle to his hearty acceptance of the Gospel." There was of course nothing in the poet's way of entertaining the young Cantab, who was reading hard for his degree and holy orders, to afford a color of probability to the strange tales told in later time of Byron's wild and voluptuous life in the halls of his ancestors, — tales for which the merry doings in the May, 1809, were less accountable than the fictions of " Childe Harold." It must, however, be con- ceded that, if Harness could have looked beneath the decorous surface of life at the Abbey, he would have seen one or two things to disprove in his old school-mate's domestic arrange- ments. To justify its title this book must glance for a moment at unedifying circumstances that will jar rudely against the feehngs of readers who would prefer to think of the poet during his grief for the vanished Thyrza, or, at least, so soon after its subsidence, as indifferent to the charms of ordinary womankind. Paphian girls, with natty caps and 164 THE REAL LORD BYRON. bright ribbons on their eervUe heads, still sung and smiled in the galleries of the Abbey mansion, one of whom (to use Moore's words) " had been supposed to stand rather too high in the favor of her master " ; and the Christmas hohdays were scarcely over when this young serving-woman and one of her companions were sent off to their relations in consequence of acta of levity and disloyalty duly proved agaiust them. To Moore, holding the views of his generation on domestic morals, which fortunately are not the views of decent people of the present age, this affair was remarkable only for the degree to which " the young peer allowed the discovery of the culprit's misbehavior to affect his mind." After speaking of his weakness in respect to these faithless young women as " a two months' weakness," Byron adds vehemently in a letter to Hodgson, "I have one request to make, which is, never mention a woman again in any letter to me, or even allude to the existence of the sex " ; the fervor and extravagance of the entreaty showing that even in so discreditable a business Byron was more influenced by sentiment than most young men would have been. On the 27th of February, 1812, just eleven days after the date of the last-mentioned letter to Hodgson, the young peer delivered his maiden speech in the House of Lords in the debate on the Nottingham Frame-breaking Bdl, — a speech that made a favorable impression on the crowded assembly, that had been brought together not more by the importance of the subject under discussion than by desire to see the poet, whose verse and travels had already made him an in- teresting personage. Having prepared himself for the essay, by Avriting his oration with care, as he had been wont in his boyhood to prepare for the Harrow " declamations," he entered the House with sentiments worthy of consideration, and, on rising to his feet, he soon made it obvious he would fad neither from want of elocutionary address nor from want of presence of mind. There was a generous disposition in the auditors to give him an encouraging reception and a full meed of applause ; and he at least proved himself not unde- serving of their indulgence. If not a success, the speech was so nearly successful that the orator left the House with "CHILDE HAEOLD." 165 the elation of triumph. Lord Eldon and Lord Harrowby had paid him the compliment of answering his arguments ; Lord Holland and Lord Grenville had praised him in their speeches, — and commended him still more cordially in private chat. Whilst Lord Holland said, " You'll beat them all if you persevere " ; Lord Grenville's complaisance went to the length of saying, that, in their construction, some of the maiden orator's periods resembled Burke's. Sir Francis Burdett declared it " the best speech by a Lord siace the ' Lord knows when ' " ; — a compliment that delighted the Lord of Newstead, though it came from the " general foot- ball, kicked at by all and owned by none " ! Meeting Dallas in the passage to the Great Chamber with an umbrella in his right hand, Byron exclaimed, joyfully, " What ! give your friend your left hand upon such an occasion " ? To Hodgson he wrote, " I have had many marvellous eulogies repeated to me since, in person and by proxy, from divers persons ministerial — yea, ministerial." No wonder that he was delighted with the stir and approving hum of the House, which he had entered three years before without an introducer. No longer faltering in the choice of his party, he threw himself into the arms of the opposition, and was welcomed to Holland House, Melbourne House and aU " the best Whig houses." Having made his dihut in " the Lords " to his own con- tentment, though scarcely to the satisfaction of his most sanguine admirers, BjTon made a second essay to achieve parliamentary distinction on April 21, 1812, in the debate on the Earl of Donoughmore's motion for a Committee on the Roman Catholic Claims, but without placing himself higher in the opinion of the peers, or in the regard of poli- ticians outside the hereditary chamber. It was felt that his manner was too theatrical and " stagey," and that the effect of his fine voice was diminished by " the chanting tone " in which he delivered his periods ; — the same tone that had so disagreeable an effect in his recitations of poetry. Poets are seldom good reciters of poetry, from the disposition to "sing" what they ought only to " say " ; and in this respect Byron was a flagrant offender against elocutionary art. Later in 166 THE REAL LOED BYEON. the session, the poet was at the meeting of the opposition peers, sitting next the Duke of Grafton who, in reply to his question " What is to be done next ? " begged him to wake the Duke of Norfolk," — snoring away in his seat. Two days after the poet's maiden speech in " the Lords " appeared " Childe Harold." For a month early sheets of the poem had been in the hands of a few favored persons, — poets of the first rank and people of the highest fashion. A few copies had also been distributed in confidence to critics, who could be greatly powerful in giving the work immediate popularity. Rogers had received his early copy in January, and, pleased with the compliment of the gift, he had for weeks been telling the dramng-rooms of " the great " what a treat was in store for them. " It was," says Moore, " in the hands of Mr. Rogers I first saw the sheets of the poem, and glanced hastily over a few of the stanzas which he pointed out to me as beautiful." Lady Caroline Lamb, then in the zenith of her fashionable celebrity, thus got a view of the poem, — not in manuscript (as countless writers have asserted on the authority of the lady herself, who after Byron's death wrote to Lady Morgan that Rogers "oiFered her the MS. of ' Childe Harold' to read"), but in the " early printed copy," lent her by Rogers, under strict seal of secrecy. Lady Caroline was deUghted, and went about her bright quarter of the town, telling every one she had seen the forthcoming poem and was " in the secret," though she was bound in honor to tell no one where or how she had seen the book. The novel or poem of which Lady Caroline spoke so highly could not fail to make a stir and run through editions in a single season. "I must see him, — I am dying to see him !" she exclaimed to Rogers, in her impatience to behold the new poet and hasten to her doleful fate. " He has a club-foot, and bites his nails," said Rogers. "If he is as ugly as ^sop, I must know him," returned the impulsive lady of irresistible beauty, high birth, highest fashion. No wonder that the poem thus introduced to " the world, " — the poem that, coming into the world from the shop of the meanest bookseller and under the most inauspicious circum- stances, would have made its mark in two days, — was no "CHILDE HAEOLD." 167 sooner published (on February 29, 1812) by Mr. Murray, the rapidly rising publisher of " society," than it was seen everywhere, read by everybody. No wonder that the author " awoke one morning, and found himself famous ;" that states- men and philosophers wrote him grave utterances of their homage ; that the Queens of Society rained billets doux down upon him, that St. James' Street was blocked with car- riages pressing to his door ; that talk of "Byr'n, Byr'n," was audible over the babble of every dinner-table and salon of Mayfair. Marvellous stories were told in the literary cliques of the price paid for the poem by its publisher ; some of the gossips, who, of course, had their " information on the very best authority," asserting that Murray had paid at the rate of a guinea a line for the poem. The price really paid by the pubUsher was £600 (more than six shillings a line) ; and the poet, who, of course, could not descend so far from his nobility as to take a bookseller's money for his own use, gave the £600 to his poor relation and literary " devil," Dallas, who had negotiated the terms with Mr. Murray and seen the verses through the press with exemplary care and assiduity. At the present time one may well smile at the sensitiveness which made Byron, burdened with debts and clogged with mortgages, decline to spend on himself the earnings of his pen. A few years later he stood out stoutly for the extra shillings of the guineas from his pubhsher, counted them carefully, and pocketed them with complacence. But, in 1812, the world still held to antiquated notions touch- ing the pecuniary obligations of noblesse. A nobleman in those days would have flushed scarlet at a proposal that he should become a sleeping partner in a wine business or a Manchester warehouse, and would have put a buUet through his head rather than see his name figuring on the prospectus of a joint-stock company. It was a question whether a peer could take interest for money lying at his banker's " on de- posit " without sullying his nobility with a taint of trade. Whilst peers felt in this ■ft^ay, the populace had a strong opinion that it was unutterably " mean " for a lord to earn money in any way but fighting, gaming, political jobbery, the very highest official employment, and (through the me- 168 THE REAL LOED BYEON. dium of well-salaried agents) the clever management of land. Far from being peculiar on the point of dignity, Byron was not more certain than the ignoble journalists of his acquaintance that, as a peer, he could not honorably take to his own use the pecuniary fruits of his literary toil. No sooner had the tide turned against him, and the fashion of decrying him replaced the fashion of extolling him, than one of his fiercest assailants in the press charged him with making large sums of money by his pen, and spending the money so earned on his own pleasures. And this monstrous accusation seemed so sure to lower the poet in the esteem of all right-minded people that, whilst Dallas wrote a public denial and disproof of the calumny, Byron's friends went about the clubs and drawing-rooms assuring " the town " that he was quite incapable of such baseness of spirit and manners. " Childe Harold," the poem which people of fashion praised madly, was published on the same day as Lord G. Greville's poem which every one abused badly. On June 7, 1812, Lady Morgan, already " in the swim " of success and the brightness of butterfly celebrity, wrote to Mrs. Lefanu, " When I was in London, Lord G. Greville read me a poem of his own on the same subject as 'Childe Harold.' The rival lords published their poems on the same day ; the one is cried up to the skies, the other, alas, is cried down to " ! Lord G. Greville was the poet to " bite his nails" ; Byron had every reason to be proud and careful of the tips of his shapely fingers. On entering the great world with the glory of " Childe Harold " on his brow, the earnestness of it in his eyes, the melody of it flowing from his lips, Byron was in the perfec- tion of his personal attractiveness. He was not a handsome man, — he was beautiful. The glowing fire overpowered the brownness of his auburn hair, that gradually deepened almost to the deepest and richest brown of auburn, before it turned gray. The blue-gray eyes were eloquent of emotion through their long, fine, almost black lashes. The brow, over and about which the feathery auburn curls played in tiny wave- lets, was white as marble ; his usually pale complexion was "CHILDE HAEOLD." 169 delicate even to transparency, and at moments of joyous ex- citement was touched with the faintest sanguine glow. His mouth, with its white and dainty teeth, with its lips of femi- nine sweetness and something of feminine voluptuousness, and his delicately modelled chin, strong enough for fascina- tion, — far, far too weak for moral robustness, — were the lips and chin of a lovely, sensitive, capricious, charming woman, rather than the lips and chin of a man. It has been already remarked that his countenance, especially in the mouth and eyes, was remarkable for mobility and expres- siveness, — curiously in harmony with the quickness and vehemence of his emotional temperament. His long, broad throat, broad chest, and square set shoulders were, however, abundantly expressive of masculine strength. The shapeh- ness of his small, white hands did not escape observation at a time when it was the fashion for modish people to have models of their hands in marble on their drawing-room tables. In their smallness these delicate hands accorded with the poet's feet, that were not wanting in apparent shape- liness, though they suffered from the lameness which no one could exactly describe or satisfactorily account for. Sweeter, and richer, and more tender even than his verse, Byron's voice was, in his ordinary conversation, perhaps more musical than the voice of any other man or woman of his period. To the children of the houses where he was a most frequent and familiar guest he was the " gentleman who speaks like music." Enough of his looks, for the present. Let something be said of the manner of this young nobleman who had been trained in the parlors of a little country town for conquest in London drawing-rooms. Fortunately he has left us his own account of his bearing and demeanor toward men and women, at this point of his career, in the following stanzas of "Don Juan,"— " His manner was perhaps the more seductive Because he ne'er seem'd anxious to seduce; Nothing affected, studied, or constructive Of coxcombry or conquest : no abuse Of his attractions raarr'd the fair perspective, To indicate a CupidtQ^ broke loose, 170 THE EEAL LORD BTEOlf. And seem to say, ' ' Resist us if you can " — Which makes a dandy while it spoils a man. " They are wrong — that's not the way to set about it ; As, if they told the truth, could well be shown. . But, right or wrong, Don Juan was without it; In fact, liis manner was his own alone. Sincere he was, at least you could not doubt it, In listening merely to his voice's tone. The devil hath not in all his quiver's choice An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice. " By nature soft, his whole address held ofE Suspicion ; though not timid, his regard Was such as rather seemed to keep aloof, To shield himself than put you on your guard ; Perhaps 'twas hardly quite assured enough, But modesty's at times its own reward Like virtue ; and the absence of pretension Will go much farther than there's need to mention. " Serene, accomplish'd, cheerful, but not loud; Insinuating without insinuation ; Observant of the foibles of the crowd, Yet ne'er betraying this in conversation ; Proud with the proud, yet courteously proud. So as to make them feel he knew his station And theirs : — without a struggle for priority. He neither brooked nor claimed superiority. " That is, with men : with women he was what They pleased to make or take him for ; and their Imagination's quite enough for that : So that the outline's tolerably fair, They fill the canvas up — and 'verbum sat.' If once their phantasies be brought to bear Upon an object, whether sad or playful, They can transfigure brighter than a Raphael." A clever man's manner is always so nearly what he wishes it to be that one could rely on the general fidelity of this portraiture, even if its testimony were unsupported by other evidence. Fortunately, however, the poet's account of his own demeanor during his brief hour of social triumph is sustained by those of his biographers who knew him in this period, and half-a-hundred other persons of his acquaintance to whom we are indebted for gossip about him, — by Moore, Dallas, Hunt, Hobhouse, Harness, Lady Morgan, Lady Caroline Lamb, and a throng of other sure witnesses. By 171 the men and women who regarded him from a distance or knew him only slightly, he was thought undemonstrative and taciturn, at times even frigid. That even Lady Caroline was not insensible to the coldness and reserve of his demeanor at their first meeting appears from the passage of " Glenar- von " which says, " A studied courtesy in his manner, a proud humility, mingled with a certain cold reserve, amazed and repressed the enthusiasm his youth and misfortunes ex- cited." " Lord Byron," Lady Morgan wrote in June, 1812, " the author of delightful ' Childe Harold ' (which has more force, fire, and thought than anything I have read for an age) , is cold, silent, and reserved in his manners." But Lady Morgan had only met the poet in crowded rooms, and prob- ably had never even exchanged the courtesies of introduction with him. At most she was one of the multitudes of wor- shipful womankind who regarded the new poet with reveren- tial curiosity wherever he went. The remains of the poet's constitutional shyness were observable in his coldness and severe formality to strangers. These characteristics of his ordinary bearing in throngs were sometimes — perhaps too often for his advantage — mistaken for indications of pride, never for signs of insolence. In truth, though he was accused of superciliousness after he had begun to fall in social favor, and though he sometimes provoked the accusa- tion by his bearing to men whom he held in disesteem or aversion, nothing was more foreign than insolence to his demeanor or temper in the brief summer of his triumph in his native land. Appealing to Time the Avenger, after his banishment, he could exclaim with an unreproving con- science, — " If thou hast ever seen me too elate, Hear me not : but if calmly I have borne Good, and reserred my pride against the hate Which shall not whelm me, let me not have worn This iron in my soul in vain — shall they not mourn? " And whilst being himself courteously and modestly, though with guarded speech and a show of coldness to the many of whom he knew little or nothing at all, to the men with whoin 172 THE EEAL LORD BTEON. he was intimate, ByrOn was a very fountain of joyousness and genial humor, — brimming with quaint anecdote, bub- bling over with frolic and merriment, and not seldom running out into the practical jokes of a jolly school-boy. " Nothing, indeed," says Moore, " could be more amusing and delightful than the contrast which his manners afterward, when we were alone, presented to his proud reserve in the brilliant circle we had just left. It was like the bursting gayety of a boy let loose from school, and seemed as if there was no extent of fun or tricks of which he was not capable." With women he was what they pleased to make or take him for ? But he was most pleased with them when they treated him as nearly as possible like " a favorite and some- times froward sister." The reader may smile but must not laugh ; — it was as " a favorite and sometimes froward sister " that he was thought of and treated by Hobhouse and other men. What then more natural for him to like to be thought of and treated by women in the same way ? To be received by them on this footing, he would leave his bed early (say at 11 A.M.) so that he might breakfast with them, open their letters for them, chat with them, fondle their children in their boudoirs, for an hour or two at a time, before less privileged visitors dropped in for luncheon. It was in the character of candidate for the place of a sister in her affections that he sat for an entire hour with Lady Caroline Lamb, nursing her ladyship's babe aU the time, without speaking a word above a whisper lest the sleeping infant should be roused to con- sciousness. As "a favorite and sometimes froward sister" he hung about the Countess of Oxford's skirts, playing at odd minutes with her beautiful little girl, Charlotte, — precisely of the same age as Margaret Parker, when, as a school-boy, he loved his pretty cousin passionately. As the countess' sister and the little Lady Charlotte's aunt, he wrote the verses to lanthe, with "that eye, which wild as the gazelle's, Now brightly bold or beautifully shy, Wins as it wanders, dazzles where it dwells." If lanthe, in her innooenee, had put the forbidden questipij "CHILDE HAEOLD." 173 to her mother's sister, and asked, " Why to one so young his strain he would commend?" the unspoken answer would have been, " Because you remind me of my boyish passion for my cousin Margaret, of whom I thought tearfully, and wretch- edly, and yet not altogether unhappily, when I wrote my beautiful poetry to Thyrza." When a young man is allowed to play the part of a sister to a beautiful woman, the position is dangerous both to the one and the other. For the man, who is sympathized with and treated like a sister, whilst feel- ing and acting like one, may in a moment be stirred by mas- culine impulses to feel and act like a man, — in which case, he feels and acts like a man without self-control, and the woman remains what she has been all along — an excited and weak woman. One of the incidents of this London season (1812) was the poet's introduction to the greatest personage of the realm vice a person with a more august title, but now in retirement from illness. . At a ball given at a great house in July, where the poet was present, the Prince Regent declared the delight it would give him to number the author of " Childe Harold" amongst his personal acquaintance. Of course Byron was introduced to the prince, who was still smarting under the " Lines to a Weeping Lady," which the poet had thrown off in the previous March. Had he not attributed the anonymous lines to Tom Moore, His Royal Highness would have been less favorably disposed to their author, with whom he now held a long and animated conversation on poets and poetry, and more particularly Walter Scott's poetry, — a conversation that closed with the Regent's flat- tering expression of his desire to see his lampooner at Carlton House. It shows how manageable a creature Byron was that, in his delight at the prince's blandishments, he put his auburn curls into powder and his person into a court-suit, for the purpose of attending a levee, which was postponed at the last moment. If the powder had not been decidedly unbecoming to his style of beauty, the poet would, perhaps have grown gray again in homage to the guilty father of the weeping lady. As it was, the accidental postponement of the ceremony, personal vanity, and self-respect saved Byron 174 THE REAL LOED BYRON. from the mistake of going whither he should not have thought of going so soon after the first publication of the notorious verses. Another incident of the season was the poet's attendance, in May, 1812, at the execution of Bellingham in front of Newgate. Coming to the Old Bailey about 3 A.M., with his old school-fellows, Bailey and John Madocks, he found the house, from which they were to witness the ghastly spec- tacle, not yet open. Whilst Mr. Madocks was rousing the inmates of the house, Byron sauntered up the street with Mr. Bailey, when his compassion was stirred by the sight of a wretched woman lying on some door-steps. The act of charity to which pity moved him had a startling and painful result ; for, instead of taking the shillings he oiFered her, the miserable creature sprung to her feet, and, uttering a yell of drunkard's derision, began to imitate his lame gait. Byron said nothing either to the woman or the friend on whose arm he was leaning, but Bailey felt the violent trembling of his companion's arm, as they walked back to the house. Another story is told by Moore in illustration of the degree to which the poet's lameness was noticeable to casual passers, and his annoyance at the attention they paid to his infirmity. "This way, my lord," cried a link-boy, as Byron was stepping, with Rogers, to his carriage, from the door-way of the house where they had shown themselves at a ball. "He seems to know you," said Rogers. " Know me ! " was the bitter reply ; " every one knows me, — I am deformed ! " Apart from such annoyances, from which there was no escape, and the annoyance that came to him from the com- parative failure of his second essay in parliamentary debate, Byron could, however, at the close of the London season, review the previous five months with unqualified complacence. To be really worth having, success should come early, before time and trouble have embittered the feelings and blunted the appetite for praise. The author (whether he be peer or commoner) who becomes the idol of society in his twenty- fifth year, and, "going everywhere," never joins a brilliant throng without knowing that every individual of it has read "CHILDE HAEOLD." 175 his book with enthusiastic admiration, is an enviable mortal, though he dare not satisfy the cravings of his hunger for food, and, whilst overflowing with merriment and frolic, is persuaded that he is " one of the most -melancholy wretches in existence." Having spent the London season of 1812 in the brightest circles of fashion and dignity, Byron spent the closing weeks of summer and the autumnal months at Cheltenham (never in higher fashion) , and in visits to some of the best houses of the country, — the rural homes of the Earl of Jersey, the Marquis of Lansdowne, and other personages of light and leading. Making his head-quarters at Cheltenham, where for several weeks he had a pleasant loitering time with the Jerseys, Melbournes, Cowpers, Hollands, Rawdoris, and Oxfords ; and, returning once and again from the country- houses to his lodgings at the Gloucestershire spa, he passed the greater part of his time there till the end of November, — reading, scribbling letters, writing good poetry and bad poetry (the verse of the latter sort comprising the trumpery satire on " The Waltz," which he had no sooner published anonymously than he disavowed it by means disagreeably near falsehood), and meditating on a disappointment that wlU be mentioned more particularly in the next chapter. And how about the pecuniary affairs of the peer, who, living lavishly, had no sufficient revenue for the payment of the interest of his debts ? Soon after his mother's death he received from her trustee, Baron Clerk, the residue of the price paid for the Gight estate, — something under £4,000 ; a sum that enabled the poet to pay a few of his most urgent creditors. Coming to him at a moment of divers difficulties, this modest inheritance was a great relief. But it did not lessen the necessity for measures that would give him an adequate and sure income, after releasing him from money- lenders and clamorous tradesmen. And now that his literary triumph and social success had afforded him superior titles to respect, he could with calmness and discretion think of selling the picturesque estate, to which he had clung for honor's sake, so long as he had no higher position than that of the chief of an impoverished territorial family. The 176 THE REAL LORD BYEON. man who had become famous no longer needed some old ruins and a few farms in Nottinghamshire as evidences of his respectability within the lines of his order. If the New- stead estate could be sold for £100,000, and so many thou- sands more as would wipe out his debts, he would stand more creditably in the eyes of the world than he now stood as the owner of a noble park and ruinous mansion, without the means to live in them. With the interest of money at five per cent., he would have £5,000 of sure yearly revenue, and retain the still unproductive Rochdale property, to save him from the discredit of being a landless lord. Mr. Hanson had for years been imploring the young lord to take this view of his position ; but the lawyer begged and preached in vain, till his client could with reason value himself on his achievements rather than on being the Lord of Newstead Abbey. Early in the autumn of 1812 Newstead was offered for sale at Garraways, when it was " bought in," £90,000 being the highest offer made in the auction-room for the property. Soon, however, Mr. Claughton came forward with an offer that even exceeded the vendor's hopes. " You heard," Byron wrote from Chelten- ham to his friend, William Bankes, "that Newstead is sold — the sum £140,000; £60,000 to remain in mortgage on the estate for three years, paying interest, of course. Eoch- dale is also likely to do well — so my worldly matters are mending." By this contract it was stipulated that the estate should remain in the vendor's hands till the purchaser should fulfil his part of the agreement, and that in case of the buyer failing in that respect within a given time he should forfeit £25,000, and the bargain become void. Two years later the forfeiture was paid by Mr. Claughton in consequence of his inability to complete the purchase ; and the estate continued with Byron. Enabling him to pay some of his most pressing debts, the £25,000 also enabled him to live in comparative freedom from pecuniary anxieties till his marriage with a lady, whose fortune, which had been egregiously magnified by rumor, brought his creditors down upon him at a moment when the concessions of his marriage-settlement had seriously lessened his ability to satisfy the desire for immediate payment. "CHILDE HAEOLD." 177 Whilst the fashionable drawing-rooms were applauding the force, fire, and melody of " Childe Harold," the far larger multitudes of thoughtful and devout people living in com- parative humility outside the uttermost breast-works of " society " were considering the religious sentiments of the poem with alarm and abhorrence, and coming to the conclu- sion that the author was destined to perdition, and that, if his pernicious influence were not counteracted by bold and timely denunciations of his impiety, he would lead countless thousands of light-headed people to the doom of eternal pun- ishment. It is significant of the manners of the period that, whilst these earnest people were quick to detect the poet's infidelity and exclaim against it, they do not appear to have been greatly shocked by his account of his naughty life at Newstead before he started on his travels. The account was in truth too accordant with their conceptions of lordly living, and also with their experience of the less exalted ways of human life, for it to occasion them either astonishment or anxiety. But it was a new and terrifying thing for a poet to write of matters pertaining to religion in the style of the third and fourth stanzas of the second canto : — " Son of the Morning, rise ! approach you here I Come — but molest not yon defenceless urn : Look on this spot — a nation's sepulchre ! Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn. Even gods must yield — religions take their turn : 'Twas Jove's — 'tis Mahomet's — and other creeds Will rise with other years, till man shall learn Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds ; Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built on reeds. " Bound to the earth, he lifts his eye to heaven — Is't not enough, unhappy thing ! to know Thou art? Is this a boon so kindly given, That being, thou would'st be again, and go, Thou know'st not, reck'st not to what region, so On earth no more, but mingled with the skies? Still wilt thou dream on future joy and woe? Eegard and weigh yon dust before it flies : That little urn saith more than thousand homilies." Though he was far from imagining what a storm of repro- bation these words would bring upon him in the course of a 178 THE EEAL LOED BYEON. few months, and still further from conceiving that the outcry against them would grow louder and fiercer throughout suc- cessive years, Byron had not been many days at Cheltenham before he heard the first sounds of the rising tempest. For the moment he could smile at the letters and verses that came to him through Mr. Murray's office from good-natured cor- respondents " anxious for his conversion from certain infidel- ities," and could write with more flippancy than good taste to his publisher on September 14, 1812, " The other letters are from ladies, who are welcome to convert me when they please ; and if I can discover them, and they be young; as they say they are, I could convince them of my devotion." Nine months later, when the protest had been steadily grow- ing more audible, and the importance of the protesting voices had become more apparent, he wrote in a vein to the editor of "The Quarterly," "To your advice on religious topics, I shall equally attend. Perhaps the best way wiU be by avoiding them altogether. The already published objection- able passages have been much commented upon, but certainly they have been rather strongly interpreted. I am no bigot to infidelity, and did not expect that, because I doubted the immortality of man, I should be charged with denying the existence of a God. It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in comparison with the mighty whole, of which it-is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be over- rated." When Gifford, whom the young poet regarded with " veneration," and used to term his " father " in literary matters, urged him to be cautious, and spoke of rocks and dangers ahead, Byron could not doubt that he was sailing in peril/ous waters. And as the months went by, he saw more and more clearly the wisdom of his " father's " counsels. Of all the many strange mistakes made by clever men about Byron's career none is stranger than the error of sup- posing that the storm that drove him from his native land was brewed in a single hour, and that it was altogether due to the caprice of fashion and society's fantastic readiness to visit the sins of many upon one, and drive that one forth into the desert as a scape-goat. The sentiment, before which the 179 poet retired in early manhood, almost in' his boyhood, into exile for his remaining days, was a sentiment of slow growth and diverse causes. Not the least powerful of those causes was the general social resentment at his religious opinions, and this cause began to operate before the first edition of " ChUde Harold " was exhausted. No greatly celebrated man ever had a shorter term of unqualified and unbroken applause. The unanimity of praise was the afiFair of a single day and a single class. It can scarcely be said to have lasted even in that one class for twenty-four hours. The morning's fame, of which he used to speak, had lost some- thing of its whiteness before the evening. Even from the outset of his career, praise and dispraise joined hands to make him in the same moment famous and infamous. 180 THE EEAL LOED BTEON. CHAPTER Xni. THE ErSTAL COUSINS-IN-LAW. It was a mad world Byron entered at twenty-four years of age, with the honor of his poem fresh upon him ; — a wild world strangely fascinating and perilous to the sensitive and excitable young man who, with his reputation for gallantry and genius, his travels in Greece and songs to Eastern beau- ties, knew no more of fashionable society and the " high life," than any son of an English parsonage who, during his edu- cation at school and college, has spent his holidays in the parlors of a small provincial town. In his later time he used in his bitterness to declare that in domestic morality Venice would endure comparison with London, and Italy with England ; and if any reli&nce may be put on the chroniclers of English " society " during the regency, his words were only by a few degrees less truthful than severe. It was a wild world, honoring women for their beauty provided it was mated with loose principle, and caring little for womanly virtue that was unattended with personal attrac- tiveness. And of all its wild people none was wUder or more capricious, lighter or more wilful, than Lady Caroline Lamb — the Mrs. Felix Lorraine of "Vivian Grey," the Lady Monteagle of " Venetia." Vivian thought Mrs. Felix Lor- raine " a darh riddle." In respect to her person and charac- ter, the lady was, however, a light riddle. Her eyes, indeed, were dark and her countenance (in repose) was grave ; but her complexion was fair, her figure slight, her hair fawn- flaxen shot with gold. Writers by the score have called her tresses golden, — but they were golden with a difference. Byron rewarded her for writing a book to prove he was Satanic, by telling Medwin, with a view to publication, that she had scarcely " any personal attractions," and that " her THE EIVAL COUSINS-IN-LAW. 1^1 figure, though genteel, was too thin to be good, and wanted that roundness which elegance and grace would vainly sup- ply." Byron, however, thought better of the figure in 1812, and he never denied its possessor the merits of " an infinite vivacity and an imagination heated by novel-reading." Pressed upon the point, he would have admitted, with her most inti- mate friend of the literary cliques. Lady Morgan, that she had " a voice soft; low, caressing, that was at once a beauty and a charm, and worked much of that fascination which was peculiarly hers." Her voice and all her other charms were at their perfection when, in her twenty-seventh year, she employed them to enthrall Byron, only twenty-four years old. Now that fifty and more years have passed over her grave, and all who cared for her have gone hence, it is time to speak the truth — gently but fearlessly — of this poor Queen of Society. So much has been said insincerely of the harm Byron did her, it is well at length to hint that there is an- other side to the account, — the harm she did him. " In sf)ite of all the absurdity" of her behavior to Byron, Rogers believed her innocent. Of what ? Surely not innocent of acting in a way to justify ordinary observers of her conduct in thinking her guilty of everything of which she was sus- pected. And in regard to such a question, it should be remembered that the greater part of the social injury comes from appearances. Apart from the few persons to whom the reality would be especially injurious, the show of wicked'- ness is every whit as hurtful as the reality. Moreover, what is to be said of the self-respect, the sense of dignity, the honor of a woman — descended from a half a hundred noble houses, married to the finest-natured gentleman of her time, and having children to think for — who wantonly put herself in need of such a witness to character as Sam Rogers? More than enough having been said of her wit and genius, the time has come to speak — not harshly, but soberly and truthfully — of her arrant silliness. Though they contain a few redeeming passages, her three novels — "Glenarvon," " Graham Hamilton," and " Ada Reis " — are the tales of an unusually foolish lady, notwithstanding the care expended by skilful "hacks " in dressing them for the press. But writers 182 THE REAL LOED BYRON. being often better than their books, it is more generous to the lady to judge her by her letters. " The only question," she wrote, at a moment when social disgrace was upon her in a form that should have startled and scared the lightest women out of habitual levity, " I want you to solve is, shall I go abroad? shall I throw myself upon those who no longer want me, or shall I live a good sort of a half-kind of life in some cheap street a little way off, viz. , the City Road, Shoreditch, Camberwell, or upon the top of a shop, — or shall I give lectures to little children, and keep a seminary, and thus earn my bread ? ... or shall I fret, fret, fret, and die ; or shall I be dignified and fancy myself as Richard the Second did when he picked the nettle up — upon a thorn ? " This to Lady Morgan, when Medwin's book and its immediate consequences had compelled the writer's superb and royal- hearted husband, for his honor's sake, to put her from him in the gentlest and tenderest way ! It is simply appalling to turn over Lady Caroline Lamb's letters, and remember that the giddy, light-hearted creature — devoid alike of mental force and moral fibre — was one of those personages whom Lord Beaconsfield used to style "stateswomen," and would have been a power in the government of the country, had she lived on good terms with her lord tUl he became pre- mier ! The woman, so weak in everything but beauty, and tem- per, and vivacity, and drawing-room tact, could, however, be irresistibly charming. Her role in the wild world of which she was a queen was that of the saucy, freakish, impulsive, gushing creature, startling her friends at every turn by her eccentricities and relieving the dulness sf every assembly by doing or saying what no one else could do or say with an air of good breeding. Falling into a fit of fury about nothing at her wedding, she stormed at the officiating bishop, tore her dress to pieces, and was carried to her carriage nearly un- conscious. The lisp of her tongue gave a piquancy to her startling words. " Gueth how many pairth of thilk thtock- ingth I have on, " she said, at a ball, to Plarness (a rather seri- ous young Cantab, reading for "Orders"). Seeing by his blush that he could not answer the nice question, she an- THE RIVAL COUSINS-IN-LAW. 183 swered it for him by saying "Thicth," as she raised her skirts above a pretty ankle, and pointed to a tiny foot. At Mel- bourne House this daughter of the third Earl of Bessborough used to amuse herself in the drawing-rooms by playing ball with her pages. One of these boys having thrown a detonat- ing squib into the fire, she punished him by hurling a ball at his head, so as to draw blood from his temple. " Oh, my lady, you have killed me ! " exclaimed the childish servitor ; whereupon the lady rushed into the hall, screaming " O God ! I have murdered the page ! " in so loud a voice that the words were heard in the street and were fruitful of half- a-hundred wild rumors about the town of the horrible tragedy at Melbourne House. The temper and character of this strange woman's career were given by Byron in a single line of " Don Juan." She played the devU, and then wrote a novel. When Byron made her acquaintance she was in the earlier stage of her story. Just then, and till he had torn himself from her, it was enough for her to play the devQ. Madly vain, incessantly thinking of herself, and seizing every occasion to talk of herself, this absurd but delightful creature believed that no man could see her without admiring her, know her without loving her. Taking seriously the compliments they paid her in common with hundreds of other women, she flattered herself that Rogers and Moore were her lovers, — the cynical bachelor-banker who loved no one ; and the clever little Irishman who, ready at any mo- ment to sing his sentimental ballads to any woman of fashion till his eyes brimmed with tears of emotion, loved no one but his Bessie. As soon as she had looked through the early copy of " Childe Harold," she made up her mind that Byron, even though he bit his naUs and were as ugly as ^sop, should also love her. They first met at a ball, where she saw "the women suffocating him" and "throwing up their heads at him," — a ball given by Lady Westmoreland, who Cas Lady Caroline assured Lady Morgan) had known the poet in Italy, — a country, by the way, in which he had not then set foot. It indicates the kind of homage already rendered to Byron by the highest womankind of the land that, instead of bringing him up to be introduced to Lady Caroline, Lady 184 THE EEAL LOED BTEON. Westmoreland led her up to be introduced to him. On coming within a few paces of the young man, Lady Caroline Lamb eyed him steadily, and, without speaking a word or making movement of reverence or courtesy to him, turned away from him abruptly. "I looked earnestly at him," she told Lady Morgan, " and turned on my heel." A pretty scene, — and one that of course made a stir in the throng of suffocating worshippers. On reaching home she made this note of her opinion of the new poet and hero in these words, " Mad — bad — and dangerous to know." The words would have been better placed had she written them against her own name. If it is bad for a woman to be the slave of caprice and a violent temper, and to be disloyal to a royal- natured husband, she was bad. To palliate her misconduct, her most strenuous and charitable apologists have insisted on her madness. As for the danger of knowing her, it was an ill day for Byron (himself a weak and froward woman, in one-half of his nature) when he yielded to the charms of the lady who was at best a sensitive and wayward woman. Two or three days after this scene at Lady Westmoreland's ball, in March, 1812, Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb met at Holland House in the afternoon, when Lady Holland said, "I must present Lord Byron to you." — "That offer was made to you before ; may I ask tvhy you rejected it ? " said Byron. If the lady had answered the question truly she would have said, " Because I thought it the best way of piquing you into loving me." The next day, heated and muddy from a gallop in the park (she rode as boldly as she talked, and far better than she wrote) she was chatting with Rogers and Moore at Melbourne House in her bespattered riding-habit, when, on the announcement of Byron's arrival, she "flew out of the room " (as she told Lady Morgan) "to wash herself." On her return to the callers, Rogers said, "Lord Byron, you are a happy man. Lady Caroline has been sitting here in all her dirt with us, but when you were announced, she flew to beautify herself." To humor the poet, who delighted in children, and to. pose herself in the most amiable manner before him, Lady Caroline sent for one of her ehildren ; and Byron did not leave till he had nursed the sleep- THE RIVAL COXJSESrS-IX-LA-W. 185 ing infant for more than an hour. Henceforth Lord Byron was for the next year or so an almost daily visitor (when in town) at Melbourne House, which was just then a place of daily meeting for the beau monde, for wa,ltzes, and quadrilles. Cherishing political ambition and seeing in a close alliance with the Lambs the shortest and surest path to political suc- cess, Byron became the tame cat — a very dangerous tame cat — of the great home of Whiggism. To Lady Caroline he was soon as a sister, — no less so than to Lady Oxford, a few months later. The mutual attachment of Lady Caroline and the young poet, who had learned drawing-room manners at Southwell, was all that aplatonic love should be, — fervid enough for jealousy on either side ; enthusiastic with a secret anticipation of the coming embarrassments by both parties ; confidential in the highest degree with reserves on both sides ; and so obviously innocent that people soon began to whisper that mischief would come of it. These remarks are of course equally applicable to the young man's platonic friend- ship with the Countess of Oxford. Every one was sure there was " nothing wrong " in these friendships, but if people had been quite confident the friendships were " alto- gether right," so much would not have been said about them. One of the first persons to feel that trouble might come of Lady Caroline's vehement liking for the young poet was her ladyship's mother-in-law, who spoke to Byron on the subject with the frankness she was entitled by her years and position to use to so youthful and inexperienced a person, of whose amiability and goodness of principle she had a high opinion ; — for, at the beginning of the present century, the fact of his having amused himself, as Byron was believed to have amused himself at Newstead, was not regarded as any serious evidence against his domestic morals, and absolutely no evi- dence whatever that he would play the libertine to women of his own social degree. "You need not fear me," Byron is said to have answered to the lady, whom he regarded with filial reverence, and even spoke of as his "second mother" (no great compliment, by the way, to Lady Melbourne) ; " I do not pursue pleasure like other men : I labor under an 186 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. incurable disease and a blighted heart. Believe me, she is safe with nae ! " Lady Melbourne's apprehensions were not, however, completely dissipated by her protigSs assurance, though she had implicit confidence in his kindness, rectitude, honor. Anyhow, she thought the future Lady Melbourne would be safer if Byron were married, and married also within the lines of the Lamb family. With a clever idoliz- ing wife to look after him, so gentle and affectionate a young man would be happier and less likely to deviate from his present virtuous course to the ways of Paphian girls. If he married the future Lord Melbourne's first cousin his intimacy with the future Lady Melbourne would be so much a matter of course that no one would gossip about it maliciously. As a member of the Melboui-ne connection, indeed of the Melbourne family, he would have a strong domestic interest in the social honor and credit of the Lambs. If the young lord, who wrote such charming poetry and had given promise of becoming an able debater, could only be led into loving and marrying her niece, he would have a wife with better opportunities for observing his friendship with Lady CaroHne, and keeping it within proper limits, than any Lady Byron, taken outside the Lamb family. Lady Melbourne had reason for confidence that her niece — a young woman with a high reputation for dutifulness and other virtues — would act with her in keeping Lady Caroline in order, and be abundantly grateful to her for helping her to so good a match. ' What more natural project for the lady — a woman, and, therefore, a match-maker ; a mother, and, therefore, anxious for her son's welfare; a " states woman, and, therefore, with a taste for managing other people's affairs — to entertain for the good of her family." And who was the niece? — Anne Isabella (familiarly styled Annabella) Milbanke, the only child of Lady Mel- bourne's brother, Sir Ealph Milbanke, of Seaham county Durham, and Halnaby county York, who was just twenty years of age (three years and eight months Byron's junior), when her aunt first entertained this scheme for her matrimo- nial settlement. That the match would be a good one for Byron either in money or rank, Lady Melbourne neither THE RIVAL COUSINS-IN-LAW. 187 imagined nor tried to persuade herself. She was looking out for her niece rather than for him, and for herself, her hus- band, and her son, more than for her niece. One of the wildly wrong notions about Byron is that he married Miss Milbanke for her money ; that he sought her out because she was an heiress. She was not an heiress at the time he proposed to her. She had only a modest, though sufficient, provision for a young lady of her rank. There is in Medwin's " Conversations " an absurd story, that on first meeting Miss Milbanke at a London rout in 1812, Byron mistook her from the simplicity of her costume for a humble companion, when Moore enlightened him on the point by saying, " She is a great heiress ; you had better marry her, and repair the old place, Newstead." The story is fictitious in every particular. Byron first met her under Lady Mel- bourne's wing, well knowing her to be Lady Melbourne's niece ; she had at that time no reputation for wealth ; and instead of wishing Byron to. marry her, Moore was one of the poet's several friends who thought her no fit match for him. These are the facts of Miss Milbanke 's position. She was the only child of a baronet of fairly good estate ; but Sir Ealph Milbanke had only a life interest in the property which, on his death without mal6 issue, would pass to the heir under the entail. He was in no position to endow his daughter largely, for he had crippled himself with election- eering expenses. Under these circumstances Miss Milbanke's assured fortune was £10,000 — and no more. From her parents she looked for nothing of importance, apart from this sum. She had, however, "expectations" from her uncle, Lord Wentworth, who, at the time of Byron's first oiFer to her, was sixty-seven years of age and likely to live for many years. She was not this uncle's only niece ; and as he had the free disposal of his estate, it was conceivable that, even if she survived him, she would be none the richer for his death. Dying in 1782, one of Lord Wentworth's sisters left a son, Nathaniel Curzon (third Baron Scarsdale, who died in November, 1856) ; a second son, William Curzon, killed at Waterloo ; and Sophia Caroline Curzon (Viscountess Tam- worth) , who died in 1824. Thus at the time of Byron's first 188 THE REAL LOED BTEON. offer to Miss Milbanke, Lord Went worth had two nephews and two nieces. He was known to have natural children whom he regarded affectionately. The expectations Miss Milbanke had from her uncle were not likely to inspire Lord Byron with a mercenary desire to capture her. So much for her money. Now for her rank. On Lord Wentworth's death, in 1815, the viscounty of Wentworth became extinct, whilst the barony fell into abeyance between his lordship's sister, Lady Milbanke, and his nephew, the Hon. Nathaniel Curzon, afterwards third Lord Scarsdale, and it was not till this Lord Scarsdale's death in November, 1856, that the poet's widow became Baroness Wentworth. It cannot be supposed that Byron was impelled to Miss Milbanke by regard for her uncertain prospect of a peerage, which did not come to her till thirty-two years had passed over his grave, — till a time when, had he survived, he would have been sixty-eight years old. So much has been said to magnify the wealth and grandeur of the lady whom he married, and said, moreover, for the sake of putting Byron under something more than a suspicion of mercenary and sordid motives, that it is well for people to remember how small her fortune was, and how remote her peerage, when he first sought her hand. Let it, also, be observed that Byron's first offer to Miss Milbanke was made at the time when Mr. Claughton's offer of £140,000 for Newstead gave him a good prospect of a sure income of £5,000 a year after the payment of his debts, without selling any part of his Kochdale estate, where things were again looking brighter. Consequently, the case of this proposal for marriage stands thus : A young peer of the realm, the idol of society, the greatest poet of his time, with £5,000 of yearly revenue (on the settlement of his affairs), an estate in land which is expected to yield him further in- come in a short time, and a pen soon to earn more than £2,000 a year, makes an offer of marriage to a baronet's daughter with £10,000 for her immediate fortune, a pros- pect of something more (not much) from her father, and indefinite " expectations " from a rich uncle, through whose death she has no hope of any considerable en- richment, so long as her mother (a hale woman, only THE RIVAL COUSt!irS-IN-LAW. 189 elxty-one years old) shall be living. And yet Byron has actually been accused of mercenary motives in this business. Can it be questioned that, had he been a fortune-hunter, Byron might have carried off the wealthiest heiress in the kingdom, when he asked a lady with £10,000 and shadowy " expectations " to become his wife ? Instead of being a good one, the match, from a pecuniary point of view, was a decid- edly bad one. Indeed, the badness of it was pressed upon his notice by several of his friends. In the course of events, had he lived happily with his wife, it would have proved a. fairly good match — though nothing more. On making his first offer, he could not calculate on Lord Wentworth dying in 1815, and leaving between £7,000 and £8,000 a year to his sister (Lady Milbanke) for life, with remainder to her chUd. On the appearance of Medwin's loose gossip. Hob- house might well be astounded at hearing that the marriage, which proved his friend's indifference to money at that early point of his career, had been a mercenary one. How often had Hobhouse to repeat that Byron did not marry for money ! a declaration which came from his lips whenever this mean- ness was charged in his hearing against the poet. In her book of strange misconceptions and delusions, Mrs. Beecher Stowe regards Miss Milbanke as a simple maiden of high degree, who, passing her life in stately seclusion and benevolent concern for the peasantry on her father's estate, entered womanhood with no experience of the world's wick- edness, and gave herself to her husband in ignorance of the sins of his youth. Having read " Childe Harold," and, like all the other ladies of the period, taken much of it as auto- biography, Miss Milbanke cannot have been unaware of the difference between his former life and her own. She knew the meaning of the verses about the Paphian girls. It cer- tainly was due to no want of frankness on his part, if she did not think him much worse than he really was. More- over, the morals of "county society" in Durham and York- shire at the beginning of the present century afforded a young lady of the highest quality ample opportunities for discover- ing there was a morality for men and a different morality for women of their degree. Instead of being shocked by " Childe 190 THE REAL LOKD BYEON. Harold," she admired the poem greatly ; and though she de- clined the poet's first offer, she was far from thinking him unfit to hold communion with a gentlewoman of her refine- ment. On the contrary, she refused him in so gentle and flattering a manner that he wished to be to her as a brother ; and he had little diflSiculty in persuading her to receive let- ters from him and to answer them with sisterly trustfulness. Perhaps it will surprise Mrs. Stowe to learn that Miss Milbanke's views of English life and character were not taken altogether from the habits of the Durham gentry and the manners of the poor on her father's estate. Though she was not so considerable a personage as her sister-in-law of Melbourne House, Lady Milbanke had her place in London society and came to town for the season ; and her only daughter saw as much of people of letters, art and science, if not of people of the highest fashion, as her cousins, the Lambs. Lady Milbanke's parties were in good repute ; and when she received her acquaintance, which was often, the visitor found people of mark in her drawing-rooms. Mrs. Siddons, Joanna Baillie, and. Maria Edgeworth, were her fa- miliar friends. If she had not been Lady Melbourne's niece. Miss Milbanke would have heard all about Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb, his doings and his worshippers, from her mother's guests, when all London was talking of the new poet and of the pains people were taking to make him a foolish one. Being Lady Melbourne's niece. Miss Milbanke, a young woman of abundant intelligence, knew well enough why her aunt was so desirous of seeing her Lady Byron. Without being beautiful, Miss Milbanke was by no means unattractive to those who were not repelled by her formality and coldness. Simple, unaffected, and more likely to think too much than too little of her dignity, she had the air of natural refinement rather than of fashion. Pier presence would have gained greatly in effectiveness by two or even three more inches in stature, but "her figure" (to use By- ron's own words) "was perfect for her height." Though her countenance was remarkable for the roundness, which suggested to Byron the pet-name of " Pippin " for her, it had a piquant and sometimes slily humorous expression. If they THE RIVAL COUSINS-IN-LAW. 191 were wanting in regularity, her features were delicate, femi- nine and intellectual. There was nothing in her face to in- dicate hardness of nature, unless it was the placid severity it could wear to those who were distasteful to her. She was known to be clever, and well-read, so far as the reading of gentlewomen went in the days of the blue-stockings. Camp- bell went much too far when he said that her poetry would endure comparison with her husband's. Her best verses just missed the goodness that would have qualified them to be compared with his worst verses. Two of the minor poems, however, of Mr. Murray's complete edition of Byron's works, were certainly of her writing. At the same time her slight- est and most most trivial essays in poetical composition were superior to the average poetry of the " Keepsakes " and other fashionable collections of " Vers de Societe!" In their ignorance of Byron, people have wondered how a woman, more remarkable for composure than loveliness, attracted Byron's attention ; and in their misinformation respecting her pecuniary worth, they have escaped from the diflficulty by assuming he was drawn to her by her money. In his knowledge of the poet, Harness suggested shrewdly that her coldness had a charm for him ; and there is sure evidence that the suggestion was in a degree a true one. From his knowledge of himself Byron knew that an air of reserve and even of frigidity to comparative strangers did not necessarily indicate coldness of heart. He was precisely the man to be piqued by coldness to curiosity about its cause, and a desire to overcome it. Lady Caroline Lamb began in the right way when she " turned on her heel " ; two days afterwards he asked for the reason of her conduct, and the next day he called upon her and made love to her. But though she was clever enough to see the right course, Lady Caroline Lamb had not self-control and strength enough to persist in it. There was little love between Miss Milbanke, who was by nature sincere even to faultiness, and her cousin's wife, who was by nature an actress, — an actress of a flashy and melo- dramatic kind, with all her high fashion. Whilst she affected to disdain her husband's cousin, as an inferior and lamenta- 152 THE REAL LORD BTKON. My rustic young person, Lady Caroline Lamb secretly feared her quiet manner, calm self-dependence, and unaffected contempt for the artifices and triumphs of fashionable woman- kind. Miss Milbanke thought Lady Caroline a silly creat- ure ; — she even said what she thought on this point. Two words expressed Miss MUbanke's estimate of her cousin-in- law : Beautiful silliness. Another name Miss MUbanke invented for her fashionable cousin-by-afiinity was. Fair- seeming Foolishness. And at least on one memorable occa- sion. Miss Milbanke told Lady Caroline that her affectation of a woe-begone, melancholy visage of Byronic grief marred the effect of her fascinating silliness. It was not long before Lady Caroline found that she had a rival in the young lady from Durham county. Whilst " the women were suffocat- ing " their idol, " throwing up their heads at him," dressing their features and toning their voices with manufactured melancholy, very much in the fashion of Mr. Gilbert's love- sick maidens, Miss MUbaijke smiled at the absurdities of the Byromaniacs. When some verses of rather clever satire on the Byronic mania, after being circulated for several days about Mayfair in manuscript, found their way into the newspapers, Lady Caroline was furious, — because Byron applauded the good sense of the verses, which she suspected Miss Milbanke to have written. WhUst his fair idolaters suffocated and sickened him (to a degree Lady Caroline little imagined) with their insane worship. Miss Milbanke was one of the few women to talk to him of his poetry in a way showing they could appreciate it. But her respect for his art was curiously devoid of enthusiasm for the artist. She Hked to talk with him of poetry ; and showed him specimens of her own verse. But she respected poetry too much to fall at the poet's feet ; she respected herself too much to become one of the apes who tried to imitate bis feeling and manner. The young man, who plumed himself on his superiority to the herd, naturally honored the woman who showed herself superior to the mob of fashionable womankind. And as he grew more and more weary of the fantastic caprices and hysterical vehemence of the silly woman of fashion, he was more and more attracted by the composure and tranquil intellect of thg clever woman of no fashion. THE RIVAL COUSINS-IN-LAW. 193 Byron's journals show how steadily his tender concern for Miss Milbanke deepened and strengthened throughout the two years following her refusal of his first offer, and how much his manly sentiment for her — born of judgment rather than emotion, and fed by experience and reflection — differed from the fierce, fitful, boyish " passions," with which inferior women had inspired him. Having induced her to correspond with him (a thing he would not have done had he not really cared for the lady of small fortune) , he wrote in his journal on November 26, 1813, " Two letters ; one from Annabella, the other from Lady Melbom"ne — both excellent in their respective styles. Annabella's contained also a very pretty lyric on ' Concealed Griefs ' ; if not her own, yet very like her. Why did she not say the stanzas were or were not of her own composition ? I do not know whether to wish them hers or not. I have no great esteem for poetical persons, particularly women ; they have so much of the ' ideal ' in practics as well as ethics." Four days later (November 30, 1813) he has another letter from Miss Milbanke, and writes in his journal, " Yesterday, a very pretty letter from Annabella, which I answered. What an odd situation and friendship is ours ! — without one spark of love on either side, and produced by circumstances which in general lead to coldness on one side and aversion on the other. She is a very superior woman, and very little spoiled, which is strange in an heiress — a girl of twenty — a peeress that is to be, in her own right — an only child and a savante, who has always had her own way. She is a poetess — a mathe- matician — a metaphysician, and yet, withal, very kind, generous, and gentle, with very little pretension. Any other head would be turned with half her acquisitions and a tenth of her advantages." Most readers will detect the workings of love in this memorandum, — and all the more clearly, on account of the writer's disclaimer of every " spark of love." In February, 1814, Lady Melbourne, still hope- ful and wishful for the match that would place her staid and dutiful niece between Byron and her flighty daughter-in-law, is writing with maternal kindness to the young man about his melancholy. " Had a note," he jots down in his jour- 194 THE REAL LORD BYRON. nal on February 18th, "from Lady Melbourne, who says, it is said I am ' much out of spirits.' I wonder if I really am or not." On Tuesday, March 15, 1814, the diarist jots down this significant note : " A letter from Bella, which I answered. I shall be in love with her again, if I don't take care." On September 15, 1814, he made his second offer to Miss Milbanke ; — the offer she accepted. Moore says that just before this offer was made, Byron was strongly urged by a lady, on whose judgment and care for his interests he relied, to propose to another lady than Miss MUbanke, — "remarking to him, that Miss Milbanke had at present no fortune, and that his embarrassed affairs would not allow him to marry without one ; that she was, moreover, a learned lady, which would not at all suit him." On the pecuniary ground, the advice was certainly good ; and that the lady called Byron's attention to the question of money is evidence that in marrying Miss Milbanke he was not thought by " society " to be making a fortune-hunter's match. Mr. Claughton's undertaking having by this time dropped through, and the £25,000 of forfeit-money having been nearly all spent, Byron was again in trouble for money — with a rev- enue that still barely covered the interest of his debts, and nothing wherewith to defray his current expenses, except the Hterary earnings which he still declined to apply to his own needs. Under these circumstances, the match with Miss Milbanke was, in respect to money, a bad match. There were persons who thought it an almost ruinous match. But he made it ; — because he was in love. Writings from his uncertain memory (the biographer's words are, "as far as I can trust my recollection"') of a passage in the destroyed "Memoirs," Moore says that even at the last moment Byron relinquished his purpose of proposing to Miss Milbanke, and by the hand of his fair coun- sellor proposed to a lady of better fortune, and that he did not resume the relinquished purpose, and send his second pro- posal to his AnnabeUa, till this mercenary offer had been declined. If the " Memoirs " contained any story so discred- itable to Byron, its presence strengthened the reasons for destroying them. It is only fair to Byron and reasonable to THE EIVAL COUSINS-IN-LAW. assume that Moore's memory (so far as he could trust it) was no memory at all. The anecdote, eo inconsistent with the poet's contemporary memoranda and letters, — the anecdote, so vaguely recalled after several years from papers that were destroyed because they were unreliable and foolish, — the anecdote, in respect to which the reporter admits he cannot trust his memory altogether, does not weaken the abundant evidence that Byron's marriage was a love-match ; on the contrary, even to those who believe it, the story rather confirms the evidence that the match was not a mariage de convenance. It is not wonderful that Byron — no callous,, hardened, aged roue (as his calumniators insist) , but a highly nervous and emotional young man (a boy, mtat. 24, 25, 26), with no sure knowledge of the world or of himself — revolted from the hysterical heat and emotional extravagances of the fashionable fervor ladies, and conceived that, in choosing a companion for life, he had better select a woman as unlike Lady Caroline Lamb as possible. For a month Lady Caro- line with her beautiful silliness, her fair-seeming foolishness, was delightful to the young man, who, in the spring of his twenty-fifth year, was of course flattered, even intoxicated, by the preference shown for him by so famous a Queen of Society. At the end of six months he had seen enough of her tears and swoonings, her caprice and gusty passionate- ness, her jealousies and spites, her hot fits and her hotter fits, to feel terror at imagining what would become of him were he to be linked for life to a woman of her unruly kind. Another six months and, instead of affording him social dis- tinction, her devotion was alternately making him ridiculous and menacing him with disaster. What more natural than for the youthful student of life and character (with Lady Mel- bourne for his sympathetic adviser and " mother ") to think that, instead of mating with an impetuous and ungovernable woman, he had better mate with a woman of serene temper and well-balanced mind, who could govern herself ? All London was talldng of Lady Caroline Lamb's friendship with the poet ! How could it be otherwise, when from the day of her first letter to him, — an epistle in which she had 196 THE REAL LORD BYRON. oflPered him all her jewels, if he were in want of money, — she had seized every occasion for letting all the world know everything of the matter ? As soon as he entered a room in her presence she pounced upon him as though he were her peciiliar possession. On leaving one party, at which she was present, for another to which she was invited, Byron could not seat himself in his carriage without having the lady on the opposite seat of the " vis-d-vis." On leaving parties, to which she had not been invited, he found her waiting for him in the street. More than once on returning home from his social diversions after midnight, Sam Rogers found Lady Caroline Lamb walking in the garden of St. James' Place, and waiting for him ; her purpose being to entreat him to make up her last quarrel with Lord Byron. People asked how her husband could allow her to behave in such a way ? This question could be answered only by those who knew the temper of the man (whose favorite maxim of statecraft, when he had lived to be a great statesman, was embodied in the question, " Why can't you leave it alone ?) " and who knew also the great-hearted husband's confidence in his wife's devotion to his honor. Though he knew her to be wilful, wayward, vain, wildly passionate, insanely extravagant, it never occurred to him to suspect her of disloyalty to him, — etill less to imagine her capable, even in thought, of the most shameful wickedness. The Byromania was only her last mania ; — like previous manias it would work itself out, if people would only leave her alone. To him it was only one of Caroline's pretty ways when, at Lady Heathcote's ball, in June, 1813, she vented her fury, arising out of words with Byron, first by trying to throw herself out of a window, and then by stabbing herself — slightly (just for the scene's sake) with a supper knife, or (as another account says) rather badly with a piece of a broken glass. It was not in every one's power to judge her so leniently as she was judged by her husband. Lady Melbourne ventured to entreat her daughter-in-law to be more careful. Lady Bessborough begged her daughter to accompany her for change of scene to Ireland. Advice so insulting, an invitation so cruel, were unendurable indignities to the lenial descendant of Sarah, THE RIVAL COUSINS-IN-LAW. 197 Duchess of Marlborough. Hastening to Byron she told him all the barbarities done to her, simply because she loved him. The story told, she implored him to fly with her to some distant scene of tranquillity. Till she rushed in upon him with this entreaty, Byron had never fully realized what perils might arise, what an appalling catastrophe might ensue from his Platonic friendship with an extremely excitable and ro- mantic woman of fashion. It was his duty to repel this piece of Beautiful Silliness firmly, but with such kindness and flatteries as should preserve to her a few rags of self-respect,, — with kindness and flatteries that should prevent the need- ful repulse from overpowering her weak and heated brain, and driving her to suicide. At the interview he played a part that made her inveigh against his coldness and stern- ness. Having sent her back to Melbourne House, he sent the following note after her : — Mt deakest Caroline, — If the tears which ydu saw, and know I am not a-^t to shed ; if the agitation in which I parted from you, — agitation whicli you must have perceived through the whole of this most nervous affair, did not commence till the moment of leaving you approached; if all I have said and done, and am still but too ready to say and do, have not sufficiently proved what my feelings are, and must ever be towards you, my love, I have no other proof to offer. God knows I never knew till this moment the madness of my dearest and most beloved friend. I cannot express myself — this is no time for words ; but I shall have a pride, a melancholy pleasure, in suffering what you yourself can scarcely con- ceive, for you do not know me. I am aboutto go out, with aheavy heart, for my appearing this evening will stop any absurd story to which the events of the day might give rise. Do you think now I am cold and stern and wilful? Will ever others think so ? Will your mother ev.er? That mother to whom we must indeed sacriiice much more, — much more on my part — than she shall ever know or can imagine. "Promise not to love you? " Ah, Caroline, it is past promising ! But I shall attribute all con- cessions to the proper motive, and never cease to feel all that you have already witnessed, and more than ever can be known, but to my own heart — perhaps to yours. May God forgive, protect, and bless you ever and ever, more than ever. Your most attached, BrnoN. P.S. — These taunts have driven you to this, ray dearest Caroline, and were it not for your mother, and the kindness of your connections, is there anything in heaven or earth that would have made me so happy as to have made you mine long ago? And not less now than then, but more than over at this time. God knows I wish you happy, and when I quit you, or rather you, from a sense of duty to your husband and mother, quit me, you shall 198 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. acknowledge the truth of what I again promise and vow, that no other, in word or deed, shall ever hold the place in my affections which is and shall be sacred to you till I am nothing. You know I would with pleasure give up all liere or beyond the grave for you ; and in refraining from this must my motives be misunderstood. I care not who knows this, what use is made of it — it is to you, and to you only, yourself. I was, and am yours, freely and entirely, to obey, to honor, love, and fly with you, when, where, and how yourself might and may determine. The copy of this letter, different in two or three particu- lars from all other published copies of the epistle, has been made from the original manuscript. The erased " devoted " — erased by a single fine line — is a notable feature of the letter. It was by striking out the word " devoted " (left clearly legible), and substituting the colder word "attached," that Byron defined his attitude toward the receiver of the epistle in Mn unmistakable manner. Was ever woman re- pelled more firmly and gently? Declining to fly with her, he does his utmost to make her feel as though she were de- clining to fly with him. Yet more, in his generosity he puts himself in her power, to the extent of enabling her to prove against him the villany of which he had not been guUty. To relieve the repulse as far as possible of the humiliation most likely to pain her in the coming time, he penned the last sentence of the postscript (a sentence inconsistent with and contradictory to all that precedes it) , so as to enable her to say truly ( should she be ever taunted with the matter) that he had declared his readiness to fly with her, when, where, and how she pleased. What written words to put in such a woman's keeping ! Henceforth, by showing the con- cluding words of the postscript and at the same time with- holding the rest of the epistle from perusal, it was in Lady Caroline Lamb's power to make any one conceive that the poet had entreated her to elope with him. What words, what a writing, for her to have at hand, should she ever wish to give that impression to man or woman ! Lady Caroline Lamb told Lady Morgan that, whilst she was in L-eland with her mother, out of the way of the Eng- lish hubbub about her escapades, she "received letters con- stantly, — the most tender and amusing " from Byron ; — the fair interpretation of the words being that she wrote THE RIVAL COUSINS-IN-LAW. 199 Byron many letters, and he answered some of them, as civ- illy as he could. Certainly the last of his letters was neither amusing to her ladyship nor tender to any one. By her statement of the case in " Glenarvon," the letter ran thus : "Lady Caroline Lamb, — I am no longer your lover ; and since you oblige me to confess it by this truly unfeminine persecution, learn that I am attached to another, whose name it would of course be dishonest to mention. I shall ever remember with gratitude the many instances I have received of the predilection you have shown in my favor. I shall ever continue your friend, if your ladyship will permit me so to style myself. And, as a first proof of my regard, I offer you this advice : Correct your vanity, which is ridiculous ; exert your absurd caprices on others ; and leave me in peace. — Your obedient servant, Byron." — Of course, in the novel this epistle opens with " Lady Avondale " and ends with " Glenarvon." That Byron actually sent some such letter is certain ; for Med win (an honest though foohsh reporter) says that Byron remarked to him of "Glenarvon," "The only thing belonging to me in it is part of a letter." The letter came to Lady Caroline's hands in Dublin, as she was on her way back to England. " There was," Lady Caroline told Lady Morgan, " a coronet on the seal. The initials under the coronet were Lady Oxford's. It was that cruel letter that I have published in ' Glenarvon ; ' it de- stroyed me ; I lost my brain. I was bled, leeched ; kept for a week in the filthy ' Dolphin ' at Rock." As she recovered her brain, and was able to continue her journey in a week, the lady's illness was not very severe. The letter is not a letter one likes to think of the poet and peer writing to a gentlewoman ; but Byron's excuse is that, having vainly tried to escape from her persecution by courteous ways, he was driven to violent measures. That the words were none too harsh was proved by her behavior after her return to London. Driven as he was, Byron may be pardoned for writing roughly to this lady of fashion, who was capable of throwing herself into his rooms in the disguise of masculine attire (in the manner described by Lord Beaconsfield in " Venetia " ) when 200 THE EEAL LOED BTEON. she found his valet had been ordered to deny her ad- mission. But though she resented the letter, which she published under the impression she would injure the writer more than she would hurt herself by doing so, Byron's most grievous offence was that he married her cousin. For that insult she could not forgive him, tUl he had himself bitterly repented the imprudence. It tortured the fashionable lady's pride to think how her insignificant and lamentably rustic cousin, with her reputation for virtue and propriety, and other homely qualities, had carried off the poet from all the Byromaniacal women of the great world. It exasperated her to know that this hateful match (approved and favored by Lady Jersey) had been desired from the first and brought about at last by her mother-in-law. Of course. Lady Caroline saw the motive and end that had actuated Lady Melbourne in the business, and was properly grateful to her mother- in-law. After Byron's fall, it was the cant of " good society " to say that he had trifled cruelly with poor Lady Caroliae's feelings. Ten years later, when she had broken her nerves by drinking brandy and laudanum, people of mode used to sigh and say, " Ah, poor thing ! — it was all that wretched Byron ! " Cer- tainly the Lambs were slow to discover that the poet trifled with this lady of their house. All through Lady Caroline's extravagant behavior to him. Lady Melbourne treated the poet with maternal kindness. Months after the stabbing scene at Lady Heathcote's ball, Lady Melbourne is found writing to him with undiminished confidence and affec- tion. On escaping from Lady Caroline's persecutions he married the only daughter of Lady Melbourne^ brother. Lady Melbourne's treatment of the poet-, and his marriage within the hues of the Lamb connection are evidence that he was not regarded at Melbourne House as having failed in honor or right feeling towards Lady Caroline Lamb. Nor were there any better grounds for attributing the eccen- tricities of the lady's behavior in her later time to Byron's maleficent influence. She was a vain, flighty, violent creat- THE EIVAL COUSINS-IN-LAW. 201 Tire long before she knew him. Miss Milbanke rated her as a piece of fair-seeming foolishness long before Byron saw either of the cousins. In her thirty-fifth or fortieth year she was just what she promised in her earlier and brighter time to become in her middle age. Byron had no more to do with her later than her earlier follies. She failed early, as women of her temperament and training are wont to faU.. 202 THE KEAIi LOED BYEON. CHAPTER XIV. THE TUENING OP THE TIDE. Instead of returning to the rooms in St. James' Street, •where he awoke one morning to find himself famous, Byron, on coming up from Cheltenham to London, entered the lodgings in Bennet Street, which he occupied tUl the end of March, 1814, when he moved into the Albany, — the pre- cise date of the commencement of his residence in the " col- lege of bachelors about town " being given in one of his journals in these words: "Albany, March 28. This night got into my new apartments, rented of Loid Althorpe, on a lease of seven years. Spacious, and room for my books and sabres. In the house, too, another advantage. The last few days, or whole week, have been very abstemious, regular in exercise, and yet very unwell." Elected a mem- ber of "the Alfred" before his return from Greece, the poet joined Watier's Club somewhere about the time of his migra- tion from Bennet Street to the Albany. In one of his books of memoranda, quoted by Moore, Byron wrote after his withdrawal from England, "I belonged, or belong, to the following clubs or societies : To the Alfred ; to the Union ; to Racket's (at Brighton) ; to the Pugilistic ; to the Owls, or ' Fly-by-Night ' ; to the Cambridge Whig Club ; to the Harrow Club, Cambridge ; and to one or two private clubs ; to the Hampden (political) Club ; and to the Italian Car- bonari, etc., etc., 'though last not least.' I got into all these, and never stood for any other — at least to my own knowledge. I declined being proposed to several others, though pressed to stand candidate." It was at Watier's, soon after he joined the club, that Byron made a characteristic fish-supper on May 19, 1814, after going with Moore to " see Kean." Bitten and goaded THE TUENING OF THE TIDE. 203 by hunger (which he had been quickening rather than appeasing for two days with biscuits and bits of gum-mastic) he came into the club, faint and famished, to devour two or three lobsters (to his own share), which he washed down with four or five (" near half-a-dozen " is Moore's expres- sion) small liquor-glasses of strong white brandy, drunk neat, with a draught of hot water after each dram of the spirit. "After this," says Moore, "we had claret, of which having despatched two bottles between us, at about four o'clock in the morning we parted." This may be taken as a fair example of one of the "outbreaks," — one of the conces- sions to appetite, — that varied at considerable intervals the poet's brave and suicidal persistence in the regimen, by which he kept down his fat and destroyed his stomach. The reader has already been told that Byron sometimes appeased the famine, ever preying on the delicate membrane of his stomach, by chewing something less cleanly than mastic. Writing to Harness on December 8, 1811, he says, " You will want to know what I am doing — chew- ing tobacco." On the same day he writes to Hodgson, " I do nothing but eschew tobacco " ; a curious mistake as to the meaning of eschew, which he repeated some ten years later in " Don Juan " (Canto xii, stanza 43) : — " In fact, there's nothing makes me so much grieve As that abominable tittle-tattle, Which is the cud eschewed by human cattle." That Byron was an occasional (if not a regular) tobacco- chewer in Italy we know from Leigh Hunt's base book. Guilty of the tmpleasant practice during his severe fasts, for the purpose of mitigating the pangs of hunger, from 1811 to 1824, he was, chiefly for the same purpose, a consumer of opium. At Bennet Street Byron found the hideous old woman, Mrs. Mule, whom he took under his protection in a man- ner so agreeably illustrative of his affectionateness and also of his habitual kindness to liis servants. During one of his transient illnesses in Bennet Street, this aged person, whose " gaunt and witchUke appearance " made her a thing of dislike 204 THE REAL LOED BYEON. and dread to most beholders, waited on the lordly tenant of the best rooms of the Bennet Street lodging-house with a show of sympathy that stirred his grateful nature. The particulars of her services are unknown. Possibly in Fletcher's absence, she had on a sudden emergency of spasms from indigestion, to which he was liable, come opportunely upon the scene with wet clothes for hot fomentations, and had ventured to soothe the sufferer by saying, " Dear my lord, your lordship will be easier soon ! " That would have been quite enough to make the young man regard her tenderly and . feel she had a claim upon him forever. To the surprise of his friends, who hoped to be quit of the ugly old body when he had left Bennet Street, Mrs. Mule appeared in better clothes at the Albany Chambers. A year later she shone forth in a black sUk dress in the Piccadilly house, where Lord and Lady Byron played their parts in a domestic drama that will never perish from the annals of literature. On being asked by an intimate friend what on earth induced him to carry this ancient body about with him, as one of his household gods, Byron answered, " The poor old devil was so kind to me." Having been instructed by " ChUde Harold " to look for personal revelations in his literary productions, the readers of "The Giaour" (published in May, 1813) were quick to discover the author in one of the personages, and an episode of the poet's own history in the principal incident and posi- tions of the " wild and beautiful fragment " (as Moore calls it) that, containing in the first edition about four hundred lines, grew with its success till it became a poem of nearly fourteen hundred verses. It is still to be shown that the poem was based on one of the poet's adventures in Greece. The probabUity is that the underlying story relates to some affair, of which Byron heard when he was in Athens, and about which he made inquiries in a way that caused him to be con- founded in local gossip with the heroic actor in the melo- drama. Could Byron have truthfully told of himself the story which the Marquis of Sligo reported as being current about him after his departure from Athens, he would have certainly told it for himself with full particulars on his word THE TURNING OF THE TIDE. 205 of honor, instead of inviting the marquis (a mere repro- ducer of hearsay gossip) to stand forth as sponsor for the truth of the romantic fable. The Junius mystery had produced a general appetite for literary mysteries ; and to gratify this appetite popular writers, from Walter Scott to very humble fabricators of romance, were exercising their ingenuity in feats of literary mystification. The time was not far distant when Byron could without compunction send to the journals of continental capitals pure fictions about his own doings, — fictions by the way that redounded to his dishonor instead of his credit. But though he already delighted in mystify- ing his readers with misleading dates and other light touches of his pen, and dehghted in " bamming " and hoaxing his hearers with piquant inventions, he had too much regard for truth and his own honor to be capable of exceeding the wide license accorded by fashion to humorous raconteurs, so far as to make on his honor a statement which he knew to be false. He could mystify his readers, hoax credulous quidnuncs, " bam " dull and impertinent questioners within the limits of the license accorded to humorous talkers. Mis- led by heated fancy he would misstate matters of fact. But he was incapable of lying. To persons who asked whether he really saved the wretched damsel from execution, whether he really pulled out his pistol and threatened to shoot the chief of her escort at the very jaws of death, he could not reply " Yes, I did." But, having no wish to contradict the stories that exhibited him in so interesting and heroic an at- titude to his Mayfair idolaters, he bethought himself of an ingenious way of avoiding the question and leaving the sto- ries to do their work. He could say to questioners, "You must excuse me for declining to speak of that matter, as it is a business on which I do not like to speak more than I can help. If you really wish for the particulars, go to Sligo, who will tell you all he heard of the affair immediately after I left Athens. Or, if you like, I will show you what Sligo has written to me on the subject. But you must permit me to hold my tongue on the matter." By this means, without avouching the stories, or telling any positive untruth, he jould leave his questioners under the influence of the delu- 206 THE REAL LORD BYEON. eions and misconceptions, in which he wished them to remain. To the last, Byron thus used the marquis' letter, which merely states what the writer heard of certain loose and unsifted rumors. He offered to show Medwin the letter. But he never committed himself by an assertion that the rumors mentioned in the letter were substantially true. . Though it was no work to raise him to the eminence he had achieved by "Childe Harold," the new poem was precisely the performance to enlarge the young poet's popularity, and intensify the general admiration of his genius. Giving the novel-readers a romantic story, and tickling the ears that pre- ferred to loftier and more thoughtful song the particular kind of musical verse, the poetry of sweet and delicate sounds, of which Moore was so perfect a master, " The Giaour " was a great success. The enlarged editions followed one another rapidly ; the poet throwing into each of them more and yet more verse, of animating . lilt and lyric lightness. But the poem's success could not extinguish certain indications that the enthusiasm for the poet was already subsiding in that central and exclusive circle of the polite life of the capital, which claimed to be " society " {^par excellence, and in in- verted commas). No man of his day had a finer hand or more sensitive touch for feeling the pulse of this " in- ner circle " than its favorite piano-poet, Tom Moore ; and on coming to town for the season of 1813, he detected signs of a disposition in certain sets and coteries of "society" to think less cordially of the author of " ChUde Harold." "In the immediate circle, perhaps, around him," says Moore, " familiarity of intercourse might have begun to produce its usual disenchanting effects." If the change had been only the slightest, Moore's nice discernment would have appre- hended it. But if it had been only a very slight change, the biographer, retained by Byron's publisher, and the world's voice to re-dress and re-paint and re-vamish the bat- tered poet, would have been silent about the matter. It must have been a change so considerable and obvious, that the biographer felt he could not forbear from referring thus lightly to it, without exposing himself to critical censure. Moore's words are even more remarkable when he goes on to THE TXJENING OF THE TIDE. 207 account for this change. "His own liveliness and unre- serve," says the biographer, " on a more intimate acquaint- ance, would not be long in dispelling that charm of poetic sadness, which, to the eyes of distant observers, hung about him ; while the romantic notions, connected by some of his fair readers with those past and nameless loves al- luded to in his poem,s, ran some rish of abatement from too near an acquaintance with the supposed objects of his fancy and fondness at present." In other words, Byron was found no more a Byromaniac than John Wilkes was a Wilkeite. On coming to know him intimately, persons who would have preferred him to resemble his melancholy poetry, were disappointed at finding him so merry, droll, and loqua- cious ; and he was at the same time sufFeriag in the esteem, of the best drawing-rooms from his devotion to Lady Oxford, and still more from his devotion to Lady Caroline Lamb. The many ladies with good reasons for disliking the countess questioned the taste of the young nobleman who had made 80 poor a choice of an especial object of adoration. The very many ladies with better reasons for disUking Lady Caroline were beginning to think meanly of him for his sub- missiveness to the caprices of the woman, who was doing her best to make him as ridiculous as she was making herself. That the universal favor, shown to Byron by society in his first season, should have waned thus perceptibly at the outset of the second season is remarkable. It is part of the evi- dence that society did not, as Lord Macaulay imagined, make up its mind all in a single moment to pitch the poet away like an old glove. The season of 1813 closed with the famous " Dandy Ball," at which Byron was present as one of " the dandies." It was the season, in which he dined with Leigh Hunt in Horse- monger Lane gaol, where the minor poet was undergoing his term of punishment for the libel on the Prince Regent. It was also the season that heard (on June 1st) his third, least successful and last speech in the House of Lords, in the debate on Major Cart Wright's petition. Just as the first speech was in fact a tame success (though circumstances made him for a moment think it a brilliant one) , this third 208 THE EEAIi LOED BYEON. speech was a tame failure (though circumstances blinded him to its completeness) , — a failure that was another slight indicar- tion of the turning of the tide of triumph. On the occasion of the maiden speech people wanted to see and hear him ; on the occasion of the third speech, the lords and their friends, without being antagonistic to him, had ceased to be curious abouthim, and therefore in a mild way showed they had seen and heard enough of him — at least in their chamber. Combative on the masculine side, just as he was alternately yielding and fro ward on the feminine side of his double nature, Byron would have justified Dr. Drury's opinion and become a great parliamentary debater, had he in his first forensic essay encountered such humiliation as would have stung him to assert his natural superiority to other men. Baffled at the outset like the younger Disraeli, he would have conquered like Beaconsfield. But, in 1812 and 1813, things went smoothly with Byron, and it was only in troubled waters that he found his strength. Moreover, his literary triumphs made him indifferent for the moment to political distinction. So his parUamentary career ended almost as soon as it had begun. Some one (surely, a humorist!) asked him in the November of this year to present the Debtors' petition, and he decUned to do so. "I have," he wrote in his journal, "declined presenting the Debtors' petition, being sick of par- liamentary mummeries. I have spoken thrice ; but I doubt my ever becoming an orator. My first was liked ; the second and third — I don't know whether they succeeded or not. I have never yet set to it con amove ; — one must have some excuse to one's self for laziness, or inability, or both, and this is mine. ' Company, villanous company, hath been the spoU of me ' ; — and then, I have drunk medicines, not to make me love others, but certainly enough to make me hate myself." During tlxis year of 1813 (and also the next) he was often at theatres, kept up his boxing and friendship with Jackson, dined with wits and statesmen, and was seen in the best of good society, — showing no disposition to go into any society that was not good in some sense or other. In need of money for himself he always had money for others ; doing several deeds of munificence to people who had only tike sMghteat THE TUENDSTG OF THE TIDE. 209 claim, or no claim whatever upon him, — one of these latter recipients of his bounty being the paltry fellow, Ashe, whom he assisted out of pity for him, and pitied out of disgust. At the same time, though upbraiding himself in his journals for laziness, he worked much — sometimes at high pressure. Each of the new editions of "The Giaour" might be called a new poem. " The Bride of Abydos " was published in De- cember, 1813 ; " The Corsair " (with the padding of trifles at the end of the pamphlet) followed it quickly upon the turn of the year. "What induced him to put "Weep, daughter of a royal line " in that padding is unknown. The avowal of the lines could not heighten his reputation, could serve no good end, was sure to make him many dangerous enemies. Yet he reproduced them thus obtrusively ; — perhaps out of gener- ous sympathy with the other libeller of the Prince Regent, with whom he had dined in Horsemonger Lane gaol. If the act was done out of concern for Leigh Hunt, generosity was never more completely wasted. The reckless act had the consequences he might have foreseen. Forthwith abuse of the most paesionate and even virulent kind was poured upon him by newspapers especially jealous and zealous for the honor and interest of the Prince Regent. Day after day, through- out successive weeks of February and March, 1814, these journals poured the vials of their wrath out upon him. He was a mean creature, Avho had eaten his own words, in order to curry favor with powerful writers whom he had assailed in the " English Bards." He was a scribbler of poor verse, to be placed low in the list of minor poets. He was a venal poetaster, guilty of the meanness of " receiving and pocket- ing " large sums of money from his publisher ; — the rapid and prodigious sale of the last poem being pointed to as a justification of the charge. He was no less deformed in mind than he was in body. The Prince Regent almost shed tears of regret, on finding that the offensive lines, which he had attributed to Tom Moore, had been written by Byron. In his alarm at the outcry, which was no less surprising than the sale of the poem, Murray begged the poet to omit the lines from future editions of the pamphlet, and even ventured 210 THE EEAL LOKD BYKON. on his o-\vn authority to issue copies without the naughty verses. But Byron would not yield to the man of business. He would not withdraw the verses, and seem to be " shrink- ing and shuffling after the fuss made about them by the Tories." Macaulay wrote of Byron that " he lampooned the Prince Regent ; yet he could not alienate the Tories." This was true in a limited sense, — but in a very limited sense. As a " ladies' man," as the dandy and poet especially accept- able to women of rank, Byron still went to certain of the great Tory houses. But if he continued to receive cards from great ladies to their routs, and had not yet provoked the Tories of high society into dropping him, he had most cer- tainly so far alienated powerful organs of the Tory press, that they felt it their duty to educate the great body of their readers to regard him with fierce animosity. They had in truth become a great force for his overthrow. Whilst powerful papers were denouncing him for the lam- poon, another thing happened, in this third season of his fame, to show Byron how the tide was now setting against him. Murray sent him the manuscript of "Anti-Byron," which had been offered to the publisher. No work of reck- less abuse, or angry flippancy, or dull fanaticism, but a thoughtful performance, attacking the poet (as he himself wrote to Murray) "in a manly manner and without any malicious intention," " Anti-Byron " was a serious exhibition of what its author deemed pernicious in the religious sentiment and in the moral and political influence of Byron's writings. "It is not," Byron wrote of this work to Moore on April 9, 1814, "very scurrilous, but serious and ethereal. I never felt myself important till I saw and heard of my being such a little Voltaire, as to induce such a production. Murray would not pubHsh it, for which he was a fool, and so I told him ; but some one else wfll doubtless." In the autumn of 1812 serious ladies wanted to convert the poet to righteous- ness. In the spring of 1814 a book had been written to demonstrate that he was a teacher of evil. Having no doubt that this manuscript would find a pub- lisher, Byron cannot have supposed it would be the only book produced to discredit him. He must have foreseen the THE TXJRNING OF THE TIDE. 211 approaching storm, and felt that he was nearing the troubles predicted by GifFord. But instead of disheartening him and shaking his nerve, the prospect of the tempest seems to have inspired him with new zeal and energy. Anyhow, the man, who at the end of AprU, 1814, in a sudden fit of pique at the insults of certain of his anonymous assailants, and of distaste for labors that were rewarded with their abuse, had actually resolved to withdraw from literature, and ordered his publisher to stop selling his books, now found courage to go to work on another poem. Begun towards the end of May, "Lara" was ready for the printer — indeed, in the printer's hands, and almost ready for publication — at the beginning of July. To think of the rapidity with which "The Giaour," " The Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," the Napoleon " Ode," and " Lara," came from his pen whilst he was in the quick stream of the social excitements of a man of pleasure and the world, is to be amazed at the fecundity of his genius, and of its power to achieve its ends amidst countless distractions. 212 TEE SEAL LOBD BTBON. CHAPTEK XV. byeon's maeeied life. Engaged to Miss Milbanke in September, 1814, married to her in January, 1815, Byron, in July, 1816, wrote the poem which made the whole world think that during hia engagement to Sir Ealph MUbanke's daughter his heart was in his cousin's (Mrs. Muster's) keeping, — that at the very moment when he took his bride for better and for worse he was thinking of the Mary who, ten years before, had become "another's bride." Byron's journals and letters of 1813, 1814, and 1815, afford conclusive evidence that the autobi>- ography of "The Dream" was, in that matter, mere romance. Having cared enough for Miss Milbanke in 1812 to wish to make her his wife, he learned to love her during the next two years ; and having by assiduous addresses won her love in the autumn of 1814, he married her — not in a frenzy of boy- ish passion, but with the steadier sentiment of manly devo- tion. On September 20, 1814, he writes to Moore in high 1 spirits, " I am going to be married ; that is, I am accepted, and one usually hopes the rest wUl follow. My mother of the Gracchi (that are to be) you think too straitlaced for me, although the paragon of only children, and invested with ' golden opinions of all sorts of men,' and full of ' most blest conditions ' as Desdemona herself. . . . She is said to be an heiress, but of that I really know nothing certainh'-, and shall not inquire. But I know she has talents and excellent qualities ; and you will not deny her judgment, after having refused six suitors and taken me. ... I must, of course, reform thoroughly ; and, seriously, if I can contribute to her happiness, I shall secure my own." To the Countess of , he writes from the Albany on October 5, btron's maeeied lifb. 213 1814, "I am very much in love, and as silly as aU single gentlemen must be in that sentimental situation ; . . . all our relatives are congratulating away to right and left in a most fatiguing manner. You perhaps know the lady. She is niece to Lady Melbourne, and cousin to Lady Cowper and others of your acquaintance, and has no fault, except being a great deal too good for me, and that I must pardon, if nobody else should. It might have happened two years ago, and, rf it had, would have saved me a world of trouble." Again, to his intimate friend, Moore, he writes on October 14, 1814, averring that he has chosen from love, not money : "I certainly did not address Miss MUbanke with these views, but it is likely she may prove a considerable parti. All her father can give, or leave her, he will ; and from her childless uncle, Lord Wentworth, whose barony, it is supposed, will descend on Lady Milbanke (his sister) , she has expectations. But these will depend upon his own disposition, which seems very partial towards her. She is an only child, and Sir R.'s estates, though dipped by electioneering, are considerable. Part of them are settled on her ; but whether that will be dowered now, I do not know, — though, from what has been intimated to me, it probably will. ... I certainly did not dream that she was attached to me, which it seems she has been for some time. I also thought her of a very cold disposition, in which I was also mistaken — it is a long story, and I won't trouble you with it. As to her virtues, etc., etc., you will hear enough of them (for she is a kind of pattern in the North) , without my running into a display on the sub- ject." To Henry Drury, he writes on October 18, 1814, "I am going to be married, and have been engaged this month. It is a long story, and, therefore, I won't tell it, — an old and (though I did not know it till lately) a mutual attachment." Are these passages (which fairly represent the tone of the letters from which they are taken) indicative of selfish greed or despondency ? Would a fortune-hunter have writ- ten so carelessly and contentedly of the lady's small present fortune and uncertain expectations, and of the probability that her present fortune would be settled upon her ? Would a man, dropping in a faint-hearted way into a mariage de 214 THE SEAL LORD BTEON. convenance, have written so proudly and affectionately of the lady's virtues, of his love of her, and of his pleasure at finding that her love of him was no younger than his love of her ? Moore speaks of finding the poet melancholy and de- spondent and restless in December, shortly before his mar- riage, — speaking, be it remembered, fourteen years after the marriage, from memory, when events had trained the biogra- pher to regard the wedding a doleful business from first to last. The poet, however, may well have been anxious and troubled just then. The nervous man had cause for discom- fort, on the eve of his marriage, at a time of pecuniary em- barrassments that made him foresee his bride's home would be besieged by bailiffs. His marriage would put him in a worse position than ever for dealing with his creditors. For he had agreed to make a large settlement on his wife, whose trustees, under the deed of settlement, would, for the perform- ance of the trust, have control over £60,000 of the capital that should come from the sale of Newstead. Whilst Byron made this large settlement on his bride, her fortune of £10,000 (which Byron is so generally believed to have squandered) was also settled upon her. Hobhouse knew aU about this matter ; and in answer to one of the most serious of the two or three hundred misrepresentations of Medwin's book, he wrote in the "Westminster Eeview," " The whole of Lady Byron's fortune was put into settlement, and could not be melted away." Byron, with Hobhouse for his " best man " and his travel- ling companion from London to the North, set out for Seaham county, Durham, at the end of December, 1814, and was there married to Miss Milbanke on January 2, 1815. Enough has been said to show that " The Dream " has no auto- biographical value, except as evidence of the way in which the poet was pleased to regard certain passages of his life, eighteen months after the wedding. A dream, it was as false to fact as dreams usually are. The ceremony over, and the breakfast a thing of the past, the happy pair started for Halnaby, Sir Ralph MUbanke's place, near Darlington. Hobhouse handed Lady Byron to her carriage, and saw her drive off with the poet by her side ; her parting words to the bybon's maeeied life. 215 " best man " being, " If I am not happy, it will be my own fault." Of course there was no lady's-maid in the carriage, sitting " bodldn " between the bride and bridegroom ; though Byron, no doubt, said to Medwin at Pisa, in 1821, "After the ordeal was over, we set off for a country seat of Sir Ralph's ; and I was surprised at the arrangements for the jour- ney, and somewhat out of humor to find a lady's-maid stuck between me and my bride. It was rather too early to assume the husband ; so I was forced to submit, but it was not with a very good grace. Put yourself in a similar situation, and tell me if I had not some reason to be in the sulks. I have been accused of saying, on getting out of the carriage, that I had married Lady Byron out of spite, and because she had refused me twice. Though I was vexed at her prudery, or whatever you may choose to call it, if I had made so uncava- lier, not to say brutal, a speech, I am convinced Lady Byron would instantly have left the carriage to me and the maid (I mean the lady's). She had spirit enough to have done so, and would properly have resented the affront." On reading this piece of literature in Medwin's book, Hobhouse ex- claimed fiercely, that Medwin Avas an infamous impostor. He had himself handed Lady Byron into the carriage, and could swear there was no maid in it ! And Hobhouse was not mistaken on the point of fact. But he was wrong in thinking Tom Medwin an impostor. How did this invention come into Tom's book ? How came Byron to put it there ? When he spoke to his especially confidential friends of Byron's most serious faults, Hobhouse used to put high in the list the poet's readiness to gossip with sycophants about his private affairs, a failing which, though it had a show of amiability, was in truth a most hurtful weakness. Whilst the habit fed the selfishness, which (according to Hobhouse) was Byron's worst and most deplorable characteristic, it was prolific of absurd stories that darkened the poet's fame. To Hobhouse it seemed that Tom Medwin was one of the sycophants who, by humoring Byron's vanity, led him to talk loosely ; and an impostor who deliberately vamped up the poet's imprudent statements with bits of fiction, so as to im- pose the gossip more readily on the public. 216 THE REAL LORD BTRON. But Shelley's familiar connection and school-mate — poor Tom Medwin, whilom of the 24th Light Dragoons, and, in 1821, and the two following years, living in Italy on in- sufficient means — was neither knave nor toady. A man of gentlemanly address and puerile simplicity, he was a good- tempered fool. If he had disliked this relative and hanger-on of the Shelleys, Byron — living in close intimacy with Shelley — could not have treated him with open rudeness. But Byron had a tenderness for the young man, who was just then no less unfortunate than unwise. Warned by Trelawny that this inquisitive prattler was taking notes with a view to printing them, Byron answered lightly, " So many lies are told about me that Medwin won't be believed." And having said thus much and a little more to Trelawny, Byron took care that Medwin should not be believed, — took care that the '' notes " should comprise so large a proportion of ob- vious fictions, that cautious readers would not know what of their statements they might believe, — would be doubtful whether they contained a single pure and unadulterated fact. In a word, Byron " bammed " Medwin ; and Medwin was a very easy man to " bam " I " To bam " was to hoax with a humorous fiction. The old slang word " bam " meant a story which none but a simple- ton would believe. It occurs in " Sam Hall," the convict's ditty that used to be encored loudly in the Oave of Harmony, when Arthur Pendennis was a young man, — "The parson, he did come, he did come, And talk of ' kingdom come ; ' But then it was all bam! " In the days when Kit North's friends wrote their convivial articles for "Blackwood" over their tumblers, and sometimes under them, a reference to the art of " bamming " was often seen in the columns of that pohte magazine. At the same time the Prince Regent, a consummate master of the elegant art, made "bamming" a favorite pastime with the gentle- men of his entourage. When George the Fourth enter- tained a dinner-table by describing gravely how he com- manded-in-chief at Waterloo, he was not mad or tipsy ; he BYRON S MAREIED LIFE. 217 was telling a " bam " for the fun of seeing how it would be received by one of his guests, the Duke of Wellington. " Bamming " was " lying with a difference." It was neces- sary for " a bam " to be humorous ; it might not be uttered for the teller's pecuniary benefit or for his material advantage in any way ; it was needful for it to be so egregiously absurd that no one but a dullard would believe it. Byron's story about the lady's-maid was " all bam." Med win having swal- lowed the invention, and gravely put it away for use, it is not wonderful that Byron found him a diverting companion in idle hours. The marriage, on which Lady Melbourne had set her heart, was an accomplished fact. For the moment she could breathe freely, whilst her daughter-in-law meditated mischief and brooded over schemes of revenge. She could breathe the more freely because she sincerely believed that her niece was precisely the wife for the young man, for whom she felt genuine affection. And for a while it seemed that events would justify her opinion. The evidence of "The Dream," notwithstanding, Byron passed his time so agreeably at Halnaby, with the lady who had carried him off from the Byromaniacs, that in the very heart of the honeymoon he could vn-ite gayly to Moore (Jan. 19, 1815), "So you want to know about milady and me ? . . . I like Bell as well as you do (or did, you villain !) Bessy — and that is (or was) saying a great deal." On his return to Seaham, he writes to the same friend (February 2, 1815), "Since I wrote you last, I have been transferred to my father-in-law's, with my lady and my lady's-maid, etc., etc., and the treacle-moon is over, and I am awake, and find myself married ! My spouse and I agree to admiration. Swift says ' no wise man ever married ' ; but, for a fool, I think it the most ambrosial of all possible future states. I still think one ought to many upon lease; but am very sure I should renew mine at the expiration, though next term were for ninety and nine years." On February 10, 1815, again writing from Seaham, he says to Moore, "Bell desires me to say all kinds of civilities, and assure you of her recognition and high consideration. . . . By the way, don't engage yourself in any travelling expedi- 218 THE EEAL LORD BYKON. tion, as I have a plan of travel into Italy, which we will dis'^ cuss. And then, think of the poesy wherewithal we should overflow, from Venice to Vesuvius, to say nothing of Greece, through all which — God wUIiug — we might perambulate in twelve months. If I take my wife, you can take yours ; and if I leave mine, you may do the same." On the day before leaving Seaham for London, with the intention of visiting Colonel and the Hon. Mrs. Leigh, at Six Mile Bottom, near Newmarket, on the road to town, he writes to Moore (March 8, 1815), "Bell is in health, and unvaried good-humor and behavior. But we are all in the agonies of packing and part- ing ; and I suppose by this time to-morrow I shall be stuck in the chariot with my chin upon a bandbox. I have pre- pared, however, another carriage for the abigaU, and all the trumpery which our wives drag along with them." If By- ron was melancholy in the first nine weeks of his wedded life, and pining for " another bride," he hid his grief under a BmUing face. Writing to Moore from Sis Mile Bottom on March 17, 1815, the young husband, touching a delicate question, says, " To your question, I can only answer that there have been some symptoms which look a little gestatory. It is a subject upon which I am not particularly anxious, except that I think it would please her uncle. Lord Wentworth, and her father and mother. The former (Lord W.) is now in town, and in very indifferent health. You, perhaps, know that his prop- erty, amounting to seven or eight thousand a year, will eventually devolve upon Bell. But the old gentleman has been so very kind to her and me, that I hardly know how to wish him in heaven, if he can be comfortable on earth. Her father is still in the country. We mean to metropolize to- morrow, and you will address your next to Piccadilly. We have got the Duchess of Devon's house there she being in France." The brief sojourn at Six Mile Bottom, under Colonel Leigh's roof, was especially agreeable to the newly-wedded couple, — Lady Byron conceiving a strong affection for Augusta Leigh, whom she approached with a strong predis- position to love as if she were really her sister, whilst Byijon ■ byeon's markied life. 219 was delighted to see how cordially and sincerely the two women "took to one another." The house was none too large and the children were noisy, but the stay was enjoyable in the highest degree to both visitors. Byron had never seen much of his little, plain, dowdy-goody sister. Whilst he was on his travels and after his return to England, fully occupied with literary labors, in which she felt no concern beyond a sisterly pride in their success, and with social distractions in which she was no participator, Augusta had her Cambridge- shire home, her husband, and children to engage her attention. Hence it was that, on July 8, 1813, Byron wrote from Bennet Street to Moore, "My sister is in town, which is a great comfort, — for never having been much together, we are naturally more attached to each other." Till October 16, 1814, Miss Milbanke had never either seen or written to Augusta, of whose amiability and womanly sweetness of nature she had, however, heard much from a common friend. At Six Mile Bottom, Mrs. Leigh and the newly-married couple addressed one another by pet names. Whilst Byron called his wife " Pippin " and she called him " Duck," then both fell into the habit of calling Augusta "Goose," who addressed her sister-in-law by her husband's pet name for her, but in speaking to Byron persisted in her old practice of call- ing him "Baby." Their use of these pet names — Pippin, Duck, Goose, and Baby — may be taken as an indication of the affectionate heartiness and freedom from formahty that characterized the intercourse of the trio. Coming to town on March 18, 1815, in good spirits and undiminished affectionateness for one another, they settled down in the PiccadUly house, which had been lent to them by the Duchess of Devon, and had a very quiet time throughout the season. In his " Westminster Review " arti- cle on the misstatements of Medwin's "Conversations," Hob- house said, " Lord and Lady Byron did not give dinner-par- ties ; they had not separate carriages ; they did not launch into any extravagance." Hobhouse's accuracy on these points is demonstrated by abundant evidence. The new chariot, which conveyed the bride and bridegroom from Durham to London, was never seen on the London pavements after that 220 THE REAL LOKD BTEON. journey, until it was brought out of the coach-house on January 15, 1816, to convey Lady Byron to Kirkby Malloiy. Lady Byron had this carrialge at hand during her residence in 13 Piccadilly Terrace, but she never used it between her arrival at and final departure from Piccadilly. She drove about town in her husband's carriage ; often driving about town with him, and waiting good-temperedly for the hour at a time at the doors of houses, whilst he was making calls on people whom he did not care to introduce to her, as on the occasion of his visit to Leigh Hunt, at Paddington Green, when, after going by herself to buy flowers at Henderson's Nursery Ground, she sent up twice to remind her lord that she was waiting. Several circumstances combined to make them live thus quietly. In the middle of April they went into mourning for Thomas Noel, second Viscount and ninth Baron Went- worth, who died on the seventeenth of that month, leaving the bulk of his property (from £7,000 to £8,000 a year) entailed on his sister, Lady Milbanke, for life, with remainder to Lady Byron and her issue ; and whilst she was in mourning for so beneficent an uncle, the eventual heiress of his estate and barony could not with propriety have thrown herself into the gayeties of the London season, even if she had wished to do so. She had, of course, no disposition to go much at present to houses where she would be almost sure to run across Lady Caroline Lamb. She was already in a state of health that gave her hope of becoming a mother. " Lady Byron," her husband wrote to Moore on June 12, 1815, "is better than three months advanced in her progress to mater- nity, and, we hope, likely to go well through with it. We have been very little out this season, as I wish to keep her quiet in her present situation." Moreover, for a peer and peeress, housed in Piccadilly, with a sufficient establishment of servants, the Byrons were as " poor as mice." Living with economy in Piccadilly as a married man, Byron lived at a greater cost than he had done as a bachelor of the Albany ; and about £500 a year was all the immediate growth of his income from his marriage. Newstead was again in the mar- ket ; but a good purchaser for so considerable an estate was byeon's maekied life. 221 not to be found in a day ; and on its sale, it would devolve on the trustees of the marriage-settlement to determine how £60,000 of the money paid for the property should be in- vested. Duns ran in upon the poet at every turn and from every quarter. Confirming them in their misconceptions respecting the change effected in their debtor's pecuniary circumstances by his marriage. Lord Wentworth's death made the poet's creditors louder and more urgent in their demands for immediate payment. How matters went in this respect at 13 Piccadilly Terrace may be conceived from the fact that there had been nine executions in the house before Lady Byron left it on January 15, 1816. No wonder that the Byrons forbore to give dinner-parties, lived economically, and did as they best could with a siagle pair of carriage- horses. Annoyances and humiliations from want of money not- withstanding, the young husband and wife Mved as young married folk should for. four and even five months in the Duchess of Devon's house without quarrelling or even bick- ering. In society Byron played the part of an idolizing and triumphant husband ; at home he found in Lady Byron a thoughtful and sympathetic wife, who, throwing herself into his literary interests, was delighted to act as his amanuensis and secretary ; — her service in this respect being of great convenience to the poet, who wrote a poor hand, and on his nervous days disliked the drudgery of penmanship. During these months she wrote several small poems, some of which he corrected, — very much, of course, to their improvement. They had no altercation, dispute, or difference of a serious kind, or, indeed, of any kind, till August. This was the time when he was habitually so cheerful, and sometimes so hilarious in her society that he was surprised to find her of the same opinion as those who regarded him as the victim of deep and incurable melancholy. He had been more than usually gay and brilliant in society, when his wife declared her pleasure at seeing him in such high spirits. "And. yet. Bell," he said, "I have been called and mis- called melancholy, — you must have seen how falsely, fre- quently." 222 THE EEAIi LORD BYKON. "No, Byron," she answered, with the fine perception of wifely sympathy, " it is not so ; at heart you are the most melancholy of mankind ; and often when apparently gayest." If Byron had been so gloomy at his wedding as " The Dream " represents, he could scarcely have been so surprised at his wife's detection of his melancholy. An incident of the time closely preceding the weeks in which they began to diifer, deserves especial notice, as it shows how pleasantly they dwelt together up to the very threshold of their discord. Events having occurred to make it desirable that better provision should be made for the Hon. Mrs. Leigh and her children, — the lady's husband having lately sustained losses, — Byron made the will that was proved at Doctors' Commons, London, after his death. Dis- posing of the residue of his estate, after the performance of the trusts of Lady Byron's marriage-settlement, for the benefit of his sister and her issue, the testator uses these words, " I make the above provision for my sister and her chil- dren, in consequence of my dear wife. Lady Byron, and any children I may have, being otherwise amply provided for." A few days after making this wUl Byron told his wife the contents, — telling her at the same time of his reasons for doing so much for his dear Goose, and talking of his dear Goose's financial anxieties and her goodness, till the tears came to his eyes, and also to the eyes of his sympathetic listener. He expressed a hope that his action would have Lady Byron's approval, in consideration of the fact stated in the above- quoted words of the testament. The wUl was cordially ap- proved by " Pippin," on that ground, for other reasons also. Despite the coldness and reserve of her manner, and notwith- standing the hard things said of her temper. Lady Byron had a warm and generous heart, at this period of her story ; and in her delight at Goose's good fortune, and also at her hus- band's display of brotherly affection, she declared her pur- pose of writing to Goose, telling her what a superlative brother her Baby was, and how cordially Pippin approved the will. It was on this occasion that Lady Byron (the cold and stony-hearted Lady Byron, as she has been called by her detractors) thanked her husband for giving her the desire of byeon's married life. 223 her heart, — a sister whom she could love as thoroughly as she could have loved any sister given her by her own parents. Come what might, she promised always to be kind to Augusta, — the promise of which she was in later time reminded by Byron in a very impressive manner, that bit the words too deep into her memory for time to be ever able to erase them from the tablet. From the day of Byron's withdrawal from England to the hour of Augusta's death, and onwards to the hour of her own death, the words lived in Lady Byron's soul. They were a living part of it. No fire of anger could kill them, no force of hatred could pluck them out of the heart into which they had grown. Again and again at critical moments of her career those words struck her with awe. They were visible to her in luminous letters in the darkness of sleepless nights. She heard them even in her deep slum- ber, when her spirit could not sleep. Another incident of this point of Byron's life with his wife must be mentioned, — an incident showing how nicely con- siderate he was for her happiness shortly before the time when he began to show strange indifference to her feelings. Hav- ing assumed the surname of Noel, in accordance with the requirements of Lord Wentworth's will, and taken up their abode at Kirkby Mallory, Sir Ralph and' Lady Milbanke (now Noel) offered Seaham to their daughter and her hus- band for a country residence. Made in July, thi« offer was accepted thankfully ; and forthwith Lady Byron began to think of going to Seaham for her accouchement. Byron at the same time, with his wife's hearty concurrence, asked Tom Moore and Mrs. Moore to stay at Seaham in the course of the autumn. "If so," he adds, "you and I {without our toives) will take a lark to Edinburgh and embrace Jeffrey" ; — this postscript of the invitation being probably withheld from Lady Byron. A few weeks later (at the beginning of August, 1815) Byron asked his wife to invite Lady Noel to stay at Seaham in November, so as to be there during the accouchement. "You see," Byron added in explanation, "your mother will be so anxious at a distance." Even more pleased by this nice thoughtfulness for her mother than by the suggestion itself. Pippin was a truly happy wife for a few 224 THE EEAL LOED BYRON. days. And it shows the cordiality and completeness of her affection for her sister-in-law, that even ia her delight at By- ron's delicate mindfulness for her mother, she liked to think that Goose had suggested to him that he should put the proposal in this peculiarly agreeable way. Feminine instinct causing her to attribute to feminine influence the alleged rea- son for the proposal, she was pleased to regard Augusta as the woman who had said to him, " To give your wife the most pleasure, you must make her think your thoughtfulness is due to your thoughtfulness for her mother ; she will be more gratified by the show of consideration for her mother than by another display of consideration for herself." At the same time, fearful of ruffling him, possibly even of vexing him into rebellion, by any premature or indiscreet ex- ercise of wifely authority, the young wife hoped to govern him through her influence over the sister who had so much influence over him. In this hope she began a practice of hinting to Mrs. Lei'gh what she might say to Byron on cer- tain delicate and troubling matters. A good example of this practice is found in the way in which she confided to her sister-in-law that the frequency of Byron's visits to Mel- bourne House caused her uneasiness. Of course, on his coming to town, Byron went quickly to call on his wife's aunt, Lady Melbourne, his "second mother." He went there repeatedly. He was continually calling there. Of course the niece had no reason to resent his dutiful and affec- tionate attentiveness to her aunt. But the cousin was troubled at his frequent visits to a house where he would be so sure, or likely to see Lady Caroline Lamb. She was jealous, but pride and prudence combined to make her desir- ous of concealing the jealousy from her husband. If she even hinted that he was troubling himself overmuch about her aunt, he would detect the motive of the hint, and cut her to the quick by retorting, " You mean your aunt's daughter- in-law. You are jealous ! You distrust your husband ! " But she would escape this suspicion and imputation, and yet carry her point, if she could induce Goose to say to her Baby, " Take care you don't go so often to Melbourne House as to make Pippin think you have a lingering weakness for byeon's married life. 225 Beautiful Silliness." And in Lady Byron's uneasiness about the visits to Melbourne House, the reader sees the first rising cloud over her domestic happiness, — a cloud from which many drops were soon to fall. When Lady Caroline Lamb called on Lady Byron after Byron's withdrawal from Eng- land, she was received by her cousin with these words, "I know all. Lady Caroline. He has told me all, and you could have saved me from all my misery." It was natural for Lady BjTon to take this view of her cousin's part in the dismal drama ; but she probably attached too much impor- tance to the mischief done by the mischievous woman of fashion. But though they had no diiFerences before August, 1815, the month did not close without bickerings, and by the beginning of September the husband and wife were in the " some time " of " an unhappy sort of life," described in the First Canto of " Don Juan,"— "Don J6se and the Donna Inez led For some time an unhappy sort of life, Wishing each other, not divorced, but dead ; They lived respectably as man and wife, Their conduct was exceedingly well-bred, And gave no outward signs of inward strife. Until at length the smother'd fire broke out, And put the business past all kind of doubt. "For Inez call'd some druggists and physicians, And tried to prove her loving lord was mad. But as he had some lucid intermissions, She next decided he was only bad ; Tet when they ask'd her for her depositions, No sort of explanation could be bad, Save that her duty both to man and God Eeguired this conduct — which seem'd very odd. ' ' She kept a journal, where his faults were noted, And open'd certain trunks of books and letters. All which might, if occasion served, be quoted ; And then she had all Seville for abettors, Besides her good old grandmother (who doted) ; The hearers of her case became repeaters, Then advocates, inquisitors, and judges, Some for amusement, others for old grudges." It i3 needless to say that in thus describbg his domestic 226 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. troubles, the poet was not severely accurate. In his talk with Medwia, Byron admitted that the spies employed to watch and gather evidence against him were Mrs. Clermont, acting on her own account, and persons obeying Mrs. Cler- mont's instructions. In the same talk, though he charged Lady Byron with sending the epistles to the writer's husband, he pointed to Mrs. Clermont as the person who had broken open his writing-desk, and taken from it the letters he had received from a married woman before his marriage. He expressly acquitted Lady Byron of being accountable for the visit of Dr. Baillie and the lawyer to ascertain whether he was insane. "I do not, however, tax Lady Byron with this transaction ; probably she was not privy to it," he is repre sented as saying to the reporter, who, though a simpleton was an honest gentleman. It is certain that Lady Byron and her husband separated on account of reasons covered by the familiar and elastic phrase " incompatibility of temper," — a phrase that may cover serious unkindness, scarcely a hair's breadth short of legal cruelty. It is certain that no one of the various kinds of flagrant immorality charged against her husband by scandal- ous rumor was the reason why Lady Byron determined to leave him. It is certain if he was guilty of any one of the charges so made by report, the sin was done with a secrecy that saved it from being an insult to his wife, and made him certain neither she nor any of her friends knew of it. On all these points, fortunately for human nature, there exists con- clusive evidence, that wiU, sooner or later, be published to the world. It is certain, also, that she did not determine to repudiate him for trivial reasons ; but for reasons so serious and weighty, that they will not be deemed positively insufficient for her justification, even by those who may on hearing them be disposed to deem them scarcely sufficient to justify her action. It is certain that from the beginning of September to the date of her accouchement, — a time when it was espe- cially incumbent on him to make sympathetic allowance for the unevenness of her spirits, and to show her extraordinary kind- ness ; and -afterwards from the day of her child's birth to the byeon's mareied life. 227 day of her journey to Leicestershire, he treated her with extraordinary unkindness for which her conduct afforded no sufficient excuse. It is certain that she had good reason to think he might be insane ; and instead of being singular in attributing hia strange behavior to miental disease she was countenanced in this view of his case by the poet's sister, Augusta, and his cousin, George Byron, who were both of opinion that his conduct might possibly be due to trouble of brain, falling within the terra of " mental derangement." On aU these points, fortunately for human nature, there exists evidence. No doubt, Harness heard nonsensical stories of the poet's ill-treatment of his wife ; but however absurd they may have been in their details or from' the peculiarities of the narrator, the stories about the discomfort of the lady's meals pointed to no slight matter, but to a constant source of daily and serious annoyance. Byron's alleged dislOie to see women eating was probably nothing more than a poetical way of stating the fact that it irked and irritated him to see them enjoying their food, whUst he, with an ever keen appetite pinching and biting his vitals, resisted the cravings of appe- tite. And he was not the man to pretend day after day at his own table, that he liked what he disliked extremely. He was not the man to put himself to the discomfort of "making believe" that he enjoyed his dinner and chat with his wife, when he was all the while longing for the meal to be over. The consequence was that, after the earlier months of her married hfe. Lady Byron usually breakfasted alone, lunched alone, and dined alone, — or, what was even less cheerful, had the solitude of her meals broken by a husband who came in for a few minutes in the middle of a repast, or after show- ing himself at the outset of dinner, ran off at the second course. Just as life's happiness is made up largely of smaU, daily unremembered enjoyments, the misery of human ex- istence is made up in a great degree of countless petty, daily, and too often bitterly remembered vexations, any one of which may be fairly termed insignificant. It follows, there- fore, that the comfortlessness coming to Lady Byron's life from her husband's regimen of diet is a matter not to be 228 THE KEAL LORD BYRON. overlooked in the consideration of her position at a time when — as a young wife, looking forward to the perils of childbirth, at a distance from the mother and father whom she loved vehemently — she had especial need of her hus-- band's tenderest consideration and most soothing speech. One of the earliest causes of discord between the youri\g husband and his younger wife was his determination to leavt England as soon as possible, — to breathe a warmer air and live under bluer skies ; to escape from the duns and fog^ of London, and be at ease and freedom in a sunny chme.\ Four years since he had returned from Greece in submission to the tyranny of circumstances, with the intention of leaving y England again as soon as he should settle his affairs. Oni February 28, 1811, he had avowed this purpose to his) mother in the letter from Athens, in which he says, "I feel', myself so much a citizen of the world, that the spot where I can enjoy a delicious climate, and every luxury, at a less expense than a common college life in England, will always he a country to me ; and such are in fact the shores of the Archipelago." In the following June, he wrote to Hodgson that, " after having a little repaired his irreparable affairs" lie would be off again to Spain or the East, where he could r,t least have cloudless skies and a cessation from imperti- nence. He had no sooner rehnquished his purpose of accom- panying the Earl and Countess of Oxford to Sicily in the summer of 1813, than he began to lay plans for an expedi- tion to Abyssinia. Immediately after the " treacle-moon " at Halnaby, he invited Moore to join him in a year's tour through Italy, adding significantly, " If I take my wife, you can take yours." Any annoyance in England made him restless ; and with him restlessness quickly shaped itself into a yearning to go abroad, to a land of sunshine, blue skies, and freedom. Moore knew there was trouble at 13 Piccadilly Terrace, on the morrow of January 5, 1816, when he read the letter ending, " But never mind, — as somebody says, — for the blue sky bends over all ! I only should be glad if it bent over me where it is a little bluer ; like the ' skyish top of blue Olympus,' which, by the way, looked very white when I last saw it." Byron's married life. 229 Lady Byron opposed this wish to roam. She did not oppose it warmly or with excessive firmness. . She only let him see that if his heart was in the East, hers was in Old England, where she had a father and mother, and would soon have a nursery with a child in it. Nowadays, with raUroads and steamboats and telegraphic cables, to live in Madrid or Cairo or Athens is only to live in a rather out-of-the-way part of England, But in 1815 foreign travel was temporary expatriation. Tourists of pleasure returned from Southern Europe to London, to be shocked at the gaps made in the ranks of their home-loving kindred. On preparing for his Eastern tour Byron had told his mother he had better roam the world at once, as his marriage would probably end his days and opportunities for roaming. But now that he had been married some eight or nine months ; now that his young bride was on the point of giving birth to her first child, he thought it preposterous that she should expect him to curb his passion for roaming, out of regard for her feelings. After Byron's death, Hobhouse, who loved him dearly in spite of his failings, used to say that selfishness was the grand defect and blemish of his character ; and it was not in the power of the poet's closest friends to gainsay the severe judgment. It was a curious felling for a young man of vivid sensibility and generous impulse, who could not see pain or sorrow without weeping over it, who in his most urgent pecuniary straits would give a struggling author, a miserable widow, a group t»f wretched orphans, half his rapidly sinking balance at his bankers ; — for the young man who won the love of men, women, and thoughtless children by the completeness of his sympathy with th'em. But selfishness was Byron's grand fkUing. He would concede, he would give away anything except the one thing on which he had for the moment set his heart ; but as soon as any one denied him that one thing, or tried to take it from his hands, the selfishness overpowered every generous force of his nature. Lady Byron had no sooner declared her disinclination to travel in countries far away from England, than she became a person set on denying him enjoyment for which he yearned, a hard and unsympathetic creature to whom he was linked 230 THE EEAL LOKD BYRON. forever by that rash, fatal act — his marriage. He told her he did not wish for her company in his joumeyings by sea and land. She could have her own pleasure and remain in England, whilst he would please himself at a distance from her. As she preferred her mother and father to her husband, he would not imitate her example and hiader her from pur- suing happiness in her own way. But he would not be her slave any more than he would be her tyrant. He and Hob- house would go abroad together; and before Lady Byron went to Leicestershire with her babe, Byron and Hobhouse had arranged to leave England together in the spring. The young wife saw that she was not necessary to her husband's happiness. The pleasure of touring was greater to him than the pleasure of living with her ; the delight of visiting new scenes, keener than his delight in her society. All this as the time drew nearer and nearer for the birth of her child ! This difference having arisen between them, Bjnron and his wife daily drifted farther apart. Ceasing to trouble himself about her poetry, he was seldom present at her meals. Tak- ing little note of her proceedings, he spent more time at the Drury Lane Theatre, where it devolved upon him (as a mem- ber of the Sub-Committee of Management, — or Mis- management, as malicious censors averred) to confer with dramatic authors, peruse bad comedies and worse tragedies, take counsel with actors, and arbitrate on the disputes of actresses. Working hard on his poems (" The Siege of Corinth " and " Parisina," written as his troubles grew thicker, passed through the printers' hands, when his troubles were at their thickest), he was annoyed when his wife disturbed him at his work by coming into his room. " Byron, I am in your way ? " she inquired on one occasion, when she entered the room, and found him standing before the fire, musing on his troubles ; — the answer was, " Damnably ! " After admitting that he made this unmannerly reply, the poet observed to Medwin, " I was afterwards sorry, and reproached myself for the ex- pression ; but it escaped me unconsciously — involuntarily ; I hardly knew what I said." But he said things far more brutal and inexcusable. In her hearing he inveighed against bykon's maeeied life. 231 Ms folly in marrying her, and vowed to extricate himself from the unendurable bondage of the union. He did worse, he himself told her that he had persisted in wooing her tiU he won her, — not from motives of love and devotion, but from resentment and a thirst for vengeance ; — an absolutely false statement that in his passionate incontinence of speech was probably made to other people. From this mad and utterly untrue speech came the revolting reports of the brutal words said to have been spoken by him to her during the journey from Seaham to Halnaby, and lq the subsequent weeks when he was overflowing with affection for her. At Venice, Byron confessed to Moore that there were occasions during his life with Lady Byron, when he had " breathed the breath of bit- ter words." From these examples of his more violent utter- ances to his young wife, it may be seen that the poet told Moore in that respect no more than the bare truth against himself. When Byron breathed the breath of bitter words, the breath was hot indeed and the words were very bitter. It has been suggested by successive writers that he frightened Lady Byron with wild fables of his wickedness. It is con- ceivable that he was guilty of such freaks of morbid humor. But no satisfactory evidence that he terrified her in this way has come to the writer of this page. At other times, instead of cutting her with sharp and burn- ing speeches, he punished her with silence. In his childhood he had been given to fits of what he styled " silent rage " ; and now, sulking and scowling all the while, he maintained an insulting and exasperating taciturnity to the victim of his wrath for days together. His violence, also, expressed itself in other ways than speech. In a sudden rage at an incident, arising out of his distress for money, he threw a favorite watch on the hearth, and then smashed it to pieces with the poker. Readers wUl be the better able to account for aU this maniacal behavior — the rages of false words, the rages of stubborn silence, the outpouring of wrath on a favorite watch, as though it were a living creature — when they are told that Byron was at this time (no less than in later times of his career) a laudanum-drinker. The man who chewed tobacco to deaden the pain of his 232 THE EEAL LORD BTEON. rigorous fasting, may have had recourse to opium for the same purpose. But the practice of taking opium in some form or other was so common in the higher classes of English society from the opening of the present century tiU De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium-Eater" (1822) called attention to the pernicious effects of the indulgence, that the poet may have taken his first dose of the drug at the advice of Lady Caroline Lamb (who is known to have been an habitual laudanum-drinker in her later time) , or at the sug- gestion of some other person of fashion. The habit may have been formed in the East, and brought home with him, together with the two cantos of "ChUde Harold." Any- how, there is the very best evidence that Byron was taking laudanum at this point of his story. Another fact to be borne in miad respecting his condition, when other persons besides his young wife watched his eccentricities with anxious suspicion, is that, just at the opening of 1816, he was visited with jaundice. With an overwrought brain, nerves shaken by laudanum, temper incessantly irritated by his creditors, digestive organs impaired by fasting, a liver undergoing con- stipation, and a mind torn and oppressed by matrimonial misadventure, he may well have said and done things for which charity would be slow to hold him accountable. Peo- ple have made merry over the folly of Lady Byron's advisers in regarding his hysterical emotion at witnessing Kean's impersonation of Sir Giles Overreach, as a matter worthy of mention in the list of sixteen symptoms of insanity ; but to those who were unaware of the nervous peculiarity referred to in previous pages of this work, his overpowering agitation from so inconsiderable a cause may well have seemed worthy of medical notice. There were numerous good reasons for his wife, in common with his sister and cousin, to attribute to mental derangement the symptoms which the men of medicine accounted for in another way. Three or four months earlier the patient had given every indication of contentment with his lot and of delight ill his wife's society. Now, though she was about to present him with offspring, and by his own admission had treated him with consistent affectionateness, he regarded byron's married life. 233 her with aversion and addressed her with harshness and insult. At the beginning of August he could reflect on the previous seven months as a period of unruffled harmony, and was exulting in her generous acquiescence in the will he had made for the advantage of Augusta and her children, to the injury of his own future offspring. And now in October he was assuring her with every appearance of sincerity that he abhorred wedlock, and had married her solely from resentment and for revenge. What kindlier or more rational view could a young woman take of such behavior than that her husband's quick and subtle genius had broken down the thin partition that was understood to divide great wits from madness ? From the outset of his manly time Byron recognized an element of insanity in his mental constitution, and was now and again apprehensive that the madness would eventually conquer all the other forces of his great genius. And yet he and his friends affected to think Lady Byron guilty of monstrous impertinence in thinking him mad when he certainly behaved very much like a madman. Shunned and harshly used by a husband, whose aversion for her caused him to look away from her or down on the carpet more often than at her when they met, Lady Byron was glad to welcome to her house her old governess, Mrs. Clermont, who came to stay with her former pupil in the midst of her trouble and anxieties. It would not be sur- prising if it could be shown that, in her want of sympathy and in the absence of a more suitable confidante, Lady By- ron told Mrs. Clermont too much of her griefs, and was in other respects imprudently communicative to the person whom Byron came to regard as the principal cause of his wife's resolve to repudiate him. Evidence there doubtless is to support the general opinion that Lady Byron was guilty of a weakness, inconsistent with her abundant self-respect and habitual regard for her own dignity ; but the evidence is by no means conclusive. Before one could give a confident ^pinion on this point, it would be necessary to know the exact time and other circumstances of the withdrawal of the letters from the poet's desk, the way in which they came to Lady Byron's hands, and the time when she sent them to the 234 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. writer's husband. Bjrron, as readers know, acquitted his wife of, or at least forbore to charge her with, being an ac- complice to the withdrawal of the letters. Moreover there are grounds for believing that at least till she went into Leicestershire, Lady Byron maintained a proper reserve to her former preceptress. Lady Byron was certainly under the impression that her parents knew nothing of her domestic troubles, when she arrived at Kirkby MaUory in January, 1816 ; and she could scarcely have been under this impression had she talked freely of her griefs and cares to her mother's especial and confidential dependant. That Mrs. Clermont was a vigUant, busy, prying, meddlesome, scheming, mis- chievous woman, as women &f her years and way of living often are, is conceivable though not quite certain. Reasons altogether distinct from Byron's vulgarly abusive " Sketch " of the woman, whose activity in his affairs caused him to say at the moment of signing the deed of separation, " This is Mrs. Clermont's work," make it probable that she deserved her odious name of "the mischief-maker." She certainly did Byron an iU turn. But it does not follow that she was so dangerously influential over Lady Byron before the middle of January as the poet wished people to imagine. Nor does it foUow that she was so completely without a natural right to be curious about his doings and meddlesome in his con- cerns, as he caused the world to think. THE SEPARATION. 235 CHAPTER XVI. THE SEPAEATION. The discord between Lord and Lady Byron had not dimin- ished, when their daughter — " The child of love, — though bom in bitterness And nurtured in convulsion" — was bom on December 10, 1815, and soon afterwards was christened Augusta Ada, the former of the two names being given to her in compliment to her aunt, the Hon. Mrs. Leigh, who was one of the babe's sponsors at the baptism. In those darkest days of December, 1815, and January, 1816, Mrs. Leigh was in her sister-in-law's house, nursing her, comfort- ing her, encouraging her to take a hopeful view of Byron's state of health, which caused the conSorter no less anxiety than it had caused the wretched wife and mother. George Byron was a frequent caller at 13 Piccadilly Terrace, and, in his astonishment at the poet's recent treatment of his wife, concurred with the two ladies in thinking that the behavior, so perplexing to persons of no medical experience, was, or at least might be, referable to mental illness. Bailiffs were in the house, and the post kept bringing letters to quicken Byron's anger and humiliation at his pecuniary embar- rassments. On one point, at least, he showed his good sense. A house occupied by bailiffs and besieged by clamorous tradesmen being no fit abode for his wife, he begged Lady Byron to be off with her babe as soon as possible to her mother in the country, — the request being made in writing on January 6, 1816 ; so made possibly on account of the husband's desire to avoid a personal interview with the woman who six months since had been the (Relight of his heart. 236 THE REAL LORD BYEON. Lady Byron forthwith made her arrangements for the journey to Kirkby Mallory, which she deferred no later than January 15th, though it was questionable whether her strength would be sufficiently restored by that time for the fatigue of travelling in so cold a season. Mrs. Leigh, who after paying her sister-in-law a long visit, wished to return to her husband and children in Cambridgeshire, was entreated by Lady Byron to remain yet a while in Piccadilly. Augusta had been her grateful sister's best comforter; Augusta could control her brother in his fits of anger; if Augusta would remain with the invalid in London, his wife at Kirkby Mallory would receive regular and reliable news of the progress, for good or ill, of affairs in London. It was by such arguments that Lady Byron induced Augusta to postpone her return to Six Mile Bottom. On January 8, 1816, after talking the matter over with Augusta and George Byron, Lady Byron consulted Dr. Baillie about her husband's state of health ; but this visit to the physician was not the cause of the call he made at a later date (in the com- pany of a lawyer) on the poet, — for which intrusion on his privacy Byron believed his wife to have been in no way accountable. The doctor's advice was that Lady Byron should go into the country in accordance with her husband's desire, and during her absence from town should write him bright and animating letters. It was arranged between Lady Byron and Augusta that they shotdd correspond daily ; so that whilst the one would know every change in her husband's case, and every incident of the life in her London house, the other would be informed of every matter of Lady Byron's intercourse with her parents having any relation to the poet's interests. The agreement of these ladies to write thus frequently and fully to one another demonstrates the completeness of their mutual confidence, and of their wish for the greatest possible measure of sisterly in- tercourse at a time of the keenest anxiety to both of them. Of the affectionate warmth of their correspondence a notion may be formed from the scraps and extracts of some of Lady Byron's letters to her dear sister, that were published in 1869 by the " Quarterly Review," in the article on the Byron THE SEPAKATION. 23t Mystery, — one of the most sagacious and judicious, and, iu every respect, ablest articles ever contributed to a Review, where literary adroitness and strength are matters of course. Taking her child with her, Lady Byron left London on January 15, 1816, and entered her father's house on the fol- lowing day, with the hope of having Byron with her in Leicestershire before the middle of next month. The hope cannot have been a confident one ; for the view she took of his illness necessarily made her apprehensive that a month hence he might be no fit inmate for her mother's house. One of her apprehensions was that he would commit suicide. She and Augusta had discussed the propriety of removing his laudanum bottle ; their fear apparently being that, yield- ing to a sudden impulse, he might take an overdose of its contents. Stdl she left town with the hope of seeing him at Kirkby MaUory in the middle of February ; for he had promised to come to her before he should go abroad, — the promise being accompanied with a very remarkable and im- portant statement of the poet's main purpose in determining to join his wife in Leicestershire, and to stay with her there for some weeks. Like most young husbands, with hereditary dignity to transmit to their descendants, — indeed, like most newly married men of every social degree, — Byron had set his heart on having a son. On October 31, 1815, he had written to Moore, "Lady B is in full progress. Next month wiU bring to light (with the aid of ' Juno Lucina for opem,' or rather opes, for the last are most wanted) , the tenth wonder of the world — Gil Bias being the eighth, and he (my son's father) the ninth." His child's sex had there- fore caused Byron much disappointment, in which Lady Byron sympathized. As the peerage, to which she had a prospect of succession, would descend in the female line in case of her death without male issue. Lady Byron was less troubled than her husband at having a daughter, when a son would have been more welcome. She was, however, disap- pointed by the domestic incident, and before she left London for Ejrkby MaUory was comforting herself with the hope of having better luck next time. Byron was touched far more 238 THE EEAL LOKD BYRON. acutely by the misadventure ; and as he was not given to hide lus feelings out of "regard for the feelings of others, it is not wonderful that he allowed Lady Byron to see his vex- ation. It is less an affair for surprise than regret that he allowed his annoyance to express itself in petulant words. Like Lady Byron he hoped for better luck next time, and on announcing to her his purpose of joining her in Leicester- shire, he told her that he would remain there in her society until she should be in the first stage of another progress to maternity, — an assurance that afforded her the liveliest gratification. In confidence Augusta was informed of Byron's intention to visit Leicestershire in . the ensuLog month, and also of the chief purpose of the visit. After her sister-in-law's departure it devolved on Mrs. Leigh to use her influence over her brother, to make him follow his wife to Kirkby Mallory ; and for the achievement of this end, she took occasion to influence- Le Manu (Byron's apothecary) through her cousin George Byron, who received a hint that he should instruct the medical attendant to urge his patient to go into the country for his health's sake. It follows therefore that, when she left London for Leicester- shire, Lady Byron was animated by a hope, which could not have occupied her breast had she not still regarded her husband affectionately. On her way from town to Kirkby Mallory, Lady Byron wrote her husband a tender and cor- dial letter (beginning with " Dear Duck" and signed with the pet name "Pippin"), and on the following day (January 16) after her arrival at her parents' house she wrote him another epistle in the same vein of humorous fondness, — an epistle from " Pippin " to " Dear Duck." This second letter was written by a wife still hopeful of seeing her husband in the course of a few weeks, in order that an heir might be born to the Bjrron barony. And Lady Byron continued in this hope until she received intelhgence from London that her husband, though seriously out of health, was not insane. Seventy years since people neither knew nor troubled themselves so much as they do nowadays about the transmission of malady from parents to oflTspring. It is conceivable that Lady Byron had never heard of inherited insanity. That Lady Bjrron spoke with THE 8EPAEATION. 239 her sister Augusta on such a subject as the chief motive of her husband's resolve to visit her in Leicestershire, and that she. entrusted Augusta with the delicate task of keeping him to the intention, are facts strongly eloquent of the mutual con- fidence of the two sisters-in-law, and of the high opinion Lady Byron had of her sister-in-law's discretion and womanly goodness. These facts sweep away and forever the odious fancy that gave us the Byron controversy of 1869 and 1870. When Lady Byron appeared before them at Kirkby MaUory on the 16th of July, Sir Ralph and Lady Noel saw from her looks that she was far from well. She was pale and thin ; but, till she spoke to them about it, they knew nothing of the anxiety that had been oppressing and fretting her for weeks and months. Before she went to bed she had told them her whole story, — ivithholding from them nothing of the cares she had brought with her to Leicestershire. Though she made a fiiU statement, — a statement without a single reserve, — Lady Byron said nothing to move her parents to indignation agaiast their chUd's husband. Byron was ill in body and mind, especially in mind. He was set on going abroad when he was unfit for travel. His wife was possessed by terrifying apprehensions for him. After hear- ing her story, from which nothing was withheld, Sir Kalph and Lady Noel said that Byron must be induced to come to Earkby MaUory, where he should be considered and humored in everything. The knowledge of the cause of any perverse humor he might display would make it impossible for Sir Ralph and Lady Noel to resent the perversity. Lady Noel, a kindly and well-intentioned woman, though excitable and passionate, made' sensible suggestions of measures to be taken for the sufferer's advantage. Before their talk ended. Lady Byron and her parents came to several conclusions. Instead of withdrawing the bottle, Augusta should be told to weaken the laudanum with colored water. Respecting Byron's project for going abroad with Hobhouse, it was de- cided that, should it appear that the poet was in no fit state for the enterprise, it would be well for Sir Ralph and Captain Byron to wait upon Hobhouse and represent to him. that, in their opinion, it would be injurious to Byron to travel for 240 THE EEAL LOED BYKON. the present, — injurious to him in respect to his domestic peace and reputation as well as his health. In the face of such a representation from Lady Byron's father and Lord Byron's nearest kiasman, Hobhouse it was thought would not dare, for his own character's sake, to persist in encourag- ing Byron to go abroad. The 17th of January, 1816 — the day on which Lady Noel with her daughter's concurrence wrote the kind and sympathetic letter to Byron, inviting him to Kirkby Mallory — was a day of paia and distress to Lady Byron. She had of late suiFered severely from acute headache ; and on this day the headache assailed her with unusual vehemence, and put her to extraordinary torture. It cheered her to know that the invitation had been despatched to Byron; and in the intervals between the neuralgic paroxysms she could look forward to the time when Byron would come to her. The next morning's post brought news from London that troubled her, — news that her husband was not insane. Le Manu's report was that he detected nothing of mental derangement in his patient. The apothecary was confident that the symptoms, which had occasioned Lady Byron, Augusta, and Captain Byron so much alarm, were referable to the com- bined excitement and exhaustion of an overwrought brain, the excessive vexation to the patient's temper from the action of his creditors, the melancholy arising from domestic an- noyances, and the disorder of the liver, now declaring itself in manifest jaundice. On receiving this intelligence of her husband's mental soundness. Lady Byron declared that she would never live again with the man who, being sane, had treated her in a way, for which insanity alone could be pleaded as a sufficient excuse. Even yet, if it could be proved that he was insane, she could live with him and love him ; but should Le Manu's opLaion be confirmed, she would never again put herself in the power of the man who had treated her so ill. Thus the case stood on the 18th of January, when Lady Noel was making ready for her journey to London , — in the first place to consult Dr. Baillie ; and then, in case Byron should be found of sound mind, to take counsel with Dr. Lushinsrton. THE SEPARATION. 241 For the information of the physicians, and, if needful, for the instruction of the lawyer, Lady Byron made with her own pen a statement of her reasons for thinking her husband mad, — a statement that was a repetition of the matters she had told her father and mother on the 16th instant, Not- withstanding what Lady Byron wrote and published to the contrary, fourteen years later, this statement comprised (without reserve of any kind) Lady Byron's whole case against her husband, as it then stood. Thus instructed and authorized to act for her daughter, she set forth on her mis- sion ; and for several days after their arrival in London, Lady Noel and her companion (Mrs. Clermont — the mischief- maker) were busy. The first notable consequence of the activity of these two ladies was the visit which Dr. Baillie and the lawyer paid Lord Byron, whose treatment of them, however wanting it may have been in courtesy, satisfied the intruders that he was no madman. The physician and lawyer having no doubt on this important point, the ladies went off to Dr. Lushington, to learn whether Byron's treatment of his wife would entitle her to the benefit of judicial separation. After hearing and considering the case submitted to him by Lady Noel, who showed no disposition to exaggerate the facts, the counsel was of opinion that, though the poet's misconduct would entitle his wife to judicial separation, it was not of so hein^ ous a kind as to render separation indispensable. It was a case for reconciliation ; and the counsel wished to be of ser- vice in bringing the quarrel to an amicable conclusion. This opinion was given on what was then the whole of Lady Byron's case against her husband. The evidence is more than sufficient that she withheld nothing of her original case from her parents. In the absence of her mother and Mrs. Clermont, Lady Byron spent doleful days and wretched nights at Kirkby Mallory. There were moments when, in alarm for her own mind, she felt she was in no fit state to have. the management of herself. One day she was seen riding about the Kirkby Mallory park at her horse's fullest gallop . On the morrow she could not leave the room where, racked with headache and 242 THE EEAL LOKD BYEON. burning with fever, she alternately lay on a couch or paced over the floor, crying to God for help, declaring she had done nothing why He should desert her. Of Byron she thought by turns bitterly and tenderly, resentfully and relentingly. She Avorked off some of her agony of heart and brain by writing him a letter of vehement feeling (the letter mentioned by pre- vious writers about Byron) which she withheld at the last moment from the post. Had Byron come before her, with the gentlest of his smiles, the richest tones of his irresistible voice, and the light of love in his eyes, when she was penning that letter, there would have been an end to their discord. This passage of softening emotion was followed by hard moods and gusts of anger. On being told that to get judicial separation it would perhaps be necessary for her to endure the scandal and indignity of a trial, she declared she would en- dure any shame rather than the misery of living with the man who had treated her so badly. When she talked vindictively of her husband. Lady Byron's words of wrath were some- what seasoned with self-righteousness. As for Byron's sen- sibility and the pain and shame that would come to him from the scandal of separation. Lady Byron thought it was better his pride should be broken and punished in this than in the next world. It was hard she should be made the instrument of his chastisement. But God's will must be done. She must do her duty. When Lady Byron had begun to think in this wild and insolent and self-righteous way, the chance was small for the speedy reconcilement of the angry husband and resentful wife. In all this miserable business George Byron and Augusta were wholly in Lady Byron's confidence, if not wholly on her side. George Byron, indeed, was completely on her side. In his opinion the fault was altogether with his cousin, — none of it with his cousin's wife. And though she clung fondly to her brother, Augusta was brave enough to tell him the fault was chiefly, if not wholly, with him. Byron never in his heart forgave his cousin for siding with Lady Byron in this bitter contention ; but he admired and honored his sister more than ever, for the steadiness and courage with "which she defended his wife and censured him. THE SEPARATION. 243 To the last hour of her sojourn at 13 Piccadilly Terrace, Augusta never humored her brother by speaking a single unkind word of his wife. One result of Lady Byron's perfect confidence ia Mrs. Leigh and George Byron, was that they knew much more than the poet of his wife's doings and purposes, after the 15th of January. Byron did not know of his wife's inten- tion to repudiate him till the 2d of February, 1816, when he received Sir Ralph Noel's letter of proposal for an amica- ble separation. On that day, Mrs. Leigh and her cousin Captain George Anson Byron, R.N., had been in possession of Lady Byron's purpose for more than a week ; but the cousins forbore to give Byron a hint of the course affairs had taken, thinking it best in every way that the poet should get his first knowledge of his wife's determination from her father. Consequently, Augusta, still her brother's guest at 13 Piccadilly Terrace, and George Byron, a daily visitor at his cousin's house, were aware of Lady Byron's decision on this grand question some eight days before it was communi- cated to the person whom it concerned most deeply. The exact date of Lady Noel's conference with Dr. Lush- ington is not known to the writer of this page. But the confer- ence seems to have taken place on January 22, 1816. It cannot well have been earlier. It certainly was not later. A fortnight or three weeks later (" about a fortnight or perhaps more," said Dr. Lushington in 1830) Lady Byron was in Lon- don with her father on business touching the separation. It has been assumed by most of the many writers about this busi- ness, thatSirEalphNoel was throughout the aiFairamere cipher in the hands of the overbearing Lady Noel and the artful Mrs. Clermont, — and had no strong feeling on the subject. In this last respect, at least, he has been misrepresented. He was the first to cry out for the lawyer. And as soon as he had reason to think Byron sane, he became the stern censor of his only child's husband. On learning that the poet certainly was not mad, the baronet was pugnacious in the highest degree and would not hear of reconciliation. Lady Byron probably took her own course in the matter from first to last. But if her action was influenced by parental authority, 244 THE REAL LORD BYKOKT. the influence came from her father rather than her mother. If Byron knew this, he never admitted it. He preferred to attribute his domestic troubles and consequent social disgrace to the rancor of two deceitful women rather than the judgment of an honorable and sensible man. Writing to Moore on February 29, 1816, when he was in the fiercest period of his first fury against Lady Noel and Mrs. Clermont, Byron said, " My little girl is in the country, and, they tell me, is a very fine child, and now nearly three months old ; Lady Noel (my mother-in-law, or, rather, at law) is at present overlooking it. Her daughter (Miss Milbanke that wae) is, I believe, in London with her father. A Mrs. C. (now a kind of house-keeper and spy of Lady N.'s) who, in her better days, was a washerwoman, is supposed to be — by the learned — very much the occult cause of our late domestic discrepancies. In all this business, I am the sorriest for Sir Kalph. He and I are equally punished, though magis pares quam similes in our afflictions. Yet it is hard for both to suffer for the fault of one, and so it is — I shall be separated from my wife ; he will retain his." This was Byron's way of putting his case against the women, and showing his dis- position (possibly sincere) to regard Sir Ralph as his friend. Whilst Lady Byron was in town with her father, she had an interview vdth Dr. Lushington, " about a fortnight, or perhaps more, after the advocate's first interview with Lady Noel." At that interview Lady Byron informed Dr. Lush- ington of facts, which the lawyer, in 1830, was of opinion could not have been known to Sir Ralph. These additional facts had such an effect upon the lawyer, that, instead of con- tinuing to regard the case as one for reconciliation, he declared that reconciliation was impossible. On receiving the same additional information, Sir Samuel RomUly underwent the same change of opinion and declared it no case for reconcile- ment. Writing in 1830, fourteen years after the events, Lady Byron spoke of these additional facts, as matters she had reserved from her parents, when, penning the statement for her mother to submit to medical and legal advisers in Jan- uary, 1816. "She," Lady Byron wrote in 1830 of her mother's part in the affair, " was empowered by me to take THE SEPARATION. 245 legal opinions on a written statement of mine, though: I had then reasons for reserving a part of the case from the knowl- edge even of my father and mother." Writing so long after the affair with insufficient memoranda Lady Byron may well have imagined that these additional matters were part of her original case against her husband, when in truth they came to her knowledge at some time subsequent to January 15, 1816. The memory of the most honest witnesses is so treacherous and unreliable, that to suggest Lady Byron made this mistake in 1830 is to raise no suspicion of her general veracity, or of her hona fides on that particular occasion. After making her statements (of January 16 and January 18, 1816) to her parents. Lady Byron believed the statements had been explicit. Affecting to take her parents wholly into her con- fidence, and causing them to think themselves bo treated. Lady Byron cannot have been innocent of deceit, if whilst pro- fessing to tell them everything, she withheld the chief fact from them. Disregard for truth certainly was not one of Lady Byron's failings at this early stage of her career or (though she lived to say things strangely untrue) at any time of her passage through life. There is other evidence that Lady Byron's original statement to her parents was the whole of her case against her husband up to January 15, 1816. But of this evidence there is no need to give the particulars. The additional statement, that had so great an effect on Dr. Lushington and Sir Samuel Romilly, was either a false statement (which is in the highest degree improbable), or a statement of matters that came to Lady Byron after her first communication to her parents. As the poet was living more or less under espionage, circumstances to his greater discredit with Lady Byron may well have come to her ears in the course of three or four weeks. What was the statement? By those, who gave their creduHty to the monstrous invention set forth in Mrs. Beecher Stowe's book, it has been assumed that this mysterious and additional statement to Lady Byron's counsel was a communication which could not have faded to inspire the lawyer with unutterable repugnance to the Hon- orable Mrs. Leigh, and to make him think her unfit for the society of any Christian woman. Had the mysterious state- 246 THE HEAL LORD BYEON. ment been what the writer of that lamentable book fancied it to be, Lady Byron would scarcely have told Dr. Lushington only a few days later, that she was longing to have an inter- view with her dear sister Augusta — her child's godmother — for the purpose of conferring with her on their domestic in- terests. Nor would even so courteous a gentleman as young Dr. Lushington, on receiving this piece of information, have merely advised Lady Byron to keep away from Ada's god- mother, till the business of the separation was settled, lest their necessarily emotional conversation at so critical a mo- ment should have a prejudicial effect on their future inter- course. Moreover, had the mysterious statement been what Mrs. Stowe imagined, Lady Byron would scarcely have just then sought a meeting with her " dearest Goose," in spite of Dr. Lushington's caution. The negotiations for the separa- tion were still pending when Lady Byron and Augusta had as affectionate interview, before the latter returned to Cam- bridgeshire. What was the mysterious statement of which so much has been written ? What were the words spoken in strict con- fidence by Lady Byron to Dr. Lushington that made the ad- vocate take another and altogether different view of his client's case ? What were the facts — or the allegations which two hard-headed lawyers were content to receive as proven facts — that, besides working so great a change in the lady's legal adviser, determined the counsel on the other side (Sir Samuel Romilly) to return the fee with which he had been retained, on the ground that Lady Byron had a right to the privileges of separation, and that, under the newly discovered circumstances of the case, Byron had no right to resist her demand ? What were the facts or the allegations that affected Byron's own counsel in so remarkable a manner ? Before an attempt is made to answer these questions, or rather to indicate the right answers to them, something must be said of two women who exercised no small influence over the poet's career. Two ladies named Clermont are memorable personages of the Byronic story, — Mrs. Clermont, the mischief-maker, and Jane Clermont, the mother of AUegra. If they were THE SEPARATION. 247 not members of the same family, they were acquaintances bearing the same peculiar surname. Whilst Mrs. Clermont appeared at Lady Noel's receptions as the whilom governess of Miss Mnbanke, and the gentlewoman ever in faithful attendance on Lady Byron's rather overbearing and hot- tempered mother, Jane Clermont's people were personages of a literary set, some of whose members Lady Noel con- descended to favor. Of Mrs. Clermont, the mischief-maker, every one has heard, from the satire Byron poured upon her, almost as much to his own discredit as to her infamy. But the poet's biographers have hitherto been strangely and sus- piciously reticent about the charming girl who gave Byron his natural daughter. The surname of these two ladies has been spelled in various ways. One comes upon it in the form of Claremont, Clairmont, and Charlemont as well as Cler- mont. Jane Clermont (as her name is rightly spelled in the British Museum Catalogue) , the clever and brilliant daugh- ter of William Godwin's second wife, had no liking either for her Christian name or her surname. Dropping Jane (either because it was Christian or unromantic) , she cut the second syllable from her surname and adapting the first syllable of it to her sense of the fitness of things, called herself — Claii'e. A beautiful brunette, with fine, though irregular features, this girl of a wayward spirit and Italian aspect called on Byron, as a person of power in the Drury Lane Theatre, when he was in the midst of his domestic troubles. Claire's purpose in the visit was to ask the poet to introduce her as an actress to the stage. The girl's name caught the ear of the poet, whose pulse always quickened at the sound of his old school- mate's name (Clare) ; and the brightness of her beauty charmed his fancy. Why Claire's application for employment on the stage was unsuccessful does not appear. Possibly Byron saw she would not make a good actress. Possibly he thought she would do better by becoming his mistress. Anyhow the poet conceived a passion for Claire ; and Claire, "holding " (as Mr. Eossetti expresses it) " independent notions on ques- tions such as that of marriage " fell in love with the poet, — love that changed slowly to detestation. The day of 248 THE EBAL LORD BYEON. Claire's first interview Tvith Byron is unknown ; the precise time at which she yielded to his addresses is of course un- known. Circumstances, however, point to some one of the earlier days of February, 1816, — some day closely following on Sir Ralph Noel's announcement to Byron of his wife's desire for separation, — as the time at which the poet's brief association with WiUiam Godwin's step-daughter began. It is not very probable that it began earlier. It certainly did not begin before Lady Byron's departure from Piccadilly Terrace ; though there is reason to believe that Lady Byron was ere long induced to imagine it began whilst she was in town. Partly because he felt that greater communicativeness would weaken the case against Lady Byron and put discredit on the "Fare Thee Well," and partly because he wished to spare the feelings of Godwin and Mrs. Shelley, Moore skates very lightly over the dangerous surface of Byron's scarcely edifying friendship with Allegra's mother. After insisting that Byron's official connection with Drury Lane Theatre afforded nothing at which his wife could fairly take umbrage, he observes, "The sole case in which he afforded anything lilie real grounds for such an accusation did not take place till after the period of the separation." The period of separation is an elastic expression. It may be taken as covering only the time between Lady Byron's jour- ney from Piccadilly to the second day of the following month, the day on which Byron was informed of his wife's purpose to keep away from him ; or it may be taken as covering the far greater time between Lady Byron's journey to the country and the 22d of April, on which day the deed of separation was signed. In his own breast Moore used the expression in the smaller sense, whilst he intended his readers to con- strue it in the larger sense. Feeling it would be imprudent to make no reference to a matter which was imperfectly known to a large number of people, Moore thought it best to refer to it in a manner which would cause his readers to infer that the matter was of a time subsequent to the publication of the verses on the unforgiving wife. Bom at least as early as January 22, 1817, Allegra was no offspring of a premature birth. Leaving England on THE SEPARATION. 249 April the 25th, Byron saw nothing more of Claire tiU the 27th of the following month at Geneva, whither she travelled in the company of the Shelleys. Allegra's birth was due to nothing that took place after Byron's withdrawal from England. Byroh had taken Claire for his goddess, and she had enjoyed his patronage for several weeks before he crossed the water from Dover to Ostend. The " Fare Thee Well " (published in the middle of April, 1816) did not set the sentimental women weeping, till the poet had for a consider- able period found consolation in Claire's smiles for the cruelty of his unforgiving wife. Whilst the poet's liaison with Jane Clermont was a new arrangement, it came to the knowledge of Mrs. Clermont, the mischief-maker, who rendered Lord Byron the considera- ble dis-service, and her former pupil the questionable service of informing Lady Byron of the affair. The intelligence could not fail to incense Lady Byron. It did incense her. For though Byron could have urged in his defence, that he had not knelt to Claire till he had been discarded by his wife, the quickness with which he had found material consolation for her severity was peculiarly calculated to pique Lady Byron's self-love, quicken her animosity against him, and confirm her in her purpose of having noth- ing more to do with him. On coming to her knowledge, the liaison may well have been regarded by Lady Byron as a demonstration that he had never really loved her. An unsuspicious woman, in Lady Byron's position, would have been almost certain to assume that the liaison had begun before the separation, even to assume that her husband had sent her into the country, in order that he might enjoy the society of his mistress with greater security from detection. Being of a suspicious nature. Lady Byron necessarily leaped to the erroneous conclusions to which an unsuspicious woman would have come. Having taken this view of the liaison, it was natural for Lady Byron to place it amongst her original grounds of dis- pleasure with her husband, — to think and speak of it as part of her original case against him. It misses several barleycorns of certainty that Lady 250 THE KEAL LORD BYEON. Byron's " additional statement " to her counsel had reference to her husband's intimacy with Jane Clermont ; and in the absence of the several barleycorns of positive evidence — . likely to appear at any moment, almost certain to appear on the publication of the Hobhouse papers — that would either convert a considerable body of circumstantial evidence into a perfect historic demonstration or exhibit its fallaciousness, no personal historian would be justified in offering the present suggestion as anything more than a reasonable hypothesis, countenanced by a variety of facts. Readers are, therefore, cautioned to take the suggestion as nothing more than a rea- sonable hypothesis pointing to what will probably be found in due course the true explanation of matters that have caused the world much perplexity. The strong evidence that Lady Byron's first statement (of January 16) of her case against her husband was a full and unreserved statement, the sufficient evidence that Lady Byron's written statement (of January 18) was no less ex- plicit and complete, and the abundant evidence that Byron's marital behavior up to January 15 had not been faulty in any important particular (discoverable to his wife) over and above the matters set forth in the two statements, are three several bodies of testimony justifying the strongest opinion that Lady Byron's additional statement {if a true one, — and the lady was not at that time at all likely to make an intentionally untrue one) must have related to some matters that, besides coming to her knowledge, had taken place since her departure from London on January 15, 1816. Though the precise date of its commencement is unknown, and most lUcely un- discoverable, Byron's intimacy with Jane Clermont certe««?y followed so closely on Lady Byron's journey to Kirkby Mal- lory that it was probably known to her before she came up to town towards the middle of February to confer with Dr. Lushington. Byron knew that Lady Byron's " additional statement " to Dr. Lushington (made towards the middle of February) was the cause of the advocate's new view of his client's case, — and the cause of Romilly's determination not to act professionally against Lady Byron's demand for a sep- aration. Knowing this he regarded Mrs. Clermont as the THE SEPARATION. 251 person chiefly accountable for Ms domestic troubles, — as the person really accountable for the " additional statement " that had operated so seriously to his disadvantage. The period of Byron's wildest wrath against Mrs. Clermont lay midway between the middle of February, when the " addi- tional statement " was made, and the middle of AprU, when the ignoble "Sketch" was published. On February 29, 1816, he wrote to Moore the letter of coarse abuse of Mrs. Clermont, and he dated the satire on the obscure gentle- woman March 29, 1816. He regarded Mrs. Clermont as the author of the " additional statement " made a fortnight before the railing letter. She was the channel through which Lady Byron sooner or later gained her knowledge of her husband's intimacy with Jane Clermont ; — an affair that in- censed Lady Byron long after she had heard of it. If the " additional statement " had reference to the Jane Clermont business. Dr. Lushington could only say to his client, "That being so, and your feelings being what they are, I will no longer advise you to think of reconciliation " ; and as a man of fine feeling Eomilly could only say to his client, " I wUl not be used as an instrument for forcing Lady Byron to return to a husband who knows so well how to make himself happy without her." Regarding her husband's intimacy with Jane Clermont as an affair of older stand- ing than January 15, 1816, Lady Byron (for reasons already indicated) may well have come to regard it in 1830 as part of her original case against her husband ; as some- thing withheld from her parents in January, 1816 ; as some- thing kept back from the oral statement of January 16, and the written statement of January 18, although her first knowledge of the matter was considerably subsequent to those days. It is not difficult to imagine reasons why Lady Byron felt herself bound in honor to withhold her knowl- edge of the Jane Clermont affair from her parents. If the information, which Lady Byron withheld from her parents, related to that business, it was doubtless so withheld out of respect to the feelings and wishes of its giver, Mrs. Clermont. Several motives are conceivable, any one of which would dis- pose the mischief-maker to bind her former pupU to withhold 252 THE KEAL LOED BYEON. the information from her father and mother. If Jane Cler- mont was Mrs. Clermont's kinswoman (a question respect- ing which the present writer has sought in vain for evidence) Lady Noel's " companion " must have wished to keep from general knowledge a matter so discreditable to her family. Mrs. Clermont may have been moved to secrecy by kindly feeling to the Godwins or other members of Jane Cler- mont's domestic circle. She may have been actuated to it by fear of Byron, and a nervous desire to avoid the very dis- repute which he so ruthlessly put upon her. The large body of facts and considerations indicated in this long paragraph no doubt fall short of an liistoric demonstration, that Lady Byron's mysterious statement to her lawyer referred to the Jane Clermont business. But they are facts and considera- tions to justify a strong opinion, that a perfect exhibition of all the circumstances and consequences of the poet's intimacy with Jane Clermont would probably put an end to all uncer- tainty respecting his wife's " additional statement " to Dr. Lushington. Though the new love followed so closely upon the old, that prosaic persons will be disposed to think the poet cannot have suffered severely from the loss of the wife for whom he so speedily found a substitute, it would be a mistake to re- gard the " Fare Thee Well " as an altogether insincere and theatrical performance, by which Byron hoped to win sym- pathy for himself, and cause antipathy to the wife against whom he was so incapable of "rebelling." That it was pub- lished for such ends is more than probable. That it went to the press without his authority or knowledge, through the action of an officious friend, as he meant to inform the world in his posthumous "Memoirs," is very much less than prob- able. It can, however, be readily believed that the verses, which should have been seen by no one save the writer and the person to whom he addressed them, were the result of genuine emotion. The wife whom he had wooed with a persistence foreign to the impetuous and gusty passions of his earlier time, may have occasioned him the disappointment that is the usual sequel of extravagant expectations ; but their inter- THE SEPARATION. 253 course had been fruitful of endearments and mutual tender- ness. Though she was not one of the few women whose love is more likely to be quickened than extinguished by un- kindness, she had unquestionably married him from affection. The mere vanity, which has been declared her only motive in accepting him, would in so temperate a woman have been satisfied by a suit that was no secret in her circle. The offer which she declined had given her all the triumph she doubt- less coveted over her rival at Melbourne House. Mere rivalry would have disposed her to decline the second offer, even as she had declined the first , rather than to accept the suitor who was not likely to revert to her married rival. On the other hand, though selfishness caused the poet to repent his marriage as soon as he was required to sacrifice his own wishes to his wife's happiness, and had chafed for a brief while under the petty vexations of conjugal bondage, it is no less certain that he also married from affection. Of course there were contributory motives and influences. But on either side the predominant motive to this luckless union was sentimental preference. On Lady Byron's side the feeling may have been deficient in fervor and intensity, qualities not to be looked for in a woman of her tranquil and compara- tively unemotional nature. On Lord Byron's side the feeling was certainly devoid — perhaps ominously devoid — of the tempestuous rage and sweet turbulence, which, three years later, made him sing on the river's brink, as he journeyed to- wards Bologna, — " My blood ia all meridian-; were it not, I had not left my clime, nor should I be, In spite of tortures, ne'er to be forgot, A slave again of love, " — But it was no marriage of ^ convenance.' It was as much a love-marriage on both sides as ninety-and-nine out of every hundred marriages done and celebrated with all honesty in love's name, and without a hint heard from any corner to their sentimental discredit. Lady Byron was no woman to promise to love a man, without regard to the importance of the vow. Pliable though he was in a clever woman's hands, 254 THE REAL LORD BYEON. BjTon was not the man to marry a woman he didn't really care for, simply because Lady Melbourne (old enough to be his mother, as he called her ; indeed, old enough to be his grandmother) wished him to do so. His letters before and after his marriage, all the circumstances of his suit to the lady, and the superabundant evidence of the harmony of their tempers during the earlier half of their term of union, put it beyond doubt that he loved her on the bridal morning, and deUghted in her for several months. That she was really acceptable to him during this period of their closest intimacy is shown by his reluctance to sign the deed of separation, and shown yet more strongly by his futile attempt to lure her back to his embrace soon after his withdrawal from England notwithstanding all the embittering humihations which their dissension and severance had occasioned him. Had he not still felt a strong attachment to his wife, it is inconceivable that within three months of putting his hand to the deed he would, in accordance with Madame de S tad's counsel, have made overtures through a friend in England for a reconcile- ment. Of those overtures nothing is known positively, with the exception of their failm-e and his vindictive annoyance at their failure. But they must have been based on a frank admission that Lady Byron had much to forgive, and must have proceeded from a sincere yearning for restoration to her favor and campanionship. They cannot have resulted from mere arguments and considerations of prudence. It is mar- vellous and perplexing that they should have been made so soon after the rupture which had been fruitful of so many exasperating incidents. It was absolutely impossible for By- ron to have made them, had he not found her a congenial companion, and persisted in loving her. In the first three months of his separation from the woman for whom he felt thus strongly, memory cannot have failed to stir his sensibility with words and looks she had given him, — with pathetic scenes Lq which they had been the sole actors. His sensibility cannot have failed to rouse poetic fancy to play on these pictures of remembrance. Acting upon one another in their customary manner, remembrance, feeling, and imagination may well have produced the flood THE SEPARATION. 255 of tender and subduing emotions that found utterance in the valedictory verses. But though the poem may have been an outpouring of genuine feeling it was published with a mean and malicious purpose. Given to the world as a fair state- ment of his case against his wife and of her case against him, it became a falsehood. The act of publication was, in truth, a crafty attempt on the poet's part to catch applause at her expense, to get advantage to himself by lowering her in the world's regard. It was an act of public war upon the woman he had injured, that changing her regard for him, determined her to change her course towards him, — and henceforth to be silent in behalf of the man who was so well qualified to be her assailant and liis own defender. On reading the pathetic verses, which brought their writer much sympathay and caused thousands of people to imagine he had been more sinned against than sinning, Madame de Stael exclaimed, "How gladly would I have been unhappy in Lady Byron's place ! " Had this woman of wit been in Lady Byron's place — had she been Lady Byron instead of Madame de Stael — she would have regarded the verses as coming from a husband who, after wooing her for two years and a half assiduously, had in nine short months found her society tame and wearisome ; a husband who after living in harmony with her for seven or eight months had made her feel that his delight in possessing her was merely the delight of a chUd playing with a new toy ; a husband who, whilst recog- nizing her conscientious desire to please him, had told her she wasted her pains on an enterprise beyond her power ; a husband who, passing abruptly from tenderness to harshness, had poured cruel speech upon her at a time when her health gave her a peculiar title to his most delicate consideration ; a husband who within a few weeks of her accouchement had told her she must choose between travelling with him, or staying at home with her mother, whilst he pursued his pleasure in distant lands, where he would find life enjoyable without her; a husband who, whipped to wUd fury by her reluctance to assent to either alternative, had declared his union with her the one disastrous step of his life ; a husband who in moments of calmer malice had said he never loved 256 THE EEAL LOED BYEON. her, and indeed wooed her out of spite from the date of his first offer to the date of his second proposal ; a husband who, passing from noisy rage to silent rage, had lived with her for days together in speechless gloom, and whilst per- secuting her with morose taciturnity had never encountered her glance without instantly dropping or averting his eyes in a manner eloquent of aversion. Had she been Lady Byron, and seen the verses for the first time in the author's own handwriting, Madame de Stael would have had reason for thinking it probable he had not sent them to her without first reading them, in a voice of cynical drollery, to Jane Clermont. Had she been Lady Byron, and seen the verses for the first time in a newspaper, she would have read them as an ingenious composition sent to the press for her injury by the man who, no long while since, had spoken of her as breaking her marriage- vow. Had she been fully instructed in the case, the Frenchwoman of a proud spirit and exacting temper would have been less ready to change places with Lady Byron, and less hopeful that the unforgiving wife would be induced by a few submissive and conciliatory phrases, to pillow herself once more on the breast "where her head so oft had lain." Had the verses been seut by their writer to Lady Byron for her sole perusal on the 17th of March (the date assigned to them by their author) , they might have made her falter, at least for a few moments, in her purpose. It is even con- ceivable, though improbable, that, surrendering herself to their influence, she might (the Jane Clermont business not- withstanding) , have answered the verses in a way that would have saved her from the imputation of " wanting one sweet weakness — to forgive." But their publication in the middle of April was an outrage she had good reason to resent. To receive such an insult tamely, to endurfe unresent- fully so undying an injury — a wrong repeated daily through- out the world — a woman must be either the equal of the angels or much lower than sensitive and self-respecting womankind. To Lady Byron the outrage was the more oifensive on account of what she regarded its meanness. Heretofore she had admired, loved, feared, and pitied her THE SEPAEATION. 257 husband. In the season of his triumph she had regarded him with admiration, whilst holding aloof from the crowd of Byromaniacs who suffocated him with their white shoulders and foolish flatteries. In the days of his tenderness to her she had worshipped and loved him for treating her so ten- derly. His outbreaks of anger and " the breath of his bitter words " had made her fear him. Whilst she thought him mad, she watched him with compassionate anxiety. On being assured that his violence and moodiness were not referable to insanity, she had parted from him in perplexity and dismay rather than with repugnance. In her mental narrowness she had thought him possessed by the demon of impious insolence. In her spiritual arrogance she had for a few days been disposed to regard herself as' an instrument chosen by the Almighty for his humiliation. But it never occurred to her to 'despise him till he tried to divert from himself the unanticipated storm of obloquy which he had provoked by his own action. She felt that if the storm had broken in thunder over her head, she would have borne all the infamy of it uncomplainingly. She scorned him for trying to turn the fury of the hurricane upon her ; and in her disdain of the meanness of his design she thought, to his shame, precisely what he wrote a few months later to her discredit, " I would not do bj thee as thou hast done ! " 258 THE KEAL LOED BYKON. CHAPTER XVn. THE STOEM. Using the word "simple" in the sense of "ordinary and common," Byron remarked shortly before his death to a gentleman who was pressing him for an avowal of the causes of his separation from Lady Byron, "The causes, my dear sir," were too simple to be easily found out " ; — words by which he wished to intimate that, to discover Lady Byron's grounds for dissatisfaction with him and her reasons for repudiating him, people should seek them in matters that are the usual sources of discord to newly married couples, instead of imagining that the rupture resulted from ex- travagant crimes and improbable incidents. When their association has survived the first delights of novelty, it is not unusual for a newly married couple to l)icker and even to quarrel bitterly from causes that, without being trivial and altosrether fanciful, are remote from the outrages which afford a young wife the strongest justification for withdraw- ing from uncongenial wedlock. Though it may be a question whether Lady Byron was justified by the circumstances of her case in breaking from her young husband, when she was aware that by doing so she would compel a man of his temperament to a life of more or less flagrant libertinism, no holder of the nicely balanced scale can accuse her of taking so serious a step without serious provocation. As she acted from prudent and selfish care for her own comfort and happiness, she can claim none of the admiration and gratitude that would have been her proper and glorious reward had she preferred her husband's welfare and dignity to her own advantage. The sympathy due to her for the wretchedness which came to her from the alUance she had not sought is weakened al- THE STOEM. 259 most to extinction by the recollection of the alacrity with which she retreated from the position of trial and misery. Finding him no worse in any other particular (probably finding a better man in all other particulars) than she ex- pected to find him, she had no sooner made acquaintance with what Hobhouse used to style the poet's morbid selfish- ness, and the gusty violence of his temper, and ascertained those defects to be no results of insanity but the chief and incurable failings of an otherwise noble nature, than she de- termined to be quit of him. Wanting the sympathetic large- heartedness and moral breadth of temperament that would have enabled her to refer his wild speech to the maddening heats of constitutional irritability, she was stung to resent- ment by his outrageous and absolutely truthless assertions that he had never really loved her, and had pursued her from motives of resentment and vengeance. Instead of taking these extravagant utterances seriously and weeping over them in her solitary hours, Lady Byron would have received them with cheerily ringing laughter, would have rallied him about them with sly humor and pleasant irony in their privacy, and would even have chattered gayly and with piquant drollery about them in his hearing and pres- ence (never behind his back) to her more volatile acquaint- ances, had she been a woman capable of controlling the humors of .her lord, and "managing the devil" that lurked in his nature, — a nature good and ill by turns. The woman is conceivable who would have made Byron a happy and good man, and won unutterable happiness to herself from the service of successful devotion to so marvellous a master ; but she would have been " the one woman of ten thousand," and greatly unlike Lady Byron in intellect and temper. Being a fairly good woman. Lady Byron should not be blamed for not being other than she was. On the contrary, she is rather to be compassionated, like all persons who have come through circumstances, rather than by voluntary intrusion, to high places for which they are singularly in- competent. It remains, however, that she retreated from the place of trial and difficulty to please herself, not because she was un- 260 THE EEAL LOED BYRON. der a clear and imperative obligation to leave it. If Byron was morbidly selfish, his wife cannot be credited with per- haps the rarest virtue — absolute unselfishness. To her ad- vantage it may be declared on sufficient evidence that, on withdrawing as far as possible from the distasteful union, she was convinced no good would ensue to Byron from her self- sacrifice, should she constrain herself to remain with him. Recognizing her complete impotence to make him happy, and believing that his grief at losing her would at the worst be nothing more serious than a transient annoyance, she resolved to escape from a companionship that, affording him no com- fort, could yield her nothing but grief. Under these circum- stances it certainly is not obvious that she was wrong in re- verting from wedlock to singleness, and in falling back on her natural right to pursue her own happiness. Though it can never rise to rank with the virtues, selfishness is within certain limits the salutary and even sacred privilege of all human creatures. And it does not appear that Lady Byron's selfishness exceeded these limits, when she determined for her pleasure to leave forever the husband, who for his own mere pleasure was preparing to leave her for a considerable time. Nothing having occurred since 1816 to enlarge his knowl- edge of his wife's reasons for parting from him, it is remark- able that Byron spoke so confidently and precisely in 1824 of the nature of the matters respecting which he had for years pretended to want clear and definite information. In spoken words and in written words it had for eight years been his complaint against Lady Byron and her advisers that they had refused to tell him in what particulars he had wronged her, when he was at length moved to remark that the causes of the separation were too simple to be easily found out. Having for so long a period affected inability to ac- count for a matter so hurtful to his happiness and reputation, it is strange that in a sudden fit of candor and communica- tiveness he should almost at the last moment have admitted his sufficient knowledge of the mysterious business. Of course there never was a moment when he needed any enlightenment on the affair. After worrying a fairly sensible THE STOEM. 261 woman into thinking him a madman, no sane man needs to be told why she thinks him mad. The husband who has whipped and goaded his wife into disaffection, by malicious words and aggravating taciturnity, does not need to be in- formed why and how she has come to regard him with aver- sion. If he asks for the information, he does so from some freak of humor, from some notion of policy, from an appe- tite for further disputation, or from curiosity respecting her feeling on particular points of the contention, — not from a genuine inability to account for her disapproval of his treat- ment of her. When Byron, after perusing his father-in- law's letter of the 2d of February, 1816, begged his wife to state her reasons for desiring a separation, he knew both her reasons, and the reasonableness of them. And it is only fair to Lady Byron, of whose sUence so much has been said by her censors, to put it upon record that, in reply to the requirement she gave the needless information with abun- dant frankness. To the letter, in which Byron made the request for the first time by his sister's pen. Lady Byron replied ia a letter published in 1869 in the " Quarterly Keview," — KiRKET Mallokt, Feb. 3, 1816. Mt deakest Augusta : — Tou are desired by your brother to ask, if my father has acted with my concurrence in proposing the separation. He has. It cannot be supposed that, in my present distressing situation, I am capable of stating in a detailed manner the reasons which will not only justify this measure, but compel me to take it ; and it never can be my wish to remember unnecessarily those injuries for which, however deep, I feel no resentment. I will now only recall to Lord Byron's mind his avowed and insurmountable aversion to the married state, and the desire and determination he has expressed ever since its commencement to free himself from that bondage, as finding it quite insupportable, though candidly acknowledging that no effort of duty or affection has been wanting on my part. He has too painfully convinced me that all these attempts to contribute toward his happiness were wholly useless, and most unwelcome to him. I enclose this letter to my father, wishing it to receive his sanction. Ever yours most affectionately, A. I. BYEON. It may not be inferred from the least perspicuous sentence of this epistle (penned under circumstances sufficiently try- ing to account for its occasional obscurities of expression) 262 THE REAL LORD BYKON. that Byron declared his purpose of escaping from wedlock almost from the very moment of its celebration, or that it was the writer's purpose to accuse him of having done so. His gravest oifence (which would have been received with laughter instead of dismay by "the one woman in ten thousand ") against his wife was that, on coming to quarrel with her some eight months after their wedding, he declared that he Aac? entertained a purpose ever since his marriage of freeing himself from its bondage. As Lady Byron cannot have intended to make Mrs. Leigh and her brother a statement, whose untruth would be obvious to both the one and the other, it may be taken for granted that on this point she only wished to inform her sister-in-law and remind her husband, that, on declaring his intention to escape from domestic thraldrom, he declared the resolution to have been formed at the very beginning of their union. Augusta being no less aware than her brother of the harmony of the marriage throughout the earlier months of 1815, it cannot have been Lady By- ron's purpose to represent that the grossly offensive speech was made in the honeymoon. An editorial interpolation of four words (as an obvious omission) after "he has ex- pressed," would give no more than the thought of the writer who must have meant to write, " I will now only recall to Lord Byron's mind his avowed and insurmountable aversion to the married state, and the desire and determina- tion he has expressed himself as having entertained ever since its commencement to free himself from that bondage." The propriety of this emendation appears also from the fact that the letter represents the offensive speech to have been made at a time when its utterer could speak of himself as "finding the bondage quite insupportable," whilst "candidly acknowledging that no effort of duty or affection had been wanting " on the part of his wife, — a time that must have been, from the terms of the statement, considerably subsequent to the wedding. Written for persons who can "read be- tween the lines " and catch the precise meaning of vague and inexact expressions, domestic letters are seldom so carefully worded as official epistles. Whilst its frankness and direct- ness indicate how little cause Byron had to charge his wife THE STOEM. 263 with stubbornly withholding her grounds of offence from his knowledge, the freedom and inconsideration of this epistle will prepare readers for the assurance that she was at the outset of the quarrel no more chargeable with caution than with uncommunicativeness . Instead of returning from London to Kirkby Mallory without seeing her sister-in-law, in accordance with Dr. Lushington's prudent advice, Lady Byron sought and had a meeting with Augusta. Greeting one another with undi- minished affectionateness and cordiality, the two sisters-in- law after their conversation parted in perfect friendship. Certainly Mrs. Leigh had no reason to complain of Lady Byron's dogged uncommunicativeness ; and it is not con- ceivable that Byron ventured to charge this fault upon his wife in his sister's hearing. Alluding to the smaller vexa- tions she had endured since her marriage, in a manner to make it obvious that mere considerations of comfort and discomfort were in some degree accountable for her original determination not to return to an uncongenial association, Lady Byron admitted that she had not come to the resolve without a struggle and passages of sentimental vacillation, which, of course, would not have troubled her had circum- stances left no other course open to her. Acknowledging her weakness in not coming to the final resolve directly and unhesitatingly, she expressed sorrow for causing Augusta and several other friends much uneasiness, which she might have spared them by action less wavering and uncertain. Of what she had suffered from Byron's ebullitions of temper and manifestations of selfishness, there was no need for her to speak to Augusta, who had been a witness of some of them, and was well aware of her brother's intention to go abroad with Hobhouse. Spealdng thus frankly, she spoke with a singular appearance of freedom from the bitterness to be looked for in a person moved to a momentous conclusion by a strong sense of insult and injury. It comforted her to believe that the separation would cause Byron no acute sorrow or enduring discomfort, — that, instead of regetting her as a lost delight, he would remember her only as a former burden and incumbrance. She declared that. 264 THE KEAL LORD BTEON. though she might not refer his ill-treatment of her to mental derangement, which would have made it altogether blame- less, she thought of all that had passed between them with- out resentment, and almost without a sense of injury. If tliere was any subject on which Lady Byron was otherwise than frank in her communications to her sister-in-law, the subject was Byron's intimacy with Jane Clermont, — the one subject on which Byron was probably most desirous for her to be free of speech. There are reasons for the opinion that Byron's first disposition to accuse his wife and her advisers of stubborn and mysterious reticence originated in ■^llisjrexation^^their avoidance of the matter, which he may well have thought^cMefly aceeuntable for his wife's dis- pleasure. But this is no question on which the present writer can speak authoritatively. Possibly the publication of the Hobhouse papers will remove it from the field of mere conjecture. Another proof of Lady Byron's disposition to think gener- ously of her husband and to act justly towards him, at a moment when she might be pardoned for regarding him vindictively, is found in her determination to do everything in her power to lessen the injurious effect which her action in withdrawing from him could not faij to have on his reputa- tion. On being told that rumor was dealing hurtfully with her husband's reputation, she resolved to give the lie to any slander that should be uttered against . him in her hearing. This was certainly her spirit and purpose for some time after she decided on separating from him. And there is reason to believe that she remained in this temper and resolve till that disastrous act of publication two months later, by which he dragged her from her privacy and exhibited her to uni- versal reprobation as an unforgiving woman, who, having quarrelled bitterly with her unrebellious lord on trivial matters, refused to give him again the love he longed for. Though his wife's silence, persisted in for several days — a silence his sister could have fuUy accounted for, had she cared to do so — must have forewarned him of the coming trouble, and prepared him in some degree for the staggering blow, the first effect on Byron of the announcement (Feb- THE STORM. 265 ruary 2, 1816) tliat his wife had resolved neither to return to him' nor receive him again, was supreme and unqualified astonishment. The silence had told him that mischief was brewing. By the mysterious silence he had doubtless been caused to anticipate expostulation, and exhibitions of censure from his father-in-law and mother-in-law, with all the other disagreeable incidents of a domestic difficulty, that would not issue in an amicable arrangement, without occasioning him many vexations, much disturbance of temper, and some humiliation. But till the post brought him Sir Ealph Noel's demand for an act of separation, Byron had neither conceived nor suspected the seriousness of the situation. In his first surprise he could not believe Lady Byron had authorized the astounding letter. Sir Ealph Noel (whom the poet re- garded as a good-natured old fool) was surely the mere tool of Lady Noel and Mrs. Clermont, who ha4 exceeded their instructions, possibly had acted without any instructions from Lady Byron, in making their puppet pen the marvellous ultimatum. This was Byron's view of the situation. It was inconceivable to him that "Pippin" would take such extreme measures without a few preliminary intimations through the post of her serious displeasure with her " Dearest Duck." In a moment Augusta was ordered to write to Lady Byron in his name to ascertain whether she had authorized her father's action ; and as she had for more than a week been fuUy informed of Pippin's purpose, and had for several days been looking for Sir Ralph's declaration of war, Mrs. Leigh may weU have felt some compimction for her duplicity, if without a previous avowal of her knowledge of the real state of the case to her brother, she wrote the letter which drew from his wife the epistle set forth on a previous page of this chapter. Dispersing the mist of egotistic moodiness that had dark- ened his moral vision for several months, and lifting him for a season above the depraving influence of his morbid selfishness, the shock of Sir Ralph Noel's letter startled Byron out of his meaner nature, and in a trice raised him to his better self. On realizing the situation, he saw and confessed that the pain and humiliation of it were the natural consequences of his own folly and wrong-doing. Losing sight of his imaginary 266 THE BF.AIi LORD BYBON. grievances lie took a just view of his serious misconduct. At the same time he took a manly and even generous view of his wife's resentment and resolve. Without overstating the case against himself, as he was apt to do in seasons of hys- terical contrition and remorseful self-introspection, he con- fessed that he had behaved badly, very badly, and had only himself to thank and upbraid for his misfortune. Instead of pretending that he could not account for his wife's revolt, or talking miserable nonsense about her impious violation of her matrimonial vow, or accusing her of obstinately withholding the motives and considerations of her conduct, as he did with no ordinary meanness and dishonesty a few months later, he avowed that he had treated her worse than ill, and that she showed proper spu-it in rebelling against his tyranny. If he stopped short of declaring her fully justified for her extreme measures of retaliation, he averred stoutly that she had been driven to them by great provocation, and forbore to hint that the justification was less than complete. Forbidding his friends to offer him a suggestion to her discredit, he was no less imperative that they should urge nothing in his defence, or even in palliation of his flagrant misbehavior. On February 29, 1816, he wrote to Moore, "Don't at- tempt to defend me. If you succeeded in that, it would be a mortal, or an immortal, offence." To the same correspond- ent, who had suggested that his friend's matrimonial misad- venture was due to his injudicious choice of a wife, he wrote on the 8th of March, 1816 : " The fault was not — no, nor even the misfortune — in my ' choice ' (unless in choosing at all) — for I do not believe — and I must say it, in the very dregs of all this bitter business — that there ever was a better, or even a brighter, a kinder, or a more amiable and agreeable being than Lady B3T:on. I never had, nor can have, any reproach to make her, while with me. Where there is blame, it belongs to myself, and, if I cannot redeem, I must bear it." No person saw more of him during this period of heavy trouble and exasperating annoyances than Kogers ; no one was more certain than Sam Rogers to have heard the ungenerous talk had Byron in the time of tribular' tion been betrayed into speaking of his wife with animosity THE STOKM. 267 or disparagement ; and yet he could write fearlessly and con- fidently to Samuel Rogers on March 25, 1816, "You are one of the few persons with whom I have lived in what is called intimacy, and have heard me at times conversing on the untoward topic of my recent famUy disquietudes. Will you have the goodness to say to me at once whether you ever heard me speak of her with disrespect, with unkindness, or defending myself at her expense by any serious imputa- tion of any description against her? Did you never hear me say, 'that when there was a right or a wrong, she had the right 9 ' The reason I put these questions to you or others of my friends is, because I am said, by her and hers, to have resorted to such means of exculpation. — Ever very truly yours, ' B.'" It being in the nature of family quarrels to produce bitter and angry speech, one can readUy believe that Lady Byron's nearest relations and warmest partisans spoke iU and unjust words of Byron. In doing so they only did to hie injury what he himself did to their discredit. The poet who, in the very letter of his testimony to his wife's irre- proachable goodness during their familiar association, de- scribed her " nearest relatives " by epithets too violent and gross for Moore to venture to publish them, was in no posi- tion to express surprise and indignation on hearing that they spoke of him with similar extravagance. But, though her closest friends doubtless thought and spoke of Byron much worse than he deserved, it is improbable that Lady Byron — ever mindful of her dignity, even to the vigilance of a jeal- ous concern for it — was ever guilty of the same offence. Far from joining in the outcry, hourly becoming more violent against her husband, she was still in the mood to protest against its excesses of injustice. The time had not yet come for her to make the contribution of " speechless obloquy " to the clamor of monstrous slanders. Byron's note to Rogers should not be produced in evidence against her. It is, however, good evidence to the time when the poet, revert- ing to his former animosity against her, and dropping away from his better to his baser self, passed to the state of feeling that resulted in the publication of "The Farewell," the " Dream," and the subsequent satires on the woman about 268 THE KEAIi LORD BYBON. whom he should, for his own honor's sake, never have allowed himself to pen a single bitter verse or utter a single angry word. It has been suggested by several of his censors that, whilst he spoke justly and even generously of the wife who had repudiated him, the poet was playing the part of a specious hypocrite, with a view to restoring, himself to her favor, — that the fair words were false words, spoken only that they should be reported to her, and dispose her to condone his offences. But the suggestion can be accepted only by per- sons who have still to apprehend the elementary forces and the structure of Byron's mental and moral constitution. To men of his acute sensibihty and vehement temperament such hypocrisy is impossible. Insincerity might within certain limits be charged against Byron. He was capable of saying untrue things at . the instigation of anger, pique, jealousy, spite, — like his monstrous assertion to his wife that he had never loved her and had married her from a vindictive motive. Sincerity was by no means an ever-present characteristic of his art. But it was not in his power to play the hypocrite consistently for any length of time. The creature of impulse and the slave of emotion he could neither mask his stronger feehngs nor even express them temperately. His insincerity was an affair more of show than reality. The natural vehemence, which made him too essentially honest for a hypo- crite's career, was associated with a mobihty of thought, fancy, and feeling that often had the appearance and the mischievous consequences of insincerity when it was altogether devoid of falseness. A man so constituted passes quickly from mood to mood ; and the inconsistencies of his speech and action in the course of successive moods, instead of being indications of falseness and superficiality or even fickleness, are signs of his sincerity to the impressions and feelings of the moment. Such a man may be untruthful for an hour ; he may be a hypocrite for a single day, — but not for weeks together. So constituted Byron passed quickly from love to hate, from anger to pity, from cynical hardness to cordial benevolence. In regard to his wife he went suddenly from justice and generosity to mean and malignant animosity. But he was THE STORM. 269 not more genuine in the later than in the earlier stage of feeling. When he spoke of her justly he thought of her with justice ; and when he spoke of her bitterly he thought of her with bitterness. Plad he in February and March been the dissembler many people have been induced to think him, he would have acted more cautiously in several particulars, and, dissembling a little longer, would probably have com- passed what he certainly desired — reconcilement with his wife. He would have avoided the intimacy with Jane Cler- mont, — an affair which could not faU to confirm Lady Byron in her opinion that he had never really loved her. He would have persisted in generous speech about her for another month. He would have gone abroad without insult- ing her before the whole world by the publication of " The Farewell," and speaking in violent terms, certain to come to her knowledge, of her violation of her marriage-vow. For some days, even for some weeks, after Sir Ralph Noel's demand for an agreement of separation, Byron was hopeful that his wife would be silent. Knowing that, so long as she remained with him, he had done her no wrong greater than the unkindness described in previous pages of this work, he could not believe that she would persist in her resolve. He was even disposed to question the sincerity of the demand, and to regard it as a mere device for bring- ing him to a perfect sense of his misconduct, and a proper state of contrition. On finding his wife so much in earnest as to have already taken steps for a suit in the Ecclesiastical Court, should he decline to sign the deed of liberation, he saw that he must yield to her request. It has been urged by half-a-hundred writers before Mrs. Beecher Stowe meddled so miserably with the matter, that had he not been gTiilty of some extravagance of immorality, far more heinous and re- volting than the serious misconduct of which he had actually been guilty, he would have refused to join in the private ar- rangement, and insisted on a public statement and public in- vestigation of her complaints against him. And could he have conceived all that slander would soon be saying loudly or whispering secretly to his infamy, he would probably have taken the course which, painful and inexpressibly humiliating 270 THE KEAL LOKD BTEON. though it would have been to him, would have revealed to the world the precise number and nature of his offences. Unforeseeing the violence of the coming storm, and the disadvantage that would come to him from the secrecy of a private submission, it is not wonderful the poet consented to liberate liis wife by the process that seemed least likely to occasion enormous scandal. The circumstances of the case forbade him to hope that his wife's suit would be unsuccess- ful should her case go to trial. The evidence would expose him not only to the censure of rigid moralists, but to what he dreaded far more than their reprobation, the ridicule and contempt of " society." Instead of being exhibited as a gay and irresistible libertine, triumphing over the virtue of women of the highest rank and fashion, he would be found guilty of the most unromantic offences, bad temper and pitifully bad manners, — would be pilloried as the ill-conditioned fel- low who had worried his young bride into rebellion from spite and peevishness begotten of a disordered liver. One of the chief witnesses against him would be his own sister. Another of them would be his nearest kinsman. What could he urge against their testimony? That he had not railed at his wife, and told her he had never loved her, with- out provocation ; that she had not been so cheerful as she ought to have been ; that she had murmured occasionally at the solitariness of her meals and the discomfort of a home besieged by bailiffs ; that the squabbling had not been all on one side. Was it possible for a man of sensibility and pride to go into court with no better defence than this, — no better grounds for insisting that the woman, who had found him an unendurable companion, should return to him and his iU- humor? How could a gentleman, a man of honor, a poet, go into court with such a case to resist his wife's entreaty for liberation from insufferable bondage ? There being no alter- native but the private deed or the public trial, he chose the former. Clinging to the hope that his wife would relent if she had a longer time for consideration, he delayed to do what was required of him. He parleyed with Sir Ralph Noel and wrangled with the lawyers. He asked them for particulars of Lady Byron's grievances ; a request that, of course, only THE STORM. 271 elicited the assurance that the particulars (known, of course, to him quite as well as tljiey were known to the lawyers) would be produced in Doctors' Commons, should the case go to trial. He wished for the " specific charges in a tangible shape " ; not because he needed further information respect- ing the charges, but because Lady Byron's sufficiently com- municative letter to her sister-in-law and through her to him, was no such document as he could use in literary and open warfare against her advisers. At length, yielding to the force of cruel circumstances, he put his hand to the deed on the 22d of April, 1816, at a moment when he may well have felt that by forbearing to force the Noels into the ecclesias- tical court he was giving up his best and last chance of check- ing the turbulent and seething flood of slander that was sweeping over his reputation, and carrying away all his just claims to sympathy. To account for that flood of wild and clamorous calumny, several things must be taken into consideration, some of them being at the first glance matters of such small moment that it is not wonderful they have escaped due attention. In its brightest hour, when no dissentient voices were audible in the acclamations rendered to the poet's genius, shrewd and calm observers of the social ferment would have predicted that so enthusiastic a triumph would be followed at no distant date by a reaction of feeling, — a reaction in which the multitude would be as quick to detect the failings as it had been zealous in magnifying the virtues of its former idol. The qualities of the man and his writings, the circum- stances of his personal career, and the peculiarities of the promise of liis genius intimated that praise so passionate would ere long be succeeded by wilder and even more violent blame. The receiver of this tempestuous worship was a satirist, a dandy, and a poet. He was a satirist who had wounded the self-love of an army of writers, greedy for applause, hungering for the homage lavished on the competi- tor whose fame was the growth of a "single morning, and longing for a safe opportunity to wreak their resentment on the wit who had exhibited them to derision. He was a dandy who, though he could not dance, had captivated women of 272 THE EEAIi LORD BmON. fashion, and become the ballroom star of his particular season, before the peerless Brummell had declared him " in- comparable." He was a poet who had questioned the immor- tality of the soul, and hinted that Christianity was a delusion. Satirists are universally hated. Tolerated only in their own small and super-elegant coteries, the dandies even in their palmiest time were the aversion of ordinary Englishmen. Poets are the objects of masculine distrust in proportion as they are the objects of feminine confidence and approval. Was it possible for such a satirist, dandy, and poet as the author of " Clulde Harold " to escape enmity, jealousy, dislike, and suspicion ? Too young to be acceptable to men of years and experi- ence, too triumphant not to be envied by men of every age, too great not to be cordially detested by the small and ignoble of his own sex, Byron rated ordinary men at less than their proper worth, and, without intending to treat them insolently, on the contrary, whilst often going out of his way to please them, and do them good service, allowed them to see he held them of small account. Whilst so considerable a man as Hazhtt was nettled by the young poet into styling him " a sublime cox- comb," hundreds of inconsiderable men were piqued into call- ing him "an arrant puppy." Byron's eccentricities were pecu- liarly irritating to large numbers of men, who ridiculed them all the more roundly and with easier conscience because they had so strong an appearance of being aiFectations. Even in this era of universal tolerance and indifference, when wine- drinkers and water-drinkers tipple together with gushing good-fellowship, and vegetarians live in charity with devour- ers of venison, antagonisms spring from difference of taste in trifles more often than from difference of opinion on matters of importance. In the " port-wine and beefsteak days " of "the Regency," social feeling was apt to run strongly against gentlemen who fed sparingly, and either would not or could not carry their two bottles daily from the dinner-table to the whist-table. Byron's system of diet (carried out with need- less ostentation and aggressiveness) was scarcely more injurious to his stomach than it was to his character with honest gentlemen, who sniffed treason and every form of so- THE STOEM. 273 cial mutiny in the pale poet, capable of sustaining life ott biscuits and soda-water. On questions of amusement Byron was at war with men of every country-house he visited. The sentimentalist, who shed tears and wrote poetically about the eye of a wounded eaglet, detested field sports for their cruelty. Riding fairly well (on such horses, by the way, as provoked Trelawny's derision) Byron seldom rode to hounds. A good marksman with the pistol he fired away in the garden at five-shilling pieces, whilst the barbarians were slaughtering the pheasants. Under any circumstances such a young lord would have been unacceptable to the men who rose every morning from their beds to exclaim, "Go to, let us kill something." Whilst these men — a powerful factor of social opinion in the aristocratic classes of English society — regarded the poet coldly or with positive antipathy for disliking the sports in which they delighted, the favor shown him by their womankind made him an object of their jeal- ousy and suspicion. Whilst the women pressed towards and thronged about him in the drawing-rooms, the men scowled at him and muttered deep curses on the folly of his idolaters and on the arts by which he maintained his power over them. Ponsonbys and Lambs were not the only men to wish devoutly that some breeze, Ul for him and good for them, would blow the verse-writing dandy to the devil, and rid them of the sentimentalist who made their wives and sis- ters so ridiculous — so heedless of their dignity and even of their honor. Worrying the men by his method and address with their women, Byron at the same time exasperated them by his political views, sympathies, and preferences. Whilst nine out of every ten Englishmen regarded Bonaparte as the incarnation of evU, the poet declared in the very teeth of foaming patriots his admiration for the Corsican adventurer. In days when nine out of every ten Englishmen were ready on the slightest provocation to call Washington a successful traitor and the American republic a federation of rebellious planters, Byron rated the American " Pater Patriae " as the greatest, brightest, and loftiest of heroes. Worse, still, at a time when for the sake of social order people of good breeding and loyal nature were required to look 274 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. away from the failings and* magnify the virtues of all persons in supreme authority, the peer of Great Britain, who exulted in Napoleon's escape from Elba, and wor- shipped the Cincinnatus of the West, had ventured to exercise his dangerous faculty of verse in lampooning the Prince Regent. It has been shown how that lampoon alienated from the poet certain powerful organs of the Tory press that had previously commended the productions of his genius. For more than two years those journalists had been educating their readers — no small or powerless portion of the entire community — to underrate his poetry and exag- gerate his political maleficence. And now that the scandal of his rupture with a young wife, who had long enjoyed a singular reputation for feminine excellence, gave them a con- venient occasion and safe pretext for breaking from his acquaintance and excluding him from their houses, men of high rank and influence in the Tory connection were quick to reveal how completely they also had been alienated from him by his political indiscretions and extravagances. At the same time he was regarded with coldness, or warm hostility by the Whigs, to whom he had for some time been an embarrassment, and now promised to become a source of serious scandal. Several of the Whig families wished him out of the way, — at least for a time. Lord Beacons- field was fully justified in representing in " Venetia" that, at the very moment of the poet's fall, there was less disposition within his own party than in the ranks of its opponents to moderate the catastrophe. Religious organizations are not readily moved, and when put in movement they are not soon brought to rest. Relig- ious opinion is not formed in a day. On the contrary, it requires so considerable a period for its gradual develop- ment, that four years were all too brief a term for the fer- ment which the theology of " Childe Harold " could not fail to occasion throughout the country — the ferment, whose first indications reached Byron in the autumn of 1812 — to find adequate expression. The religious circles of the pro- vincial towns and rural villages were still forming their judg- ment on the poet's greatest literary achievement, were still THE STOEM. 275 moving to their universal verdict that the book was supremely mischievous, when it was announced that its writer, whose dissoluteness was paraded in his poisonous verse, had re- turned tfi the profligacy which he had described himself as quitting from transient satiety rather than from sincere peni- tence. And in considering how the general disappraval of the poet's religious heterodoxy affected the general view of his domestic troubles, the reader should remember how closely scepticism and immorality were associated in the popular imagination throughout the earlier decades of the present century. In these days we have amongst us a small though considerable minority of people not unwilling to think, and not incapable of thinking that moral rectitude is quite as likely to prevail in persons whose strongest hope of future happiness depends on their present devotion to good- ness, as in persons who are likely to be inspired by misappre- hended doctrine with a notion that it matters little how wrongly they act towards their neighbors, provided they think rightly on matters of creed. But when " ChUde Har- old" was new literature, the Englishmen who held any such opinion could be almost counted on the fingers of a single hand. In respect to its influences on human aflairs in this world, creed was valued by the poet's contemporaries as a power disposing people to be good for the sake of the future rewards of goodness, and restraining people from evU through dread of the future punishment of wickedness ; — one of their prime theories of human nature being that man was so strongly disposed to evU, — especially to the indulgence of the vindictive passions and sensual appetites, — as to be incapable of living righteously on b,eing liberated from the terrors of orthodox theology. In escaping from orthodox creed the unbeliever escaped from the motives and considera- tions that withheld men from evil, and was bound sooner or later to surrender himself to his natural propensity to evil. When this opinion was so general as to be almost universal in English society, it followed from the eyiflence of his vwit- ings that the poet of free thqu^ht was a person, not only capable of flagrant iiqmora,lity, but certain to distinguish him- self sooner or late? by sinfij excesses, 276 THE REAL LOED BYRON. In the Observations on the "Eemarks on Don Jiian," written in 1820, Byron urged that his fellow-countrymen can have had no sufficient grounds for the almost unanimous verdict which drove him from their presence, as tliey knew literally nothing of him and his affairs except that he was a nobleman who had written poetry, and after becoming a father had quarrelled with his wife and her relatives from causes that had not been revealed to the public. Speaking of the same verdict Macaulay insists that the poet was the victim of something worse than Jedburgh justice in the pro- ceedings, which opened with the execution and closed without an utterance of the articles of accusation. But in truth the public knew more of the culprit's affairs than the poet cared to admit, and more of his misbehavior than the essayist cared to allow. Besides knowing that he had written poetry, the judges had read the poems in which he had proclaimed himself a sceptic and a libertine. And though people were altogether in the dark as to the particulars of his misdemeanor, the notorious and indisputable fact of Lady Byron's refusal to live with him any longer placed him at the tribunal of social opinion under a general accusation of disloyalty and misbehavior to a wife, whose irreproachable fame forbade the world to think it possible for her to have repudiated him for light and trival offences. Under these circumstances it can- not be fairly alleged that the poet was condemned without indictment, or that his judges were altogether without grounds for declaring him guilty. The accusation was wanting in particularity ; and the merciless sentence was wildly dispro- portionate to the culprit's considerable offences ; but the verdict was a just one. During a long distemper of selfish- ness and irritability and splenetic savagery he had treated -his wife ill ; though he was absolutely innocent of the more serious offences of conjugal disloyalty, and absolutely inca- pable of the atrocious excesses of which many — indeed, the majority — of his judges imagined him to have been guilty. However culpable he may have been to his conjugal partner, every man who consents to a private deed of separation from his wife on mere considerations of incompatibility of temper, is likely to suffer in reputation from the privacy of an arrange- THE STORM. 277 mentj which, by withholding the nature and particulars of the dissension from the world's knowledge, may be almost said to invite the malicious and the idle to discover worse causes than the real ones for the severance. In credit and happiness Byron suffered heavily from such secrecy. Had it been the result of a suit and decree in the Ecclesiastical Court, the poet's separation from his wife would have been nothing worse than a transient inconvenience and momentary trouble, instead of being a perpetual poison to his nature, an enduring disfigurement to his fame, and an unwholesome mystery to the students of his story. Had he driven the Noels into Doctor's Commons, he would not have lived to exclaim in anguish, impotent for everything but the expres- sion of its own intense bitterness, "Hare I not suffered things to be forgiven? Have I not had my brain sear'd, my heart riv'n, Hopes sapp'd, name blighted, life's life lied away? " By defining his wife's grievances, putting precise limits to his own misbehavior (for which he was to be compassionated rather than blamed), and telling all the evil that could be justly said of him, the investigation would have given him a security from the spite of lying tongues and the inventions of morbid fancy, that would have been cheaply purchased by the humiliations of the exposure and ridicule accruing to him from the one day's suit and nine days' scandal. EesemblLag the majority of sudden storms in being her- alded by sure signs of atmospheric disturbance, the storm, that swept the poet from the pedestal of national honor, exceeded all tempests of its kind known to biography in the copious- ness of the calumny, the virulence of the denunciations, and the diversity of the slanders it poured upon the object of universal detestation. It was not enough for his assailants to deride the man of fine sensibility for lacking the temper of men of gentle breeding, to ridicule the poet for failing in chivalric considerateness towards his young wife, to taunt the nobleman with having displayed the most offensive quali- ties of a churl and boor. Words of truth, however scorn- ful and scalding, were too weak for the passion and frenzy of 278 THE REAL LORD BYKON. the hour. To give expression to the ferment and the sincere convictions of society it was . necessary for journalists and pamphleteers to charge him with crimes foreign to his nature, and vices to which he had no inclination. It was alleged that he had struck his wife, brought profligate women to her house, and fired off pistols in her bedroom in the hope of frightening her into premature labor and fatal childbirth. It was even whispered that he had offered her indignities too nauseous and revolting to be mentioned in a book written for general circulation. Whilst poetasters wrote doggerel about the unbeliever's " guilty mind" and " unhallowed eye," noto- rious Ubertines spoke of his impurity with virtuous repug- nance. " I was accused," the poet observed four years later without exaggeration, " of every monstrous vice by public rumor and private rancor ; my name, which had been a knightly or a noble one since my fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for William the Norman, was tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered, and muttered, and murmured was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me." As though he were stricken with a loathsome disease, to be caught from the touch of his hand, the exha- lation of his body, or the baneful light of his evil glance, the world fell away from the man of blasted fame, to whose door carriages used in former time to roll in such, numbers as to block the way of St. James' Street. With the exception of letters from angry tradespeople, dunning lawyers, and anonymous slanderers, few epistles came now to the tables which no long while since were covered with cards of invitation from the Queens of Fashion. Murmured and muttered against, if not loudly hooted, when he drove through the streets, or walked across a pubHc pavement to his carriage, the man of fine sensibility and tur- bulent temper, whether he moved about the town or stayed within his own doors, saw and felt the infamy that had come upon him, — saw it in the stony coldness of averted faces, felt it in the silence of his solitary rooms. He still went to see Kean in his best characters ; but the half-dozen of his oldest and trustiest friends, who stUl had the courage to cross his threshold, would fain have dissuaded him from visiting THE STORM. 279 the theatre, where an actress of singular beauty and cleverness had been recently hissed from the stage because she was suspected of iatimacy with the poet, to whom she had never even spoken. He still dared to show himself and vote in the House of Lords, but he went thither at the risk of being insulted by the way, and with the knowledge that, whilst the populace regarded him with furious disfavor, the peers re- garded him with contemptuous coldness. The mob never mobbed the poet, in the fashion of the mob through which Lord Cadurcis cuts his way in the pages of "Venetia"; but Hobhouse and Rogers had good grounds for their lively fear that a riotous crowd would give the poet a rough farewell, on his departure from London for Dover. The curious and angry people, who gathered about the poet's travelling- carriage whilst its roof was being loaded with his luggage, and scowling viciously at him breathed deep curses on all wicked lords and false husbands, as he took his seat in the vehicle when he had first regarded them with proud com- posure, were an assemblage that any untoward accident would have converted to a mob of rioters. Possibly the poet's aspect, — something in the air of his delicate and lovely features, something in the tranquil beauty of his firm and fearless face, something in the grandeur of his brow, some- thing iu the sorrow and courage of his terribly luminous blue-gray eyes, — niay have restrained them from premedi- tated violence, by inspiring them with doubt whether a man so young and fair to view could be so old in vice and hardened in crime. Anyhow, they forbore to wreck his carriage, and let him go his way without provoking him to use his pistols. It was the opinion of persons familiar with Byron and shrewdly observant of the circles in which he was an idol, for barely four years, that the outcry against him within those circles proceeded from the men who disliked him for rhis eccentricities, envied him for his success, resented his occasional superciliousness, detested him for his political extravagances, and loathed him for their own wild miscon- ceptions of his immorality ; — and that the majority of the women only acquiesced from sheer terror in the verdict of their furious lords, which they dared not resist and could not 280 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. have reversed. And it can be believed that not a few of the women who looked away from their former friend ia public places, and drove past his carriage in the streets without bowing to him, were at heart on his side rather than on his wife's side. On the other hand, it is certain that there were not a few women amongst the people of fashionable light and leading who, throwing themselves with passionate vehe- mence into the mad war against his honor and happiness, became his most malignant traducers even as they had for- merly been his noisiest adulators. Exemplifying the truth of Congreve's lines, — " Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned " ; the woman, who ia the poet's hour of triumph had thrown herself at his feet, hunted him from house to house, forced herself into his presence in male attire, implored him to fly with her, thought no sacrifice of feminine dignity and delicacy too high a price to pay for his preference, was the woman who, on seeing the world turn against him, hastened to exult over his downfall and to stimulate with monstrous calumny the passions which she had done so much to evoke for his destruction. To make him appear more shameful she was even capable of confessing much of her own shame, iu the pages of the novel that, doing nothing for the accomplishment of the author's malignant object, wrought her reputation greater injury than the book was meant to inflict on his honor. Writing " Glenarvon " with murderous purpose. Lady Caro- line Lamb published it with suicidal result. Sufficiently clever and coherent to show that she was not mad, the book . with only half its malignity and falsehood and shamelessness would have been sufficiently malicious, untruthful, and shame- less to prove her a bad as well as a foolish woman. It was her boast that it took her only a month to write the book which followed Byron to Geneva. Even if the boast were truthful, the fact would tell nothing of the time and labor expended on the performance by the hack who dressed it for the press. Like the author's other novels, "Glenarvon" was less the work of the frivolous woman of fashion, who was THE STOEM. 281 incapable of the labor of writing a flimsy romance without professional assistance, than of the person who re-wrote it and put it together for the printer. The parts, however, of the story for which Lady Caroline Lamb was personally accountable comprise the matters which would be most dis- creditable to her, had she written every line of the produc- tion which, whenever it was begun, was pushed through the press, to consummate the ruin of the man whom she had loved and adored, — and whom she professed to adore — and in a wild, crazy way, did adore — when death had released him from the troubles which she had done so much to create and aggravate. Whilst Lady Caroline Lamb was correcting the proof- sheets of " Glenarvon " and ordering the superb cover for the copy of the novel which she meant to send to Byron, Lady Jersey was sending out her cards of invitation for the party, at which the poet took farewell of English society. If she resembled many women in sympathizing with the poet, and wishing him well out of his troubles and well away from his persecutors. Lady Jersey was almost singular in having the courage to declare the friendly feeling. But though her generosity and daring were exemplary, it is questionable whether the countess chose the best way of expressing her benevolent regard for the victim of social injustice when on the eve of his departure from England she invited him to an entertainment, given expressly in his honor. For though it was in the power of so momentous a personage to fill her drawing-rooms with people, ready to humor her generous whim and amuse them- selves by taking a last look at the departing poet, she could not constrain them to treat him with reassuring hearti- ness. After a lapse of years the guest of the evening could write with drollery of the various ways in which Lady Jersey's friends indicated their various degrees of coldness towards or compassion for him ; but at the time it must have caused him more mortification than amusement to discover in hardened features and frigid words and looks of obvious embarrassment only too conclusive evidence that he was regarded as the black sheep and discredit of his order even by 282 THE KEAL LORD BYEON. the persons who, being (as Moore expresses it) habitually "tolerant of domestic irregularities," were the persons of ail England most likely to take a charitable and lenient view of his real misdemeanors and alleged offences. One can imagine what fun was made in the destroyed " Memoirs " of the equally absurd and vexatious incidents of a scene that would doubtless have been turned to good account in one of the concluding cantos of "Don Juan," had the poet lived to finish the great satire. Some of the matrons were severely ceremonious , whilst others were loftily forgiving. Ladies of the gushing sort plunged into amiable familiarity, and then, fearful of committing themselves too far, bridled their impetuosity and withdrew into coldness and reserve. Besides Lady Jersey with her smiles of summer sunshine, the only woman to delight the culprit with frank and fearless cordiality was Miss Mercer (afterwards Lady Keith), of whom he wrote gratefully in one of his diaries. "She is a high- minded woman, and showed me more friendship than I deserved from her. I heard also of her having defended me in a large company, which at that time required more courage and firmness than most women possess." The men were hard, frigid, and suspicious. Some of them barely exchanged the civilities of the salon with the chief guest. Some of them slipped to another room, in order to avoid the necessity of greeting him. Speaking of the poet's disgrace and the acute- ness of the pain it occasioned him, Harness says, "He would have drawn himself up, and crossed his arms, and curled his lip, and looked disdainfully on any amount of clamorous hos- tility ; but he stole away from the ignominy of being silently cut." Even in Lady Jersey's drawing-room, where no one could venture to show him open incivility, he was troubled by "the altered countenances of his acquaintances," and endured the ignominy of being treated with magnanimity. A few days later he stole away from the land of his birth, — the land he never revisited. SWITZERLAND. 283 CHAPTER XVin. SWITZEELAJSTD. Sailestg from Dover on the 25th April, 1816, Byron entered the harbor of Ostend on the night of the 26th, having suffered little from the sea during a passage which, though favorable, would in these days of quick steamers be thought tedious. Accompanied by three servants (WilHam Fletcher and Eobert Hushton, the yeoman and page of " Childe Harold's" first canto, and a Swiss named Berger), he was also attended by Polidori — the vain and light-headed young doctor, of Italian name and parentage, who after playing the part of a literary impostor with his impudent expansion of Byron's brief prose sketch, " The Vampire," closed a rather discreditable career by suicide ; a form of death from which he had been saved in Switzerland by his patron's generosity, shortly before the poet dismissed from his service so embar- rassing an associate. Having provided himself with a capacious and luxurious coach (so constructed on the model of Napoleon's travelling- carriage taken at Genappe, as to contain a bed, a Kbrary, a plate-chest and a dinner-service) and a caleche for his bag- gage and servants (the vehicle whose purchase involved the poet in a rather comical dispute with an extortionate Brussels coach-lauLlder) , Byron journeyed leisurely through Flanders, and by the Rhine route to Switzerland, — a course through which he may be accompanied in the third canto of " Childe Harold"; the poem of Waterloo, the Rhine, and Lake Leman. It was at Brussels after a visit to the famous field that the poet committed to paper (in Mrs. Pryce L. Gordon's album) the two first of the Waterloo stanzas, the second of them containing the lines, 284 THE EEAI, LOED BYEON. " Here his last flight the haughty eagle flew, Then tore, with bloody beak, the fatal plain ; Pierced with the shafts of banded nations through, Ambition's life, and labors, all were rain — He wears the shatter'd links of the world's broken chain" ; — a description that waa relieved a few weeks later of a serious blemish, on the suggestion of the clever artist (R. E. Eei- nagle) who, on consenting to illustrate the verses with a vignette, remarked that the chained bird must be drawn, striking the earth with his talons. "Reinagle," the poet wrote in acknowledgment of the painter's criticism, "is a better poet and ornithologist than I am : eagles, and aU birds of prey, attack with their talons, and not with their beaks, and I have altered the line thus : — ' Then tore, with bloody talon, the rent plain.' This is, I think, a better line, besides its poetical justice." So discrimiaating and judicious a biographer as Karl Elze having expressed astonishment that Byron, only a few weeks since vis-a-vis de rein, should have been able to travel so expensively, it is well to remind the reader of this page that the poet's most urgent pecuniary embarrassments were less due to insufficiency of means for current expenses than to the absence of money for the payment of long growing debts ; that, notwithstanding the magnitude of his incumbrances, the owner of Newstead and Rochdale could stiU have bor- rowed ten thousand pounds of the most cautious money-lend- ers ; that he still had friends (like- Kinnaird, the banker, Rogers, the banker, and Murray, the publisher) able and ready to minister to his financial necessities ; and that the writer (the demand for whose writings had been stimulated instead of checked by the scandal of his domestic trouble) was well aware that his genius would aiford him a revenue exceeding both his necessities and desires, as soon as he should get the better of a foolish scruple of false pride, and condescend to write for money. The poet who received £1 ,050 for " Parisina " and the " Siege of Corinth," who sold the third canto of " ChUde Harold " at a rate of more than 28s. a line, and who got for the fourth and much the longest SWITZERLAND. 285 canto of the same poem something more than 258. a line, could have afforded to indulge in the pomp of three servants, the comfort of a luxurious coach, and the services of a trav- elling physician, even if he had been altogether dependent on his brain and pen. In the previous February, when duns were at his door and bailiffs in his house, Byron had proposed distributing between three necessitous men of letters the thousand guiaeas which Mr. Murray had recently pressed upon him in payment for "Parisina" and "The Siege of Corinth." And had it not been for the publisher's reluctance to act in accordance with his client's munificent design, £600 of £1,050 would have been given to Mr. Godwin, to whom the poet may have been disposed thus generously by regard for the philosopher's step- daughter as well as by respect for his services and concern for his distress. As Coleridge and Maturin were to have divided the remaining £450, after Godwin had been relieved with the much larger sum, the arrangement indicates a pref- erence, for which Claire may be conceived to have been ac- countable ; and whilst the excellence of Byron's motives in the affair is not affected unfavorably by the suggestion that he was just then looking out for an opportunity of doing Jane Clermont's people a substantial service, one would like to believe that Jane (whose reputation needs whatever good can be spoken of it) was not slow to use her influence with the poet for her mother's advantage, though she was far too proud and high-hearted a girl to have thought for an instant of ex- erting it for her own selfish benefit. Whilst Byron's huge coach was rolling along the banks of the Rhine, another party of English travellers journeyed less luxuriously and leisurely to Switzerland by the less pictu- resque route. This second party consisted of another poet, *wo young women (neither of whom was nineteen years old) , and an infant. They were Shelley (younger by four years than Byron, who was still only twenty-eight years of age) ; Mary Godwin who had for some time been living in the closest of affectionate relations to Shelley, though she was not his legal wife; her sister-by-affinity, Jane Clermont, alias Claire, the girl of bright eyes, olive complexion, Italian 286 THE EEAL LOKD BYKON. features and Southern fervor ; and Mary's infant son William, her first chUd by the poet whose name she had taken together with his heart. There was one strange point of resemblance in the two parties, that by different ways and in different modes were moving to the same Swiss hotel. Each of the poets had left a wife in England, from whom he had been separated by inauspicious circumstances. But the fortunes of the two wives had no similitude. Whilst Lady Byron had retired to her parent's stately home, the woman of untarnished honor, who lived to be a peeress in her own right, Mrs. Shel- ley was dropping, through shame and guilt, to the despair in which her melancholy story closed by her own act. It has been the practice of Shelley's biographers to deal with the meeting of these two parties at the Hotel S^cheron, just outside Geneva, as an unpremeditated occurrence ; and though he has sought it with some pains, the writer of these pages has sought in vain for positive testimony that both parties started from England with the purpose of uniting in Switzerland. The circumstantial evidence, however, is overwhelming that the meeting was no mere accident. StUl the evidence is only circumstantial ; and some uncertainty attends all conclusions from the inferential testimony . of circumstances. In reference to Byron's previous knowledge of Claire and his reunion with her by the bright waters of Leman, Mr. William Michael Rossetti (a biographer no less conscientious than acute and careful) observes in his " Me- moir of Shelley," "Byron possibly — indeed, probably — had then admired her; if not then, he did so now. The result was the birth, in the following January, of the daughter known to Byronic biographers as AUegra or Alba. Shelley and Mary knew nothing of this fleeting outburst of passion at the time, and were by no means pleased when its results became apparent. But they acted with perfect good feeling, and did everything for Allegra and her mother." Shelley and Mary may well have been troubled by the appearance of its results, may even have been sur- prised by consequences following so quickly on their cause, but it is beyond belief they were so ignorant of this fleeting outburst of passion at the time. It being certain that the SWITZERLAND. 287 fleeting passion had its birth and first triumph in London it is inconceivable that it was withheld by Claire from Mary. The only motives a girl in Claire's position could have for holding her passion from the knowledge of her sister would be motives of shame and delicacy. Such motives cannot be supposed to have influenced Jane Clermont in her inter- course with her sister-by-affinity, — the wife of a man to whom she was not married, the mother of a child who, in the law's eye, from one point of view, was no one's child. Claire saw no sin in her passion for Byron, no reason why she should blush to avow it. Five years later when in the bitterness of her displeasure at his plan for her child's edu- cation, she exclaimed to Byron, "I alone, misled by love to believe you good, trusted to you and now reap the fruits," Claire only rendered bare justice to the feelings which gave her to his power. Believing him good she loved him ; loving him because she believed him good and found him unutter- ably delightful and dear to her, she consented to what was his desire and her own gladness. What was there in such an affair to rouse shame in the eighteen-years old Claire, who had been taught to believe that the love which yearned for marriage was the only sanction its marriage needed. Prudence might have determined her to be silent to the world about so innocent a passion, but would not have re- quired her to be silent to her closest female friend, her sister, who was already loving Shelley and living with him, precisely as she herself was loving and hoping to live with Byron. Certainly on aU other matters there was the fullest confidence between these young girls of the same home. Their mutual affection glowed with the impetuosity of girlish romance. Mary had in every turn and trial of her love for the one poet enjoyed Claire's sympathy, approval, and en- couragement. Is it to be imagined that the impulsive Claire was less frank about her passion for the other poet ? or that Mary — to whom the affair must have been peculiarly ac- ceptable, from its close resemblance to her own affair of the heart — was less liberal of approving words and cordial wishes ? Is it conceivable that on this subject alone — the topic which must have made Claire bubble over with sisterly 288 THE KEAL LORD BYKON. communicativeness — there was a reserve in the mutual con- fidence, that was otherwise so perfect? Whilst it is impossible to believe that Mary was excluded from Claire's confidence on this most interesting and absorb- ing subject, it is difficult to imagine it a matter on which Mary gave no confidence at all or only a half-confidence to her own poet. Why should she have withheld from him anything of a matter that would appear to him alike innocent, reasonable, and advantageous both to Claire and Byron ; — an arrangement that would afford him the agreeable feeling that his own way of dealing with the gentler sex, having beeji already imitated by the most popular poet of his generation, would soon be imitated by other persons of supreme sen- sibility and enlightenment ? The thing he approved for him- self was no thing for Shelley to disapprove in Byron's case. The course, which was virtuous for Mary, could not strike him as vicious for Mary's sister. True that he and Byron were widely different men, — that whilst he was calm and steadfast of purpose, Byron was passionate and volatile, almost on principle. But as he never saw Byron tiU they met at Geneva, Shelley may well have been altogether unaware, was certainly by no means fully aware, of this difc ference, whilst the two parties were journeying to theirplace of meeting. True also that Mary and Claire (sisters only by affinity) differed greatly in temper, judgment, feeling, as well as in personal appearance. But the difference may have escaped the poetic dreamer and gentle mystic who lived more in the clouds than on the earth's surface. Moreover, systems (and the younger poet's view of marriage was part of a system of morals commended for acceptance to universal human nature) may not be nicely considerate for the peculiarities of individuals. Certainly no injustice is done to Shelley by the suggestion that he went to Geneva with a clear knowledge of Claire's passion for Byron, and of her expectation of meeting him there, or by the statement that on his road to Geneva (in his ignorance of certain of Byron's infirmities, — at least, his ignorance of them from personal, observation) he would have seen nothing to disapprove in an arrangement for Claire to live with her admirer, even as he was himself living with her sister-by-affinity. SWITZERLAND. 289 In connection with these reasons for thinking it probable that Shelley started for Switzerland with a knowledge of Claire's passion for Byron, and even carried her to Geneva for the express purpose of restoring her to his society, it may be remarked that, instead of setting out for the Swiss capital without alleging a reason for the journey, or with a bare announcement to his friends that he was going thither because it was his pleasure to do so, the author of " Queen Mab " covered his departure with a false pretext. It is dis- agreeable to attribute falsehood to anything said or done by a man who was (to adopt Mr. Eossetti's words) "loftily veracious in essentials," and who suflFered more for what he conceived to be the truth than any other man of his genera- tion. The evidence, however, is conclusive that the poet's alleged reason for going abroad in the beginning of May, and all the various statements touching the pretext were purely fictitious. His pretext for a course of action, for which he was under no obligation to give any reason whatever, was that he desired to escape from the reach of his father and one of his uncles, who were conspiring to seize his person and put him in confinement. He even alleged that he had received warning of this conspiracy from Mr. Williams, the agent of Mr. Madocks, of Tanyrallt. The whole story was an invention. There was no such conspiracy. Mr. Williams never told the poet to beware of such a plot. How are we to account for so astounding a fiction from lips, so truthful under ordinary circumstances? Mr. Rossetti is of opinion that the poet's apparent falsehood was due to overwrought fancy. " We must remember," says the admiral biographer, " that a poet is ' of imagination all compact ' ; and, as no one has better right than Shelley to the name of a poet, none consequently had a readier store of imaginations which he propounded as realities." After all that has been written of the tricks played him by his imagination, it stUl remains to be proved that Shelley suffered in so unusual a way from the force of his fancy. In April and May, when Byron's move- ments were the subject of much curiosity and gossip, and other persons besides Mrs. Clermont (the mischief-maker) were no less curious about Jane Clermont's (Claire's) move- 290 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. ments, Shelley — at the moment of preparmg to take the girl to Geneva, where she at least hoped to meet Byron — may well have been desirous of baffling the spies and tattlers, eager for evidence that Claire was going after her admirer. Under such circumstances, even so veracious a man as Shelley would be tempted to hoist a false flag, and might feel himself justified in shielding his ladies with an untruth, that could not do harm to any one. Even if the fiction was believed by its utterer, the delusion may have been the result of the poet's strong and natural desire for secrecy, acting on his quick and powerful fancy. Byron was preceded to Switzerland by the sinister reports that attended him henceforth almost even to the grave ; — the invisible and bhghting angel of defamation that, hovering over every house in which he dwelt in Switzerland and Italy, caused it to be regarded with curiosity and repugnance as the abode of a mysteriously wicked man, no less splendid by mental endowments than hateful for crime, whose sensibility was tainted with vile desire, and whose divine faculty of song gave pernicious beauty to poisonous thought. There was commotion in the S^cheron hotel when the poet's carriages drew up at its entrance ; and, before he had been there an hour, his name had been uttered in every cor- ridor and chamber of the house. Shelley's party had engaged the attention of the inmates of the hotel for eight days before the appearance of Byron and Polidori. The interest taken in each of the two parties was heightened by the closeness of their association and intimacy. It was whispered amongst the idlers that Mary was no ceremoniously wedded wife, that Claire was her sister in the fullest sense of the term, that Byron had found in the bright brunette an agreeable substi- tute for his unforgiving wife. It is needless to say that the people and visitors of the hotel were at no pains to conceal their curiosity, and for its gratification did not shrink from outrages of intfusiveness. When the poets and the ladies went for a drive, they could not get to their carriage without passing through a crowd of starers. They were attended by the same throng of whispering gazers to the water's marge, when they took boat for their evening's enjoyment of the SWITZERLAND. 291 lake. On landing by twilight or moonlight they were again under intrusive inspection. To escape from this source of continual annoyance, the two parties moved from the hotel to villas on the Mont Blanc side of the lake, — Byron and Polidori to the Villa Belle Rive, -Shelley and the ladies to a small house only a ten minutes' walk distant. The result of the migration was, however, less than satisfactory ; for in the gardens of the villa and cottage and on the way between the two habitations, the objects of interest could still be watched from a distance through telescopes ; and in order that his guests might not be altogether deprived of an amusement which had for more than a fortnight redoimded to his advantage, the obliging host of the Hotel Secheron was at pains and charges to provide them with telescopes of sufficient power. For greater privacy the victims of curiosity and scandalous gos- sip moved again — Byron into the Villa Diodati, Shelley with the wearers of petticoats into the little house at its foot, the Maison Chapnis or Campagne Mont Alegre, to which AUegra (bom in the first month of the ensuing year) was indebted for her name. Screened by the umbrage of their grounds, the tenants of these pleasant dwellings could be no longer watched by the possessors of telescopes. It was, however, still possible for the curious idlers to talk freely of the persons withdrawn from their view, and imagine the scenes they were not permitted to survey. Of the license of these gossip-mongers it is enough to say that on coming to Geneva, in September, immediately after the departure of Shelley for England, Hobhouse learned that local rumor charged his friend with living on terms of scandalous famil- iarity with both and each of the two ladies, who had been recently residing in the house of a neighboring gentleman immediately under the Chateau Diodati. If, therefore, he made the offensive statement, which caused Byron, in the (Observations, March 15, 1820) on the " Blackwood article " on " Don Juan," to denounce him furiously for trying to blast the character of the daughter of the woman (Mary Wollstoncraft) whom he had formerly loved, Southey only repeated in England the story that came to Hobhouse's ears in September, 1816, — the story which in the last-named 292 THE EEAL LOED BYRON. month was generally told and believed in Geneva alike by the tourists of the hotels, and the habitual residents of the capital ; the story which Hobhouse on his return to England repeated to Ms friends as an example of the egregious slan- ders circulated in the Swiss capital about his friend at a time when he was living with temperance and industry. "When I left England in April, 1816," Byron wrote in 1820, "ill in mind, in body, and in circumstances, I took up my residence at CoHgny, by the Lake of Geneva. The sole companion of my journey was a young physician, who had to make his way in the world, and, having seen very little of it, was naturally and laudably desirous of seeing more so- ciety than suited my present or my past experience. I there- fore presented him to those gentlemen of Geneva for whom I had letters of introduction ; and having thus seen him in a situation to make his own way, retired for my own part entirely from society, with the exception of one ,English family, living at about a quarter of a mile's distance from Diodati, and with the further exception of some occasional intercourse with Coppet, at the wish of Madame de Stael. The English family to which I allude consisted of two ladies, a gentleman and his son, a boy of a year old. One [i.e., Southey) ' of these lofty-minded and virtuous men,' in the vrords of the 'Edinburgh Magazine' (i.e., Blackwood's) made, I understand, about this time, or soon after, a tour in Switzerland. On his return to England he circulated — and, for anything I know, invented — a report, that the gentle- man to whom I have aUuded and myself were living in pro- miscuous intercourse with two sisters, ' having formed a league of incest ' (I quote the words as they were repeated to me), and indulged himself on the natural comments on such a conjunction, which are said to have been repeated publicly, ■with great complacency, by another of that poetical frater- nity (i.e., 'the Lakers'), of whom I shall say only, that even had the story been true, he should not have repeated it, as far as it regarded myself, except in sorrow. The tale it- self requires but a word in answer, — the ladies were not sisters, nor in any degree connected, except by the second marriage of their respective parents, a widower with a SWITZERLANDi. 293 widow, both being the offspring of former marriages ; neither of them were (sic) in 1816, nineteen years old. 'Promiscu- ous intercourse ' could hardly have disgusted the ^eat patron of pantisocracy (does Mr. Southey remember such a scheme ?) but there was none. . . . He" (i.e., Southey) "has written ' Wat Tyler,' and taken the office of poet laureate, — he has, in the ' Life of Henry Kirke White,' denominated reviewing ' the ungentle craft ' and become a reviewer ; he was one of the projectors of a scheme, called 'pantisocracy,' for having all things, including women, in common (query, common women ?) and he sets up as a moralist ; he de- nounced the battle of Blenheim, and praised, the battle of Waterloo ; he loved Mary Wollstoncraft, and he tried to blast the character of her daughter (one of the females mentioned)." In this review of some of the circumstances of his journey to and sojourn in Switzerland, readers have an example of the insincerity and disingenuousness with which Byron used to write and speak about his private affairs. The prominence given to the sex of the sole companion of his journey was not innocent of a delusive purpose. By calling attention to his having made the journey without a female companion he guarded against the suspicion of journeying to the Hotel S^cheron to meet one. The suggestion that Southey may have invented a piece of the common talk of the Genevese coteries during his stay amongst them was a deliberate and malicious suggestio falsi. Though the full statement of the relation in which the ladies stood to one another was accu- rate, the introductory denial of their sisterhood was inac- curatCi (Byron was curiously persistent in this denial of a rumor, that troubled him greatly. In a letter, written at Venice in May, 1819,^ about Polidori's vamped-up "Vam- pire," he avers, " The ladies are not sisters.") He must have known that girls, connected by parental marriage, in the man- ner accurately set forth, were sisters-by-affinity ; and had the rumor of their intercourse with him been truthful, the inter- course, in the judgment of the Catholic Church (which, in 1820, the poet regarded as the best as well as the most ancient of the great Christian Churches) , would have been none the 294 THE REAL LORD BYRON. less incestuous because, instead of being sisters-by-blood, they were only sisters-by-affinity. When he represented that he went into Genevese society only for Polidori's sake, the poet was less than truthful. It cannot have passed in 1820 from his memory, so retentive of annoying incidents, that, on coming to Geneva with numerous letters of introduction, he had every disposition to go into society for his own pleasure, and that he did not prefer a life of retirement from the coteries of a capital, which retained much of its ancient narrowness and austerity in matters of religion and morality, until he dis- covered how unfavorably he was regarded in those coteries. Even at Coppet he was made to feel it would be imprudent for him to go just then into the society of the salons. Every one remembers how his Satanic presence amongst Madame de Stael's guests made Mrs. Hervey (the novelist) , a gentlewoman of many years (sixty-five) and let it be hoped of as many vir- tues , scream with terror and faint away. When nervous ladies swooned or went into hysterics at the bare sight of so wicked a young man in the salon, not especially famous for orthodoxy and severity of manners, Byron received other and more serious intimations that Geneva felt for him in July precisely as London had felt for him in April. His statement that he went into the society of the Swiss capital out of paternal benevolence to his young doctor, and left it out of pure pref- erence of seclusion was hypocritical affectation, — " bam " qualified with pure falsehood ; the simple truth of the matter being that he was in no mood for society, because society was in no mood for him. The nature of Byron's show of indignation and disgust (March, 1820) at Southey's monstrous calumny — is revealed by the fact, that just twelve months later (March, 1821) he could imagine Shelley capable of the^ffence pointed to in the slander, and could remind Hoppner lightly of their knowl- edge of Shelley's vicious intimacy with his wife's sister-by- affinity. When Byron thought in this fashion of Shelley, he had long been at enmity with Claire, who, in March, 1821, protested angrily and with an imprudent use of her power of sarcasm against his action in putting her child, Allegra> into a conventual school, and against his determina- 8WITZEKLAND. ' 295 tion to have her educated in the Catholic faith. At this time BjTon and Hoppner believed that Claire had become the mother of another child, whom she had put into some Italian foundling hospital for nurture during its infancy. Hoppner, who as the Britannic Consul-General at Venice may have had better evidence than a maid-servant's tattle respecting the matter, was certain that Claire had given birth to a second child, and provided in that manner for its suste- nance. The consul-general's information (which may have been false in every particular) was imparted to Byron ; and they were both under the impression that Shelley was the infant's father. On this last point they were certainly mis- taken. Shelley was no man to live in adultery with his wife's sister-by-affinity, or to follow Rousseau's example in avoid- ing his parental responsibilities. Byron, however, believed his friend and fellow-poet capable of both offences ; — proba^ bly on no better grounds than that Claire, when not follow- ing her vocation of an English governess in Italy, at a dis- tance from the Shelleys, used to spend most of her time with them. Hence it was that Byron, in his anger at her disap- proval of his plan for little Allegra's education, thought of Claire (in March, 1821) as a woman who, in her want of natural affection, had planted her child in a Foundling. This was the monstrous story, which came for the first time to Shelley^s knowledge in August, 1821, when he was staying with Byron at Ravenna. Well might Shelley, after clear- ing himself of the hideous imputation to Byron and enjoining Byron to disabuse Mr. and Mrs. Hoppner of their odious fancy, write to his wife, " Imagine my despair of good, imag- ine how is it possible that one of so weak and sensitive a nature as mine can run further the gauntlet through this hellish society of men." How long Byron had thought thus ill of his friend does not appear. The misconception does not seem to have been of very recent growth in March, 1821. On the contrary, the matter had been an affair of interest to him and Hoppner for some time. It is neither impossible nor improbable that Byron thought thus ill of Shelley, and thought it without feeling less amiably towards him, at the very moment of his outpouring of disgustful wrath at 296 THE REAL LORD BYEOK. Southey's slanderous speech. Anyhow, the man who thought BO lightly of Shelley's imaginary relation to Claire in March, 1821, was scarcely the right man to express so much virtuous abhorrence at Southey's slander in the March of the previous year. Notwithstanding the annoyances coming to him from the curiosity of English tourists and Genevese tattlers, the cha- grin he must have felt at circumstances which compelled him to retirement, and the rage into which he was thrown by the failure of his overture to Lady Byron, the poet enjoyed his time on the shore and waters of Lake Leman. With his vanity and captiousness, his outbreaks of conceit and pique, Polidori soon became a serious embarrassment and source of discord to the otherwise harmonious party. But for awhile, by force of the very peculiarities of his intellect and temper, which in a few weeks occasioned his dismissal, the light- headed young doctor was a cause of diversion rather than disagreement. The poets and their poetical ladies sailed the lake, by day and night, by moonlight even to dawn, in storm as well as in sunshine. Byron wrote much (the third Canto of " Childe Harold " was finished by the end of July, the " Prisoner of Chillon " having been thrown off in two wet days of the previous month) ; Shelley by turns meditated deeply and read severely ; in the hot days there were the leafy gardens for the sisters, who had their books of fiction and literary enterprises for the beguUement of the hours, when their men had neither eyes for their beauty, nor ears for their sprightly talk. At night, when it was too dark or stormy for sailing on the lake, "the four friends spent hours together in conversation alternately wise and brilliant, — sometimes, brilliant and wise at the same moment. The season was impropitious from excessive rainfall ; but the young people (especially the clever girls) had light hearts, and there were once and again some superbly fine days, in which all Nature, assuming her brightest beauty, was eloquent of gladness. When the rain had kept them prisoners to the house for several days, the tenants of the Villa Diodati, in the excite- ment of reading German ghost stories, agreed to compose tales that should surpass the works of the German authors in SWITZEELAND. 297 mystery and terror. " You and I will publish ours together, Mrs. Shelley I " cried Byron, who produced the sketch which afforded Polidori an opportunity to show his natural genius for imposture. Byron's " Vampire " was no tiling but a hint for a terrifying narrative. Mrs. Shelley's wild and entranc- ing romance of "Frankenstein" was, perhaps, the most vigorous and enthralling work of prose fiction ever written by so young a woman, — a girl in her nineteenth year. Another memorable passage of this summer with the poejts covered the days which Byron and Shelley, leaving their womankind to their own devices, spent in the tour of the lake, — the tour described by the younger of the two poets in a letter known to all students of his story. The sympathy of the two companions was sustained by the admiration each felt for the powers of the other. Exploring Rousseau's peculiar country with "Heloise" in their hands, they were for a few days the happiest mortals of the whole universe. Children of sorrow, they forgot their troubles for a brief moment, and, overflowing with boyish enthusiasm, lived in the purest delights of genius. This trip was followed after a brief interval by the over- tures for reconcilement, which Byron is said to have made to his wife in submission to Madame de Stael's judgment and sympathetic influence. Probably the lady was less account- able for the futile proposal than she imagined and successive writers have asserted. In spite of the animosities that had resultedin his wife's desire for the separation, — the animosities to which the quarrel had given rise, the resentment which the pubUcation of " The Farewell " necessarily generated in the woman of imperfect temper, and the deeper wound he knew he had inflicted at the very moment of his departure, Byron had not left England without hope of a speedy recall. It has been the fashion to speak of Byron's withdrawal to foreign lands as exUe and banishment for life, and the writer of these pages has acquiesced in the fashion ; but readers may not infer that the poet took ship with a feeling that his absence from England would be perpetual or even of con- siderable duration. The sincerest, almost the only sincere, words of the " The Farewell " are those of the lines, — 298 THE REAL LORD BYRON. " Yet, oh yet, thyself deceive not; Love may sink by slow decay, But by sudden wrench, believe not Hearts can thus be torn away." In his egotism he believed that Lady Byron would suffer in the same way as he suffered from the severance. In this vanity he imagined (and perhaps rightly) that she would Buffer much more acutely than he would suffer from the violent rupture. There was little genuineness in his re- peated declarations, that "having done all in his power to persuade Lady Byron to return, and with this view put off as long as he could signing the deed of separation, that step being once taken, they were now divided forever." Knowing that he had never, as the phrase goes, violated her marriage-bed, or, at least, had never committed any such act of conjugal infidelity to her knowledge, and believing that this extreme insult was the only crime a woman would find it difiicult to pardon in so superlative a being as himself, he left England with a secret confidence that she would re- lent, and relenting would beckon him to her. His notion was that she would yield on easy terms, if not at discretion, within a few months, if he left her to herself, and in the meantime did nothing further to exasperate her. On grow- ing weary of Claire in the early autumn, he would receive the message of reconcilement. In accordance with this favor- able forecast, he was careful that his measures for enjoying Jane Clermont's society in Switzerland should offer his wife no open and flagrant afiront. He was at pains that they might escape her knowledge and even her suspicion. By travelling ostentatiously without a female companion, he hoped to make Lady Byron imagine that the liaison with Claire was at an end. The circumstances of Claire's trip over the English Channel would preclude suspicion that he and she were bound for the same remote capital. At Geneva his association with Claire would be so speciously veiled by the presence of her friends, the Shelleys, and by her resi- dence under their roof, that no one would suspect the hidden fact. Geneva was far away from London in pre-raUway times ; and all Lady Byron would hear of his doings in the SWITZERLAND. 299 remote and obscare little capital would be that he was living quietly and decorously in its best circles, with Madame de Stael for his monitress-in-chief. Of Shelley (unknown to fashion) the poet hoped his wife would hear nothing. It has been told how egregiously events falsified Byron's calculations and disappointed his hopes. The best circles of Geneva were closed to him ; the best people of Geneva avoided him. The place was unusually full of English, many of whom had come there for the sport of watching him and sending to England unfavorable accounts of his doings. In- stead of escaping attention, his intimacy with Claire was re- ported with hideous exaggerations. Far, far worse things were told of him at Kirkby Mallory than that he was living with Jane Clermont in the same picturesque abode. No wonder the overture to Lady Byron was fruitless of recon- cilement. No wonder that the letter of peace to the partic- ular friend in England, coming from Claire's admirer and Shelley's "familiar," appeared to Lady Byron a shameless and heinous aggravation of all its writer's previous offences. No wonder that Byron received an answer that made him rue his folly in provoking it . The humiliation of the rebuff was the more keen and bitter because it could not be concealed from Madame de Stael, and would, therefore, be known to the whole world. The insult offered to him at Coppet was a slap that would reverberate in every salon of Paris. The man of fine sensibility and hot temper was furious. His first act of vengeance was "The Dream," — a lovely and elaborate falsehood, written to persuade all mankind that he had never loved the woman whose heart he was yearning to recover. Then, in a still more malignant mood, he composed for her torture of heart and brain the awful, the diabolically cruel " Incantation," subsequently inserted into " Manfred," — " Though thy slumber may be deep, Yet thy spirit shall not sleep ; Though thou see'st me not pass by, Thou shall feel me with thine eye As a thing that, though uusyeu, Must be near thee, and hath been ; 300 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. And when in that secret dread Thou hast turn'd around thy head, Thou shall marvel 1 am not As thy shadow on the spot, And the power which thou dost feel Shall be what thou must conceal." With unabated vindictiveness lie went to work at the "Marriage of Belphegor," the prose romance in which he meant to turn the whole universe against one woman — a faulty woman, doubtless, but a very miserable one, who, but for him, would have been less faulty and far less mis- erable, possibly even a happy woman, and the good woman she certainly tried to be, with imperfect success. In wilder and more malicious frenzy, on hearing she was ill, as though her iUness was at the same time a matter for his exultation, a proof of her wickedness, and an intolerable addition to the injuries she had done him, this inspired maniac railed at her in the following style (the verses being, however, withheld from publication during the author's life) — " I am too well avenged ! — but 'twas my right ; Whate'er my sins might be, thou wert not sent To be the Nemesis who should requite — Nor did Heaven choose so near an instrument. Mercy is for the merciful ! — if thou Hast been of such, 'twill be accorded now. Thy nights are banish'd from the realms of sleep I — Yes ! they may flatter thee, but thou shalt feel A hollow agony which will not heal, For thou art pillow'd on a curse too deep ; Thou hast sown in my sorrow, and must reap The bitter harvest in a woe as real ! I have had many foes, but none like thee ; For 'gainst the rest myself I could defend, And be avenged, or turn them into friend 1 But thou in safe implacability Hadst nought to dread — in thy own weakness shielded, And in my love, which hath but too much yielded. And spared, for thy sake, some I should not spare ; And thus upon the world — trust in thy truth, And the wild fame of my ungovern'd youth — On things that were not, and on things that are — Even upon such a basis thou hast built A monument, whose cement is guilt ! The moral Clytemnestra of thy lord, ^.nd bew'd down, with an unsuspected sword, SWITZERLAND. 301 Fame, peace, and hope — and all the better life Which, but for this cold treason of thy heart, Might still have risen from out the grave of strife, And found a nobler duty than to part. And of thy very virtues didst thou malte a vice, Trafficliing with thera in a purpose cold, For present anger, and for future gold — And buying other's grief at any price. And thus once entered into crooked ways, The early truth, which was thy proper praise, Did not still walk beside thee — but at times, And with a breast unknowing its own crimes, Deceit, avermeuts incompatible. Equivocations, and the thoughts which dwell In Janus spirits — the significant eye Which learns to lie with silence — the pretext Of prudence, with advantages annex'd — The acquiescence in all things which tend, No matter bow, to the desired end — All found a place in thy philosophy. The means were worthy, and the end is won — I would not do by thee as thou hast done." September, 1816. And what, the reader may well ask, had the lady done to provoke this outpouring of disdainful wrath ? Twq months since she was so much the object of the poet's admiration and confidence, that his strong wish and prayer were that she would recall him to her presence and closest companion- ship. And now she has changed to a cold, crafty, subtle, treacherous, hypocritical slanderer. What had she done? Simply this : That having a few months since determined to part with him on account of the badness of his temper, and having subsequently received from him as gross an affront before the whole world as a woman ever received from a man of genius, and being fully informed of his manner of living in Switzerland, she declined his offer to hasten to her straight from Jane Clermont's arms. More abuse of the same vindictive spirit came from the angry poet : the prayer for vengeance offered in some of the stateliest and most effective stanzas of the fourth canto of " Childe Harold," and the sarcasms of withering force and appalling vulgarity poured upon his " moral Clytemnestra " in "Don Juan." It cannot be questioned that for his honor's sake he should never have spoken an ungenerous word of 302 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. hia fellow-sufferer from conjugal strife, that he dropped below the standard of gentle dignity whenever he tattled to her dishonor, and that he sunk deplorably far beneath it when he put pen to paper, for the purpose of rendering her ridiculous to those meanest readers of the great satire, who delighted only or chiefly in its disfigurements of ribaldry and unclean- ness. But it was impossible for the man of volcanic nature and tempestuous emotionality to speak coolly when he felt hotly, to write temperately when the vultures of grief and despair were pecking at his heart. The man, whose fickleness was a kind of honesty, whUst his sincerity consisted in obedience to every transient impulse, could neither hide nor falsify the impressions of the moment. It may not be imagined that, in speaking untruly and unjustly of his wife, he was deliber- ately untruthful and unjust. For the moment he believed all the wild things he said of her. To himself boUiQg with rage, the untruths were truths whenever they passed from his heated fancy to paper. It is conceivable that he never sent them to the press without still believing them. Nor may the tempestuous fury of the utterances be thought to indicate his deepest feeling for Ada's mother. Even as ocean's unseen waters are tranquil when the waves are storm- ewept, Byron's ragings against his "moral Clytemnestra " were only the superficial ferment, covering the depths of his affection for her. The woman at whom he railed so insane- ly was the woman who shared with his child and sister the last tender emotions of his unruly heart. Returning to England by way of Dijon and Havre, the Shelleys left Geneva on the 29th of August. One of the consequences of Claire's passion may still have been unknown to the younger poet and Mary, but events must have prepared them for the communication when Claire told them how likely it was she would become a mother. Allegra was no child of premature birth. Already in the fifth month of her prog- ress towards maternity, when she turned her back on Lake Leman, Claire did not give Byron the parting kiss, without having spoken to him of her confident anticipation of off- spring. The affaii' had been considered by Byron and the SWITZERLAND. 303 young girl from several points of view. It is not to Byron's discredit, under all the circumstances of the case, that he wished Claire to consent to an arrangement, by which her child would have been sent to Mrs. Leigh, for nurture with her own children. In making this proposal, the poet was no less considerate for the child, who would be well cared for in Cambridgeshire, than for Claire who would soon find her child an embarrassment and a source of discredit. The proj- ect was, however, so distasteful to Miss Clermont that it was relinquished by Byron before he had consulted Augusta on the subject. It was then settled that Claire should return to England with the SheUeys, all questions (with a single exception) touching the child's nurture being deferred till the need for considering them should be more urgent. On one point, however, Claire gained a promise from Byron. In- capable in her nineteenth year of regarding the parental obli- gations from the high philosophic point of view, which pos- sibly enabled her before she was twenty-four years old to commit with light heart and easy conscience a second child to a foundling hospital, Claire entreated Byron that her first-bom offspring should be reared under the personal sur- veillance of the one or other of its parents, or both of them. If it should appear well for her to relinquish the custody of her infant, she would surrender the infant to Byron, and acquiesce in any plan he might propose for its education, provided the child should live with him. But to no other person woidd she give the charge of her oiFspring. Let Byron promise to gratify her in this important particular, and she would return to England with undiminished confi- dence in his goodness. If he would not grant her prayer, she should leave Geneva with a heavy heart, — even with re- gret for the blissful hours she had spent with him. To this petition, preferred so earnestly and in a conciliatory manner, Byron could not reply in the negative. The promise was given, and kept by the poet till he was induced mainly by the Countess Guiccioli to place the little Allegra in the con- ventual school at Bagna-Cavallo, near Ravenna, where she died of fever, at the age stated in the following inscription of the tablet which commemorates her interment at Harrow, 304 THE EEAL LOKD BYRON. •whither her body was sent at much expense from Italy: "In Memory of AUegra, daughter of G. G. Lord Byrqn, who died at Bagna-Cavallo, in Italy, April 20, 1822, Aged Five Years and Three Months. — 'I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.' — 2 Samuel, xii. 23." — The pre- cise day of the child's birth probably is not given in this brief history in marble. Anyhow, Claire had a baby at her breast as early as the 20th January, 1817. Born in England, Allegra remained in England with her mother and the Shelleys till the 11th of March, 1818, when they took her with them to Italy ; her arrival in Milan being followed at a brief interval by her transmission to her father in Venice, when she was just a year and half old. Instead of being taken to him by Claire, the little girl came to her father's palace in the charge of her Swiss nurse ; — an arrangement that may be attributed to Byron, who may also be presumed to have insisted on it, as a good way of intimat- ing that, though willing to receive the child, he was not desirous of seeing the child's mother. It would have been a poor compliment to her, had he invited Claire to reign over his house, which was in truth no fit residence for a woman with any sense of feminine dignity, or feminine refinement. Claire, however, accompanied Shelly to Venice in the follow- ing August, and soon saw enough of her former lover's way of living, to be convinced that he was in no humor for a renewal of their former intimacy. If she came to Venice with any of her girlish illusion respecting his goodness and chivalry, — with the faintest hope that her presence would aflPord him pleasure, — the visit must have troubled her not a little. For Byron was already at the beginning of the darkest and most sordid stage of his Venetian depravity. The Palazzo Mocenigo was disreputable even in Venice. To call it a harem would be a flattery of the place and its pro- prietor. It would be more fairly described as the house of evil fame, where the poet received some of the coarsest and most vicious of the lowest class of Venetian womankind. Even his appearance must have shocked Claire, so greatly had it suffered from excesses that would have revolted him in liis brighter time. Such was the home, such the man, to SWITZERLAND. 305 whom Claire (not yet twenty-one years of age) had sent her child. If it was not irreproachable, Byron's treatment of his illegitimate child was on the whole creditable to him. Thus much must be conceded even by his sternest censors. For awhile the by no means angelic child (she was greedy, pas- sionate, and in her fifth year precociously vain and saucy) was his favorite plaything and almost his only source of in- nocent diversion within his doors. He made a liberal pro- vision for her in a codicil to his will ; and when he determined to educate her in the Catholic faith and for that purpose sent her to Bagna-Cavallo, he was certainly actuated by sincere concern for the child's welfare. Even the Shelleys, with all their aversion to clerical influence, were of opinion that, as a temporary expedient, his action in sending his daughter to a Catholic school was justifiable and even judicious and conscientious. But Claire took a very different view of his conduct. Though Byron does not appear to have made any promises of enduring devotion, the romantic girl had not yielded to his addresses without imagining, in her simphcity, that an auspicious fate designed her to be Lady Byron's successor, — in fact, that she would be to him all her sister-by-affinity was already, and all she subsequently became to Shelley, — the sure holder of his heart, the mother of his children, and, in case of Lady Byron's opportune death, his wife in every sense. On discovering how greatly she had exaggerated her power over him, how strangely she had mis- conceived her position towards him, the fond and foolish girl imagined that his passion for her would revive on the appear- ance of their child, — that at least the child would be the enduring hnk of its parents' lives. It seemed to her that, should those lives be severed by any other cause than death, the child would be an influence operating for their reunion. All this was present to Claire's mind when, speaking chiefly from a higher motive and for a less selfish purpose, she begged that her child might be reared under the personal observation of the one or the other, of its parents. An in- mate of Byron's house, the child would be a reason why its mother could not be lightly denied access to his presence. 306 THE REAL LOED BYRON. Living with her, the child would at least dispose Byron, even if it would not constrain him, to maintain intercourse with its mother. By sending the little girl to Bagna-Cavallo, Byron extin- guished Claire's hope that AUegra would restore her parents to relations of mutual confidence and affection. By the same act he also put an end to Claire's hope that AUegra would be trained to love and honor her mother. Reared in the Catholic faith Allegra would conceive aversion for her mother, as a free-thinker and unbeliever, — living in heresy more hateful and impious than the heresy of Protestantism. The arrange- ment was the more exasperating to Claire, because she had good reason to regard it as the result of Madame Guiccioli's influence over Byron, to whose mobile affection Claire regarded herself as having a kind of reversionary title, by virtue of the child she had given him. At Venice Byron smiled on several mistresses between the death of his fleeting passion for Claire and the birth of his stronger and more lasting attachment to the Italian countess. But all these women (her inferiors in culture, quality, and even in beauty) Claire could regard as mere toys of the moment to her child's father. The least disreputable of them was a tradesman's wife, in whose house the poet had lodged. Most of them were creatures picked out of cellars or wine-shops. Some of them could neither write nor read. The -most notorious of them, Margarita Cogni (the Fornarina with flashing eyes : — the baker's " baggage," with a bold face and saucy tongue) was a mere blackguard in petticoats. No one of them had given the poet offspring. It was impossible for any one of these creatures to hold his affection for any considerable time, or to recover his fancy after once losing it. Claire never felt herself utterly and hopelessly superseded by any of these vulgar women. But the Italian countess — girlish, beautiful, and Byron's equal in rank — was no charmer for Claire to regard with a scornful sense of superiority or an affectation of indifference. On the contrary, should the countess give her protector a child, Claire saw an end of her failino- hope of recovering Byron through his tenderness for her offspring. Nor was the countess without a sense of peril from the pos- SWITZERLAND. 307 sible revival of the poet's aflFection for Allegra's mother, who had beauty and cleverness, and belonged to the aristocracy of talent, though by birth she was only a London trades- man's daughter. There was no love lost between these two women. Knowing everything about one another, they lived in mutual fear and animosity. When a lady fibs, it is the parf of civUity to assume that she speaks from insuificient information. When she wrote of Mrs. Shelley's relative as an intrusive young person who forced herself on Byron's notice at Geneva, though he would gladly have avoided her, the countess was speaking from insufficient information. FamUiar with every particular of Claire's intercourse with Byron, the countess detested her ; — hating her all the more because in the lightness with which Byron had tossed her from him (notwithstanding her child) there was a forewarn- ing of the treatment in store for her successor, who could not flatter him with offspring. Dislike of Claire may have been one of the countess' motives for urging Byron to send Allegra to school, and educate her to think her mother a heretic, — a misbeliever of an especially odious heresy. To the last the woman of noble birth and Italian blood detested the woman of English birth and Southern temperament. When in her old age she put on paper the monstrous asser- tion that she had Byron's authority for saying he had never seduced any woman, the countess was aware how the words would sting Claire (in her old age at Florence) should they come to her notice. After considering this neat and final thrust at poor Claire (old, poor, neglected, though never quite friendless), no one will deny that the Marquise de Boissy (rich, prosperous, and fSted) was a woman of genius ! Under the circumstances it is not wonderful that the impulsive and hot-tempered Claire (now a young woman of twenty-three years of age) poured out the full vial of her wrath on the head of the man who had broken his promise that her child should be educated under the personal care of one or the other parent. No wonder she taunted the noble- man with breaking his word of honor, passed with the utmost solemnity to the generous and artless girl who had loved him in the belief that he was good. No wonder that 308 THE REAL LOED BYEON. she charged him with meanness and cruelty ; that she asked him with scornful sarcasm whether the purity of his princi- ples forbade him to cherish his natural daughter with pater- nal tenderness ; that she declared the education given to girls in conventual schools was chiefly accountable for the ignorance and profligacy of Italian women, whose licen- tiousness made them dishonorable and grievous to society ; that she told him Lady Byron (ever watchful of his move- ments and condemned by many people for casting him from her) would hear with delight of his behavior to AUegra and Allegra's mother, and rejoice in the honorable security of herself and Ada ; that she assured him the announcement oY his purpose towards the child in his power would be received in England as a justification of the severest censures passed upon him by his bitterest enemies ! Passing from passionate invective to plaintive entreaty, Claire entreated Byron that he would at least give her back the child she had committed to him, so that she might educate her as an English girl ought to be educated, — in a way that would at least afford the child a chance of growing to be an affectionate daughter to the only one of her parents who really loved her. By consent- ing to her prayer Claire told Byron he would be the gainer in credit and (with a sarcastic note on the word which she, felt would go straight to the poet's heart) — in purse. The child should never again cost him a penny. She (Claire) would put her to a good English school, and pay her charges there. She was able to do so, — would gladly do so. The school should be chosen by his own friends in England. Yet further, the petitioner would bind herself to see the child no oftener than his friends should think fit. But passion, sar- casm, pathos, entreaty, were all in vain. The father was unyielding. The mother might as well have offered her sup- plications to a block of stone ; the justification of his obdu- racy being his belief that Claire had no strong affection for her offspring or any one but herself, — had planted one of her children in a Foundling, — was at that very time living in concubinage with Shelley, under Mrs. Shelley's roof, — was in fact an equally shameless and saucy actress in the whole affair. He stood firm. And AUegra was sent to Bagna-Cavallo, — to die there in the following year. SWITZERLAND. 309 To return to the Villa Diodati, where Byron had a few days to himself between the departure of the Shelleys and the arrival of Hobhouse and Scrope Davies. Pained to learn how inauspiciously matters had gone at Geneva for the poet's reputation, the new-comers were delighted at the change for the better in their friend's health, temper, spirits, habits of life, and appearance. They observed with pleasure the poet's total abstinence from brandy, in which he had indulged far too freely in London during the domestic troubles. No longer drinking soda-water to excess, Byron was living (as he had lived ever since his coming to Switzerland) with a strict tem- perance, bordering on severe abstemiousness, in eating and drinking. His hours of going to rest and rising from bed were not reprehensibly late ; he was neither passionate nor perverse ; and he talked calmly of his misfortunes, even of his wife's last exhibition of cruelty in declining to receive him again into her favor, without giving his friends any of those violent hysterical ejaculations vrith which he had so often startled and even terrified them in Piccadilly. Though some of his remarks on " Glenarvon " and Lady Caroline Lamb were animated with indignation, he spoke of the book and its writer without immoderate anger. Upon the whole he looked happy and was happy. In the later time of September (from the 17th to the 29th, inclusive) , when Scrope Davies had gone off for England, the poet and Hobhouse made the thirteen days' tour in the Ber- nese Oberland, particulars of which maybe found in Moore's " Extracts " from the diary which Byron kept during the ex- cursion for the entertainment of his sister. After perusing her brother's narrative — overflowing with evidence that he had enjoyed the trip with the same boyish heartiness that distinguished his enjoyment of the tour round Lake Leman with Shelley — Mrs. Leigh (notwithstanding her knowledge of his disposition) must have been astonished by the sud- denness with which he passed in the journal's concluding paragraph from gladness to gloom. "But in all this," says the writer, turning from the sunshine of his unconstrained cheerfulness and even hilarity, and plunging instantaneously into the blackest depths of melancholy, — " but in all this — 310 THE REAL LORD BYEON. the recollection of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany me through life, have preyed upon me here ; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory, around, above, and beneath me." There is something comical in this sudden drop into despair of the young man who had just been snow- balhng Hobhouse on the Wengern Alp and laughing till he almost cracked his sides at the repeated falls of his mountain guide. The wail, however, was no mere affectation of mel- ancholy. Ludicrously untruthful as to his feelings during the trip, — no less so than his wild indictment of his false and malignant wife, — the woful words were sincere to the impression of the moment. High and long-maintained ela- tion of spirits was succeeded by corresponding depression ; and in the sadness that possessed his soul, it really seemed to him that he had made the tour in deepest gloom. The tour had brought him back to the Chateau Diodati. A few days later (after a farewell dinner at Coppet), his sojourn to Switzerland was a thing of the past. On the 15th of October, 1816, he was writing gayly from Milan to Mur- ray about the love-letters of Lucretia Borgia and Cardinal Bembo. VENICE. — BYRON'S DEPRAVATION. 311 CHAPTER XIX. VENICE. BYRON'S DEPRAVATION. From IViilan the friends went to Verona, and from Verona to Venice, where Byron became the tenant of the best rooms in the house of a linen-draper, in an extremely narrow street, — the Spezieria of Moore's narrative, the Merceria of Karl Elze's text. To give the tradesman a rank befitting the honor about to be conferred on his wife (a young woman, with large black eyes, an Italian countenance, anJ dark, glossy hair resembling Lady Jersey's tresses in curl and color), Byron styled him "a Merchant of Venice, who is a good deal occupied in business." Whilst the draper was serving his customers, Byron made love to Marianna. Segati, the young person who in one of her natural en- dowments was comparable with the English countess and in another surpassed the antelope ; and as the merchant had fewer customers and less credit than he needed for his affairs, he was sufficiently prudent to give his shop more attention than he gave- his wife. The several parties to the triangular arrangement, which gave Marianna a niche in the temple of fame, acted with equal promptitude and harmony. Coming to Venice in the middle of November, Byron was on the seventeenth of the month writing rapt- urously to Moore about the lady's merits. For several months Marianna was a very goddess to the poet, who, finding music in her voice, beauty in her face, sunlight in her eyes, humor in her persiflage, and voluptuous grace in her form, paid the price of her concessions with ungrudging liberality. Forbearing to murmur at the "inflammation of his weekly bills," the poet relieved Segati's financial distress with timely munificence, and made presents of jewellery to Marianna, — on one occasion giving her the set of diamonds 312 THE KEAL, LORD BYKON. which she sold with an unromantic alacity, that enabled him a few weeks later to buy them again for her encouragement in thrift. Had she been of noble birth and style, the poet's admira- tion of his pretty landlady could not have been more fervid or fruitful of delicate homage ; and the puerile delight with which he paraded his easy conquest to the light-tongued Venetians must have reminded Hobhouse-of the effrontery with which Lord Byron of Trinity had in former time called every one's attention to his girl in boy's clothing. Providing himself with a gondola, and taking a box at the Phoenix' Theatre, he was seldom seen at places of public amusement without his mistress, whose lessons in the Venetian dialect he repaid with instruction in the art of loving. " I am still," he wrote to Murray on the 27th of December, 1816, "dread- fully in love with the Adriatic lady whom I spoke of in a former letter ; and love in this part of the world is no sine- cure." Devotion to this siren of the shop-board had caused him to dechne accompanying Hobhouse to Rome, where, however, the friends met in the ensuing May. At the same time he found a worthier field of diversion at the convent of St. Lazarus, whither he went daily in his gondola to gossip with the monks and aid them in the composition of their English-Armenian grammar, towards the publication of which work he contributed a thousand francs. He went also to other places hesides the Armenian monas- tery, where he could not introduce Marianna. No longer pre- ferring seclusion to society, now that he was in a city of lighter morals than Geneva, he attended the Count Governor's receptions, where the Patriarch of Venice smiled benedictions on a motley crew of Austrian s and Germans, very much in the style of the Bishop of Winchester in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair. At the same time he became a regular fre- quenter of the circle of Isabella Teotochi, Countess Albri2ffii, known for her writings and conversational brightness as the De Stael of Venice, "not young" (he wrote to Moore, De- cember 24, 1816), "but a very learned, unaffected, good- natured woman, very polite to strangers, and, I believe, not at all dissolute, as most of the women are. " Whilst the lady won VENICE. — BYRON'S DEPRAVATION. 313 this meed of cold and dubious approval from her famous visi- tor, the De Stael of Venice wrote rapturously of his genius and personal endowments. "It would be to little purpose," she exclaims in her book of " Portraits," " to dwell upon the mere beauty of a countenance in which the expression of an extraordinary mind was so conspicuous. What serenity was seated on the forehead, adorned with fine chestnut hair, light, curling, and disposed with such art, that the art was hidden in the imitation of most pleasing nature ! What varied expression in his eyes ! They were of the azure color of the heavens, from which they seemed to derive their origin. His teeth, in form, in color, in transparency, re- sembled pearls ; but his cheeks were too delicately tinged with the hue of the pale rose. His neck, which he was in the habit of keeping uncovered as much as the usages of society perijiitted, seemed to have been formed in a mould, and was very white. His hands were as beautifiil as if they had been the works of art." It was thus that the Italian countess spoke of her idol in the sketch which he declined to correct for the press, or even to peruse in manuscript, and at the instigation of caprice or caution begged her to give to the flames, instead of the world. Offended with the lady for not taking his advice on a matter about which he had a moral title to command, Byron withdrew from her circle, and to her lively chagrin went over to the salon of her rival, the Countess Benzoni, where, after a period that, without extravagance may be designated the period of his darkest depravity, he fell in love with Teresa Guiccioli, who wrote to Moore after her hero's death, " His noble and exquisitely beautiful countenance, the tone of his voice, his manners, the thousand enchantments that surrounded him, rendered him so different and so superior a being to any whom I had hitherto seen, that it was impossible he should not have left the most profound impression on me. From that evening, during the whole of my subsequent stay at Venice, we met every day." The carnival of 1817 had not ended before Byron, suffer- ing from the malaria of the canals, was sickening for another severe assault of the same disease which had so nearly killed 314 THE REAL LORD BYRON. him when he was in Greece, and which, after repeated attacks on a constitution fretted by fitful dissipation and broken by persistence in the suicidal diet to which so frequent reference has been made in these pages, laid him on his bed of death in Missolonghi. The severity of his present illness was due in some degree to nervous prostration, resulting from the late hours and violent excitements of the carnival, into whose dissipations he had hurled himself with the wild vehemence and delirious energy of a libertine bent on indemnifying himself by extravagant excess for previous privations of pleasure. The man who had lived so long out of the world at Geneva, and had spent the subsequent weeks with more than his customary abstinence from festal extravagances, now leaped into the licentious freedom of the universal hohday with a passionate appetite for gayety, — even as the drunkard or gambler springs to the bottle or the hazard-table after a long term of restraint from his favorite enjoyment. " The Carnival," he wrote to Moore on February 28, 1817, "that is, the latter part of it, and sitting up late o' nights, had knocked me up a little . " On the third of the following month , he writes to Murray, " Ever since the conclusion of the Car- nival I have been unwell, and have hardly stirred out of the house. . . . My malady is a sort of lowish fever, originat- ing from what my ' pastor and master,' Jackson, would call 'taking too much out of one's self.'" Three weeks later (March 25, 1817) he says to Moore, "I have been very iU with a slow fever, which at last took to flying, and became as quick as need be. But, at length, after a week of half- delirium, burning skin, thirst, hot headache, horrible pulsa- tion, and no sleep, by the blessing of barley-water, and refusing to see any physician, I recovered. It is an epidemic of the place, which is annual, and visits strangers." That the sufferer recognized the identity of the fever which struck him down in the Morea, with the fever which gave Marianna an opportunity for displaying her nursely skUl, appears from a note he penned with a weak hand to his London publisher. Shaking off the fever, which was raising the mortahty of Venice far above its usual unhealthy average, Byron, in the middle of April, escaped from the city of death to VENICE. — byron's depeavation. 315 Rome (pausing^ by the way at Ferrara, Florence, and Foligno), — the trip that gave us the finest stanzas of the fourth canto of " Childe Harold." From Eome (where the poet dined with Lord Lansdowne, sat for "the familiar bust to Thorwaldsen, and rode to the various points of interest on the saddle-horses he had brought with him from Venice) Hobhouse would fain have lured Byron to Naples ; but the man of feeling was pining too keenly for Marianna to ac- quiesce in the proposal for an extension of his tour, and of his term of absence from the young woman who, having captivated him by her lovely face and musical voice, had won a deeper corner of his heart by the aflfectionate assiduity of her ministrations to him during his severe illness. This longing for the woman, whom he parted from lightly enough some months later, even caused him to shorten his stay in E.ome, after maJsing up his mind to remain there till the beginning of June. Inviting her to meet him on his back- ward way (an invitation that was obeyed with alacrity), Byron returned with Marianna at his side to her husband's house on May 28th. In the middle of the next month the poet and his mistress (without the draper's presence but doubtless with his approval) were living at La Mira, on the Brenta, in the house (at an easy distance from the City of the Sea) that Byron henceforth used as a place of rural retreat tUl the close of his sojourn at Venice ; — the same villa to which he had carried Teresa Guiccioli, some two years after he had hinted to Marianna that it would be well for her to leave it. The precise time at which Byron and the draper's wife parted company does not appear. Nor is anything known of the circumstances that put an end to the liaison. The probable explanation of the matter is that Byron grew weary of her, as he was wont to grow weary of the objects of his sentimental tenderness, and that Marianna was pricked, by the signs of his growing disaffection, to ebullitions of anger. Whatever its immediate cause, and however sudden at last, the severance certainly was not premature. After re-purchasing the diamonds so recently given her, Byron may well have thought it time for him to seek for another recipi- ent of his favors. 316 THE EEAL LOED BTEON. That Marianna Segatiwas no woman to endure slights meekly and smile under a sense of injury may be inferred from a scene of which Byron was a spectator in the opening stage of their friendship. The Carnival of 1817 was at its height, and the poet's passion for his new mistress was the talk of Venice, when he received from a gondolier a note inviting him to meet the fair writer, who had withheld her name from the billet. His reply was that he should be alone at home at ten o'clock of the ensuing night, or at the ridotto two hours later, and would gladly speak with his anonymous correspondent at either place. At the earlier hour he was in his lodgings (Marianna having gone with her husband to a conversazione) , when a young and pretty girl entered his room of audience and lost no time in informing him that she was Marianna's sister-in-law, and wished to speak with him re- specting his intimacy with the lady, to whom she was so nearly related. The conversation had not proceeded far in Italian and Romaic, when Marianna Segati with fury in her handsome face and dark eyes rushed into the room, seized her meddlesome sister-in-law by the hair, and gave her sixteen violent slaps on the face, — " slaps," Byron wrote to Moore, " which would have made your ear ache only to hear their echo." After seeing the back of her enemy, who fled in- stantly from the scene and spectator of her sharp chastise- ment, Marianna went off into hysterics in the arms of her admirer, who was still bringing her round with eau-de-Co- logne and endearments when Segati (the linen-draper) entered the room, to make observations that should be serviceable to Mm in coining to terms with the disturber of his domestic happiness. The woman's true nature revealed itself in this outbreak of rage. Possessing beauty of face and figure, some cleverness of speech, the taste in dress and other mat- ters of personal adornment to be looked for in a smart young mUliner, and the power of singing, to be regarded almost aS a matter of course in persons of her race and clime, Marianna Segati was a mere creature of the common bourgeoisie. It shows how much Byron had already suffered, how much more he was likely to suffer, from close intimacy with so ordinary and unrefined a woman, that he was agreeably VENICE. BYEON'S DEPRAVATION. 317 diverted by her behavior to her intrusive sister-in-law, and, worse stUI, was so highly amused and delighted by the whole affair as to think it worth his while and consistent with his dignity and poetic sensibility to give his brother in poesy (Moore) a long account of so sordid a business. It would have been to his advantage, — or, rather, let us say, it would have been less to his disadvantage, — in his dealings with women of Marianna's low quality, and the viler women for whom she may be said to have debased him, had Byron been able to approach them with passion altogether divorced from sympathy and every kind of emotional tender- ness. Had he regarded her as nothing more than an instrument of diversion, his unedifying association with Marianna Segati would not have disposed him for another and greater descent in the scale of refinement, and pre- pared him for communion with mistresses of ruder man- ners and worse morals. Less harm would have come to him from the creatures who composed the vagrant harem of the Palazzo Mocenigo had he possessed the cynical hardness and spiritual grossness to think of them as animals, differing from the brutes only in shape and speech. But the softness of his nature prevented him from taking so disdainful a view of the filles-de-joie who frequented his palace on the Grand Canal. However dissolute she might be, the woman he regarded with passion became for a moment the object of an affection that was no less tender than transient. To caU it love would be a profanation ; but no less sacred word would adequately describe the fleeting sentiment of perverted sym- pathy and debasing admiration with which he cherished these miserable beings, after descending from the moral elevation of culture and genius to their almost lowest level of human existence. Hence his strange and even appalling delight in their exhibitions of caprice and jealousy, in the humor of their sorry jests, and in the piquancy of vulgar persiflage. In the whole story of our literature few things can be found more painfully humiliating and dismally shocking to readers of average taste and sensibility than Byron's confessions of delight in Margarita Cogni's colloquial sprightliness, and the pains he took to record some of her sauciest speeches, — 318 THE SEAL LOKD BYRON. speeches that, heard from the lips of any wanton walker of the London pavements, would cause decent people to hasten beyond earshot. After restoring Marianna Segati to her rightftil owner, Byron had estabhshed himself in his stately palace (the Pa^ lazzo Mocenigo) on the Grand Canal, and was fast sinking to the darkest depths of his Venetian depravity, when the Shelleys and Jane Clermont paid him the visit to which reference has already been made. Occupying the villa I Capuccini, near Este (which Byron had recently hired of Hoppner, and now put at the service of Claire and her friends), Shelley spent the several weeks in the neigh- borhood of Venice, during which he wrote " Julian and Maddalo," — a work scarcely more memorable as a monu- ment of its author's genius than valuable as a piece of Byron's history. "Count Maddalo," the author re- marks in the introductory note to his poem, "is a Venetian nobleman of ancient family and of good fortune, who, with- out mixing much in the society of his countrymen, resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city. He is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud ; he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordi- nary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men ; and, instead of the latter having been used in curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength. His ambition preys upon itself, for want of objects which it can consider worthy of exertion. I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no other word to express the concentred and impatient feelings which con- sume him ; but it is on his own hopes and aiFections only that he seems to trample, for in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank, and' witty. His more serious con- versation is a kind of intoxication ; men are held by it as by a spell. He has travelled much, and there is an inexpres- VENICE. — BYRON'S DEPRAVATION. 319 sible charm in his relation of his adventures in different countries." This notable estimate of Byron's character and powers, formed at a moment when they were seen even by Shelley under disadvantageous circumstances, is followed in the poem by this pleasant picture of the child, who had now been for some six months under her father's care : — " The following morn was rainy, cold, and dim. Ere Maddalo arose, I called on him ; And, whilst I waited, with his child I played, — A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made ; A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being; Graceful without design, and unforeseeing.; "With eyes — oh speak not of her eyes ! which seem Twin mirrors of Italian heaven, yet gleam With such deep meaning as we never see But in the human countenance. With me She was a special favorite ; I had nursed Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first To this bleak world ; and she yet seemed to know On second sight her ancient playfellow. Less changed than she was by six months or so, For, after her first shyness was worn out. We sate there, rolling billiard balls about, — When the Count entered." It has been already remarked that Allegra was by no means the angelic child Byronic enthusiasts have delighted to imagine her. If she had inherited from her sire the blue eyes together with other personal characteristics, that were conspicuous elements of his infantile loveliness, she had also inherited from the same parent the vehement temper, the wil- &lnessand probably also the greediness, which distinguished her from an early season of her brief existence. That she was the lovely toy SheUey declared her in her second year can be readily imagined. But that she was not altogether lovely at a later time appears from the testimony of her father, and also of Mr. Hoppner, who, havings-enjoyed even better opportunities than her father for observing the child's propensities, wrote to the "Athenaeum" in 1869, " She was not by any means an amiable child, nor was Mrs. Hoppner or I particularly fond of her." The time has come for another glance at the poet's finan- cial position, and a precise statement of his pecuniary re- 320 THE REAL LORD BYRON. sources during the earlier years of his exile. There is the more need for this statement, as he has been charged with squandering his wife's money on his pleasures in Italy. Had he been disposed to live in wasteful luxury on Lady Byron's fortune, he could not have done so, for the simple reason that her rnodest fortune was in the hands of her trus- tees. Till her mother's death, in February, 1822, Lady Byron had no considerable possessions, — nothing, that her husband could touch. After Lady Noel's death, indeed, Byron took his lawful share of the income accruing to himself and his wife from the Wentworth property, in accordance with the arrangement of the arbitrators appointed for the equitable division of a revenue of some seven or eight thousand a year. Whatever may he urged on the question of delicacy and chivalrous magnanimity, he was under no obligation of honor to do otherwise. It would have been quixotic generosity on his part to decline the tardy enrichment that was a poor compensation for the material injiuy he had sustained from the luckless marriage, which had in other respects been so disastrous to his interests. It has been shown that Miss MUbanke was no great match for him at the time of the first offer, when his pecuniary prospects and almost cloudless celebrity would have justified him in seeking the hand of a woman of greater wealth and higher rank. It has been shown that even on the bridal day, when his circumstances were somewhat less auspicious and his embarrassments more urgent, she still remained a poor match for a man of his eminence and estate. It has been seen that he made a large settlement upon her, — a settlement that may almost be called prodig7 ious, so greatly disproportionate was it to her fortune and his own estate, — a settlement that enriched her for so long a period after his death. One result of this settlement was, that Lady Byron's trustees, after the sale of Newstead to Colonel Wildman, precluded him from the expansion of income he might have obtained from an investment on mortgage of Lord Blessington's Dublin property at six per cent, per annum. As Lady Byron took the full advantage of the marriage-settle- ment which affected her husband so injuriously, it is not ob- vious why he should have forborne to take the share of the VEOTCE. BYKON'S DEPRAVATION. 321 revenue from the Wentworth property, which he had, in a cer- tain sense, purchased with that deed of endowment. Possibly some readers of this page may share Moore's regret that the poet did not persist in his original purpose, never to touch a guinea of his wife's money. But whatever cause there may be for regret, there appears no ground for severe censure. Byron's action in the matter differs widely from that of the man who, having given her nothing, insists on taking much from the woman with whom he is at war ; for he had paid heavily for the marriage, which cost him so much in happiness and honor. Anyhow, the event of 1822 had no effect on his way of living from the summer of 1816 till the sale of Newstead placed him in more than easy circumstances . Nor is he charge- able with spending on his selfish enjoyments the money that came to him from Lady Byron's possessions during the last two years of his existence. For a considerable period before Lady Noel's death, he had lived well within his income, sav- ing his money (sometimes saving it in ways that justly exposed him to imputations of avarice and niggardliness), for the achievement of one or another of his several romantic projects for distinguishing himself as a man of action. The enterprise to which he eventually devoted the money from his wife's revenue was the cause to which he gave his own life. The failure of his overture from Geneva for reconcilement with his wife may have been in some degree accountable for Byron's dismissal of the notion that his nobility forbade him to use his literary emoluments for his personal comfort. Reunion with Lady Byron, attended with a readjustment of his affairs by the aid of her father and mother, would proba- bly have encouraged him to persist in a resolution which he could not have abandoned without rudely shocking their feelings. In England and with the Noels about him, it would probably have been out of his power to get the better of the false sentiment, from which he liberated himself with difficulty in a foreign land. Even under the circumstances most favorable to his independence and discretion, he had a sharp conflict with his pride before he came to a wise resolve on the question of honor, which his financial embar- rassments had for some time been forcing upon his con^idera- 322 THE REAL LORD BYEON. tion. On coming to Venice with no readier source of suflScient income than his genius, Byron determined to do what four years since he would have blushed to think of doing, what two years since his enemies on the London press had accused him of doing, what his defenders on the same press had warmly declared him innocent and even incapable of doing, — to use the earnings of his pen precisely as he used the rents from his Nottinghamshire farms, and had used the money lent him on extortionate terras by London usurers. Readers may well smile at the time Byron took and the pain he underwent in coming to this determination. But they must remember that the question which the poet was so slow in answering so sensibly, was by no means the simple question it may appear at the present day. Seventy years since had the opinion of the whole Enghsh nobility been taken individu- ally on the question whether a nobleman could without dis- honor write for money, whether in plain terms he could without disgrace habitually take wages for the work of his pen, it is probable that no single voice would have answered in the affirmative, — that, on the contrary, every reply would have been an indignant " No." Had a far larger class of English- men, the whole body of the gentlemen of Great Britain, been polled on the question whether a peer of the realm might follow literature as a way of livelihood, ninety-and-nine out of every hundred of them would have answered unhesitat- ingly in the negative. And the matter just now in debate with Byron was not, how he might or might not use the money coming to him now and then from occasional exertions of his Hterary faciJty, but whether he might habitually apply to his private use and personal advantage the strong and steady stream of affluence ilowing to him in regular current from the sale of his writings. Whether a nobleman might be an author by profession was a large question, involving several nice questions. In the world's history the question had never been raised before. England had produced royal authors by the dozen, noble authors by the hundred, but never a nobleman brought fac» to face with the question whether he naght and should earn, as an author by pro- fession, an income adequate to his rank, and apply it to his VENICE. BYRON'S DEPRAVATION. 323 private necessities. In answering this question by open action, directly in opposition to the prejudices of his order and the sentiment of all English society, Byron displayed at least as much moral courage as any nobleman would have shown in declining a challenge on the ground of his con- scientious disapproval of duelling. The magnitude of the revenue that came to Byron from his pen during the five years immediately ensuing his with- drawal from England may be seen from the following data, taken from Murray's published list of payments to the poet, and the same publisher's " Chronology of Lord Byron's Life and "Works " : — 1816 A.D. Siege of Corinth £525 li Parisina ....... 625 " 3d Canto of Childe Harold '. '. '. 1,576 " Prisoner of Chillon 525 1817 Lament of Tasso 315 " Manfred 315 " Beppo 525 1818 4th Canto of ChUde Harold . . . 2,100 " Mazeppa 525 1819 Don Juan, I., II 1,525 1820 Doge of Venice 1,050 1821 Don Juan, lU., IV., T 1,525 " Sardanapalus, Cain, Foscari. . . . 1,100 Sundries . ' 450 6)12,580 Average receipts for five years . . . £2,516 What portion of the payments put together under " Sun- dries " was paid in the first two years of this period does not appear ; but at least £200 of the £450 (Sundries) came to the poet before he had been two full years away from England. As the poem was not finished till October, 1818, the price (£525) for "Mazeppa" may not be included in the receipts of these first two years. The poet's receipts for the two years (the £1,050 for the "Siege of Corinth" and "Parisina" being included in them, though the poems were written in England) may be computed at £6,605, — a trifle over £3,300 a year. In considering the value of this income at the time when it was earned, readgra must bear in mind 324 THE REAL LORD BYEON. the greatness of the depreciation of gold during the last sixty years. £3,300 in the years 1816-17 and 1817-18 were at .least equivalent to £5,000 of English gold at the present time. Other matters must also be had in consideration by readers who would get a fair view of Byron's pecuniary position in the two years, closing with the sale of Newstead to Colonel Wildman, — the sale (negotiated in November, 1817, and completed in the sununer of 1818) that has been already mentioned as placing the poet in affluence. From his com- ing to Geneva at the close of May, 1816, to the end of the year he lived economically. During the earlier part (tf his residence on the shore of Lake Leman he certainly kept no horses. At Venice we have seen the poet liviag in lodgings for a considerable period, before he took the villa at La Mira. Cheap at the present day, living at Venice in Byron's time was marvellously cheap in comparison with living in London. Perhaps aU. Europe contained no capital of gayety and fashion where the lover of pleasure could live luxuriously at a smaller expenditure. Byron's box for the season at the Phoenix theatre cost him only a trifle ; the prices for the best places at the opera were insignificant ; the cost of his gondola was a bagatelle in comparison with the expense of a London carriage ; the riot and fun of the ridotto were to be had for a few francs a visit ; the total sum of the wages given to his Italian servants fell short of what he would have paid an English butler ; his palace on the Grand Canal (not taken, by the way, till the purchase-money of Newstead was on the point of being paid) he held at a yearly rent of two hundred louis, which was deemed an exorbitant rent for one of the stateliest houses of Venice. Moreover, Byron was habitually economical in several matters on which the indulgent are prone to be lavish. Whilst dulness of palate denied him the finest enjoyments, it saved him from the heaviest expenses of the epicure. The man who could not distinguish between stale fish and fresh fish had small need of a consummate chef, and no disposition to squander money on delicate dishes and the costlier wines. Paring like an anchorite when he was heedful for his figure, he was content with common VENICE. — BYEON'S DEPRAVATION. 325 viands and ordinary drinks when he lived freely. It is not wonderful, therefore, that with an income of £3r»300 a year before the sale of Newstead, he could live showily and dis- tinguish himself by keeping saddle-horses at Venice. Having decided, after a sharp struggle with his pride, to follow as a gainful profession what he had hitherto regarded only as an elegant pastime, it was natural for Byron to overact the part of the mercenary poet and give undue prominence to the prudential motive of his industry, alike in his dealings with his publisher and in correspondence wih his brethren of the tuneful craft. It was not enough for Kim to take and spend the money sent him by his pub- lisher. Together with the new purpose he assumed the new part of an author greedy for gain, suspicious of his publisher's fairness, haggling for better terms, fighting for the extra shillings that turn pounds to guineas, set not only on making money — but on making as much money as possi- ble. Sometimes this grasping game is played with good humor, but quite as often with pugnacity and insolence. After announcing the completion of the fourth canto of "Childe Harold" he writes to Murray (July 20, 1817), "And now for our barter. What do you bid? Eh? You shall have samples, an' it so please you ; but I wish to know what I am to expect (as the saying is) in these hard times." To get a good bid for the canto, he hints that he may throw " some odd matters to the lot — translations or shght origi- nals " ; but he wiU not part with a single " make-weight " till the pubhsher has done "the handsome thing." There is hard fighting between the author and publisher before they come to terms; the man of the "trade" offering 1,500 guineas, whilst the man of poetry demands 2,500 guineas, — no excessive price, he avers, "If Mr. Eustace was to have had two thousand for a poem on education ; if Mr. Moore is to have three thousand for 'Lalla,' etc. ; if Mr. Campbell is to have three thousand for his prose on poetry." Far be it fi'om him to say a word in disparagement of those gentle- men, whose works are considerably longer than his fourth canto of "The Childe," but he asks 2,300 guineas for the canto, and won't take less. Eventually the hagglers split 326 THE EEAL LOED BYEON. the difference ; and Byron gets, £2,100 — a stupendous pay- ment for sotiew verses. In the first month of the following year (January 8, 1818), Byron opens another battle for terms with the rhyming letter that ends with the lines, " For tlie man, ' poor and shrewd,' With whom you'd conclude A compact without more delay, Perhaps some such pen is Still extant in Venice But please, sir, to mention your pay." By this time the ring of money on the shop-counter had be- come musical to the eaf of the poet, who, on relinqui^ing the r61e of the noble amateur of letters, skilful with the pen and disdainful of its profits, overplayed thus curiously the character of a writer for wages. "I once wrote," he assures his publisher in an epistle dated from Venice on July 17, 1818, "from the fulness of my mind and the love of fame (not as an end, but as a means, to obtain that influence over men's minds which is power in itself and in its consequences), and now from habit and from avarice." Persisting with equal vehemence and insincerity in this part of a mercenary scribe, he delighted in it even to the moment when, suddenly chucking up the pen, he seized the sword and hastened to Greece to figure as the liberator of an oppressed people. "John Murray, my patron and pay- master," he cried to Shelley at Pisa, " says my plays won't act. I don't mind that, for I told him they were not written for the stage — but he adds, my poesy won't sell ; that I do mind, for I have an 'itching palm.'" A day or "two later this poet with an itching palm observed to Trelawny, in a vein of petty boastfulness of his gains from "Don Juan,'' "To-night I shall write thirty more lines, and that will finish a canto — a thousand guineas. Murray now says pounds ; I won't be stinted of my sizings. Murray told Tom Moore he was no judge of the morality ; but sermons did not seU, and the ' Don ' had a ' devil of a sale.' " In the "Diary of an Invalid" Matthews remarks, "In Venice there are only eight horses ; four are of brass and stand above the entrance to the cathedral ; the other four are VENICE. — byeon's dbpeavation. 327 alive and stand in Lord Byron's stable." Like other stud- owners the poet had more horses on his hands at one time than at another. Matthews speaks of four, Hoppner of three, and Byron himself of four, and also of as many as five and as few as two horses in his stable. The number given by Hoppner seems to have been the usual force of animals for the saddle, standing in the stable which the poet hired of the commandant on the Lido — one of the long narrow islands lying between the Adriatic sea and the Lagune of Venice. After transport- ing his horses in January, 1818, to this stable, where he kept them till he left Venice for good, Byron — if he was not too ill to leave home — visited the Lido daily for exercise 'on horseback, crossing the water from his palace on the Grand Canal in something less than three-quarters of an hour, more often than not in the company of a friend whom he had invited to ride with him. Tourists who would visit the spot where the poet was seen to the best advantage during his long stay in the City of the Sea should take a gondola to the Lido, with its sand-beach towards the Adriatic, its sweep of market-gardens towards the Lagune, and the two ^torts (about three miles apart) between which he found a fair though by no means faultless riding-ground. It was on this sand-strip that Byron rode with Hobhouse and Shelley, gos- sipping with them about the latest news and newest books from England, and in default of a better comrade, with Con- snl-General Hoppner, — a man of society and worldly shrewdness, who was nearly of the same age as the poet. Some of the pleasantest pages of Moore's " Life " are those that relate to Byron's gallops on the Lido, whither the English tourists used to come, for the sake of seeing the poet alight from his boat and mount his horse. Had it not been-i for the exercise he took on this narrow island, and the fresh breezes that came from the Adriatic waves to his wan face, whether he scudded at his horse's fullest speed, or lounged musingly in his saddle at foot-pace, Byron, stricken by the malaria of the canals, and enervated by debauchery, would probably have found his grave — where he meant it to be in case he died at Venice — under the sand of the Lido. Though enough has been said for the description of the 328 THE KEAL LORD BYRON. excesses, to be hinted at rather than calendared in these pages, something must be observed of the causes and effects of the vicious habits into which he fell in 1818. Moore would have us believe that, just as a naughty little boy leaps into a big puddle in mere defiance of the nurse who bids him walk on cleaner ground, Byron plunged into the abomina- tions of his Venetian depravity to show his disdain of the English moralists who persisted in lecturing him for his evil behavior, and bidding him mend his manners. After serious consideration few persons wiU think the biographer's sugges- tion worthy of the consideration bestowed upon it. It favors Moore's view that Byron labored under a peculiar moral per- versity, which made him often delight in slandering his own nature, and even incited him to fabricate evidence that he was a worse man than his enemies declared him. For the gratification of his "morbid love of a bad reputation," which Harness happily designated "hypocrisy reversed," Byron is said on good (though by no means the best) authority to have been in the practice of libelling himself in the conti- nental journals, in order that the libels on being reproduced in English newspapers should exasperate and deepen the abhorrence with which he was regarded by the rigid and cen- sorious of his fellow-countrymen. It is scarcely credible that he was in the habit of doing so, though it is quite conceiv- able that he did so on a few rare occasions. The man, so perplexingly constituted as to delight in playing thus strangely on the credulity of his adversaries to their gratifi- cation and his own injury, must indeed have been enamored of infamy and capable of going great lengths in speech and writing for the delectation of so singular a sense of humor. One would hesitate to assign any limit to his faculty of fibr bing for so dismal an object, — to name any falsehood he would not have told in the pursuij; of so eccentric an amuse- ment. There is, however, a wide difference between " bam- ming " credulous gossipmongers with monstrous words and " bamming " them with monstrous deeds. Trained in the dan- gerous school of humorists to which reference has been made in a previous chapter, — the school in which Byron was him- self trained, — a man vnth a morbid taste for maligning VENICE. — BYEON'S DEPRAVATION. 329 himself might hoax foolish people with hideous avowals of guilt, or with anonymous libels on his character, and yet be quite incapable of committing the wicked acts so charged upon himself. He might even accuse himself of murder to shock people sufficiently simple to believe him, and yet be guiltless of the crime and have not the slightest propensity to commit it. At the instigation of perverse humor Byron might have been mad enough to do such a thing. Moore, however, would have his readers believe something far harder to believe ; — that, instead of charging himself with repulsive dissoluteness, for the pleasure of laughing in his sleeve at the dupes of his trickery, he actually committed heinous immoralities, to put it beyond the doubt alike of his friends and his foes that he was a prodigious profligate. Had he been actuated in his Venetian excesses by the mere desire to shock social opinion, without having a genuine in- clination for the excesses themselves, he could and would have achieved his purpose by the artifices of self-slander, in which he was so expert. The unreasonableness of Moore's hypothesis appears also in the fact that much of the poet's Venetian immorality, consisting of matters not at all likely to be known in England, was not adapted to the end he is supposed to have had in view. To account for the poet's depravation, that became deeper and more apparent as the weeks followed one another from the commencement of his residence in Venice till the spring of 1819, readers must put aside Moore's suggestion, and think how social humiliation, renewal of disappointment, chagrin at the failure of his overtures for reconcilement with his wife, a growing sense of desolation and ignominy, and all the embittering consequences of his extrusion from English society would be likely to afiect the temper and spirits, and through them the taste, of a man so proud and sensitive, so selfish and volatile, and so utterly devoid of stoical hardness. Though beneficial to his health and spirits, his residence in Switzerland was not calculated to improve his moral tone or raise him in his own respect. The libertine, who had amused himself with Claire, whilst nursing hopes of reunion with his wife, can scarcely have crossed the Alps with an 330 THE REAL LORD BYRON. untroubled conscience. Some compxmction for. Ms treatment of the foolish girl (a gentlewoman by culture), whom he had discarded, must surely have mingled with his fierce resent- ment against the wife who had discarded him. It is con- ceivable that secret uneasiness, arising from his reflections on his recent relations with Claire, may have disposed him to take for his next mistress a woman with whom he should be able to part with a lighter heart. Though he had talked of his voyage from Dover to Ostend as a voyage to exile, he crossed the water with a hidden confidence of being buck again in England in a few months ; but the subsequent re- buff from Lady Byron had shaken the confidence rudely, without altogether extinguishing it. With the Shelleys by his side in Switzerland, with Hobhouse for his companion in the Bernese Oberland and in Italy, the exile endured none of the pains and inconveniences of expatriation. But after settling at Venice he tasted the bitterness of banish- ment. When the exhausting dissipations of the carnival, and the sharp attack of malarial fever, had reduced him to a condi- tion in which so sensitive and companionable a being needed the stimulant of congenial and sympathetic society for the restoration of his nervous tone, he had for his closest, indeed his sole, familiar friend, the woman of alien race and tongue, of breeding and temper in no degree superior to her plebeian birth and station, whose lowering influence disposed him to prefer the rude comeliness and ruder badinage of sempstresses and courtesans to the finer beauty and humor of gentlewomen. As soon as it lost the charm of novelty, Venetian society ceased to amuse him. Petty and monotonous, it wanted the brilliance and diversity of Mayfair. Madame Albrizzi's receptions and Madame Benzoni's reunions afforded him none of the extravagant idolatry that had fed his vanity at Melbourne House and in Lady Jersey's drawing-rooms. Of the noble Venetians who stared at liim, on being informed that he was an illustrious English noble, scarcely one ia ten knew the names of his principal poems, scarcely one in a hundred had read fifty stanzas of " Childe Harold." With the men he never became popular ; and for several weeks the complaisances of the women were more fruitftd of embarrass- VENICK. BYRON'S DEPRAVATION. 331 ment than of gratification to the poet, who, from want of familiarity with their musical language, could not apprehend the subtleties of their pretty speeches. On becoming a master of their tongue, the man, who had lived with the brightest wits and ripest scholars of his native country, discovered the shallowness and amazing ignorance of the pedants and pre- tenders who passed for men of learning at the assembhes of the two Italian countesses. Withdrawing disdainfully from the learned people, who needed his assurance that George Washington was not killed in a duel by Edmund Burke, Byron thought it better to chatter with Marianna Segati about her new clothes than to converse gravely with Madame Albrizzi about her "Portraits" of famous per- sonages and her "Essays" on the works of Canova. Suffering from the want of congenial society, he longed for the voices of his friends in England. Feeling their absence acutely he chaffed and fretted at the fewness and brevity of their letters. " Business," he writes angrily to Murray (June 18, 1818), " and the utter and inexplicable sUence of all my correspondents, render me impatient and troublesome. . . . When I tell you that I have not heard a word from England since very early in May, I have made the eulogium of my friends, or the persons who call themselves so, since I have written so often and in the greatest anxiety. Thank God, the longer I am absent, the less cailise I see for regretting the country or its hving contents." A month later (July 17, 1818), he exclaims passionately to the same correspondent, in a postscript to one of the several sharp, scolding, insolent letters written by him in this period of his exile, " I have written some very savage letters to Mr. Hobhouse, Kinnaird, to you, and to Hanson, because the sUence of so long a time made me tear off my remaining rags of patience." -Yearning for his friends he had no longer the heart to go, or even to think of going to them. On January 28, 1817, he wrote to Moore, "I think of being in England in the spring." In March, 1818, whilst declaring his intention of spending the remainder of his life in Venice, he meditated visiting England for the transaction of business ; but in June, 1818, the thought of returning to the country 332 THE REAL LOED BTEON. of his birth had become so distateful to him that he resented wrathfully the attempts that were being made to lure him back to London. "Hobhouee's wish is, if possible," he writes to Murray on June 18, 1818, "to force me back to England ; he will not succeed ; and if he did, I would not stay. I hate the country, and like this ; and all foolish oppo- sition, of course, merely adds to the feeling." The misprints of his works published in London caused him to fret and fume at the carelessness of the correctors for the press. Calling Murray's attention to two slips that exposed him to adverse criticism at the time, and have per- plexed many a reader of the fourth canto of " Childe Har- old," he wrote on September 24, 1818, from Venice, "'And thou, who never yet of human wrong left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis ' ! and not lost, which is nonsense, and what losing an unbalanced scale means, ■! know not ; but leaving an unbalanced scale, or a scale unbalanced, is intel- ligible. What does ' Thy waters wasted them ' mean (in the canto) ? That is not me. Consult the MS. al- ways." The anguish of homesickness, the plaintive cry of the exile, pining for the friends and scenes he dares not revisit, are audible in the poet's alternately" petulant and passionate avowals of hatred of the land whither he would have sped on quick wings had it not been for the depressing and exas- perating conviction that to show his face in London without his wife's invitation would be to expose himself to a renewal of the ignominy of being silently cut. His vanity was to think himself a citizen of the world ; but no Englishman was more disqualified for the character. Whilst his memory, imagination, and sensibility prevented him froni surviving the forces of youthful attachments, his peculiar vein of sel- fishness disposed him to brood angrily over the griefs of wounded pride and torn affections. So constituted it is not wonderful that he sunk into the mire of sensual grossness. Humiliation, shame, keen sense of injury, remorseful anger^ and incessent fury of heart and brain were the forces that disposed Byron to depraving enjoyments, and after breaking down the safeguards of natural delicacy and artificial refine- VENICE. — BYEON'S DEPEAVATION. 333 ment drove him to deaden the tortures of indignation and despair with the dull pleasures of sordid dissipation. Some of his excesses were notorious ; others were known only to persons who, like Fletcher and Hoppner, had ex- ceptional opportunities for observing his downward course. His harem on the Grand Canal, to which he gathered frail women from the homes of artisans and the cabins of subur- ban peasants, was fruitful of scandals, that, coming to the ears of English tourists from the gossip of gondoliers, were reported with wild exaggerations on the banks of the Thames. Little or nothing, however, was heard in England of the degree to which the poet now succumbed to the appe- tites of the glutton and the sot. Never so severely abstemi- ous in drinking as in eating, and since the commencement of his domestic troubles notably less cautious with the bottle, Byron now for a short time became a large and habitual con- sumer of alcohol,, preferring spirits to wine, possibly as the cheaper as well as the quicker instrument of intoxication ; for in the poet, who had been so freehanded and even waste- ful of his pecuniary resources up to the time of his with- drawal from England, the desire of earning as much money as possible was soon associated with a propensity to the "good old gentlemanly vice " of avarice. At the same time he ate whenever he was hungry, — often taking food to grat- ify a craving that was more due to dyspepsia than need of nutriment. It is remarkable that this indulgence of the senses neither clouded nor weakened the intellect of the man, who had formerly been encouraged in abstinence by the mental clearness and activity which it aiforded him. On the con- trary, inconsiderate observers might have inferred from the development and fecundity of his genius throughout this period of moral declension that his mind was fortified and quickened by the excesses of his body. Charmed and delighted by the grace and exuberant energy of his friend's intellect at Geneva, Shelley was far more deeply impressed by its grandeur and subtlety two years later in Italy ; and had he returned to Venice, when Byron was at the lowest depth of his depravation, the younger poet would have had 334 THE EEAL LORD BYKON. even stronger reasons for styling Count Maddalo " a person of consummate genius " with " powers incomparably greater then those of other men." To account for this expansion of Byron's faculties under conditions that might have been expected to dwarf and blight them, readers must .remember that he was precisely at the age when genius hastens to maturity ; that he had for years been . gathering the wealth 'of thought and feeling, which he now poured upon his readers with brilliant prodigality ; and that by stimulating his combativeness, the circumstances, under which he revealed his full mental magnitude, and spoke, now to the world's amazement and now to its delight, from the depths of his soul's anguish and daring, were conducive to intellectual energy in proportion as they were destructive of his happi- ness and hurtful to his nature. But though the excesses spared his mind, Byron suffered in" his body a heavy punish- ment for fleshly sins. Drinking freely he paid the usual penalties of sottishness. In the increasing violence of his temper (ever too fervid) , in the alteration of his voice (once so clear and musical that children turned from their play for the delight of hstening to it) , and in his penmanship (always indicative of irritability, and now growing so illegible that it troubled the best compositors to decipher it) there were signs of the nervous distress occasioned by drinking. At the same time eating freely (perhaps without taking more food than most men require for their sustenance) he became gross in form and visage, — reassuming in the course of a few months the unwieldy corpulence and facial obesity that had caused him so much inconvenience and disgust at Cam- bridge. In some respects the poet's Venetian fatness was more disfiguring than the grossness that afflicted him at manhood's threshold. At the University he may have been an inch or two larger round the waist, his cheeks may have been fuller and his jowl bigger, but they had the smooth- ness and firmness of youth, and a complexion no less clear than pale. At Venice, on the contrary, his flesh was pasty and flaccid, and the pallor of his countenance had the faint yellow tinge and uncleanly hue of the sufferer from a sluggish liver. Working at night and far into the morning. VENICE. — BYRON'S DEPRAVATION. 335 when he had dismissed the sharers of his unedifying pleas- ures, the poet seldom went to rest till he was so fatigued that sleep came quickly to his pillow. But the slumber, wooed thus violently, seldom lasted for an hour before he returned to consciousness, — sometimes to roll in agony through long assaults of acute dyspepsia ; more often to lie in melancholy moodiness or endure the torture of afflicting hallucinations. Sufficiently severe to overcome the forti- tude of the most stoical sufferer, to Byron, with a nervous idiosyncrasy that rendered him peculiarly sensitive and im- patient of physical discomfort, the pain of these spasmodic seizures was almost maddening torment. The mental anguish that came to him from cruel dreams was no less acute. Even when he was so fortunate as to have several hours of unbroken and healthy sleep, he gained no sense of refreshment from the long repose, and left his couch to pass almost as many hours in despondency. It was, perhaps, to his advantage that, when he had per- sisted for successive months in this hurtful way of living, the failure of his digestion compelled him to return to a spar- ing diet. EebeUing against the tyrant, who had shown so little consideration for its weakness and irritability, his stomach rejected the nutriment it could no longer assimilate. From the middle to the end of January, 1819, his diet con- sisted chiefly of "scampi," — the most indigestible kind of fish taken in the Adriatic. In February, after losing his relish for this unwholesome species of marine food, he lived Hke hybemating animals and shipwrecked seamen , on the tissues of his own body, losing in a few weeks much of the corpulence which had been growing upon him through twice as many months, no less to his inconvenience than his disfigurement. For awhile he could drink grog without discomfort and even with gratification, when to eat a morsel of the tenderest meat or finest bread or a piece of biscuit was to provoke nausea, retching, and violent cramp of the body. Soon he suffered no less severely from a small glass of spirit-and- water than from a spoonful of macaroni. Taking probably the best course for its cure, this extreme sickness of the stomach " clapped the muzzle on his jaws " (his own term) and 336 THE KEAL LOKD BTKON. made him abstemious, in spite of himself. That he contin- ued to work with braia and pen, and produced some of his brightest letters and most strenuous verse during such illness, was not the least remarkable feature of his case. Contrast- ing strangely and alarmingly with the body's decay, the mind's restless vigor showedUess like a sign of recuperative energy than the action of a soul wilfully destroying its own fraU tenement. For several days the invalid could neither take his customary exerciee onbecame its slave. If at the outset, too, less slow to be won than an Englishwoman, no sooner did she begin to understand the full despotism of the passion than her heart shrunk from it as something terri- ble, and she would have escaped, but the chain was already around her " ! Less slow than an Englishwoman ! When and where did the contessa give a sign of shrinking from the " something terrible " ? In the eagerness of her acquiescence she was so heedless of the feminine proprieties as to omit the customary display of reluctance. Instead of struggling against the chain, she clutched and hugged it, in the pride and delight of novelty. On starting for Ravenna a faithless wife, this bride of seven months' standing, had not known Byron a fiill fortnight. When a lady flies to a suitor's arms with such generous promptitude, it is unhandsome to speak of her alacrity as comparable with Northern slowness-" at the outset." Parting from her lover in grief, the countess was so over- powered by her feelings as to lose her consciousness thrice during the first day's journey. At each of her several resting- places between Venice and Ravenna she wrote to Byron, .entreating him to follow her quickly, declaring that without TERESA GAJIBA GUICCIOLI. 345 him she should go speedily to her grave, promising him all the love, honor, and obedience she had so recently promised her husband. To make herself less unworthy of his regard, to make herself a better woman, she would observe all his orders for the amendment of her ways, the improvement of her nature, the exaltation of her spirit. "In accordance with his advice she would avoid all general society, and devote herself to reading, music, domestic cares, riding on horseback." To please him should henceforth be her first object and chief delight. She did not reach Ravenna with- out illness, more serious than fainting-fits, induced by pas- sionate yearning for her lover. On arriving at the Palazzo Guiccioh in her native city she was in the condition, styled " half-dead " by romantic biographers and novelists, given to write rhapsodical nonsense. There is no evidence that she did not really faint away and lie up from dangerous illness on the road, and come to her Ravennese palace in semi-dead- ness. No injustice, however, is done the lady by a sugges- tion that the fainting-fits, and dangerous illness and semi- dcadness may have been mere semblances of nervous trouble for her husband's needful discipline, — or may even have resembled the standing armies of the third French Empire in being less affairs of reality than of paper. The women of England are, of course, incapable of such artifice ; but this Italian countess was capable of writing, for her lover's edifica- tion, more vehemently of her piteous case than her actual experiences would warrant. The consumption, which seized her so opportunely in May, and left her so conveniently in 3\Aj, and harassed her worse than ever in September, was certainly more a thing of trick than truth. To induce the count to welcome Byron to Ravenna, the countess took to coughing and spitting blood. To cover her fiight to Venice in Byron's company she contrived a pulmonary relapse, that required the treatment to be found only in so salubrious a city. The lady, who showed so singular an aptitude for shamming half-deadness and consumption, was ready to simu- late death itself for a purpose. To be his companion for- ever without incurring the infamy of elopement, she actually proposed to Byron that she should feign to be dead, and by 346 THE EEAL LORD BTEON. means of a mock-sepulture pass to his possession through the grim gateway of an avoidable grave. On receiving Teresa's account of the deplorable condition in which she arrived at Kavenna, together with her assur- ances that his presence could alone restore her to health and happiness, Byron made arrangements for visiting her in ful- filment of the promise given her at Venice. On the 15th of May he was thinking of starting for Romagna in the follow- ing week. Circumstances, however, caused him to postpone the expedition till the 2d of June, on which day he left his villa at La Mira and journeyed {via Padua, Ferrara, and Bologna) towards " the lady of his love," who had informed him that her relatives and friends were looking for his arrival amongst them. " A journey in an Italian June," he wrote to Hoppner from Padua, " is a conscription ; and if I was not the most constant of men, I should now be swimming from the Lido, instead of smoking in the dust of Padua." On one of the banks of the Po, this most constant of men wrote the familiar verses so exquisitely eloquent of desire : — " Kirer, that rollest by the ancient walls, Where dwells the lady of my love, when she Walks by thy brink, and there perchance recalls A faint and fleeting memory of me : " What if thy deep and ample stream should be A mirror of my heart, where she may read The thousand thoughts I now betray to thee Wild as thy waves and headlong as thy speed I " What do I say ? — a mirror of my heart? Are not thy waters sweeping, dark and strong? Such as my feelings were and are, thou art ; And such as thou art were my passions long. " Time may have somewhat tamed them, — not forever ; Thou ovorflow'st thy banks, and not for aye Thy bosom overboils, congenial river ! Thy floods subside, and mine have sunk away. " But left long wrecks behind, and now again, Borne in our old unchang'd career, we move ; Thou tondest wildly onwards to the main, , And I — to loving one I should not love. TERESA GAME A GUICCIOLI. 347 " The current I behold will sweep beneath Her native walls and murmur at her feet ; Her eyes will look on thee, when she shall breathe The twilight air, unharm'd by summer's heat. " She will look on thee — I have look'd on thee, Pull of that thought ; and from that moment, ne'er Thy waters could I dream of, name, or see, Without the inseparable sigh for her ! " Her bright eyes will be imaged in thy stream, — Yes 1 they will meet the wave I gaze on now ; Mine cannot witness, even in a dream. That happy wave repass me in its flow I " The wave that bears my tears returns no more : Will she return by whom that wave shall sweep? — Both tread thy banks, both wander on thy shore, . I by thy source, she by the dark-blue deep. " But that which keepeth us apart is not Distance, nor depth of wave, nor space of earth. But the distraction of a various lot. As various as the climates of our birth. " A stranger loves the lady of the land. Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood Is all meridian, as if never fann'd By the black wind that chills the polar flood. " My blood is all meridian ; were it not, I had not left my clime, nor should I be,. In spite of tortures, ne'er to be forgot, A slave again of love, — at least of thee. " 'Tis vain to struggle — let me perish young — Live as I lived, and love as I have loved; To dust if I return, from dust I sprung. And then, at least, my heart can ne'er be moved." On reaching Bologna where he hoped to find a letter from. Teresa, giving him precise instructions for the regulaition of his movements, he was sorely disappointed by the non-appear- ance of the looked-for epistle. The countess' illness (which changes in the course of twelve pages of Moore's text from consumption to intermittent fever) certainly was no cause of her silence, which was wholly due to the inopportune absence of the confidential person who had hitherto been the channel of her clandestine correspondence with the poet. In his 348 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. chagrin at a circumstance which may have well caused him perplexity and annoyance, Byron, after lingering two days at Bologna, had made up his mind to return at once to Venice, when, suddenly, relinquishing a purpose that would have exposed him to the ridicule of the Venetian coteries, he went on to Ravenna on the 8th of the month, — arriving there openly in the character of a famous poet, brought to the dull town by poetic interest in Dante. The stir and gossip of the tranquil little city, at the arrival of so celebrated a person, can be imagined. Byron, who found the people full of concern for the alarming illness of their young countess, had scarcely settled himself in his hotel when he received a visit of ceremony and friendship from the Count Guiccioli, who entreated him to come on the following day to the bed- side of the dying lady. Of course the invitation was accepted with proper expressions of the poet's astonishment and pro- found sorrow at the mournful intelligence, and also of the delight he had anticipated from a renewal of his intercourse with the countess' husband. Byron's first visit to the dying Teresa in her own house having the desired effect on the patient, it was repeated daily, with the count's approval. For two months (from June 10 to August 9) the Palazzo Guiccioli was the scene of a curious comedy of several acta and many exquisitely humorous scenes ; the three actors of the droll drama being — the young countess so near dying of consumption, intermittent fever, and love ; the poet acting as her physician ; and the elderly count, less jealous than covetous, who instead of being moved by munificent impulses towards the physician, may be suspected of even then nursing a purpose of extorting a heavy fee from the successful doctor. Byron's published letters to Hoppner contain passages whichi taken by themselves, exhibit him as the dupe of the lady's acting, but there is no lack of evidence that he was from the first fully alive to the nature of her malady and the best way of treating it. "I greatly fear that the Guiccioli," Byron wrote from Ravenna (July 2, 1819) to his friend at Venice, "is going into a consumption, to which her constitution tends. Thus it is with everything and everybody for whom I feel anything like a real attachment : ' War, death, or discord, TEEESA GAMBA GUICCIOLI. 349 doth lay siege to them ' I I never even could keep alive a dog that I liked or that liked me." The sadness these mourn- ful assurances occasioned the consul-general was quickly mitigated by the reflection that the patient had the best physician for her case in close attendance upon her. When Count Guiccioli shared their long interviews, the countess languished into suffering and silence, and Byron spoke. with bated breath, whilst his countenance wore the look of affectionate solemnity befitting a chamber that might soon become the sanctuary of death. But the lady's spirits rallied, and Byron prattled away to her right merrily, as soon as the count withdrew. To qualify him to act as her medical adviser, Byron applied himself to the study of medi- cine, and then, with modesty unusual in a novice of a diffi- cult art, the amateur doctor wrote to Professor Aglietti for his opinion on the countess' illness, and entreated the famous physician to hasten to him from Venice, even though he could only remain at Ravenna for twenty-four hours. "For a long time," Teresa Guiccioli wrote to Moore, " he had per- petually medical books in his hands ; and not trusting my physicians, he obtained permission from Count Guiccioli to send for a very clever physician, a friend of his, in whom he placed great confidence." Of course Aglietti took Byron's view of the case, and declared the poet was treating it in the very best way. The count's complaisance puzzled the poet, who wrote to Murray on June 29, 1819, "Her husband is a very polite personage ; but I wish he would not carry me out in his coach and six, like Whittington and his cat." Nine days earlier the poet had ivritten to Hoppner, " She manages very well ; but if I come away with a stiletto in my gizzard some fine afternoon, I shall not be astonished. I can't make him out at all ; he visits me frequently, and takes me out (like Whittington, the lord mayor) in a coach and six horses. The fact appears to be, that he is completely governed by her — for that matter, so am I. The people here don't know what to make of us, as he had the character of jealousy with all his -wives — this is the third." Teresa was playing her game with clevcHiess highly creditable to her years ; but her 350 THE REAL LOKD BTEON. success was possibly due less to her cleverness than to her husband's crafty complicity in her proceedings. The prob- able explanation of this Italian nobleman's behavior is that he winked at his bride's liaison with the English lord, be- cause it oflfered him a brief respite from the humiliation of being compelled to allow his wife a permanent cavalier in attendance, and because he saw his way to making money out of the affair. Like Byron the count loved money, and whilst capable of Hberality and even profuseness in the ex- penses of ostentation, was vigilant against the inflammation of his weekly bills. Byron's notorious fickleness in gallantry rendered it improbable that he would wish to dangle at the countess' skirt for many months. Under these circumstances the count had good and substantial motives for conniving at a temporary and secret arrangement which would postpone the demand for a permanent and open one. Anyhow, the Count Guiccioli had no thought of thrusting a dagger between the ribs of his wife's admirer. Byron knew the count better after knowing him four months longer. On the approach of August 9, 1819, — the day appointed for the count and countess (the lady having by this time regained her usual good health) to migrate from their palace at Ravenna to their residence in Bologna, — Byron's appre- hension of a grievously long severance from his mistress caused him to implore the lady to fly with him to some scene of perpetual happiness. Probably he was no more sincere in this entreaty than he had been years since, when, in the postscript of the letter which reiterated his refusal of the lady's prayer for immediate elopement, he declared his readi- ness to fly with Lady Caroline Lamb whithersoever and whenever she pleased. After living nearly three years in Italy, he must have been aware that, though quicker than her sisters of the cold North to acquiesce in anything short of elopement for a lover's happiness, the Italian gentlewoman shrinks from the bare thought of scandalous flight from her husband even as an English gentlewoman shrinks from the bare imagination of the wickedness which in every land usually precedes the act of desertion. Had he thought Teresa would have taken him at his word, the poet would perhaps have been TEEESA GAMBA fiUIOCIOLI. 351 less ready with his generous offer to cover her with infamy. It is enough that he made the offer, which plunging her into agitations of shame and terror, drew from her a passionate avowal that, though willing to gratify him in every other way, she could not take the step that, clothing her with perpetual ignominy, would place her, countess though she was, in the herd of fallen women. On growing calmer, she made the strange offer already referred to. If the career of the Coun- tess Guiccioli could be closed with honor, she would consent to any proposal, do anything he desired, for his happiness. The woman who had feigned consumption and half-death, was ready to feign death itself, and be committed in shroud and coffin to the terrors of the charnel'house, in order to escape from the evidence of her identity with her husband's wife, and be able to devote herself wholly to her lover, without dishonoring the Guicciolis and the Gambas. As it was cal- culated to please his fancy and gratify his appetite for mys- terious adventure and the terrors of romance, this project would have received more of his serious consideration had Byron been desirous of taking the countess on his hands for- ever. The count's complaisance deferred for another ten days or so the event that might have been the occasion for so melo- dramatic a performance. It was arranged that Byron should foUow to Bologna the dear mistress "who had fed his heart upon smiles and wine for the last two months." On the day after the count and countess reentered their house at Bologna, Byron settled himself in the city's best inn. On the 21st of the month, when the count and his bride went on a brief trip to some of their Eomagnese properties, the poet was in truth (notwithstanding all that writers of romance allege to the contrary) by no means sorry to be relieved for a brief while of the society of the lady whose demands on his chivalric consideration had not tended to strengthen him during the earlier weeks of his sojourn at Eavenna ; the lady to whom he had addressed the dedicatory verses — chaste though cold as ice, exquisitely pure and elegant, though absolutely artificial — of " The Prophecy of Dante " ; — 352 THE REAL LORD BYRON. " Lady! if for the cold and clondy clime Where I was born, but where I would not die, Of the great Poet-sire of Italy I dare to build the imitative rhyme, Harsh Runic copy of the South's sublime, THon art the cause ; and howsoever I Pall short of his immortal harmony. Thy gentle heart will pardon me the crime. Thou, in the pride of Beauty and of Youth, Spakest; and for thee to speak and be obey'd Are one ; but only in the sunny South Such sounds are utter'd, and such charms display'd, So sweet a language from so fair a mouth — Ah ! to what effort would it not persuade? " The ten days which he passed at Bologna, in the society of the Guicciolis, had been days of nervous irritability and tempestuous agitation to Byron. There is abundant evidence in his letters that he was by turns hysterical, perverse, and passionate, — conditions of feeling for which his relations with Teresa and her husband were chiefly accountable, though other matters worried him. Chafing and fuming at the ad- verse criticisms on the two first cantos of "Don Juan," he returned to his old practice of brooding over his domestic troubles. On the .twelfth evening of August he was sitting in the same box with the Countess Guiccioli, when he expe- rienced, during the performance of Alfieri's "Myrrha," just such an hysterical seizure as he had experienced four years since on seeing Kean's impersonation of " Sir Giles Over- reach " ; — an outbreak of emotion that was the more incon- venient because it threw the young countess into hysterics of another kind. On the morrow of this equally significant and vexatious exhibition of sensibility, Byron was writing ia the old strain of morbid violence about Time the Avenger and the signal punishment meted out by stern justice to the atrocious Komilly. On the 22d of the same month, in his exasperation at an attack on " Don Juan " he is dashing off in hot haste and fury ( " amidst a thousand vexations " ) the Wortley-Clutterbuck epistle of retaliation, which Murray had the good sense to withhold from publication after printing it in pamphlet form. On the 24th inst. (three days after Tere- sa's departure with her husband) he writes to Murray, "I wish I had been in better spirits ; but I am out of sorts, out TERESA (JAMBA GUICOIOLI. 353 of nerves, and now and then (I begin to fear) out of my senses. All this Italy has done for me, and not England. I defy all you, and your climate to boot, to make me mad. But if ever I do really become a bedlamite, and wear a strait-waistcoat, let me be brought back among you ; your people will then be proper company." Three days later (the 27th inst.) he has a violent quarrel with a lieutenant in the Papal troops, who has sold him an unsound horse, — a quar- rel in which, after railing at the offender with unmannerly and even maniacal violence, he challenges him to fight then and there with pistol or sword, under circumstances which re- mind the reader of the ugly Byron-Chaworth duel. Two days later (the 29th instant) he preludes his blustering account to Murray of this rowdy business with this notewor- thy avowal, " I have been in a rage these two days, and am still bilious therefrom." He was raging in this frantic style, now throwing pen-and- ink daggers at his enemies in England, and now flying like a mad bull-dog at enemies crossing his path in Bologna, during the very period in which he is declared by Moore to have surrendered himself to softening and subduing melan- .cljoly. The biographer assures us that it was the poet's fancy, during Madame Guiccioli's absence from Bologna, to go daily to her house at his usual hour of visiting her, and there, causing her apartments to be opened, to sit turning over her books and writing in them. "And here," says the poetical describer of his friend's way of passing the days at Bologna during his mistress' tour about the country, " with a heart softened and excited by the new feeling that had taken possession of him, he appears to have given himself up, during the interval of solitude, to a train of melancholy and impassioned thought, such as, for a time, brought back all the romance of his youthful days. That spring of natural tenderness within his soul, which neither the world's efforts nor his own had been able to chill or choke up, was now, with something of its first freshness, set flowing once more. He again knew what it was to love and be loved, — too late, it is true, for happiness, and too wrongly for peace, but with devotion enough, on the part of the woman, to satisfy even 354 THE REAL LOED BTEOJiT. his thirst for affection, and with a sad earnestness on his own, a foreboding fidelity, which made him cling but the more passionately to this attachment from feeling that it would be his last." After turning over the books of the absent lady's apartments, the poet is described as descending to her gar- den, and passing hours in musing there. " It was on an occasion of this kind, as he stood looking, in a state of im- conscious reverie, into one of those fountains so common in the gardens of Italy, that there came suddenly into his mind such desolate fancies, such bodings of the misery he might bring on her he loved, by that doom which (as he has himself written) "makes it fatal to be loved," that, overwhelmed with his own thoughts, he burst into an agony of tears " ; — a flow of overwhelming emotion," so perfectly in accordance with all that is known of the poet's sensibility^ and hysterical diathesis, that one can readily accept to the very letter his account of the iacident. Whilst there is no evidence that Byron went daily in this manner to Teresa's deserted rooms, there is much evidence to discredit the allegation. It is highly improbable that he spent hours at a time in this fashion on the days when he was throwing from angry pen the Wortley-Clutterbuck epistle (that made twenty-three pages of printed matter) ; when he was writing the alternately querulous and stormy letters to Murray ; when he was in the fierceness of his wild fury against the military horse-sharper whom he challenged ("thief" though the fellow was) to fight a murderous duel. The truth is that he visited the silent chambers and garden of the fair Guiccioli — once and again ; certainly twice ; possibly oftener. Now, no less than in former times of emotional riot, his moods followed one another quickly. Passing in an hour from rage to love, he reverted in a trice from tenderness to wrath. In the gentler of his melancholy moods it pleased him to visit the fair garden of the Guiccioli, where he prattled with the gardeners and their women, and to saunter in the Campo Santo, where he made friends with the sexton and his pretty daughter. He certainly visited the countess' room of study on the 23d of August (the day between the subsidence of the Wortley-Clutterbuck fury and TERESA GAMBA GXnCCIOLI. 355 the wrath of the "bedlamite letter" to Murray) when he penned the brief note, touching Madame de Stael, on a leaf of Teresa's "Fragmens dee Pens^es de Corinne." He cer- tainly went there again on the 25th of August (the earlier of the two days between the working-oiF of the " bedlamite outbreak " and his wild row with the mihtary horse-dealer) , when he wrote on the last page of the "Corinne" this re- markable epistle : — Mt dearest Teresa: — I have read this hook in your garden ; — my love, you were ahsent, or else I could not have read it. It is a favorite book of yours, and the writer was a favorite friend of mine. You will not understand these English words, and others will not understand them — which is the reason I have not scrawled them in Italian. But you will recognize the handwriting of him who passionately loved you, and you will divine that, over a book which was yours, he could only think of love. In that word, beautiful in all languages, but most so in yours — Amor mio — is comprised my existence here and hereafter. I feel I exist here, and I fear I shall exist hereafter, — to what purpose you will decide ; my destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, seventeen years of age, and two out of a convent. I wish you had stayed there, with all my heart — or, at least, that I had never met you in your married estate. But all this is too late. I love you, and you love me ; at least, you say so, and act as if you did so, which last is a great consolation in all events. But / more than love you, and cannot cease to love you. Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and the ocean divide us, — but they never will, unless you wish it. — Bybon. Characteristic of the man, in its tenderness of expression, its dubitancy of feeling, its mistrust of his Teresa's affectionate assurances, this singular epistle — written in a tongue unknown to the lady — is a revelation of the wavering resoluteness and nervous incertitude of his purpose respecting the girl, who had inspired him with a passion far removed from love, — a passion less pure (for had he not worshipped Marianna Segati and Margarita Cogni ?) but no less violent than his affection for Jane Clermont, — • a passion of whose grossnesshemade a shameless revelation to Hoppner. Hover- ing over a project that offerad him the pleasures sweetest to his senses, together with a triumph peculiarly fascinating to his vanity, the exile hesitated to commit himself to a course that might postpone for years, possibly forever, his return-to the land for a sight of whose white cliffs he had long been pining. Hence the selection of the language in which he 356 THE EEAL LORD BYBON. couched the proposal he could not deny himself the delight of framing. Too weak to resist stoutly, and too prudent to yield unreluctantly, he dalHed with the temper he dared not fight. Whilst thus nursing the design to purchase imme- diate gratification with future embarrassment, he looked with less of apprehension than of hope to the contingencies that, preserving him from its accomplishment, would place the AJps and the ocean between him and the object of his desire. The last words of the epistle are especially noteworthy, for their indication of a resolve to return to England, should he be so fortunate as to encounter disappointment in Italy. No wonder that, with irritating letters coming to him by every post from England, the man of fervid temper and quick sensibility was unusually hysterical during his brief stay in the city where he eventually took the fatal step, for which weakness of wiU was even more accountable than power of passion. At the time of starting for Eomagna, Byron was enter- taining a proposal that might have preserved Allegra from death in childhood. An English lady, Mrs. Vavassour — a friend of the Hoppners, who delighted in children, without having a child of her own breast on which to expend her strong maternal affectionateness, — had offered to adopt Jane Clermont's daughter, provided Byron would surrender all his paternal authority over the little girl, together with the claim to be even consulted respecting her education ; and, notwith- standing his promise to Claire before the birth of her offspring, the poet would have consented to Mrs. Vavassour's offer, had not she persisted in her demand for the total transference of his parental powers. Negotiation on this matter was stUl in progress between the lady and the consul-general when Mrs. Hoppner, soon after Byron's arrival at Kavenna, wished to be relieved of the child's custody, at least for a time, in order that she might be free to accompany her husband on a trip to Switzerland. "The best way," Byron wrote from Eavenna to Hoppner on July 2, 1819, "will be to leave Al- legra with Antonio's spouse till I can decide something abojit her and myself; but I thought that you would have had an answer from Mrs. Vavassour. You have had bore enough TERESA GAMBA GUICCIOLI. 357 with me and mine already." The scheme having fallen through, in consequence of Mrs. Vavassour's refusal to abate anything of her demand for complete parental authority, Byron directed that the child and her nurse should join him at Bologna. " I have," he wrote to Murray on August 24, 1819, " sent for my daughter from Venice." It has been assumed that Byron sent for his child at this moment merely for the diversion of her infantile presence and prattle. But whilst it is probable, it is also pleasant to believe, that before taking the meditated step which would place the Countess Guiccioli, at least, for a while, in the position of step-mother to the little girl, he wished to form an opinion from an observation of the lady's treatment of the child, whether AUegra would be likely to find a fond and devoted mother in Teresa. Anyhow, the child and her nurse were with Byron when the Guicciolis re- turned from their tour to Bologna. Teresa's reappearance at Bologna was followed at no long interval by her husband's departure for Ravenna, whither he had been called by business ; and during his absence she Avent from Bologna to Venice in Byron's company. Of course the lady went thither to consult physicians about her health, which fluctuated in so singular a manner. Of course her journey to so salubrious a capital in her lover's society was no shameless flight ; but a progress made with due regard to her dignity and honor. Is it not written in Moore's "Life,'' in the lady's own words, that the state of her health obliged her to go to Venice, and that she went thither so attended, with her husband's consent? On this point the lady is the only and by no means satisfactory wit- ness. Had she been any other nobleman's wife, common- sense would reject her statement as an impudent untruth ; but aa she was the wife of the Count Guiccioli, who had been conniving for weeks and months at her passion for the poet, it is conceivable that she had received her husband's permission to please herself when she started from Bologna on the 15th of September^under circumstances so scandalous. At Bologna the countess' departure with the English lord was regarded as an elopement ; and all the notorious circum- stances of the afiair, together with a far larger number of 358 THE EEAL LORD BTEON. imaginary particulars, speedily became the gossip of every palace and tavern of the city and surrounding country. " When we arrived at Bologna," Lady Morgan wrote from Florence, October 25, 1819, to Lady Clark, " They recom- mended us our apartments by telling us they were well aired, as Lord Byron only left them the day before. You may suppose he came to Bologna to visit the learned body of that ancient university, or consult its famous library. Not a bit of it. He came to carry off a young lady." The invalid was, of course, too weak for rapid travel. Journeying leisurely she and Byron " visited the Euganean HUls and Arqua, and wrote their names in the book which is presented to those who make this pilgrimage. But," adds the countess in her narrative of the proceedings that placed her in the world's regard as Byron's mistress, " I cannot linger over these recollections of happiness." The invalid was a very happy invalid^ On her arrival at Venice it was discovered by her physicians that she needed country air ; the immediate consequence of the discovery being that Byron carried her off to his viUa at La Mira, and introduced her to the same garden under whose trees he had sat with Marianna Segati, the same rooms in which Marianna had dwelt, the same bed in which the linen-draper's wife had slept. It does not seem to have occurred to the romantic believers in the chivalric purity of his devotion to Teresa Guiccioli that they were speaking even worse of Byron than he was spoken of by his enemies, in declaring him capable of treating the object of his finest affection with such indignity. Association with Margarita Cogni and her crew had im- pregnated his nature with poisonous uncleanness, not to be speedily eliminated from his soul, — the poison that mani- fested itself in the disfigurements of "Don Juan," and ren- dered him capable of satirizing his wife with satanic malice and absolutely appalling vulgarity. But it had not so far debased him that he could have housed this seventeen- years young Italian countess at La Mira of all places in the world, had she been (as Moore puts it) " the only real love of his whole life, with one signal exception" ; or, in fact, any- thing more in his eyes than a highly eligible mistress. TEEESA GAMBA GUICCIOLI. 359 Having brought her to La Mira, the poet lived there with her. "Lord Byron," says the countess in her letter to Moore, "having a villa at La Mira, gave it up to me, and came to reside there with me." What a way of " giving up " a country-house to a lady's use ! The lady does not venture to assert, that, in residing thus openly under her paramour's roof, she acted with her husband's sanction. Had she made the assertion one would be slow to declare it incredible. If the count did not authorize the step, by which his young wife crossed the clear line that in Italy divided women of honor from women of abandonment, he condoned the offence in so remarkable a manner, that he may be imagined capable of any extravagance of turpitude. She had been at La Mira for about a fortnight, living there notoriously, to the hot scandal of the ladies of Venice, who, with aU their tol- erance of moral laxity, retained their respect for certain rules of conventional decorum, and resented the violation of those rules with a warmth natural in persons capable of nearly every other kind of immorality, when she received a letter from her absent lord. A letter of scornfiil repudiation ? of indignant expostulation ? of stern command ? No such thing ! All the writer of the wheedling note required of her, was that she should induce Lord Byron to lend her husband £1,000 ! This was the game of this wealthy and long-de- scended noble. Instead of thirsting for the blood of his wife's betrayer, he only hungered for a little of his money ! — of course, on loan, at five per cent. ! " Restoration or thousand pounds ! " was the demand of this Italian count, who, in his earlier time, had earned a reputation for being a jealous hus- band ; and, instead of making the demand directly and with- out subterfuge, he wished to use his wife as an instrument for screwing the money, byway of a loan, out of her paramour. If Byron had misconceived the spirit of Teresa's husband, Count Gruiccioli had been no less mistaken in his estimate of the disposition of her lover. No man was more averse than the poet of 1819 to parting with so large a sum as £1,000 on insufficient grounds. Though Moore and Mr. Alexander Scott urged their friend to pay the £1,000 without demur or any show of unwillingness, and to make the payment an 360 THE REAL LORD BYRON. occasion for returning the lady to her lawful owner, thfenoet (who had no intention in October, 1819, that his liat^n with the contessa should be a long affair) declined to act'am their counsel, and declared with a knowing nod of the head" that he would " save the lady and the money too." The countess had been some days at La Mira, when Moore, coming to the villa in the afternoon of the 8th of October (for the brief sojourn at Venice that was the biog- rapher's only occasion of personal intercourse with his friend after his withdrawal from England) was surprised by the change in the poet's countenance, that, having lost much of its earlier refinement by the enlargement of the features, was not improved by the whiskers, which he had recently adopted, to escape the imputation of having the "Jaecia di musicol" " He had," says Moore, " grown fatter both in person and face, and the latter had suffered most by the change. "^ Though the visit was over in a few days, Moore remained at Venice long enough to discover how greatly Byron had shocked Venetian sentiment by withdrawing his "Arnica" from her husband's protection, and living with her imder the same roof. Whilst Madame Benzoni's friends expressed themselves freely on this painful subject in the hearing of the Irish poet, the lady herself ventured to entreat him to use his influence with his friend, for the abatement of so extraor- dinary a scandal. " You must really scold your friend," said the lady, — adding with more complaisance than sin- cerity, "Till this unfortunate affair, he behaved himself so well ! " Moore's stay at Venice closed with the dinner at the La Mira villa, immediately before which repast he received from Byron's own hands the manuscript of " The Memoirs," respecting whose destruction something will be said in ari ensuing chapter. On giving his friend the present, that in the course of a few years became the subject of so much angry discussion, Byron remarked, "It is not a thing that can be published during my lifetime, but you can have it, if you like. There, do whatever you please with it." Byron's natural reluctance to part with £1,000 caused the Count Guiccioli to think it full time for Teresa to return to his protection. At the same time Venetian " society " was TEEESA GAMBA GUICCIOLI. 361 evincing its disapproval of Teresa's behavior in ways that made Byron feel it would be well for him to return her to the count on the earliest occasion. Fuming with rage at the slights and censorious expostulations, by which the ladies of Venice manifested their displeasure at her misbehavior, Byron saw he had better escape from a position of extreme discredit and numerous embarrassments. Aware at Bologna that the enterprise which occasioned him so much agitation might have disastrous consequences, he at the same time cherished the hope of being able to extricate himself at an early date from the difficulties that would result from the escapade. In less than a month it was obvious to him that he could not withdraw too soon from an entanglement that was already giving him more annoyance than pleasure. All that he ventured to object to the advice given him by Moore and Alexander Scott in the second week of October was that he could not consent to pay so heavily for his frolic. In the first week of the ensuing month (November), when the Count Guiccioli appeared in Venice to reclaim his erring wife, it is conceivable that he was disappointed by the poet's readiness to acquiesce in his wishes on every point, with the exception of the pecuniary question. Receiving Teresa's husband (the count) precisely as he had a year earlier received Margarita Cogni's husband (the baker) , Byron said, "You wish for madame; then by all means take her." Coming to Venice with a paper of conditions for his wife's acceptance in his pocket (the principal condition being that she should desist from intercourse of every kind with her lover ; the minor conditions having reference to compara- tively trivial matters that set Byron laughing) , the count had stormy interviews and hard battles with Teresa, who would have risen against her owner in unqualified mutiny, and sent him back to Ravenna with a flea in his ear, had her lover encouraged her rebellious spirit with so much as a single approving nod or a single sympathetic glance. Byron's tameness at her moment of trial would have been more pain- ful to Teresa, and might even have inspired her with feelings of resentment, had he not been suffering from the prostra- tion of a sharp attack of tertian fever ; — yet another 362 THE EEAIi LORD BYKON. assault by the enemy that eventually killed him. With encouragement from her lover, who indeed advised her to be a sensible creature and go home, Teresa made a feeble re- sistance. Accepting the conditions, after much weeping and appropriate indulgence in hysterics, she kissed the poet, and returned to Ravenna with her husband, — of course, not without a hope that, by sending intelligence of her imminent death from despair and consumption, she would again draw her lover to her bedside in the Palazzo Guiccioli. So far, the game had been a winning one with Byron, who, after gaining from it a series of exciting adventures and much romantic enjoyment in Ravenna, Bologna, and Venice, was now quit of his playmate in the drama without having paid her husband a single farthing for her services. He had saved the thousand pounds, returned the lady to her conjugal partner, and won the wager with which Alexander Scott had supported his strong opinion that the poet would not induce the count to take back his young wife without lending the money. A fortnight later events favored the hope with which Teresa retraced her steps to Ravenna. Worried by the mis- demeanor of the secretary (house steward), whose petty peculations had tended to the inflammation of his master's weekly bills, and laboring imder the dejection that attends malarial fever, Byron soon missed the contessa, who, in the sharper and more violent stages of • the malady, had nursed him, as tenderly as he had been nursed under similar circumstances by Marianna Segati. If he con- gratulated himself for a day or two on the fortunate arrangement of his differences with the Count Guiccioli, and turned his thoughts hopeftiUy to England, whither he had all along determined to go, on the quick or tardy conclusion of his engagement to the countess, the exultation was soon followed by melancholy and annoyance at having dismissed her prematurely. Whilst Byron languished ' and fretted at Venice, making his arrangements for the return to England with gloomy forebodings of a cold reception in his native country, Teresa Guiccioli was agaia dying of consumption at Ravenna. Weeping and pining and fretting, the unhappy TEEE8A GAMBA GUICCIOLI. 363 girl either became so seriously ill, or acted serious illness so excellently well, that her husband, her father (Count Gamba) , her uncle (Marquis Cavalli), and the other chiefs of her domestic circle believed her dying. Of course there was a renewal between the separated lovers of the correspondence which they had promised never to reopen. Whilst Byron's tender effusions only deepened the cbntessa's despair, her plaintive prayers for him to visit her, once again before she breathed her' last breath, overpowered the poet's waning pru- dence and wavering fortitude. With significant slowness Byron had at length made all his arrangements for returning to England. He had selected his route, and announced to friends in England that he was on the point of journeying to them ; his boxes were actually on board the gondola, when, as he stood at the head of the staircase, with gloves on his hands and cap on his head, he changed his mind, less from force of passion than imbecility of purpose. Even at that moment, when, by rousing his com- bativeness, any opposition to his resolve might have stimulated him to persist in it, he wavered away frcfm the path he had chosen. "If it strike one before everything is in order, I won't go to-day ! " he said, when something still remained to be done for the preparation of his arms. The hour striking before the arms were quite ready, he said, "I stay here!" Hoppner stated the case fairly when' he said that at the last it depended on the toss of a halfpenny whether the poet followed the countess to Eavenna, or returned to England. The woman who hesitates is lost. Byron was a fanciful and hysterical woman in one half of his nature, and at times was the mere plaything of feminine fickleness and emotionality. He hesitated, and lost the tide that niight have floated him back to his proper place in English society. On the morrow came the letter, inviting him to hasten to Eavenna, to accept the office of cicisbeo to Teresa Guiccioli. The invitation was accepted ; and instead of returning to England he went to Eavenna, where he was welcomed by Teresa's relatives to a place of affectionate, if not honorable, regard in their circle. To show him proper respect, some three hundred people of the best families of Eomagna were invited by 364 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Teresa's uncle, the Marquis Cavalli, to a grand reception, where music, dancing, and play went on in the same splendid salle. "The Guiccioli's object," he wrote to Hoppner on the last day of 1819, "appeared to be to parade her foreign friend as much as possible, and, faith if she seemed to glory in so doing, it was not for me to be ashamed of it. Nobody seemed surprised ; — all the women, on the contrary, were, as it were, delighted with the excellent example. The vice- legate, and all the other vices, were as polite as could be ; — and I, who had acted on the reserve, was fairly obliged to take the lady under my arm, and look as much like a cicisbeo as I could on so short a notice, — to say nothing of the em- barrassment of a cocked hat and sword. "' The only course by which the husband, who sanctioned this arrangement, could avoid the universal contempt of his own people was taken by the Count Guiccioh. Having greeted Teresa's foreign lover with cordiality as well as cour- tesy, the count displayed a strong desire to live with him on terms of affection as well as of intimacy. At the count's invitation, Byron, towards the close of January, 1820, gave up his rooms at the "Albergo Imperiale," and took possession of a suite of apartments in the Palazzo Guiccioli; — an arrangement that was the less disagreeable to the owner of the palace, as his lordly lodger paid a good rent for the rooms. Close resemblances are often discernible in the manners and morality of the different social grades. On first coming to Venice in November, 1816, Byron, lodging in a linen-draper's best rooms, had taken the tradesman's wife for his mistress, Avith the sanction of her husband. At Ravenna he had for his mistress the wife of a wealthy noble, in whose palace he took lodgings. Resembling one another in letting their spare rooms to the foreigner, the Romagnese count and the Venetian linen-draper resembled each other also in marital complaisance. EAVENNA. 365 CHAPTER XXI. EAVENNA, Including the six weeks spent in the trip to Rome and the three months of the visit to Romagna, Byron's sojourn at Venice (from the middle of November, 1816, to the middle of December, 1819) covered just three years and one month. Coming (for the second time) to Ravenna shortly before the Christmas of 1819, he resided there for something more than a year and ten months, — occupying till his departure for Pisa (October 29, 1821) "the splendid apartments in the palace of Count Guiccioli " where he received the author of " Queen Mab " in the August of the last-mentioned year, and "living," as Shelley wrote to his wife, "in considerable splendor, but within his income of about £4,000 a year, £1,000 of which he devoted to purposes of charity." Possi- bly the elder of the two poets in giving his friend the partic- ulars of his income and expenditure put some of his con- tributions to brethren of the Carbonari under the heading of ' benevolence. But there is a concurrence of evidences that Byron (whose freaks of parsimony never seem to have been indulged to the exclusion of the indigent from his sympathy and assistance) gave alms so freely to the people of the town and neighborhood throughout his stay at Ravenna that his munificence provoked the suspicion of the police, whilst it covered him with the blessings of the poor. As he could gossip lightly of the contessa's constitutional peculiarities in an earlier and m6re romantic stage of his pas- sion for the lady, it is not surprising that, soon after his sec- ond coming to Ravenna, Byron, in writing to Consul-General Hoppner spoke of Teresa with curious coolness, as a person to whose imperfections he was not absolutely insensible, and of his association with her as an arrangement that might end 366 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. at any moment. Even whilst he was in the full enjoyment of a novel position, accepting the hospitalities of the con- tessa's relations, and "drilling very hard how to double a shawl " with the adroitness of a gallant cicisbeo, he wrote to the consul-general on January 20, 1820, " I have not decided anything about remaining at Ravenna. I may stay a day, a Aveek, a year, all my life ; but all this depends upon what I neither see nor foresee. I came because I was called, and will go the moment I see what may render my departure proper. My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning, nor the microscopic accuracy of the close to such liaisons; but 'time and the hour' must decide what I do. I can as yet say nothing, because I hardly know anything beyond what I have told you." One needs micro- scopic inaccuracy to discern in these words the devotion by which the poet is alleged by Moore to have been animated towards the Countess Guiccioli. Even the poet's declaration (made to Moore on May 24, 1820) of his strong attachment to the lady, when she was in the middle of her quarrel with her husband, is accompanied with a large prudential reserve. " I should have retreated," he says, " but honor, and an ery- sipelas which has attacked her prevent me, — to say nothing of love, for I love her most entirely, though not enough to persuade her to sacrifice everything in a frenzy." After the papal decree that separated the count and countess, Byron wrote to Moore on August 31, 1820, "I only meant to be a cavalier servente, and had no idea it would turn out a ro- mance, in the Anglo fashion"; a noteworthy admission to the biographer, who insists that real love was a motif in the liaison from its commencement. The only persons likely to take Moore's view of the affair, after considering the quota- tions of this paragraph, together with the data of the previous chapter, must be persons with a singular aptitude for believ- ing what they please, in the teeth of evidence to the contrary. It is less surprising that, in the course of a few months. Count Guiccioli required his wife to dismiss her cicisbeo, than that he permitted her to introduce the poet in his official character to her relations, and invite him to take up his quar- RAVENNA. 367 ters under her roof. Mindful of the difference of their ages, and aware that her powerful relatives would hold him accountable for any scandal which might ensue from his want of deference to her wishes, the count could scarcely deny his countess a cavalier servente. In truth, the usages of the cicisbeat had their origin in social tenderness for women in her position, quite as much as in social consideration for husbands in his predicament or in any general sympathy for masculine libertinism. Under these circumstances, on be- ing required to allow his wife to avail herself of a practice that had at least the sanction of social tolerance, the count may well have been disposed to approve of Teresa's choice of an official admirer, — and at least, to be thankful she had chosen a person whose rank and celebrity would enhance the lustre of their circle, whilst his wealth might conduce to her hus- band's enrichment. It is also conceivable that he was charmed by the Englishman's aspect and address, and con- ceived himself an object of the poet's most flattering regard. In the earher months of his attachment to Teresa, Byron had of course exerted himself to concUiate the lordly owner of the coach-and-six horses. On coming for the second time to Ravenna, he had of course approached the count with his best smiles and a thousand delicate blandishments . And when it 'pleased him to wear his best manners for their management, Byron could be no less charming to men than to women. The count therefore had more than one reason for thinking' favorably of the English poet who was ready to pay hand- somely for the splendid rooms assigned to him iu the Palazzo Guiccioli. According to the unreliable " Conversations," Byron as- serted that, after winking at his intimacy with Teresa for a considerable time, the count made exceptions to him " as a foreigner, a heretick, an Englishman, and, what was worse than all, a liberal." On coming to differ with him, the count probably disliked him all the more for each of these reasons. But the count had welcomed the poet with a perfect knowl- edge that he was an Englishman, a free-thuiker, and a hb- eral. The count, however, can scarcely have anticipated that the English liberal would soon exhibit his liberalism by 368 THE REAL LORD BYRON. an activity in Italian politics, that for more than twelve months made the Palazza Guiccioli a place of reunion for the Romagnese Carbonari. Byron is represented to have told Medwin that the count would have contuiued to acqui- esce ia the liaison, had his wife's gallant been an Italian. But, though Byron may have said so in all sincerity or to "bam " his listener, no discreet reader will believe that, had Teresa's cicisbeo been an Italian, the count would have ac- quiesced in proceedings that, by making his palace a centre of conspiracy against the government, made it an object of suspicion to the police and may well have caused its owner to be suspected of participating in the counsels and projects of the Carbonari. It is significant of the order and relation of events at the Palazzo Guiccioli that' Byron's letters to his English correspondents afford evidence of his lively concern in Italian politics for some weeks before they contain refer- ences to the count's desire to be quit of Ms troublesome lodger ; — no easy matter for the count, of whom Byron had hired the splendid apartments on terms that secured Mm fiwm sudden and capricious ejectment. On April 16, 1820, after begging Murray for prompt acknowledgment of the receipt of certaia copy, the poet says, " I have, besides, another reason for desiring you to be speedy, wMch is, that there is that brewing in Italy which will speedily cut off all security of commumcation, and set all your Anglo-travellers flying in every direction, with their usual fortitude in foreign tumults. ... I shall, if per- mitted by the natives, remain to see what will come of it, and perhaps to take a turn with them, like Dugald Dalgetty and his horse, in case of business ; for I shall think it by far the most interesting spectacle and moment in existence to see the Italians send the barbarians of all nations back to their own dens. . . . No Italian can hate an Austrian more than I do ; unless it be the English, the Austrians seem to me the most obnoxious race under the sky. . . . Write while you can ; for it is but the toss up of a paul that there will not be a row that will somewhat retard the mail by and by." A week later the poet writes to Ms publisher (AprU 23, 1820) , " We are on the verge of a row here. Last night EAVENNA. 369 they have over-written all the city walls with ' Up with the republic ! ' and ' Death to the Pope ! ' etc. , etc. , etc. This would be nothing in London, where the walls are privileged. But here it is a different thing : they are not used to such fierce political descriptions, and the police is all on the alert, and the cardinal glares pale through all his purple. .' . April 24, 1820, 8 o'clock P.M.— The police have been, all noon and after, searching for the inscribers, but have caught none as yet. They must have been all night about it, for the 'Live republics — Death to Popes and Priests' are innumerable, and plastered over all the palaces : ours has plenty. There is ' Down with the Nobility ! ' too : they are down enough already, for that matter." Five weeks, less one day, (May 20, 1820) after the date of the first of these notes, the poet writes, " The Countess G. is on the eve of being separated." In April, 1820, the Count Guiccioli found himself in a position alike ludicrous and exasperating, — peculiarly exas- perating because it was so unutterably ridiculous. In his desire to make money out of his wife's cicisbeo, he had in- vited the English poet to reside under his roof; and Byron had scarcely acted on the invitation and found himseli the temporary master of the best rooms of the count's palace, than he made haste to busy himself in Italian politics in a way that made the house a head-quarters of the Carbonari; and exposed its owner to suspicion of complicity in his tenant's doings. By a slip of the pen, Karl Elze, speaks of "the Guiccioli family" as favoring Carbonarism, and attributes the poet's participation in the conspiracy to his warm sym- pathy with the family. The Gambas (father and son) were zealous chiefs of the secret league, though Byron (playing with the dupe he dehghted to " bam " ) gravely assured poor Tom Medwin that they " took no part in the affair " which resulted in their proscription. Teresa went heart and soul with her father and brother into the political movement. But the Gambas were not the Guiccioli family. To the rich Count Guiccioli, with nothing to gain from a successful revolution and much to lose from participation in an abor- tive attempt at one, conspiracy against the existing govern- 370 THE REAL LORD BYRON. ment was by no means the attractive enterprise that it was to the needy Gambas whose best hope of brighter fortunes lay in the movement for a change of rulers. Had Count Guiccioli been of one mind with his wife's brother and father-in-law, the significant menace, " Down with the No- bUity ! " would not have been inscribed on the walls of his palace. Between the secret friends of the Gambas and Teresa's EngUsh gallant, who were threatening him with the extinction of the nobility, and the agents of the papal government, who treated him with ominous reserve whilst they set spies to watch his house and visitors, the Count Guiccioli was in an awkward predicament, and had reason to curse the hour when he invited Byron to come within his walls. To be quit of so ineligible an inmate, the count required Teresa to dismiss her admirer, — a demand that drew from her a refusal to do any such thing. The immediate result of the lady's mutiny against her husband was that he feigned astonishment at her devotion to a man whom he had imagined her to regard with mere feelings of friendship. One can imagine the scornful laughter this affectation provoked from Teresa. But her derision only whipped the count to declare with greater vehemence his abhorrence of her wickedness ; his impression that his own social qualities had alone drawn Byron to Ravenna ; his dismay at discovering his wife's betrayer in the perfidious Englishman ; his determination to sue for a decree of separation from her if she did not forth- with order her paramour to be off. From the count, to whom she gave only words of ridicule and aversion, Teresa hastened to Byron, who (according to his own accounts of the affair) urged her to obey the dictates of prudence rather than the impulse of love, — to pitch him over, and, making up the quarrel with her husband, to live with him on terms of apparent affectionateness. " I wUl stay with him," Teresa answered, "if he will let you remain with me. It is hard that I should be the only woman in Romagna who is not to have her A^mico ; but, if not, I will not live with him ; and as for the consequences — .... Tut ! " The stir of Ravenna's little world was prodigious. Scarcely EAVENNA. 371 a man in all Romagna had a word to say for the count, who was rendering himself contemptible by feigning surprise at his wife's liaison with a foreigner. Teresa had her own sex on her side almost to a woman ; — the ladies declaring it intolerable that, after first conniving at the affair and then openly sanctioning it, the count should now presume to have a voice in the matter. As Teresa would not yield, the count prepared to put his threat in execution. But in his steps for getting a separation he encountered two difficulties. There waa no sufficient evidence of facts that would have to be proved without inferential aid before the papal court could decide in his favor. Another and more humiliating difficulty was that the count could not find an advocate to undertake his cause ; "the whole bar" (as one would say in England) being of opinion that so miserable a plaintiff* — fool if he was really unaware of the liaison, rogue and paltry hypocrite if he knew of the matter all along — should be left to plead hia own cause. Pressure of some sort was of course put on Byron to end the scandal by withdrawing from Kavenna. But in considerations of love and honor he found sufficient reasons for remaining by Teresa's side and under her husband's roof. In truth, the game was so flattering to his vanity and so diverting to his sense of humor, that he could not deny himself the pleasure of playing at it a little longer. The Count Guiccioli having already declined to settle the matter by a duel with his father-in-law (old Count Gramba) , there was no hope for a settlement of the dispute by means of a duel between the lady's husband and her admirer. But though the count was not likely to " call " the poet " out," he was thought capable of sending a bravo to way-lay Byron during one of his daily rides in the pine forest. Teresa's husband being suspected of having in former time perpetrated two assassinations by deputy, Byron was strongly advised to be on his guard and have his pistols ready for immediate use when he rode through the immemorial pines. Though he affected to think himself guarded from assassination by the covetousness of the count, who had not the courage to spend twenty scudi on a clean-handed cut-throat, the poet after this friendly warning never omitted 372 THE REAL LORD BYRON. to look to his "primings" before he put his feet in the stirrups. Eventually the conflict was ended by the act of the lady, who, in opposition to the wishes of some of her friends, petitioned the court for the very fate with which the count had threatened her. To heighten the comicality of the whole business, Teresa's prayer for separation was resisted stoutly by her husband, who, by making the most of his wrongs, hoped to escape an order of the court for payment of alimony. In this, however, he was disappointed. In consideration of his extraordinary behavior, in first conniving at her misbehavior and then oppressing her with scandalous exposure, the court, whilst granting Teresa's prayer for separation, ordered him to return her trifling portion, surrender her carriage and jewels, and pay her an alimony of £200 a year ; it being further pro- vided by the decree that she should henceforth reside under her father's roof and protection or retire to a cloister." In conseqpience of this decree (dehvered at Rome and pub- lished at Eavenna a few days later, July 12, 1820), Teresa Guiccioli, still only seventeen years of age, withdrew to her father's villa (some fifteen miles distant from the city of her birth) , where she resided for several months, receiving two or three visits in the course of each month from her lover, who continued to live m the palazzo of the count whose domestic affairs he had disturbed in so remarkable a manner. How- ever distasteful and vexatious this arrangement may have been to the lady, who would, of course, have preferred to see her lover oftener and for longer visits, it was neither "unwelcome " (as Moore admits) to the poet, nor unfavorable to her power over him. A day or two of Teresa's company once a fortnight was probably enough for the contentment of the worshipper, whose passion was more likely to be quickened than quenched by the successive intervals of absence ; and it is conceivable that a few months later when she was living under her father's roof in Ravenna, within a few hundred yards of the palace of which she had ceased to be the mis- tress, the poet missed the excitement of the fortnightly gallops to the remote villa, and wished her at a distance that would have exempted hini frqm the obligation to visit her EAVEIWA. 373 daily. Leigh Hunt suggests that (as the stipulation for Teresa's residence in her father's house or a convent must have been intended to separate her from Byron no less eiFectually than the decree itself separated her from her husband), the arrangement, which defeated the purpose of the condition whilst complying with its letter, cannot have been anticipated by the Pope, and must have been oflFensive to serious and de- vout Catholics. But though Count Gamba's action in winking at the liaison may have displeased many of his neighbors, there is no reason for supposing that the stratagem of the lovers occasioned surprise to the framers of the decree. On the contrary, there are grounds for a rather strong opinion that the papal authorities were fully prepared for the avoid- ance of the ostensible object of the stipulation, and even made the condition in order that its apparent purpose should be so avoided. Anyhow, instead of forbidding the arrange- ment by which Byron had the enjoyment of his mistress with her father's sanction, the vice-legate and his associates exhibited significant indifference to the irregularity, which they turned adroitly to their advantage when they wished to elbow the poet out of Romagna. It speaks much for Byron's political prescience that he believed Greece might stUl be free, when to hold the opinion was to be rated with mere visionaries and enthusiasts by serious statesmen, and that, writing "The Prophecy of Dante " more than half a century before Rome became the capital of reunited Italy, he penned the glorious verses, — " Oh ! my own beauteous land ! so long laid low, So long the grave of thy own children's hopes, When there is hut required a single blow To break the chain, yet — yet the Avenger stops, And Doubt and Discord step 'twixt thine and thee, And join their strength to that which with thee copes ; What is there wanting then to set thee free. And show thy beauty in its fullest light? To make the Alps impassable ; and we, Her sons, may do this with one deed — Unite." And it detracts nothing from this prescience and the honor due to it, to say that in the domain of politics Byron was a sentimentalist, in the best and finest sense of the word, who, 374 THE REAL LOED BYKON. after choosing his party from sympathy, was more indebted for his political principles and convictions to emotional influ- ences than to passionless deliberation. That men are more obedient to sentiment than to facts, was a favorite maxim with the younger Disraeli, whose influence over his contem- poraries was largely due to a fine apprehensiveness of the poetry underlying familiar things, and an habitual disposi- tion to discover a sentimental significance and value in the matters that are mere matters of course to official underlings who, living wholly in them, seldom look an inch beyond them. Accountable for the steadiness and consistency that in politics distinguished the man of dangerous " mobility," the force which inspires multitudes with a single purpose, and causes millions to move like one, was scarcely more operative in the sensitive and imaginative Byron at moments when he was wholly a poet, than at moments when he tried to be only a politician. It was the source of the enthusiasm that, carrying him into the ranks of the Italian Carbonari, made him a participator in their miserably insufficient prepa- rations for a noble enterprise. It was the source of the less sanguine impulse that determined him to fight in Greece for a cause of whose success he was far less confident than desirous. It was also the light by which he foresaw events, neither hoped for nor imagined by the commonplace poli- ticians who, with all their assiduity and usefulness, are mere manipulators of affairs lying immediately under their noses. Under any circumstances, and in every quarter of the world, this political sentimentalist would have played a simi- lar part, or none at all, in the political arena. For the morbid selfishness, which, in Hobhouse's opinion, was the darkest stain on his friend's character, had nothing in com- mon with the sordid selfishness which in every community disposes the baser sort of prosperous people to side in politics with the prevailing party, simply because it is the stronger party. Had his nature possessed no other endowments mak- ing for benevolence, his sensibility and superabundant com- passionateness would by themselves have saved him from becoming an unsympathetic chui;l or callous despot. So sensitive to the sufferings of others as to be incapable of wit- EAVENNA. 375 nessing physical pain without shrinking from it, or regarding any kind of mental distress without longing to relieve it, the poet, who had a tear for every grief and a coin for every mendicant, and who, retaining to the last his early propen- sity for protecting his inferiors, spoiled his servants by in- dulgence whilst he made playmates of their children, — was precisely the man to feel intense pity for the victims and in- tense hatred for the doers.of oppression ; albeit, in his fits of gusty anger and his longer moods of suUen rage, he could be ■ wildly violent and cruel to the individuals who provoked his animosity in personal matters. Whilst pity impelled him to embrace the weak, combative- ness and passionate intolerance of injustice disposed him to battle with the strong. At Ravenna, where he enjoyed the confidence of the nobles who favored the conspiracy, and was worshipfuUy regarded by the peasantry whom he conciliated by lordly munificence and . gracious bearing, — nobles, amongst whom he found persons of culture and lofty senti- ment ; a peasantry, under whose rudeness and ignorance he discovered courage and affectionateness, — it was natural for a man so sympathetic and fervid to espouse the cause of a people groaning under the grievances of execrable misgov- ernment. Led by the contemplation of the troubles of Italy to brood mournfully over the wrongs done and endured in every region of the earth's surface, it is not wonderful that, on closing the survey of man's cruelty to man, he threw him- self into a movement which promised to stay the growth of human iniquity and to diminish the sum of human wretched- ness in Southern Europe. It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that no con- siderations of personal interest and ambition mingled with the loftier aims and impulses of benevolence that determined the poet's action towards the Italian patriots. Though he would have favored the Carbonari from sincere and romantic devotion to freedom, and, in the absence of all other motives, would have embraced their enterprise from enthusiastic ap- proval of its principles and object, there can be no question that Byron was regardful of his own advantage in furthering the movement for the advantage of Italy. To the poet, 376 THE KEAL LOED BYKON. acutely remorseful for his Venetian excesses, service in so righteous a cause was all the more congenial from the con- sideration that it would probably enable him to recover, together with his own self-respect, that large portion of the world's respect which had been withdrawn from the tenant of the Palazzo Mocenigo. Should insurrection result in revolution, and the revolution be glorified with success, no small portion of the honor of the achievement would pertain to the English peer who, coming to the aid of the patriots almost at the inception of their enterprise, had lent them money, provided them with arms, and led them to victory on hard-fought fields. Covered with fame and glory he would return to England in triumph, to receive the applause ever given ungrudgingly in the land of freedom to successful liberators. Instead of reappearing in London, un- heralded and unannounced, doubtful of his welcome and ap- prehensive of slights, to live at first in comparative seclusion with a few old friends, and then to feel his way with delicate and timorous steps back into society, he would be greeted at Dover with acclamations, and find himself the idol of a party, if something less than the hero of the nation. Even though it should miscarry, a campaign for Italian freedom would exhibit him in an honorable light and aflford him opportunities for figuring amongst men of action. At the worst, it would divert attention from the least creditable passages of his career, and yield him an auspicious occasion for resuming his old role of the hero of his own poems. At the best, it might invest him with the pomp and power of a military dictator, and render his name no less terrible to monarchs in their capitals than to the curates of EngHsh villages. In Ms boyhood, when his regiment of " Byron's blacks " used to turn the fortune of imaginary fields, he nursed hopes of martial distinction ; and to the last, the tinsel and toys of war had a fascination for the poet, who, after emptying the vials of his scorn on such vulgar heroes as Suwarrow and Welling- ton, bought the three gilt helmets (that tickled Leigh Hunt's malicious humor) , and died the commander-in-chief of a nation fighting for freedom. One of the curious features of liis story is the disregard, quickened sometimes to angry RAVENNA, 377 disdain, in which he held the writer's vocation. Assuming it in the first instance for youthful vanity, to astonish his school-fellows and win the approval of young ladies, he to the last rated the pen as little more than a plaything, — using it by turns for sport and malice ; valuing it fitfully as a weapon ; but never honoring it steadily as the sacred and only instrument for the loftiest and largest aims of his ambi- tion. Even when he was meditating the lines (to be placed amongst the manliest and most sincere of all his egotistic verses) , "I twine My hopes of being reraember'd in my line Witli my land's language ; if too fond and far These aspirations in tlieir scope incline, — If my fame should be, as my fortunes are, Of hasty growth and blight, and dull Oblivion bar My name from out the temple where the dead Are honor'd by the nations — let it be — And light the laurels on a loftier head ! " — lie was wishful for a renown to which the deathless produc- tions of his poetical genius would be mere matters of sub- sidiary beauty, like the traceries of the chisel on a superb work of Gothic architecture. "If I live," he wrote to Moore on February 28, 1817, at the very time when the reviewers were busy with the poem containing those lines, " ten years longer, you wiU see, however, that it is not over with me — I don't mean in literature, for that is nothing; and it may seem odd enough to say, I do not think it my vocation. But you will see that I shall do something or other — the times and fortune permitting — that, 'like the cosmogony or creation of the world, will puzzle the philoso- phers of all ages.' But I doubt whether my constitution will hold out." Other passages of similar purport may be found in the letters of the poet. From 1814, when he gave orders for the suppression of all his writings, to 1823, when on his departure for Greece he congratulated himself on having done at last with scribbling, Byron was perpetually looking away from the labors that will ever cause his name to be remembered in his line with his land's language, for some field of enterprise in which, without the pen's aid, by 378 THE EEAL LOED BYRQN. deeds instead of words, he might build up a renown, nobler and moresatisfjdng to his moral aspirations than the fame that, surprising him in a morning and growing with every moon, had been even more fruitful of sorrow to his heart than of flattery to his pride. Sometimes the dreamer's fancy turned to South America as a scene for exploits of chivahic adventure and romantic benevolence. At other timeg it played about the rocks and, valleys of some island of the Grecian archipelago, whose people he would rule with gentle sway and patriarchal dignity. At Ravenna he saw in the revolutionary movement an opening to a career that, gratify- ing his strong desire for the only kind of martial honor for which he had any appetite whatever, — the glory to be won in battles for freedom, — would p'lrge his fame of the stains put upon it by passion and un^ieanness, and give him place amongst the heroes of huiKOuby. Moreover, in the survey of the forces that carri6''''^iByron into the ranks of the Carbonari, allowance must be made for his need of some fierce though pure "excitement to replace the agitations of sensual intemperance. Allowance must also be made for the influence of the poet's < 423 like Ms own — had a natural and manifest right to take from the pockets of their prosperous acquaintances whatever gold they needed for their necessities. He even contrived to per- suade himself that, by accepting money from a well-to-do friend, he laid himself under no obligation to the giver of the money. On the contrary, if any obligation attended the transaction it was one that made him his benefactor's bene- factor, and required the giver to feel grateful to the receiver of the gift. " I have not," he wrote, " had that horror of being under obligation, which is thought an essential refinement in money matters, and which leads some really generous per- sons, as well as some who only seek personal importance in their generosity, to think they had a right to bestow favors which they would be mortified to receive." Though Dr. Elze uses too harsh a word, when he says, " Hunt's connection with Byron commenced with a falsehood," it cannot be questioned that Hunt was deficient ia the honorable frankness which is so large a part of fair dealing, when he ar- ranged with Byron to come out to him in Italy, without letting him know that he had ceased to be editor of " The Examiner," and , being absolutely without any source of income , had no pros- pect of income save the revenue he hoped to get from the journal not yet in existence. He was bound in honor to inform both Byron and SheUey, that should he .come to Italy with his family, they or one of them would have to keep him, his wife and his six (or seven) children, till the projected jour- nal should afford him an income, and that, in case the enter- prise miscarried, they would have him on their hands for a lono-er period. This information Harold Skimpole withheld from his two friends, who, though they knew him to be in pecuniary embarrassment and had every reasonable readiness to assist him, were both under the impression that a regular (though possibly somewhat insufficient) income would be coming to him from the office of a London newspaper. There is also ilo doubt that, whilst he refrained from show- ing his friends the real state of his circumstances, he was well aware of their misconception of his case. In this reticence respecting matters about which he should have been freely communicative, Leigh Hunt, if not actually guilty of positive falsehood, was certainly guilty of disingenuous concealment. 424 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. It follows that this Micawber of the literary world went out to Italy with his wife and children, to prey on the bounty and to live (certainly for a time, possibly till he and his family should be returned carriage-free to England) on the resources of Shelley, who was by no means rich, and of Byron, to whom he was but slightly known. Byron was astonished at learning, either whilst the Hunts were on their long voyage (of five months) to him, or immediately after their arrival at Leghorn, that his selected coadjutor had not enough in his pocket for a month's current expenses. Under the circumstances he may well have been nettled at the discovery ; and the poet — so nicely carefiil over his petty disbursements as to lose his temper once every seven days over his weekly biQs, and so impatient of imposition and extortion as to demand bloody satisfac- tion of the military horse-sharper who sold him an unsound animal — was not the man to submit tamely to Hunt's arrangements for sucking money from him. From a letter (misdated by an entire year and misplaced in Moore's "Life") it appears that Byron had received a sufficiently plain intimation of Hunt's predatory character more than four months before his appearance at Montenero. On February 15, 1822 (not 1823, as Moore misprints it), Shelley wrote to Byron, — Mt deak Lord Byron: — I enclose you a letter from Hunt, which annoys me on more than one account. You will obserre the postscript, and you know me well enough to feel how painful a task is set me in commemting upon it. Hunt had urged me more than once to ask you to lend him this money. My answer consisted in sending him all I could spare, which I have now literally done. Your kindness in fitting up a part of your own house for hia accommodation I sensibly felt, and will- ingly accepted from you on his part, but, believe me, without the slightest intention of imposing, or, if I could help it, allowing to be imposed, any heavier task on your purse. As it has come to this in spite of my exer- tions, I will not conceal from you the low ebb of my own money affairs in the present moment, — that is, my absolute incapacity of assisting Hunt further. I do not think poor Hunt's promise to pay in a given time is worth very much ; but mine is less subject to uncertainty, and I should be happy to be responsible for any engagement he may have proposed to you. I am so much annoyed by. this subject that I hardly know what to write, and much less to say ; and I have need of all your indulgence in judging both my feelings and expressions. I shall see you by and by. Believe me yours most faithfully and sincerely, P. B. Shellet. PISA. 425 On his arrival in Leghorn harbor, where he made Tre- lawny's acquaintance, Leigh Hunt was in the brightest and blithest spirits, overflowing with praise of the Italian sun and climate, pleased with everything about him, and pleas- ing everybody. If he was disappointed that Byron, tarrying at his villa outside the town, had not come to welcome him in the harbor, he concealed his discontent. The joyous, riant, rather too affable gentleman does not appear to have exhibited any mortification at the greater poet's neglect to call upon him. For the moment he was in no mood to look out for slights ; was too delighted to find himself in Italy, whither he had come apparently for pleasure rather than business, to be out of humor for a mere trifle. Moreover, he found congenial occupation in providing for the comfort of Mrs. Hunt (an invalid), and arranging for the convey- ance of his babes and baggage to Pisa. A day or two later, however, his spirits fell, when he walked through Leghorn's hot and dusty suburb, to the hottest-looking viUa he had ever seen, to make a call on Byron, who' had not oiFered him an opportunity for going to Montenero, to return a call. Arriving at an unfortunate moment, when Byron and Teresa and the young Count Pietro were in their highest excitement about the murderous man-servant, who had just stuck a knife into Teresa's brother, the man of letters had a reception, for which he could not be thankful, though he had no right to resent it. Byron's fatness was not the only thing that dis- tressed the visitor. At a glance the mere man of letters saw that the nobleman of letters was no person to lend rouleaus of gold pieces inconsiderately. Having journeyed from Eng- land for a pleasant time with Lord Byron, who, only six years since, was bent on distributing a thousand guineas amongst three necessitous authors, whilst baUiffs were actu- ally seizing the books of his library, Leigh Hunt (a nice reader of the human countenance) was troubled l3y the worldly hardness and selfish shrewdness of the poet's still handsome face. A chilly tremor played about the heart of the needy litterateur who all through his tedious voyage had looked forward to the ease, and state, and luxury, in which he, and his dear wife, and all his dear children would 426 THE REAL LORD BYRON. live, after being welcomed to the palace of the lordly exile who required his assistance in a graceful enterprise. Beginning as he meant to go on, Lord Byron from the first showed Mr. Hunt that he was not a man to be im- posed upon. And going on as he began Lord Byron, to the last hour of a vexatious and ignoble association, was very careful not to be imposed upon by "the Cockneys " (as he designated them contemptuously to Trelawny, before they had been forty-eight hours in his house) , for whose accom- modation the ground-floor of the Palazzo Lanfranchi had been fitted at his cost, with suitable furniture, which Shelley had selected and intended to pay for. In some respects he was too careful. He might have been more courteous, with- out being less careful. He should at least have behaved with a show of cordiality and politeness to poor Mrs. Hunt, to whom he accorded no other greeting than a severely formal bow, without a single word, when she entered his house, exhausted with illness and the fatigue of travelling. He could have kept the Hunts to their proper floor of his palace, without patting the big bull-dog on the head, and saying to him in Trelawny's hearing, "Don't let the Cockneys pass that way." So long as they lived under the same roof the two poets however maintained a show of mutual complaisance. Though he seldom invited his literary coadjutor to the salons of the first floor, he gossiped with him in the garden. Occasionally he mounted him on a horse, and took him for a ride to the farm-house. Now and then he even relaxed so far as to invite the " chief of the Cockneys " to dinner, and to hold a brief conversation with Mrs. Hunt, who was at no pains to conciliate the peer. As Mrs. Hunt could not speak Italian and the Countess Guiccioli could not speak a sentence of English, the ladies had a good excuse for keeping apart. At first Teresa showed a disposition to behave graciously to Hunt ; but on finding him an unsympathetic listener to her complaints of Byron's faulty behavior she dropped him from her consideration. Shelley's death, following so quickly on the arrival of the Cockneys, placed the occupant of the base- ment rooms ia a terribly false position. Had Shelley lived, his influence would have diminished the friction attending the PISA. 427 intercourse of the rich lord and the penniless author. Under Shelley's handling Byron would have been less inclined to resent than laugh at Hunt's crafty silence respecting his dis- connection from " The Examiner." Moreover, as Shelley would have borne at least half the burden of the shiftless family Byron would have been less apprehensive for his own purse. As Byron wrote the ninth, tenth, and eleventh cantos of "Don Juan "in August, whilst the Hunts were under his roof in the Lung 'Amo, it may be taken for granted that the father of the httle Hunts was not absent from the poet's mind when he wrote the stanza, — ' Alas ! how deeply painful is all payment ! Take lives, take wives, take aught except men's purses, As Machiavel shows those in purple raiment, Such is the shortest way to general curses. They hate a murderer much less than a claimant On that sweet ore which everybody nurses. — Kill a man's family, and he may brook it, But keep your hands out of his breeches' pocket." The amount of the money expended by Byron on the Hunts was not great. Beside paying for the " good and respectable " furniture for their rooms in the Palazzo Laniranchi, and sending £200 to England for the charges of their voyage to Italy, he gave Hunt £70 at Pisa, defrayed the cost of their journey from Pisa to Genoa, and supplied them with another £30 to enable them to go from Pisa to Florence. The sum probably did not greatly exceed £500. There was no need for him to give them more ; but under the circumstances he could scarcely have given them less. From the way in which Leigh Hunt writes of money, pecuniary obligations, and Byronic niggardliness, it is obvious that the sum would have risen to thousands, had it not been for Byron's resoluteness ia resisting the insatiable applicant "for more." It is a sordid business to smile about. But Hunt's indignant account of Byron's device for keeping the demands on his purse down to the minimum is droU as well as slightly sickening. Hunt's notion was that the money 428 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. should have been handed over in the way least likely to wound the recipient's pride. Byron, on the contrary, saW it would be to his disadvantage to part with his gold thus con- siderately and delicately. " During our residence at Pisa," says the litterateur in difficulties, " I had' from him, or rather from his steward, to whom he always sent me for the money, and who doled it out to me as if my disgraces were being counted, the sum of £70." Whilst the position at the Palazzo Lanfranchi was irritating to Byron, it was exasperating to Hunt, who, saved from syco- phancy by constitutional insolence, was intolerant alike of his social superiors and his intellectual superiors. For weeks be- fore the appearance of the first number of "The Liberal," the joint-adventurers in the ill-fated enterprise (that perished in the delivery of its fourth budget of wit and wisdom) were as thoroughly and heartily at feud as Moore and Murray wished them- to be. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that when Byron moved with his dependents from Pisa to Genoa, he would not travel in the company of the Hunts. The migration was accomplished towards the end of Decem- ber. Whilst Byron went by land with Teresa Guiccioli to Lerici, the rest of the party went thither by water, — the Hunts in a felucca; Byron's servants, with " what the Yankees would have called a freight of notions," in another boat ; whilst Trelawny, as director-in-chief of the operations, convoyed the voyagers in Byron's yacht the " Bolivar," having the plate, books, and papers under his especial care. Meet- ing at Lerici — where Byron was detained for four days (two of them spent in bed) by one of his violent attacks of indi- gestion — the whole party proceeded, after visiting Shelley's last home, from Lerici to Sestri by water, Byron and the countess making the passage in a fourth boat by themselves. " It was pretty," says Hunt, " to see the boats with their white sails, gliding by the rocks, over that blue sea." The remain- der of the journey from Sestri to Genoa was by land, — over the maritime part of the Apennines, lying (says the same descriptive writer) "in a succession of great doughy billows, like so much enormous pudding, or petrified mud " ; — Byron PISA. 429 and Madame Guiccioli still holding aloof from the Hunts, till they came to Albaro, where the two poets (according to Byron's statements of the case) had scarcely any intercourse, with the exception of unavoidable conferences on matters of business. Well might poor Hunt ejaculate, " Genoa again ! With what diflFerent feelings we beheld it the first time 1 " 430 THE REAL LOED BYRON. CHAPTER XXm. GENOA. Leaving Pisa in September, 1822, when he was well within one year and seven months of his death, Byron went to Genoa, and for something less than ten months abode with the Gambas (the two counts and Teresa Guiccioli) in the Casa Saluzzi, — the house, standing in a court-yard planted with cypress trees, cut fantastically in accordance with the practice of what the English gardeners of the seventeenth century used to term "topiary art"; the house where he entertained the Blessingtons and Count D'Orsay, and in January, 1823, received the enthusiastic young Frenchman, Mons. J. J. Coulmann, who, having expected to find him a person of haughty bearing and heroic presence, was greatly surprised by the cordial manners, diminutive stature, and sim- ple costume of the poet, " whose publishers paid him a guinea a line " ; — the house famous in Byronic story as the scene of his last literary labors, and of the negotiations with the Lon- don Greek Committee, that resulted in the fatal expedition to Greece. Planted in a picturesque suburb, the Casa Saluzzi was a pleasant place, commanding fine views of Genoa, the Gulf and the Apennine range. The first number of " The Liberal " came from London to the joint-proprietors by the Genoese post. It has been already observed how quickly the birth of the unluckly publication was followed by its death. No one can say that Byron figures creditably in this business. In truth, the affair of " The Liberal " is the episode of his purely literary career in which he shows to least advantage. The journal having been a thing of his own conception and inception, and its failure being due almost entirely to his own capricious dis- taste for the enterprise before the first number went to press, GENOA. 431 he should have had the manliness to confess himself alike responsible for the project and the misadventure. But in- stead of taking the discredit to himself, he held the brothers Hunt (especially Leigh Hunt) accountable both for the under- taking and the miscarriage. By clouding the mental and moral vision, and throwing matters out of historic perspec- tive, anger disposes even truthful men to untruthfulness ; and of all living men Byron under irritation was the least likely or able to take an accurate and judicial view of the circum- stances of his displeasure. Ceasing to hold himself respon- sible for the journal as soon as he foresaw failure for it, he began to think and talk of it as the affair of the Hunts. Having designed the thing for the attainment of his own ends and the gratification of his own ambition, the vent- ure had no sooner come to grief than he contrived to per- suade himself that his only motive for having a part in the fiasco was benevolence towards the Hunts. "I am afraid the journal is a bad business, and won't do," he wrote to Murray in October 9, 1822, "but in it I am sacrificing myself for others — / can have no advantage in it. I believe the brothers Hunts to be honest men ; I am sure that they are poor ones ; they have not a Nap. They pressed me to engage in this work, and, in an evil hour, I consented. Still, I shall not repent if I can do them the least service. I have done aU I can for Leigh Hunt since he came here ; but it is almost useless. His wife is ill, his six " (there were seven, by the way, according to Trelawny) "children not very tractable, and in the afiairs of this world he himself is a child. The death of Shelley left them totally aground, and I could not see them in such a state without using the common feelings of humanity, and what means were in my power, to set them afloat again." From any one but Byron this would be staggering. Even from him it causes eyes to open with astonishment. In the same strain he wrote to a lady [Letter 509, Moore's "Life"], "If you mean to say that, had he" {i.e. Leigh Hunt) "been a wealthy man, I would have joined in this Journal, I answer in the negative. . . . . I engaged in the Journal from good-will towards him, added to respect for his character, literary and personal ; 432 THE REAL LORD BYRON. and no less for his political courage, as well as regret for his present circumstances. I did this in the hope that he might, with the same aid from literary friends of literary contri- butions, which is requisite for all journals of a mixed nature, render himself independent." This was the amazing way in which Byron spoke and wrote to his acquaintance about his part in an enterprise which had originated in his own mere motion for the attainment of his own private ends, and for which, had it been successful, he would have taken to himself something more than the lion's share of the credit. It may not be imagined that he was fibbing wilfully. Had he not persuaded himself that he was drawn into the affair by benevolent concern for the Hunts, he could not have written thus to Moore and Murray, who, to his knowledge, knew as much as himself about the matter. As soon as he quarrelled, Byron talked wide of the truth — without know- ing it. The same Byron who, in his excusable annoyance at Leigh Hunt, accounted in this marvellous fashion for his disastrous entanglement with the needy man of letters and his journal, was the same Byron who, in his furious rages against his wife, thought her the moral Clytemnestra of her comparatively unoffending lord, and, in his colder resentment against her, persisted in declaring that he could not conceive why she had quarrelled with him. At Genoa, Byron wrote "The Age of Bronze," "The Island," and the twelfth, thirteenth, foxu:teenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth cantos of "Don Juan " — the great, unfinished satire which Goethe, with all his admiration for the perform- ance, declared the most immoral poem that was ever written. Whilst thus busy with his pen he had a civil pretext for seeing but little of Leigh Hunt, of whom, by the way, he probably saw more than he admitted in his letters to Moore and Murray. Speaking of himself as "passing a melancholy time at Albaro," Hunt says, "My intercourse with Lord Byron, though less than before, was consid- erable ; and we were always, as the phrase is, 'on good terms.' He knew what I felt, for I said it. I also knew what he thought, for he said that 'in a man- ner ' ; and he waa in the habit of giving you a good deal GENOA. 433 to understand, in what he did not say. In the midst of all liis strange conduct he professed a great personal re- gard. He could do the most humiliating things, insinuate the bitterest, both of me and my friends, and then aiFect to do all away with a soft word, protesting that nothing he ever said was meant to apply to myself." The truth of the matter seems to be that, whilst keeping vigilant guard over his breeches' pockets, and resolutely checking each dis- position to yield to Harold Skimpole's insidious arts, Byron softened occasionally to the man whom he pitied for being a poor de^ol, and would have liked heartily had he been a self- sustaining " poor devU " ! In April and May, 1823, Byron saw much of the Blessing- tons and their Cupidon dechaini, — the Irish earl to whom Lady Byron's trustees had refused to lend the poet's money ; the countess who had already published a book or two ; and the young Frenchman whose MS. journal of English society and manners afforded Byron much diversion. (What has become of the young count's Journal ? In whose keeping does it rest ? Will it be found two centuries hence in Eng- lish libraries, side by side with Grammont's "Memoirs"?) Calling at the Casa Saluzzi on April Fool's Day, 1823, the Blessingtons left Genoa on the second day of the following June, after spending just two months in familiar intercourse with the poet, who, opening his heart to the countess on the old story of his domestic troubles (a subject, by the way, on which he could be curiously garrulous to casual acquaint- ances), opened it the more fully and precisely on discover- ing that Lady Blessington was on friendly terms with a gentleman (even then at Genoa), whose sister was Lady Byron's most confidential friend. Conversing on the one hand with this gentleman about the anxieties of his sister's especial friend, and on the other hand with the poet himself about his feelings towards his wife, it was natural for Lady Blessington to entertain a wish to be of service in bringing about a friendly understanding between the long-separated husband and wife. One noteworthy result of this amiable readiness on Lady Blessington's part, and her free talk with 434 T^E REAL LORD BYRON. Byron on the inteiesting topic, was that he wrote her the following epistle : — Mat 3, 1823. Deae Lady Blessington, — My request would be for a copy of the miniature of Lady Byron, which I have seen in the possession of the late Lady Noel, as I have no picture, or indeed memorial of any kind, of Lady Byron, as all her letters were in her own possession before I left England, and we have had no correspondence since — at least on her part. My message, with regard to the infant, is simply to this effect : that in the event of any accident occurring to the mother, and my remaining the survivor, it would be my wish to have her plans carried into effect, both with regard to the education of the child, and the person or persons under whose care Lady Byron might be desirous that she should be placed. It is not my intention to interfere with her in any way on the subject during her life ; and I presume that it would be some consolation to her to know (if she is in ill health, as I am given to understand) that in no case would anything be done, as far as I am concerned, but in strict conformity with Lady Byron's own wishes and intentions — left in what manner she thought proper. Believe me, dear Lady Blessington, your obliged, etc., etc. Noel Bteoit. Three days later, in a letter dated May 6, 1823 (enclosing the poet's withheld letter to Lady Byron, of November 17, 1821, — printed in the preceding chapter) , Byron says, " The letter which I enclose I was prevented sending by my despair of its doing any good. I was perfectly sincere when I wrote it, and am so still. But it is difficult for me to withstand the thousand provocations on that subject, which both friends and foes have for seven years been throwing' in the way of a man whose feelings were once quick, and whose temper was never patient. But 'returning were as tedious as go o'er.' I feel this as much as ever Macbeth did ; and it is a dreary sensation, which, at least, avenges the real and imaginary wrongs of one of the two unfortunate persons it concerns." The only persons to deny or doubt Byron's sincerity in this correspondence with Lady Blessington and in the withheld letter of November 17, 1821, to Lady Byron, are those who have been induced to believe him to have been guilty of mis- conduct that, lying beyond forgiveness, rendered it impossible for him to have been sincere in writing letters as though for- giveness and reconcilement were possible. But it is certain that the persons thiaking thus of his misconduct were led to GENOA. 435 think so by misconception or misrepresentation. It is certain he had committed no such unpardonable offence. It follows therefore that the grounds for questioning his sincerity are imaginary. There must be an end to personal history if these letters may not be taken as evidence of the state of feeling which they indicate. Unsupported by a single scrap of good testimony, discredited by the conclusive evidence as to the nature and extent of his misbehavior to his wife, the notion that the poet played the hypocrite in this correspondence, and fabricated the withheld letter merely to show it about to his advantage, must be dismissed as absolutely ludicrous. The letter to Lady Blessington was a sincere overture by the poet for something like a friendly arrangement with his wife. To most readers it will seem something more, — the first step towards a petition for complete reconciliation. By asking for his wife's miniature, because he had no picture of her and desired the solace of a portrait to strengthen his recol- lection of her lineaments, he declared, with equal delicacy and force, that he longed to look again on her face. In promising never to interfere with her in any matter touching their child's education, he made a promise (to which Lady Blessington and every reader of his letter to that lady would be witnesses ) , that must have afforded great comfort to the mother who, now that Ada had ceased to be a mere nursling, was in constant fear that he would soon come to England and claim his daughter. It was a momentous concession of parental right, for which he might well feel sure at least of his wife's grati- tude. It was his return for the lock of the child's hair, and the words written by his wife on the paper, enclosing the hair. After this exchange of conciliatory gifts, friends surely had reason to hope that the time was not far distant when the husband and wife would meet occasionally in amity, even though they might not think it well to repeat the hazardous experiment of living together under the same roof. Whdst Byron's thoughts were turning thus tenderly to the wife of whom he had written so many violent and cruel words, and to whom he had hoped in 1816 to return in a few months, his feelings for Teresa, which had never known the delicacy of love, were fast losing the warmth of dying 436 THE REAI/ LORD BTBON. paesion. Byron's long separation from her, after her with- drawal from the Papal territory, had resulted in a brief, though faint, renewal of his former delight in her beauty and society. "Fancying she walked in the eyes of the whole world, a heroine by the side of a poet," Leigh Hunt admits that when he first "saw her at Montenero, she was in a state of excitement and exaltation, and had really something of this look." Untruthfulness in actual words, be it observed, was not one of Hunt's infirmities. Spite and malice never caused him to pen a deliberate falsehood even against Byron. His suggestion that Byron was deficient in masculine courage — the only statement resembling a false- hood in his base book — was not so much an assertion of a fact, as an ungenerous but sincere inference from unquestion- able facts, — the poet's physical timidity and nervous un- steadiness, when he was taken unawares by little dangers tiU he had found time to gather his fortitude and resoluteness. The painful fact of Hunt's book to Byron's disparagement is its truthfulness. Bringing together all the great poet's pettinesses and meannesses, to which a generous friend would have closed his eyes, it tells them so voraciously that Trelawny, with all his disposition to admire Byron, was constrained to admit that of all the numerous books about the poet, it was the book which gave the best idea of the man, as he appeared to his ordinary acquaintance. Conse- quently Leigh Hunt is a reliable witness respecting Teresa Guiccioli ; and he had not known her many weeks before he saw that Byron had no real love for her, and that she had no real love for him, — that whilst he took a perverse delight in mismanaging her, she " did not in the least know how to manage him, when he was wrong." The poet found pleasure in shocking her by no means nice sense of delicacy ; and after worrying her into petulant exhibitions of disapproval of his conduct, he would look " as if he enjoyed her vehe- mence, and did not believe a word of it." Beside protesting against his words or acts, and "nagging at him" to his face before witnesses, she used to make complaints against him to his acquaintances behind his back. Looking no older than her years at Montenero, she in a few months assumed an air GENOA. 437 of age and weariness and secret misery. This ""rapid and very singular change," says Hunt, " took place, to the sur- prise of everybody. In the course of a few months she seemed to have lived as many years. It is most likely in that interval that she discovered she had no real hold on the affections of her companion." The witness's "every one" includes, of course, Trelawny (who used to bear evidence to Hunt's accuracy) , and Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams. What Hunt saw was foreseen by Shelley, who had no sooner made Teresa's acquaintance than he detected her insufficiency for the difficult place into which passion had carried her, and predicted that she would have plenty of time to repent her rashness in leaving her husband for so changeful an admirer. Knowing that Byron had never really loved her, Hoppner had no doubt that a chief cause of the poet's restlessness in Italy was a desire to get away from her. Hunt, Trelawny, Mrs. Shelley, Mrs. Williams, and Hoppner are a goodly company of witnesses to this point. Their evidence is not to be disposed of by the smartness with which Tom Moore whipped up Teresa's testimony in her own favor, — so as " to run her " as an angelic woman against the unrelenting Lady Byron. Another witness to the same point was Byron himself. Sitting at the stern of the " Hercules," when they were mak- ing their slow passage from Leghorn to Cephalonia, Byron said to Trelawny, " Tlie Greeks are returned to barbarism ; Mitford says the people never were anything better. Nor do I know what I am going for. / was tired of Italy, and liked Greece, and the London Committee told me I should be of use ; but of what use they did not say, nor did I see." This confession that he was tired of Italy and wanted to get out of the country, where he left Teresa and her father to go their own way, is significant of a state of feeling towards the young countess that may be called " thinly veiled estrange- ment." No doubt he had several reasons for wishing to leave the land. The mortifying and humiliating failure of the Carbonarist movement, to which he had committed him- self so openly, was one cause of his distaste for the country, where he had so often declared his purpose of spending the 438 THE REAL LORD BYRON. remainder of his days. Eemorse for his Yenetian depravity ■was another cause of the distaste. Italy was mournfully associated with the sorrow that came to him from the death of his natural daughter, whose interment in England was a pathetic revelation of her father's affection for the country of his birth and the scenes of his boyhood. At the same time he disliked Italy as the scene of his recent literary humilia- tion, which he would not have been so desirous of shifting from himself to his coadjutor had it not touched his pride acutely. Moreover, his relations with Hunt, on which he cannot have reflected with complacence, and the feeling of sorrow and repugnance with which he recalled the circum- stances of Shelley's death and cremation, quickened his wish to escape from a land in which he had sinned and suffered much. But the strongest of all his motives for clearing out of Italy was his desire to get away from Teresa Guiccioli, and to be quit of an alliance which he had never meant to be anything more than a temporary arrangement, and which, now that the countess irked and bored and fretted him, was nothing better than a vexatious and unendurable entangle- ment. The Countess Guiccioli persuaded Moore to believe, or at least persuaded him to represent, that Byron left her in .Italy because the unsettled state of Greece rendered it an unsuitable country for her to reside in. Probably this was the poet's pre- text for requiring her to remain in her native land, whilst he followed his fate in scenes dear to him from early manhood. But there is often a wide difference between the real reason and fair pretext for a decision. The unsettled state of South America did not preclude him from meaning to take her thither in his company, when he was in a better humor with her and was meditating an expedition without any purpose, that would be defeated by her presence at his side. Though there was war in Greece, whither he had no intention of going directly from Genoa, tranquillity reigned in the Ionian Islands, where he meant to linger and loiter, whilst gleaning sure and sufficient information about the men and parties engaged in the struggle for emancipation ; and had not his passion for the Italian lady completely burnt itself out, she GENOA. 439 would have been permitted to accompany him to the Islands, - — would have partaken of the festivities at Argostoli, joined in the excursion to Ithaca, and shared the poet's cottage at Metaxata. In that case, instead of making the voyage from Genoa to Cephalonia in the lumbering " Hercules," that had no accommodation for a lady, Byron would have sailed thither in the " Bolivar " — the yacht that had been buHt for him, dur- ing his stay at Pisa, when he was playing with a project for an expedition to Bolivar's country, with Teresa for his fellow- voyager. In Grecian waters, where he would sail within view from the windows of London drawing-rooms, — where liis movements would be reported in every English news- paper — where he wished to figure in the way that might dispose Lady Byron to send him the miniature he had so recently solicited, nothing was further from Byron's purpose than to have the notorious Teresa hanging on his arm in every port at which he might touch. Truth to tell, she would have been a more embarrassing feUow-voyager in the Ionian Islands where the wives of English residents would probably have decMned to receive her, than in Greece, where the main difficulty would have been to find her a safe and comfortable asylum. In selling the "Bolivar" to Lord Blessington for a song (of four hundred guineas), and deter- mining to make the voyage to the Islands in the "Hercules," with his horses and freight of arms and munitions, Byron's main object was probably to put an end to the harassing en- treaties of the lady whom he was determined to leave behind him. Writing during the Marquise de Boissy's life, after speak- ing contemptuously but none too lightly of the lady's " Recollections of Lord Byron," Dr. Elze recommended her " to take steps for the publication of Byron's correspondence with herself, and of the letters of her brother Pietro written while he was in Greece." It can scarcely be doubted that the correspondence would have been published before this advice was given, had tlie correspondence been calculated to sustain the lady's flattering view of her relation and services to the poet, who lived long enough to make her see his pur- pose of throwing her over, even as he had dismissed Claire. 440 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Moreover, though Moore avers (on the lady's authority) that Byron wrote " frequently but briefly " to Teresa after leaving Italy, there are grounds for a strong opinion that the letters were more brief than frequent. That they were cold and unloverlike epistles may be inferred from the extracts from three of them, printed in Moore's " Life" ; for, of course, Madame Guiccioli gave the biographer the passages that were most eloquent of the writer's devotion to the receiver of the epistles. Here are the three specimens of the way in which Byron wrote from Cephalonia to the lady who (accord- ing to Moore) was the only woman he ever really loved, with the single exception of Mary Chaworth : — (1) October 7 [1823]. Pietro has told you all the gossip of the island, — our earthquakes, our politics, and present abode in a pretty village. As his opinions and mine on the Greeks are nearly similar, I need say little on that subject. I was a fool to come here ; but, being here, I must see what is to be done. What a contrast between these frigid lines and the efiu- sions Byron used to send his Teresa from Venice ! If it be pleaded that the poet had his hands full of momentous affairs, when he deputed Pietro Gamba to give his sister " the gossip of the island," let it be remembered how Napoleon, during the fierce agitations and innumerable distractions of his cam- paigns, wrote the tenderest of love-letters to Josephine. Moreover, let it be borne in mind that, instead of thinking him engrossed by affairs, the Marquise de Boissy thought Byron had leisure for writing successive cantos of " Don Juan " and copious additions to the " Memoirs," during liis residence in Cephalonia. (2) October — [1823]. We are still in Cephalonia, waiting for news of a more accurate de- scription ; for all is contradiction and division in the reports of the state of the Greeks. I shall fulfil the object of my mission from the Committee, and then return into Italy ; for it does not seem likely that, as an individual, I can be of use to them ; — at least no other foreigner has yet appeared to be so, nor does it seem likely that any will be at present. Pray be as cheerful and tranquil as you can ; and be assured that there is nothing here that can excite anything but a wish to be with you again, — though we are very kindly treated by the English here of all descriptions. Of the Greeks, I can't say much good hitherto, and I do not like to speak ill of them, though they do so of one another. GENOA. 441 Again what a contrast to the letters he wrote her in the summer and autumn of 1819 ! Instead of hungering and thirsting for her presence and the music of her voice, he can- not even say unequivocally that he wishes to be with her again. All he can aver in that direction is that he has seen no woman in Cephalonia capable of inspiring him with any other wish, — no woman of whom Teresa should be jealous. (3) October 29 [1823]. You may be sure the moment I can join you again will be as welcome to me as at any period of our recollection. There is nothing very attrac- tive here to divide my attention ; but I must attend to the Greek cause, both from lionor and inclination. Messrs. B and T are both in the Morea, where they have been very well received, and both of them write in good spirits and hopes. I am anxious to hear how the Spanish cause will be arranged, as I think it may have an influence on the Greek contest. I wish that both were fairly and favorably settled, that I might return to Italy, and talk over with you our, or, rather, Pietro's adventures, some of which are rather amusing, as also some of the incidents of our voyages and travels. But I reserve them, in the hope that we may laugh over them together at no very distant period. Something less frigid ! But what lukewarmth for the sensitive, ardent, impetuous Byron, when writing to the only woman he ever really loved, with the single exception of Mary Chaworth ! The moment of their reunion will be as welcome to him as any moment of their liaison ; there is no beauty, amongst the beUes of the island, "to divide his atten- tion " ; and he anticipates joining with Teresa in laughing over her brother's adventures ! But he does not trouble him- self to describe any of these adventures, for the mitigation of her melancholy, during her lord's absence. With what a heavy heart must Teresa have put away these cold and un- feeling notes (after wetting them with her tears) by the side of the epistles he wrote her, in the days when he loved her — after a fashion ! The notes were all the colder to her be- cause they were not written in her native Italian (the lan- guage of which he had so perfect a mastery), but in his native English of which she knew so little that she could not get at the purport of the brief letters without the help of a dictionary. It is curiously indicative of Byron's purpose to Teresa that he thus wrote to her in English from Cephalonia. 442 THE REAL LOED BYRON. Never before (with a single exception) had he written to her in English. In her absence from the city, whilst dallying with his passion at Bologna, he wrote the memorable love-letter (on the fly-leaf of one of her favorite books) — in English, so that she might not understand a word of it. In Cephalonia, whilst soothing his conscience by writing her a few civil and faintly amatory sentences, he again wrote to her in English, — so that the little love of the epistles should waste by translation and fade almost to nothing, ere her mind could apprehend it. At the same time, for his own comfort or Pietro Gamba's contentment, Byron used now and then to put a few words (whether they were English or Italian, does not appear) into the letters which Teresa received from her fifFoctionate brother, who seems to have done his best to keep liis sister in Byron's memory. Whilst he was in familiar intercourse with the Blessingtons at Genoa, Byron was in correspondence with the Committee that had been formed in London to aid the Greeks in their cfForts for the emancipation of their country. By a letter, dated from London on the 14th of March, 1823, though from some postal delay it did not come to his hands tUl the twentieth of the ensuing May, Byron was told that he had been elected a member of the London Greek Committee, ■whose agent (Mr., Captain, or General Blaqui6re as he is diversely styled in private letters and published literature) waa on his way to Greece (for the purpose of gathering information respecting the affairs of the country) , with in- struction to touch at Genoa, in order to confer with the poet. On April 5, 1823, just five days after making the acquaint- ance of Lord and Lady Blessington, Byron wrote to Bla- quiere, inviting him to Casa Saluzzi in the following terms : — Albaro, April 5, 1823. Bear Sis, — I shall be delighted to see you and your Greek friend, and the sooner the better. I hare been expecting you for some time, — you will find me at home. I cannot express to you how much I feel inter- ested in the cause, and nothing but the hopes I entertained of witnessing the liberation of Italy itself prevented me long ago from returning to do what little I could, as an individual, in that land which it is an honor even to have visited. Ever yours truly, Noel Btron. GENOA. 443 On the twelfth of the following month, after being for six weeks in possession of the intelligence of the London Committee's letter that came to his hands on the twentieth of May, Byron wrote the letter published in Moore's "Life," beginning with Genoa, May 12, 1823. Sir : — I have great pleasure in acknowledging your letter, and the honor which the Committee have done me. I shall endeavor to deserve their confidence by every means in my power. My first wish is to go up into the Levant in person, wiierel might be enabled to advance, if notthe cause, at least the means, of obtaining information which the Committee might be desirous of acting upon ; and my former residence in the country, my familiarity with the Italian language (which is there universally spoken, or at least to the same extent as French in the more polished parts of the Continent) , and my not total ignorance of the Romaic, would afford me some advantages of experience. To this project the only ob- jection is of a domestic nature, and I shall try to get over it ; — if I fail in this, I must do what I can where I am ; but it will be always a source of regret to me to think that I might perhaps have done more for the cause on the spot. Whilst they aiFord a precise statement of the service he felt himself capable of rendering the Committee, these words are 'also especially interesting for the indication that Teresa Guiccioli (the only person in a position to make " the only objection of a domestic nature") was using all her failing influence to withhold the poet from an honorable enterprise. Referring again to the possibility that this influence would prevent him from going to Greece, and at the same time indicating the magnitude of the pecuniary aid he was pre- pared to render the cause, in case he should overcome the domestic obstacle, Byron wrote in the same long letter, " The principal material wanted by the Greeks appears to be, first, a park of field artillery — light and fit for mountain service ; secondly, gunpowder ; thirdly, hospital or medical stores. The readiest mode of transmission is, I hear, by Idra, ad- dressed to Mr. Negri, the minister. I meant to send up a certain quantity of the two latter — no great deal — but enough for an individual to show hia good wishes for the Greek success, — but ana pausing, because, in case I should go myself, I can take them with me. I do not want to limit WY awn contribution to this merely, but more 444 THE EEAL LOED BYEON. especially, if I can get to Greece, myself, I should devote whatever resources I can muster of my own, to advancing the great object." On the 7th of July, 1823, the poet (turned " man of action") wrote to Mr. Bowring, "We sail on the 12th for Greece. I have had a letter from Mr. Blaquiere, too long for present transcription, but very satisfactory. The Greek Gov- ernment expects me without delay. In conformity to the desires of Mr. B. and other correspondents in Greece, I have to suggest, with all deference to the Committee, that a re- mittance of even ' Ten thousand pounds orily ' (Mr. B.'s expression) would be of the greatest service to the Greek Government at present. I have also to recommend strongly the attempt of a loan, for which there will be offered a suffi- cient security by deputies now on their way to England. In the meantime, 1 hope the Committee will be enabled to do something effectual. For my own part, I mean to carry up, in cash or credits, above eight, and nearly £9,000 sterling, which I am enabled to do by funds I have in Italy, and credits in England. Of this sum I must necessarily reserve a portion for the subsistence of myself and suite : the rest I am willing to apply in the manner which seems most likely to be useful to the cause — having, of course, some guarantee or assurance, that it will not be misapplied to any individual speculation. If I remain in Greece, which will mainly depend upon the presumed probable utihty of my presence there, and of the opinion of the Greeks themselves as to its propriety ; in short, if I am welcome to them, I shall continue, during my residence at least, to apply such portions of my income, present and future, as may forward the object ; that is to say, what I can spare for that purpose. Privations I can, or at least could once, bear — abstinence I am accustomed to — and as to fatigue, I was once a tolerable traveller. What I may be now, I cannot tell — but I will try." Now that he had entered upon his share of the Wentworth revenue, Byron's income may be computed at between £6,000 and £7,000 a-year. The occasion having come for spending his hoarded money (to be computed at about £9,000or£10,000) , Byron was prepared to spen4 it in a way to redeein his honor GENOA. 445 from imputations of ignoble niggardliness ; provided he could see his way to spending it effectually fof the two ends he had in view, — the success of a cause, that had his sincere though cold approval ; and the attainment of distinction that, whilst satisfying or at least gratifying his appetite for glory, would atone to human judgment for the errors of his youth. Between the date of Blaquiere's visit to him at Albaro (April 5, 1823) and the date of this last-mentioned letter to Bowring (July 7, 1823), Byron experienced alternations of confidence and despondency, resoluteness, and vacillation. To-day hopeful of Greece and the part he should play for her emancipation, he was possessed on the morrow by gloomy anticipations for the country and dismal presentiments of disaster to himself from the enterprise. On May 26, 1823, Captain Roberts wrote from Genoa to Trelawny, " Between you and me, I think there is small chance of Byron's going to Greece ; as I think from the wavering manner in which he speaks of it; he said the other day, 'Well, captain, if we do not go to Greece, I am determined to go some- where, and hope we shall be at sea together by next month, as I am tired of this place, the shore and all the people on it." On the evening (June 1, 1823) before the Blessing- tons left Genoa, the poet was sitting on a sofa by the side of Lady Blessington in the presence of several persons, when he remarked with a voice and air of overpowering sadness, " Here we ai-e all now together — but when and where shall we meet again? I have a sort of boding that we see each other now for the last time ; as something tells me I shall never again return from Greece " ; the melancholy utterance being followed by one of those womanish fits of hysterical weeping to which he was liable in certain moods of violent agitation at every period of his life. Resting his head on an arm of the sofa, he sobbed as his tears fell like a school-girl, before he recovered enough self-command to make a jest of what he called his "nervousness." Distributing farewell gifts amongst the party — a book to one, a print of his bust by Bartolini to another — he gave Lady Blessington a pin from his breast, a gift which he recalled on the morrow, replacing it with a gold chain of Venetian manufacture. " My dear 446 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Lady Blessington," he wrote in the first paragraph of a letter that came to the lady's hands on the day of her departure from Genoa, " I am superstitious, and have recollected that memorials with a, point are of less fortunate augury ; I will, therefore, request you to accept, instead of the pin, the en- closed chain, which is of so slight a value that you need not hesitate." This passage of weakness was followed by one of comparative buoyancy and fortitude, during which he went on board several vessels with Captain Roberts, for the purpose of choosing a suitable ship for the voyage. " Byron," the captain wrote to Trelawny on June 5, 1823, "has sold the ' Bolivar ' to Lord Blessington for four hundred guineas, and is determined to go to Greece ; he says, whilst he was in doubt, fearing it might prove no reality, he did not like to bring you here ; now, he wishes much to see you to have your opinion as to what steps it will be most necessary to take." Then came the fit of vacillation that caused Mrs. Shelley so late as June 9, 1823, to write to Trelawny, "Lord Byron says, that as he has not heard from Greece, his going there ifj uncertain ; but if he does go, he is extremely desirous that you should join him." Six days later with an accession of resoluteness, Byron wrote to Trelawny, to come to him quickly, as he had at last made up his mind to go to Greece, " the only place he ever was contented in." It is noteworthy that the poet excuses himself for not writing sooner, because his indecision made him fearful of giving his friend " a journey for nothing." He adds, " They all say I can be of use in Greece. I do not know how, nor do they ; but at all events let us go." It does not appear that Byron ever thought again of draw- ing back from the collar, after bringing his shoulder up to it, in this fainthearted way. Before the 23d of June he had hired the " Hercules," the rocking, rolling, coUier-buUt tub of 120 tons, at whose manifest deficiencies Trelawny grumbled to no purpose, whilst Byron observed, smiHngly, "They say I have got her on easy terms," — a consideration that afforded no contentment to the Cornish adventurer, who was not the paymaster. Trelawny having appeared on the scene, matters moved tovf ards the end in view. Horse-boxes for five animals GENOA. 447 (Trelawny'soree, and Byron's ybw) were knocked together by the contractor, who scamped his work, to the subsequent in- convenience of the voyagers ; the arms and ammunition, with the "Bolivar's" two one-pounders and a year's supply of medicines for a thousand men, were stowed away. The horses had been shipped ; Byron's suite (as Moore grandly styles Pietro Gamba, Trelawny, Bruno, the Italian doctor, who had never seen practice, and five or six men-servants) had embarked; the poet, with his ten thousand crowns in specie and his forty thousand crowns in bills of exchange was afloat ; in short, everything but the breeze was ready for a beginning of the voyage on July 13, 1823, — at the close of which day the adventurers slept on board the "Hercules." Moore's account of Byron's departure contains some curious examples of the inaccuracy too often discoverable in personal histories. According to the biographer, Byron and his com- panions, after passing the night in their berths, cleared the port at sunrise of the 14th of July, when from want of wind they remained in sight of Genoa the whole day ; the dead calm of the previous four-and-twenty hours being followed by a night of serious danger. The moon shone full and clear, but the wind was violent and adverse. Remaining on deck during the storm, Byron, " with the aid of such of his suite as were not disabled by sea-sickness," busied himself in preserving the horses which had broken loose and injured each other. " After making head against the wind for four hours, the captain " (the biographer continues) " was at last obliged to steer back to Genoa, and reentered the port at six in the morning," when the poet, on relanding to pass the day (July 15th) on shore, "appeared thoughtful, and re- marked that he considered a bad beginning a favorable omen." The day of July 15th, spent by the carpenters in repairing the damages done to the vessel, was spent by Byron in a visit to the Casa Saluzzi, which the Countess Guiccioli had left a few hours earlier, and in a visit to " some gardens near the city," where he spoke with equal freedom and sadness to his friend Barry, the Genoese banker, — regretting that he had not decided to go to England instead of Greece, and in his hopelessness for an enterprise that had commenced so in- 448 THE KEAIi liOED BYEON. auspiciously, declaring that " nothing but a devoted sense of duty and honor prevented him from relinquishing his rash purpose at the last moment." In the evening of the same day (the 15th of July), having again set sail, Byron soon recovered his spirits and went merrily over the M^ide waters. " In the breeze," says Moore, " that now bore him towards his beloved Greece, the voice of his youth seemed again to speak. Before the titles of hero, of benefactor, to which he now aspired, that of poet, however preeminent, faded into nothing. His love of freedom, his generosity, his thirst for the new and adventurous, — all were reawakened ; and even the bodings that still lingered at the bottom of his heart but made the course before him more precious from his conscious- ness of its brevity, and from the high and self-ennobliag resolution he had now taken to turn what yet remained of it gloriously to account. Moore is comically wrong in most of the statements of this bit of melodramatic story. Byron did not spend the 14th of July in the offing, within sight of Genoa, but spent the day on shore. He did not pass the night of the 14th at sea, but either in bed on shore or in a motionless berth in harbor. He did not distinguish lumself by activity in a storm off Genoa ; the " Hercules " was not damaged by a storm ; — there was no storm to injure the vessel, or afford the poet an occasion for displaying his intre- pidity in danger, and the singular steadiness of his lame feet on a rocking deck. Instead of relanding at six A.M. on the 15th of July he was just then towed out of port by American boats. Instead of spending the 15th of July at the Casa Saluzzi and " some gardens near the city " he spent it at sea. Instead of relanding once only, he returned to shore twice, after sleeping on board the " Hercules." Dissatisfied in this matter with the personal historian, to whose imagination she was indebted for so many of her facts, to whose pages she was indebted for nine-tenths'of her anec- dotes about Byron, the Marquise de Boissy heightens the dramatic interest and multiplies the romantic incidents of Moore's sufficiently sensational account of the poet's departure from Genoa. Not content with a single imaginary storm,- the lady insists there were two on successive nights. " It is GENOA. 449 also known how," the says (ujc?e"MyEecollections," Vol. II., pp. 34, 35), "being driven bark into port by a storm, he resolved on visiting the palace of Albaro ; and it may well be imagined that the hours passed in this dwelling, then silent and deserted, must have seemed like those that count as years of anguish in the hfe of great and feehng souls, among whom visions of the future float before the over-excited mind . The night which followed tliis gloomy day again saw Lord Byron struggling against stormy waves, and not only determined on pursuing his voyage, but also on appearing calm and serene to his fellow-traveller." On page 03, of the same volume, the storm that " drove " rises to the " tempest that cast him back." " When hardly out of port from Genoa," says the aged Teresa, " a tempest cast him back. He landed, and resolved on visiting the abode he had left in such anguish the day before. While climbing the hiU of Albaro the darkest presentiment took possession of his soul. ' Where shall we be this day next year ? ' said he to Count Gamba, who was walldng by his side." The simple facts of the departure are these. The horses having been shipped and all the freight of the " Hercules " put on board by the evening of the 13th of July, Byron (with his " suite," i.e. , Pietro Gamba, the unfledged medical student Bruno, Fletcher the valet, Lega the secretary, and tliree or four stablemen) and Trelawny (with his "suite" of a single negro) slept on board, after going to their berths with the hope that at daybreak they would be starting for Leghorn. On the morning of the 14th, there being no breath of wind to move the lumbering ship onwards, the poet and his party went on shore for the day. Weighing anchor at daylight on the 15th, the " Hercules , " with the full complement of adventurers , was towed out of the bay by boats sent, in complaisance to the poet, by American ships to render him that service. The calm continu- ing the " Hercules " lay all day in the offing " like a log upon the main under the broiling sun, the Italians skipping about, gesticulating and chattering like wild monkeys in a wood," whilst (vide Trelawny 's capital book) "the pilgrim sat apart, solemn and sad," taking no notice of any one or anything. Freshening towards midnight, the sea-breeze tumbled the 450 THE REAL LORD BYRON. waters, and rose so much that it was necessary to shorten sail, when the no longer nimble and vociferous Italians had crept off to their holes and corners to enjoy the sickness of the occasion. At this crisis the horses, ill-secured and fright- ened by the vessel's motion, kicked down the flimsy partitions, and would probably have lashed out with their heels at one another, had not Trelawny and his "suite" (the negro) looked after the animals. The poet — with tottering legs on terra firma, and no legs at all on a rocking deck — could, of course, only thank Trelawny for the timely service in which he could not share. "We must bear up for port or we shall lose our cattle ! " said the Cornish gentleman, who in no proper sense of the word was one of his friend's "suite." "Do as you like," was Byron's answer, — the four monosyllables being the whole of his contribution to the measure for abating a diflSculty that might have resulted in harm to the horses, but never for an instant put the ship in danger. The "Hercules" sustained no damage from the gale, which only raised Tre- lawny's spirits ; and had it not been for the necessity of re- constructing the horse-boxes, the ship would have gone onwards to Leghorn. Having enjoyed his laughter at the doleful appearance of those of his land-lubbers, who had made the most of the opportunity for turning sick, Byron, after reentering harbor, went on shore for the second time, whilst the helpful Trelawny went to work with two or three English carpenters, and in a few hours put up sufficient boxes. "In the evening" (of July 16th), says Trelawny, "we took a fresh departure, and, the weather continuing fine, we had no other delay than that which arose from the bad sailing qualities of our vessel." So much for Moore's "storm" and Teresa's "tempest." Moore calls attention to the fact ( ?) that, notwithstanding his superstitious dislike of Friday as an unlucky day, the poet, who would not make a first call upon a new acquaint- ance on Friday, for fear of the consequences, and from the same motive returned upon the hands of a Genoese tailor the coat which the tradesman delivered on the inauspicious day, set sail for Greece on a Friday. As he was in error respect- ing the day of the month, possibly Moore was also mistaken GENOA. 451 respecting the particular day of the week on which the " Her- cules " eventually began her voyage to Greek waters. Any- how, folk-lore was so far discredited by the event that the biographer might as well have been silent about the matter. Whatever the day of its commencement, the voyage of the " Hercules " (to Cephalonia) , though tedious, was fairly fortunate. Making some twenty mUes in the twenty-four hours, the torpid craft came in five days to Leghorn, where Mr. Hamil- ton Browne and two Greeks (suspected of being spies) joined the party, whilst the vessel was taking in gunpowder and English goods. Clearing out of Leghorn on the 24th — the day on which Byron received the verses from Goethe and wrote the German poet a prompt acknowledgment of the courtesy — the " Hercules " proceeded tp the Ionian Isles by an irregular course, in order that Byron, who had never seen a volcanic mountain, might enlarge his observation of natural phenomena at Stromboli. But nature declined to satisfy the curiosity of the poet, though he lay off the island for a whole night, looking in vain towards the volcano for an emission of fire. On nearing Greek waters it was matter of debate with the principal voyagers whether they should go to Zante, where Byron expected to find Blaquiere, or to Cepha- lonia, where there was a governor favorable to the Greek cause, the question being eventually decided in accordance with the advice of Hamilton Browne, who, speaking from his knowledge of the Ionian Islands and their residents, was urgent that the "Hercules" should make for Argostoli. The choice was fortunate. At Zante the voyagers would not have met Blaquiere, who had started for England without awaiting Byron's arrival. Lying off Cephalonia, they en- joyed the sympathy of an English circle, whose members vied with one another in showing respect for the poet, and also of a governor (colonel afterwards), Sir C. J. Napier, who was disposed to further their objects to the utmost of an ability that was limited by pfficial obligations. 452 THE KEAL LOED BYEON. CHAPTER XXIV. CEPHALONIA. Leaving Leghorn (where the "Hercules" stayed for two days, taking in gunpowder and other stores) on July 24, 1823, when he was well within nine months of his death, Byron sighted Cephalonia and Zante on the second of August. Shortly after he had viewed the islands, the adventurer, pointing towards the Morea, said to Trelawny, " I don't know why it is, but I feel as if the eleven long years of bitterness I have passed through since I was here were taken off my shoulders, and I was scudding through the Greek Archipelago with old Bathurst, in his frigate." Anchoring in the roadstead for the night, the " Hercules " entered the harbor of Argostoli on the following morning. On learning that Blaquicre, without awaiting his arrival, in accordance with their arrangement and the requirements of courtesy, was on his way back to England, Byron could not conceal his vexation. " Now they have got me thus far," he exclaimed bitterly to Trelawny, in reference to the London Committee, " they think I must go on, and they care nothing as to the result. They are de- ceived. I won't budge a foot further untU I see my way ; we will stay here ; if that is objected to I will buy an island from the Greeks or Turks ; there must be plenty of them in the market." For the particulars of the voyage from Genoa to Cepha- lonia, the readers of this memoir should refer to Trelawney's "Eecords, — perhaps the most interesting and suggestive of all the numerous books about the poet. In the earlier stage of the voyage (from Genoa to Leghorn), Byron, unusually silent and serious, with a countenance in- dicative of a strenuous effort to conceal melancholy emotion, CEPHALONIA. 453 passed his time chiefly on deck at the stem of the vessel, sometimes occupied witli his own anxious thoughts, some- times reading Scott's " Life of Swift," Colonel Hippesley's "Expedition to South America," Grimm's " Correspondence," or Rochefoucauld. The fellow-voyagers messed on deck, and most of them slept on deck. At Leghorn the poet was pro- vided with more literature, — English newspapers and re- views, and the recently-published first volume of Las Cases' " Memoirs of Napoleon." After leaving Leghorn he suiFered even more visibly from dejection than in the earlier days of sailing. " It was not," says Trelawny, " until we had been some days fairly at sea, with no land to look back upon, that the Pilgrim regained something of his self- command." Suffering nothing from the motion of the vessel, that rocked and rolled in its tardy progress as though it had been " built to roll," he improved gradually in health and spirits till he could say to his most familiar comrade, "I am better now than I have been for years." Daily at noon he went overboard for a long swim, the one and favorite muscular exercise in which he could compete with his fellows on equal terms. " It was the only exercise he had, for he could not walk on deck," Trelawny says of the man who was described by the most imaginative of his historians as running about on board and tackling unruly horses during a. violent gale. Every day he played with his pistols, firing at empty bottles and live poultry (notwithstanding his old vow never again to shoot a bird). Once and again, he and Trelawny, and the brig's captain, whiled away the time with ghost stories and superstitious tales of strange presentiments. There were times of elation when he laughed heartily, and perpetrated practical jokes that made the sailors roar with glee till their sides cracked. For instance, whilst the big-bellied captain was taking his mid-day nap, Byron got possession of the seaman's bright scarlet waistcoat, and induced Trelawny to join him in trying whether the gorgeous piece of raiment could not be made to hold both of them at the same time. "Now," he cried with a school-boy's boisterous hilarity, " put your arm in, Tre, and we will jump overboard and take the 454 THE EEAL LORD BYBON. shine out of it." Coming on deck in time to see his splendid garment thus dishonored by the " Siamese swim- mers," to the riotous dehght of the shouting crew, Captain Scott (given to talk of his freight as "frite") exclaimed passionately, "My lord, you should know better than to make a mutiny on board ship. I won't heave to, or lower a boat. I hope you'll both be drowned." To which threat Byron cried out from the water, "Then you'll lose your frite !" — a reminder that doubtless made the captain of the " Hercules " more careful for his freight than his waistcoat. But such exhibitions of gayety were the occasional breaks of sunshine in a gloomy April. Even in these passages of joyousness the poet was likely at any in- stant to drop away to despondency and the weakness of womanish grief. " I often saw Lord Byron during his last voyage from Genoa to Greece," Hamilton Browne wrote to Colonel Stanhope, " in the midst of the greatest gayety sud- denly become pensive, and his eyes fill with tears, doubtless from some painful remembrance. On these occasions he generally got up and retired to the solitude of his cabin." During these last months of his existence, Byron's eyes often revealed the sorrow that combined with bodily sickness to kUl him. Even as Hamilton Browne saw him weep on board the "Hercules," Colonel Stanhope .(afterwards Lord Harrington) often saw Byron at Missolonghi pass in a moment from the gayety of light speech to the tears of untold misery. But alike in gloom and gladness, in his meditative moods and Ills fits of dejection, Byron was yemarkable throughout the voyage for the qualities that commend a traveller to the kindly regard of his associates. " I never," Trelawny says emphatically, "was on shipboard with a better companion than Byron ; he was generally cheerful, gave no trouble, assumed no authority, uttered no complaints, and did not interfere with the working of the ship ; when appealed to he always answered, 'Do as you hke.'" Though a chief, if not the main, purpose of his expedition to Greece was to show the world that he could do better things than make verses, there were occasions of the passage from Leghorn to Argostoli when, notwithstanding his CEPHALONIA. 455 avowals that he had done with literature, and his petulant expressions of dislike to being reminded of his literary celeb- rity, he spoke as though he would return to writing when he had done fighting. When he broke down, like a school-boy set an impossible task, in his endeavor to "perpetuate his verses on Tyranny," at Trelawny's request, as they were shpping past the dungeons of Lonza, he observed, " Give me time, — I can't forget the theme ; but for this Greek busi- ness I should have been at Naples, writing a fifth canto of " Childe Harold," expressly to give vent to my detestation of the Austrian tyranny in Italy." Subsequently he acted on Trelawny's suggestion that he should write a war-song for the Greeks ; — producing the lost song that was seen after his death amongst his papers at Missolonghi by Trelawny, who made his lost copy of the verses at the same time when he made his published copy of the poet's last (unfinished) let- ter to his sister. After lying all night off Stromboli, watch- ing for the fire which declined to show itself, the poet said to the same companion, "If I live another year, you will see this scene in a fifth canto of " Childe Harold." And weeks later, when Trelawny started from Cephalonia for the Morea, Byron's parting words to him were, " Let me hear from you often, — come back soon. If things are farcical, they will do for " Don Juan " ; if heroical, you shall have another canto of " Childe Harold." But of all Byron's talk at sea about his literary doings the most noteworthy utterances were those that relate to what may be termed the egotistic mystification of his personal story, that are so peculiar a feature of his writings ; — more especially the utterances that relate to the "Dream" and the poems to " Thyrza." " People say," he observed to Tre- lawny, " that I have told my own story in my writings. I defy them to point out a single act of my life by my poems, or even of my thoughts, for I seldom write what I think." Of the " Dream," he said, " There is some truth as to detail in the ' Dream,' and in some of my shorter poems. That there is much untruth as to the detail and main facts of the " Dream " has been already shown in these pages. Eespect- ing the poems to " Thyrza," he said, " When I first left Eng- land I was gloomy. I said so in my first canto of ' Childe 456 THE REAL LOKD BYEON. Harold.' I was then really in love with a cousin " [" Thyrza,'* Trelawny remarks parenthetically, " he was very chary of her name "], "and she was in a decline." On examining them with reference to what has been said about Thyrza in a former chapter, the reader will observe that, though they obscured the precise facts to Trelawny and were probably intended to mystify them and him, these words were con- sistent with the truth. In leaving England for the first time, Byron was in love with Margaret Parker in the manner set forth in that chapter. Margaret Parker, dead for years be- fore the poet's first departure from England, was in a decline even to her death, — and to the poet's fancy was in decline, long after she was resting in the grave. The Greek Expe- dition was fruitful of three interesting confessions for Byronic biographers; (1) the poet's confession that Thyrza was a cousin who died of consumption ; (2) his avowal that the " Dream " was truthful only in some of its details ; and (3) his admission, made in Cephalonia, that he knew the reasons of his wife's resolve to part from him, — the reasons that were too simple to be readily discovered. Byron's German biographer, Karl Elze, calls it " a painful and undeniable truth," that the poet's "taking part in the work of the liberation of Greece did not so much arise from enthusiasm, or from a lofty impulse for liberty, or from a deeply-rooted sympathy with the sufferings of the Greek people, still less from self-sacrificing courage, as from personal and by no means ideal feelings." As he had come to the middle of his thirty-sixth year before sailing from Genoa, and had led a life peculiarly calculated to exhaust the generous sympathies, it would have been strange had the poet embarked for Greece in obedience to sentiments that are sel- dom strongly operative in men who have survived the illusions and romantic hopefulness of youth. Instead of lamenting the absence of feelings, not to be looked for in a battered and embittered worldling of middle age and broken health, the biographer should rather have extolled the bravery that animated such a man to engage in an enterprise requiring all the energies of his earlier and undiminished vigor. Other things might be urged to his credit respecting the frame of CEPHALONIA. 457 mind in which he started for Greece, and of his objects in an expedition so unsuited to his failing energies. Though recollections of former felicity caused him to regard Greece with a peculiar fondness, he had little liking and no respect for the people. "I am of St. Paul's opinion," he said, " that there is no difference between the Jews and Greeks, tlie character of both being equally vile." But though he regarded the Greeks thus disdainfully, their cause had his sincere approval ; and whilst he nursed a far from sanguine hope for the cause, he believed that its triumph would in course of time have beneficial consequences in the condition and character of the people. In the contemplation of these consequences, there were moments when he could rise superior to selfish aims, and exclaim with sincerity, "• What signifies Self, if a single spark of that which would be worthy of the past can be bequeathed unquenchedly to the future." In bare justice to a man whose conspicuous fail- ings were associated with conspicuous virtues, it must be ad- mitted that no prospect of individual aggrandizement could ever have induced Byron to join in any battle which he believed to be a battle for the wrong, — or in any battle which he did not conscientiously think a battle for the right. Grateful to the land that had inspired his genius at man- hood's threshold and made him famous, he wished to repay the debt he owed to her story and natural loveliness by being of service to her degenerate people. At the same time he was moved by a desire for the glory that would purge his fame of the stains put upon it by evil behavior, and would be accepted in England as a perfect atonement for all he had ever done to her displeasure. " Like all men educated as he had been," says the well-informed writer (Bo wring) of the article on "Lord Byron in Greece," that appeared in the " Westminster Review " soon after the poet's death, " Lord Byron too often probably obeyed the dictates of impulse, and threw up the reins to passion which he had never been taught the necessity of governing ; but the world are under a grievous mistake if they fancy that Lord Byron embarked for Greece with the ignorant ardor of a school-boy, or the flighty fanaticism of a Crusader. It appeared to him that there 458 THE BEAL LORD BYKON. was a good chance of his being useful in a country which he loved — a field of honorable distinction was open to him, and, doubtless, he expected to derive no mean gratification from witnessing so singular and instructive a spectacle as the emancipation of Greece." It follows that, in respect to the motives which actuated him towards Greece, Byron is less comparable with those few and sublime liberators whose services to the victims of oppression proceeded from enthu- siastic and absolutely disinterested devotion to Freedom, than with those royal pretenders who, in fighting for a crown, have been animated by selfish as well as philanthropic motives. There is another reason for rating him with the noble candi- dates for dynastic eminence, rather than with the sublimely unselfish liberators to whom he was likened by his fervid eulogists in the times following closely on his death. For if he did not embark at Genoa with a hope that the expedition, on which he started with scanty information and indefinite views, would make him the sovereign of Free Greece, it is certain that either during the passage from Leghorn to Cephalonia, or at the latest soon after his arrival at Argostoli, the hope had a place in his view of the possible consequences of the revolution. Reference has been already made to the two Greeks who joined the party on board the " Hercules " at Leghorn — Prince Shilizzi, suspected of being a Eussian spy, and Captain Vitaili, of whom it was rumored that he was a spy in the service of the Porte. On learning the rumors respecting his guests for the passage to the Ionian Islands, Byron remarked lightly, "And a fair sample too of the ancient as well as the modern, if Mitford is to be believed." By these two Greeks, whose dubious fame caused him so little concern, Byron was assured that most of the Greeks favored monarchical government ; and it is probable that the poet was indebted to their wUy lips for his first pleasant fancy that the people, so wishful for a king, might invite him to be their sovereign, — that he might exchange his coronet for a crown, and through Ada become the founder of a line of kings. Once oflFered to his mind, the flattering thought would not fail to fascinate his imagina- tion, and be fruitful of pleasant and even intoxicating antici- CEPHALONIA. 459 pations. At Cephalonia he was also assured that the Greeks needed and wished for a king, whose influence would unite the chiefs, and give solidarity to a nation made up of tribes, that, ever at fierce feud amongst themselves, had no common sentiment but vindictive hatred of the Turk. " If they make me the offer," Byron observed lightly to Trelawny, either during or soon after the voyage from Leghorn, " I may not refuse it. I shall take care of my own ' sma' peculiar ' ; for if it don't suit my humor, I shall, like Sancho, resign." Believing that Byron relished the suggestion, Trelawny also held a strong opinion that, had it not been for his death, the poet would have been invited to the throne of Greece. "Byron," says the author of the "Records," "several times alluded to this in a bantering vein ; it left an impression on his mind. Had he lived to reach the congress of Salona as commissioner of the loan, the dispenser of a million silver crowns would have been offered a golden one." There is no evidence how far Byron surrendered himself to a dream so certain to gratify his pride, and delight his romantic spirit. Still less is there evidence that he deUber- ately entertained a purpose of making himself King of Greece. But whilst it cannot be doubted that Trelawny had reasonable groimds for his strong opinion on the matter, few persons will question that had the offer been made it would have been accepted. Most persons will hold it more than probable that, though he might not have died a king, the poet would, at least for a brief hour, have borne the regal title and moved in kingly state had he lived for another year. Byron's temper, his long-cherished ambition to astound the world by adventurous achievement outside literature, and the course of events in Greece, countenance this view of what was at least a possibility. It is significant to the mat- ter that, in allying himself so closely with Prince Mavro- cordatos, the poet associated himself with the chief who was most influential with those of the Greeks who were favorably disposed to monarchy, and at the same time desired to have a foreigner for their king. It is (to use Dr. Elze's words) more than probable that conferences of a confidential charac- ter were held oa this subject at Missolonghi. There is 460 THE KEAL LOED BYEON. nothing incredible in the statement (made by the author of "Parry's Last Days of Lord Byron") that the poet, with characteristic inability to keep his hopes altogether in his own breast and to guard aU the secret purpose of his friends from discovery or at least from suspicion, ejaculated in an in- cautious moment to the whilom ship's carpenter, " I have had offers that would surprise you, were I to teU you of them, and which would turn the head of any man less satiated than I am, and more desirous of possessing power than of conti-ibut- ing to freedom and happiness." The writer of the book from which these words are taken, insists that these offers (necessarily made by persons with questionable authority to make them) were rejected. Of course, Byron represented himself to have rejected them, if he was so imprudent and weak as to speak of them to the nominal author of the apocryphal memoir. But no reliance can be put on the assertions of the " Last Days " — a vamped-up performance that was probably put together and published by a politician, who, after Byron's death, aimed at forcing his own views on Grecian affairs into consideration by the aid of the poet's reputation. Originally a ship's carpenter, afterwards a fire- man at the Woolwich Arsenal, subsequently a captain of Mavrocordatos' creation, a few days later a major by virtue of his own impudence, never a man of even the slightest education, and towards the close of his by no means credit- able career an insatiable brandy-drinker, WUHam Parry — a curious and rather piquant combination of impostor, buffoon, and sot — was incapable of writing the spurious book, for which he furnished some of the materials besides the name that figures on its title-page. Byron was as good as the petulant words that escaped his lips on hearing that Blaquiere had gone for England instead of remaining, as he should have done, to give him the latest intelligence and fullest possible information of affairs in the Morea. " I won't budge a foot farther until I see my way ! " was the exclamation of the adventurer, who had learned the necessity for caution and precise knowledge of facts in revo- lutionary enterprise, from the miscarriage of Italian Carbo- narism. The words were spoken in pique, but he acted on OEPHALOXIA. 461 them stubbornly. Till he saw what to do, he would do nothing but gather intelligence and study the position by means of the emissaries of rival parties and chiefs, who would not fail to flock to him, as soon as it was known that he was at Argostoli with a cargo of arms and gunpowder, and chests full of specie. Ready to play with a heavy stake, he was deter- mined not to place his money, without first studying the table and observing the ways of the game. And notwithstanding all that has been urged or suggested to the contrary, his re- solve was a wise one alike for Greece and himself. For the moment, knowledge was what he needed. Moving without it he might commit himself to the faction that he ought to be most careful to avoid, and instead of bringing the eastern and western tribes into united action might set them by the ears. Having left Genoa, knowing no more of Greece and her affairs than was known to the members of the London Committee, — that is to say, knowing hardly anything about them, — he had arrived at the Islands with only the slightest information of the men and forces with whom he hoped to cooperate. Cephalonia would be a good place of observa- tion. It would also be a fit station for negotiating with the Greek government, to whom he had no intention of render- ing assistance until it should be asked for. In Italy he offered his sword to the Neapolitan government ; in Greece he would not draw his sword till the govern- ment had entreated him to do so. Arriving at Argos- toli on the 3d of August, 1823, he remained in Cepha- lonia tni the 28th of December — a period that wanted only six days of five calendar months ; the first five or six weeks of the term being spent chiefly on board the " Her- cules " by the adventurer, who, crossing the harbor every afternoon to the rock from which he took his daily leap into the sea, went on shore every evening for horse exercise. On exchanging his narrow home on the water for roomier quarters on shore, Byron, stUl declining Colonel Napier's offer of entertainment at the Eesidency, established himself in a house at Metaxata, a pleasant and picturesque vUlage, some four or five miles distant from Argostoli. Despatching messengers to Corfu and Missolonghi for 462 THE EEAIi LORD BTKON. information soon after his arrival at Argostoli, Byron de- termined to pass some of the time that must elapse before the return of the agents in an excursion to the island of Ithaca. Made in the company of Trelawny, Hamilton Browne, Pietro Gamba, little Dr. Bruno, together with one or two new acquaintances picked up at Cephalonia, and a few pleasure-seekers, who were permitted to join the party in Ithaca, this excursion of eight days, through the loveliest scenery and some of the most interesting haunts of the island, was fruitful of one or two incidents that indicate the variableness of Byron's freakish temper and the violence that often distinguished his demeanor at moments of trivial annoyance or severe bodily discomfit. " Received," accord- ing to Trelawny, " as if he had been a prince," Byron was delighted with the treatment accorded him by the principal inhabitants of the island, and, throwing himself with boyish hilarity into the diversions of the progress, drank and feasted at the successive banquets provided for the tourists as though he had neither fear nor knowledge of the tortures of dys- pepsia. This imprudence had, of course, the usual conse- quences on the man of irritable temper and feeble digestion. After several exhibitions of petulance, he indulged in a furious fit of rage at an incident that should only have caused him amusement, and endured on the last night of the excursion one of those excruciating paroxysms of stomachic cramp that, in his later years, used to make him scream and swear like a maniac. On being invited to inspect some of the localities of the island, such as Homer's School and the stronghold of Ulysses, that are especially interesting to antiquaries, he ejaculated, pettishly, to Trelawny, "Do I look like one of those emasculated fogies ? Let's have a swim. I detest antiquarian twaddle. Do people think I have no lucid intervals? that I came to Greece to squibble mere nonsense ? I wUl show them that I can do something better. I wish I had never written a line, to have it cast in my teeth at every turn." Later in the same day, when he had taken a long swim and thoroughly fatigued himself with exertion, he fell asleep in the cave where Ulysses is said to have deposited the presents of the Pheacians, and remained there OEPHALONIA. 463 whilst Pietro Gamba climbed to the ruins of the hero's castle, an ascent which the poet was precluded by his lameness from making. "I awoke him," the Count Pietro says, mildly, " on my return, and he said that I had interrupted dreams more pleasant than ever he had before in his life." The poet's regret for the disturbance was, however, couched in terms less courteous than vehement. "Gamba," says Trelawny, "having nothing to do, hunted him out, and awakened him from a pleasant dream, for which the poet cursed him." After leaving Vathi, where he ate and drank of indigesti- ble things more than would have been for his good had the fare been fit for his squeamish and weak stomach, he chmbed (in the saddle) , with the rest of his party on foot, to the summit of the hill of Athos, to sleep at a monastery, where he was received with abundant hospitalitj' and extravagant adulation by the chief of the religious brethren, whom Tre- lawny styles "the Abbot." Having conducted his chief guest to the great hall (illuminated for the occasion), where the poet was thronged by curious monks, whilst boys in ecclesi- astical costume swung censers of burning frankincense under his nose, this dignitary of the Church, after performing divers ceremonies, was reading from a paper scroll an address of fulsome flattery to the "Lordo Inglese," when, to the con- sternation of the EngUsh spectators, no less than to the amazement of the orator in sacerdotal vestments, the lordo, to whose glory so many extravagant things were being uttered, flew into a tempestuous rage, cursed the abbot in vigorous Italian, and then seizing a lamp rushed with it from the chamber of the audience, exclaiming to his astonished fellow-tourists, " WiU no one release me from the presence of these pestilential idiots ? They drive me mad ! " This out- break was doubtless due to the attack of indigestion that, provoked by the poet's recent indiscretions in diet, had been coming upon him for some hours. From the loose notes of the two slightly discordant and obscure eye-witnesses and historians of the evening's proceedings it appears that before the poet went to sleep that night he was driven so wild by stomachic agony as to tear his clothes and hurl oaths and 464 THE EEAL LOED BTEON. furnitiu'e at those who ventured to approach him with offers of assistance. In his torture Byron filled the house of re- ligion with riot and alarm. Driving poor little Dr. Bruno from his presence with volleys of fierce and untranslatable execrations, the victim of acute dyspepsia barricaded his chamber with chairs and a table, so that he might yell and suffer in solitude. A council was held on what should be done for the patient's relief and safety. After a brief visit to the scene of noise and disorder, Trelawny returned only to say he could do nothing for the sufferer, who seemed likely to wreck all the furniture of his room, and was so violent and strong in his frenzy that ten men would find it difficult to hold him. On forcing his way through the obstructions put against the inward side of the door, one of the historians of the affair (the author of the " Conversations with Lord Byron," printed as an appendix to Charles Mackay's "Medora Leigh") saw the poet, standing half undressed in a distant corner of the room, desperate and dangerous, like a hunted animal at bay. Roaring and screaming harshly, "Bah ! Out of my sight ! Fiends, can I have no peace, no re- lief from this hell? Leave me, I say" ; the sufferer seized a chair and hurled it at the intruder's head. The attack, how- ever, was less long than sharp. Volunteering to make an attempt to pacify the furious dyspeptic, Hamilton Browne, armed with two pills (one of powerful cathartic, the other of anodyne medicine), went to him, and more fortunate than Bruno and Trelawny, induced him to take the medicines. Soon Byron was sleeping tranquilly. The next day, appear- ing with a countepance expressive of sadness and concern, and with his pleasantest manner, he conciliated his com- panions by a gentle and winning demeanor, that seemed to offer them unspoken apologies for having caused them so much trouble on the previous night. Something more than twenty-four hours later, when the poet had returned to Argostoli and had passed another night on board the " Her- cules," Trelawny on entering his friend's cabin, to speak with him on urgent business, was witness of another scene, — miserably eloquent of the nervous derangement and exhaus- tion of the adventurer who had brought only the wreck of an CEPHALONIA. 465 irretrievably shattered constitution to Greece, for the accom- phshment of an undertaking that would have tried severely the energies and endurance of a robust soldier in the pleni- tude of his physical powers. Though it was near noon, Byron was sound asleep, with his pistols and Bible in their usual place on a chair, near the head of his bed. To arouse the sleeper it was necessary for Trelawny to call him by name repeatedly in a loud voice. Starting with a show of lively terror when he had been brought back to conscious- ness, and staring wildly at his visitor, Byron ejaculated, after a convulsive sigh, " I have had such a dream ! I am trembling with fear ! I am not fit to go to Greece. If you had come to strangle me I could have done nothing." — " Who could," was Trelawny's cheery answer, "against a night- mare ? The hag don't mind your pistols and Bible ! " Chafing at what he thought Byron's irresoluteness, which was in truth a policy of inaction for a definite purpose, Trelawny determined to start at once for the Morea and cross the country to Tripolitza, for the purpose of obtaining infor- mation and acting as a channel of communication between Byron and the Greek government. Partly from courtesy, but chiefly from natural reluctance to lose so congenial a companion, Byron for a short time resisted this resolve with entreaties for his friend to stay by his side, till the fit moment should arrive for them to go together to the scene of action ; but finding Trelawny bent on going his way, with Hamilton Browne for his companion, he gave them letters of introduc- tion to the Government, and on bidding them farewell was doubtless well pleased to feel that he had two emissaries working for him, whose intelligence he could receive with confidence alike in its discrimination and honesty. Soon after their departure Byron landed his stores, dismissed the " Her- cules," and, planting himself at Metaxata, remained there for more than a quarter of a year. It is not quite clear what Byron did with his time during this considerable period. Leaving readers to infer that his patron found abundant occupation in the affairs of his enterprise, Pietro Gamba remarks that "it is easier to conceive than relate the various means employed to en- 466 THE REAL LORD BYRON. gage him in one faction oj" another " ; and then after allud- ing generally to the letters and meeeengOTS with which each of the rival factions assailed the English peer, Teresa Guiccioli's brother records that Byron "occupied himself in discovering the truth, hidden as it was under these intrigues, and amused himself in confronting the agents of the different factions." It is to be regretted that the Itahan count, almost the only man capable of informing the world fully about Byron's daily life at Metaxata, has left so much to the imagination. Larger communicativeness on the part of so capable a witness would at least have rendered it easier to conceive the matters to which he refers so vaguely. Though Byron was usefully employed at the Cephalonian village and did well to defer his voyage to the mainland till he saw whither to go and what to do, — and though in respect to any private ambitions he may have cherished, he was unques- tionably prudent in making the Greeks see he was capable of remaining a year where he was, or even of returning to England without doing anything in their behalf, — it is diffi- cult to believe that he was fully and laboriously occupied in the matters indicated by Count Gamba. On the contrary, it is pretty obvious that without surrendering himself altogether to what Trelawny termed disdainfully " his old routine of dawdling habits, plotting — planning — shilly-shaUying — and doing nothing," Byron led an indolent life at Cephalonia ; albeit, Moore avers that whilst " pursuing his usual simple and uniform course of life " on the island, the poet " rose for the despatch of business at an early hour, which showed how capable he was of conquering even long habit when necessary." Had business pressed so heavily upon him as Moore repre- sents, he would scarcely have been (as the same biographer represents) accessible at all hours to such visitors as common- place officers from the Argostoli garrison and other idlers from the town. His readiness to enter into the society of the little capital indicates that, whilst pleased by the courtesy of the military and civil circles, he had abundant leisure to enjoy and repay it. If he had not sometimes wanted pastime, he would scarcely have engaged in those rather trivial contro- versies with Dr. Kennedy, the pietistic regimental doctor, on CEPHALONIA. 467 the evidences and doctrines of Christianity — disputations interesting only for their testimony that the poet was to the last a sceptic, whose wavering and superstitious mind never escaped altogether from the influence of the theology (in the Reverend William Harness' opinion, the hurtful theology) imposed upon it in his childhood. Under the circumstances it is not strange that Teresa Guiccioli (remembering his mar- vellous power of withdrawing his mind from matters of the strongest interest, and turning it to literary labor) imagined in her later time that the poet spent his leisure at Cephalonia in writing more cantos of "Don Juan" and keeping a careful diary. That he wrote no such additional cantos is known from his last and petulant letter to Tom Moore (dated from Missolonghi, March 4, 1824) , " I have not been quiet in an Ionian island, but much engaged in business, as the Greek deputies (if arrived) can tell you. Neither have I continued " Don Juan,' nor any other poem." To those who concur with Karl Elze in thinking that, instead of lingering in Cephalonia whilst he insisted that the Greeks should dismiss their dissensions, and made their union and establishment of order the conditions of his assistance, Byron " ought to have regarded it as an es- sential part of the work he had undertaken actively to cooperate in bringing about this union and order," it may be fairly contended that, for several weeks after his arrival at Axgostoli, he could not have taken a better course for drawing the rival chiefs and parties into the harmony requi- site for eflPective action, than by remaining a vigilant observer of events without either committing or appearing to commit himself to the policy of any one of the several factions. Be- tween the entreaties of Metaxa that he would hasten to the relief of Missolonghi, the entreaties of Colocotronis that he would appear at the congress of Salamis, and the entreaties of Mavrocordatos that he would come to him at Hydra, he did well to consider his position, and whilst weighing the arguments and sifting the representations of the contending claimants for his support, to reply to all of them : " Make up your differences and act for the whole country instead of a fraction of it. I have come to help no one of you as a 468 THE EEAIi LORD BYEON. partisan, but all of you as a common friend; on touching your soil I must be welcomed as the Liberator of a United People.' But though he did well to avoid precipitate inter- ference, it cannot be denied that he persisted too long in his policy of inaction, that he tarried at Metaxata when he should have been at Missolonghi, and that he insisted too severely on the immediate and total abatement of the internal dissen- sions which Mavrocordatos declared, as early as the 21st October, would disappear as soon as means could be found to pay the fleets and armies. In truth, the time came when (to use the words of the judicious writer of the "Westminster" article) he " was too sensitive on this point and attached too great importance to these dissensions." It is little to urge in Byron's behalf that the length of his stay in Cephalonia did Greece no harm, for it must be admitted that, under the urgent circumstances, his persistence in inactivity might have proved greatly injurious to the country. On the other hand, it is something to the disadvantage of his reputation that the inactivity, which might have been and only just missed being very prejudicial to Greece, was distinctly favorable to any personal ambition of which he may be suspected by enhanc- ing his influence with the Greeks, whose desire for his aid and estimate of its value naturally rose with the difficulty of getting it. If Byron saw this consequence of his inaction, and speculated upon it craftily, he doubtless persuaded himself that the gain to his influence would in the long run be a gain to the country, to which he was unquestionably desirous of rendering substantial service. Moreover, to account for the length of time that elapsed between his de- termination to go to Missolonghi and his departure from Metaxata, some allowance must be made for the habitual dilatoriness of the poet, who used to say with more of self- complaisance than shame, that if he stayed six days in a place, he required six months to get out of it. MI8SOLONGHI. 469 CHAPTER XXV. MISSOLONGm. Having hired two Ionian vessels — the slight and fast- sailing mistico, in which the poet made the voyage with six- teen thousand dollars on board ; and the heavy bombard, in which Pietro Gamba had charge of the horses, the London Committee's stores, the larger part of the poet's munitions, and eight thousand dollars — Byron sailed from Cephalonia on the 28th of December, 1823. Touching at Zante, where the poet transacted pecuniary business with Mr. BarfF, the two vessels proceeded on their voyage on the evening of the 29th, hoping to reach Missolonghi within four-and-twenty hours, the wind being favorable, the sky clear, and the air fresh without being sharp. With the exception of Byron, who was suffering from dejection, the two parties were in excellent spirits, cheering one another with patriotic songs as long as such interchange of feeling was possible, and then parting company with signals, made by firing pistols and carabines, — " To-morrow we meet at Missolonghi — to- morrow." The hope, however, was not fulfilled. There was danger on the deep for both ships. Passing within pistol-shot of a Turkish frigate, who, mistaking her for a Greek briilot, feared to fire upon her, the mistico, escaping capture to fall in with foul weather and imminent peuil of being wrecked on the Scrofes, came safe to the waters of Missolonghi on the evening of January 4, 1824, whither the slow bombard had arrived a few hours earlier, after having been captured by the Turks (of the same Turkish frigate that might so easily have captured the mistico), taken as a prize into Patras, and released under rather droll circum- stances by His Highness YussufF Pacha. On the following morning (January 5, 1824), Byron, 470 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. wearing a scarlet coat — made probably on the pattern of the general's uniform that has imparted brilliance to earlier pages of this narrative — landed at Missolonghi, to the tempestuous delight of the western chiefs, who saw in his arrival a great advantage for their province and party as well as for their country ; of the mob of ill-clothed, ill-fed, and long-unpaid soldiers who looked to the " Lordo Inglese " for a better time in respect to rations and money ; and of the populace of the dirty and unwholesome little town, relieved by the lordo 'a advent from the fear of despoliation and massacre, — from the dread of seeing their houses sacked by mutinous Greeks or seized by victorious Turks. Greeted with wild music, vehe- ment acclamations and salvos of artillery, Byron passed from the water-side through an enthusiastic multitude to the house prepared for his reception, in front of which Mavrocordatos, surrounded by a brilliant body of officers, welcomed him with all the marks of respect that would have been rendered to him had he been a prince. The demonstration of universal glad- ness and homage, — a demonstration alike effective by pictu- resqueness and enthusiasm, — could not fail to gratify the vanity and pride of the poet, who, if he had lost the freshness and hopeful fervor, retained the nervous sensibihty and emotional temperament of his earlier time. If he had sailed from Genoa without enthusiasm, he entered Misso- longhi radiant with delight and glowing with triumph. On the morrow his ceremonious levee was thronged by the chiefs of Western Greece, who rendered their homage to the Liberator of their country in a manner that may well have seemed prophetic to the poet of the coming time when they would no less cordially render homage to him as their king. If Byron played for a crown, it must be admitted that for some weeks he played it worthily — with spirit and discre- tion, energy and tact. Catching the fire of the prevalent enthusiasm, he went (to use the expression of a sympathetic and admiring witness of his behavior) soldier-mad. Sur- rounding himself with a body-guard of five hundred of Marco Botzaris' Suliotes, all of whom had fought in some, whilst several of them had fought in all, the famous chief- MISSOLONGHI. 471 tain's thirty victories, he busied himself in reducing them to discipline, and found his daily exercise in training them for bolder and more hazardous exploits. It was his hope that these savage warriors would march with him against stone walls as fearless and triumphantly as they had followed Bot- zaris in the open field. To win their confidence he aston- ished them with exhibitions of his dexterity with the pistol. Accepting the office of Commander-in-Chief (the grandiose title of " Archistralegos " causing him no little amusement, together with some pride) of the three thousand men appointed for the expedition against Lepanto, he spoke to his friends of the military enterprise, that chiefly held his attention from his first arrival in Greece till the middle of February, with equal enthusiasm and coolness, insisting on the good results to be anticipated from a display of martial daring on the semi-barbaric soldiers under his command ; and impressing his hearers not more by his words than his manner, that whilst bent on figuring conspicuously in the assault of the stronghold, whose capture would go far to give the Greeks perfect possession of the Morea, and to place them in a position to enter on offensive operations in the field, he was scarcely more desirous of victory than of death. "Lord Byron," Colonel Stanhope wrote of the 14th of January, 1824, " burns with military ardor and chivalry, and will accompany the expedition to Lepanto." Whilst he still tasted the first delights of military excite- ment, and had scarcely entered on the series of vexatious and disheartening occurrences which soon made him realize his constitutional unfitness and physical incompetence for the arduous undertaking to which he had committed himself under the whole world's observation, Byron wrote the familiar verses on the thirty-sixth anniversary of his birth- day, — verses which, though closely subsequent events ga^'C them a peculiarly pathetic significance, are so unworthy of his genius, and so redundant of his pettiest infirmities, that they would not be brought to especial notice on the present occasion were it not for the biographic value of the stagy and curiously egotistical performance : — 472 THE KEAL LOKD BTEON. " 'Tis time this heart should be unmoved, Since others it hath ceased to move ; Yet though I cannot be beloved, Still let me love ! " My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of love are gone; The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone ! "The fire that in my bosom preys Is lone as some volcanic isle ; No torch is kindled at the blaze — A funeral pile ! " The hope, the fear, the jealous care, The exalted portion of the pain And power of love, I cannot share, But wear the chain! ' ' But 'tis not thus — and 'tis not here — Such thoughts should shake my soul, nor now. Where glory decks the hero's bier, Or binds his brow. " The sword, the banner, and the field, Glory and Greece, around me see 1 The Spartan, borne upon his shield, Was not more free. ' ' Awake ! (not Greece — she is awake !) Awake, my spirit ! Think through whom Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake. And then strike home I " Tread those reviving passions down. Unworthy manhood! — unto thee Indifferent should the smile or frown Of beauty be. " If thou regret'st thy youth, why livet The land of honorable death Is here : — up to the field, and give Away thy breath ! " Seek out — less often sought than found — A soldier's grave, for thee the best; Then look around, and choose thy ground, And take thy rest." Offered to the world at a moment when every home in England had a mourner in it weeping for the dead poet, when MISSOLONGHI. 473 men were framing generous apologies for shortcomings, when the women of his nation (even Ada's mother, and Allegra's mother) were recalling his feverish and unhappy career with tenderness, when journalists who for years had magnified his failings could remember nothing of him but his virtues and misfortunes, when death had given the verses a quality of sacredness, — it is not surprising that the best critics and connoisseurs applauded the lines for their sincerity, pathos, dignity, and music. But now that Byron is far enough away from the present to be judged dispassionately, another view is taken of the poem that, with the exception of the single line " If thou regret'st thy youth, why live f " contains nothing to moderate the general distaste for its foppish egotism and melodramatic falseness. Greece and her cause are nothing more than a stage provided with a couch on which the actor proposes to make a pretty ending, to the admiration of a crowded house, who are reminded how he killed the girls and thrilled the boys when his looks were at their best. Some fourteen years earlier, the poet, on his return to Athens, looking more than usually delicate from the fever that had prostrated him at Patras, remarked to the young Marquis of Sligo, after regarding himself in a mirror, " How pale 1 190k ! I should like, I think, to die of a con- sumption ; because then the women would all say, ' See that poor Byron, — how interesting he looks in dying ! ' " Moore was right in attaching importance to the anecdote, as an illustration of " the poet's consciousness of his own beauty," and of " the habitual reference of his imagination to that sex, which, however he affected to despise it, influenced more or less the color of all his thoughts." The Byron who wrote his dying song, thinking of the smile and frown of beauty, was the same Byron who, as he gazed on the looking-glass, wished the women to say of him, " How interesting he looks in dying ! " Had he steadUy played the sublime coxconib to Mavrocor- datos and the Greek chiefs, as he played the part in his dy- ing poem to the British public, Byron's chance of the crown 474 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. would have been a poor one, even though he had kept his health and gone to the Congress of Salona. But no two characters could be more unlike than the sentimental dandy of the Birthday Ode and the sober, discreet, and studiously courteous man of affairs, who, whether he was required to mediate between angry chieftains or advise the government on nice matters of policy, spoke with the good sense, per- suasive firmness and conciliatory tact of a practised states- man. Excellent in everything, his conduct during this final act of life's drama was especially commendable for the care he took to control his impetuous temper, — the efforts he made to be his own master in this important particular being probably a chief cause of the sudden derangement of his nervous system, that preceded the fatal attack of fever. In his frequent conflicts with Colonel Stanhope — especially in those of them that had reference to the establishment of the printing-press and a political paper, a question on which both disputants felt warmly — Byron's command of his baneful irritability was surprising. The good sense and good argu- ment of the frequent discussions on the colonel's pet project were altogether on the side of the whilom professional author, who, when the talk grew dangerously emphatic, more than once retired adroitly from the wordy battle under the cover of a piquant pleasantry. " It is strange," he remarked on one of these occasions, "that whilst Stanhope, the soldier, is all for writing the Turks down, I, the writer, am all for fighting them down." At the very moment of his first epi- leptic seizure, he was playfully declaring his belief that " after all, the author's brigade would be ready before the soldier's printing-press." In the end Byron yielded for the sake of peace, and after subsidizing one of the colonel's organs (the Greek paper), is said to have promised contributions to another of them (the polyglot journal), which attacked the project for electing a king in a manner that must have nettled Byron greatly, if he was in his heart aspiring to the kingship. In his desire to keep on the friendliest footing with the military advocate of the press, whom he opposed so firmly, Byron concluded one of their conferences by saying with affectionate impulsiveness, "Give me that honest right MISSOLONGHI. 475 hand"; and another of them by exclaiming earnestly, "Judge me by my actions, not my words." In other ways he showed similar care for the feelings of persons of inferior importance. Indeed, the only person who seems to have had reason to complain of his irritability in Greece was the Count Pietro Gamba, whom he assailed on a comparatively trivial matter — the expenditure of a few hundred dollars on red cloth and oilskin — with a frequency and bitterness that almost seemed to indicate a desire to discover ground for serious quarrel with Teresa Guiccioli's brother. "He was constantly attacking Count Gamba," says Colonel Stanhope, "sometimes, indeed, playfully, but more often with the bit- terest satire, for having purchased for the use of his family, whUe in Greece, 500 dollars' worth of cloth. This he used to mention as an instance of the count's imprudence and ex- travagance. Lord Byron told me one day, with a tone of great gravity, that this 500 dollars would have been most serviceable in promoting the siege of Lepanto ; and that he never would, to the last moment of his existence, forgive Gamba, for having squandered away his money in the pur- chase of cloth." The agreeable excitements of Byron's first fortnight at Missolonghi were followed by vexations that sorely tried his temper, and mortifications that caused him to anticipate more serious misfortune. Five weeks of these irritatiag and mel- ancholy experiences were enough to affect the poet's health to a degree which made it manifest to all observers that he had not the physical stamina for the task on which he had entered. Indeed, before the end of the first fortnight the man of failing energy was profoundly troubled by an inci- dent that shook his confidence in the soldiers nearest his person ; — a riot, attended with the loss of several lives, that originated in a dispute between a party of Suliotes, who wanted quarters, and a burgher of the town, who refused them admittance to his house. Ere long Byron discovered worse qualities than turbulence in the soldiers, — his "lads," as he began by calling them, — whom he had taken into peculiar favor and personal patronage. Soon after Parry's long-awaited arrival on February 5, 1824, with the two 476 THE REAL LORD BYEON. mountain howitzers, the sixty-one 1001b. casks of gunpowder, and the other munitions needful for the capture of Lepanto — when the brigade of artillery was almost ready for service, and Byron hoped in another week to be master of the strong- hold, or the tenant of a soldier's grave — the Suliotes, who had been tampered with by the agents of Colocotronis, made a demand for better terms, — one of their requirements being for a month's payment in advance. Their demands being answered by concessions, which only stimulated their insolence and greed, the treacherous rascals, discovering fresh griev- ances, insisted that two of their number should be made gen- erals, two should be made colonels, two should be made cap- tains, and that there should be a further creation of inferior officers, that would have raised one hundred and fifty of the much less than five hundred men above the rank of common soldiers. To so impudent a demand there was only one an- swer. Telling them he would stUl continue the allowances for the support of their families, so that women and children should not be punished for the fault of their husbands and fathers, Byron told the Suliotes (through Pietro Gamba) that he had ceased to be their chief, and they had ceased to be his soldiers. This rupture was the affair of the 14th of February. Byron's firmness had the results to be anticipated in the savage and servile Greeks, — immediate submission and simulated penitence. But, though he took them back into his pay and nominal service on the following morning (the 15th), it was not in his power to take them again into his favor and confidence. It was obvious that Marco Botzaris' Suliotes were not the men their foreign chief had imagined them. Some days later these fellows, brave as lions in the open field, but unmanageable as wolves in the town, " de- clined marching against Lepanto, saying that 'they would not fight against stone walls ! ' " The conduct of the Suliotes troubled Byron profoundly. But he made a strong efibrt to conceal his mortification at au affair that was the first of the series of blows which laid him on the bed of death. The SuHotes had barely made their submission, and received his pardon, when, on the evening of February 15, 1824, whilst he was sitting in Colonel MISSOLONGHI. 477 Stanhope's room, and declaring that " after all, the author's brigade would be ready before the soldier's printing press," he had his first epileptic seizure, in the presence of the several witnesses to the efforts he made to regain his self-command, on the subsidence of the convulsions. On recovering his power of speech, he said, " Let me know ; do not think I am afraid to die, I am not." The attack was sharp, but short; — though brief it was ominous in a man of his age who had never before suffered from epilepsy. Losing his conscious- ness for only a few minutes, he seems to have come fairly out of the fit in twenty minutes. Indeed, Fletcher in one of his letters speaks of the fit as having run its course " in a quarter of an hour." Anyhow, he had quite recovered his senses in time to receive the first rumor of the false report, that the Suliotes were in arms, and about to attack the seraglio, for for the purpose of seizing the magazines, — a report that probably steadied and strengthened the invalid's nerve, whilst it caused his friends to hasten to the arsenal to get the artillerymen under arms. On the following day, when he was lying on his bed, after being freely leeched to lessen the feeling of dull heaviness about the temples, his nerves received another alarm from the Suliotes, who, covered with dirt and picturesque clothing, burst into his presence, brandishing their costly arms, and demanding justice and right. Byron's behavior at this moment of trial had the admiration of Colonel Stanhope, who witnessed the scene and knew as well as any officer, trained in Indian service, how a superior soldier should bear himself to an armed mob. " Lord Byron," the colonel wrote, " electrified by this unexpected act, seemed to recover from his sickness ; and the more the SuHotes raged, the more his calm courage triumphed. The scene was truly sublime." Every reader of the Byronic biographies has heard of this epileptic attack. A fact less generally known is that this seizure (of the 15th of February) was the first of a series of attacks. In one of his letters Fletcher speaks of a second and slighter paroxysm. The valet does not speak of other subsequent attacks. Possibly he was not aware of their occurrence. It is, however, certain that there was a third, a fourth, and yet another seizure before 478 THE REAL LOED BYEON. the end of February. After describing the first seizure, the well-informed writer of the "Westminster" (1824) article on " Lord Byron in Greece," says, " In the course of the month the attack was repeated four times." In fact, the poet had five epileptic fits within thirteen days. Byron was in the midst of these ominous and quickly successive seizures when he wrote the unfinished letter to his sister which Trelawny found at Missolonghi, together with a copy (?) of a letter from Lady Byron to her sister-in-law. Trelawny, who did well to take copies of the two documents, was strangely forgetfiil w'hen he styled the unfinished letter (dated February 23, 1824) "the last of Byron's writings." The poet busied himself with his pen during the next six or seven weeks ; several of the epistles, written by his hand in March and April, being given in Moore's "Life." The author of the " Records " would have been nearer the truth had he styled it the last of the poet's deeply interesting writings. Towards the close of his sojourn at Metaxata, Byron had been troubled by intelligence that Ada was suflTering from illness occasioned by determination of blood to the head ; and Lady Byron's letter was written in answer to questions, wliich he seems to have put to her through Augusta, respect- ing the child's health and character. Lady Byron's letter ran thus : Hastings, December, 1823. Mt deakest Augusta : — I will now answer those passages from Lord Byron's letter of December 8th which required information from me. Ada's prevailing characteristic is cheerfulness, a disposition to enjoy- ment ; this happy disposition was only partially interrupted when at the most oppressive period of her illness, under which she was patient and tractable. The impression she generally makes upon strangers is that of a lively child. Of her intellectual powers observation is the most de- veloped. The pertinency of her remarks and the accuracy of her descriptions are sometimes beyond her years ; she is by no means de- void of imagination, but it is at present chiefly exercised in connection with her mechanical ingenuity, her self-invented occupation being the manu- facture of ships and boats, or whatever else may attract her attention. Hitherto she has preferred prose to verse because she is puzzled by the poetical diction ; she is particularly fond of reading since she has resumed those pursuits which depend upon sight. Previous to the suspension of them she had made some proficiency in music, and began to like it. She had also opportunities of learning a little French ; these, with writing and reading suited to her age, formed her acqairements. She is not very MISSOLONGHI. 479 persevering, and with the tendency which her constitution has manifested it is not advisable to stimulate her exertion (all excitement being in- jurious), though it is desirable to regulate their objects. She is at present very desirous to draw, and shows, a singular aptitude for that art, as far as she is permitted to use her pencil. With respect to her temper, it is open and ingenuous — at an earlier age it threatened to be impetuous, but is now sufficiently under control. She is very fond of society and talking, yet not dull when alone. Her person is tall and robust, her features not regular, but countenance animated. The minia- ture is still life; she would be known by the enclosed profile. She is now in really good health under the present system laid down by Warren and Mayo. It consists of mild medicine and sparing regimen. There is great justice in Lord Byron's medical conjecture, but I am informed that the tendency to local congestion is not always relieved at that period, as the depletion may not be more than adequate to the increased supply of blood, and for some other reasons. I hope I have not omitted to men- tion any point expressed by Lord Byron. I am yours affectionately, A. N. B. As Trelawny calls the document a transcript, it has been so styled in this chapter,, though it seems more probable that Mrs. Leigh forwarded her sister-in-law's actual letter, in- stead of a copy of it, to her brother. Another reason for thinking the document may have been the original letter is, that at this period there was quite enough of general resem- blance in the handwritings of the two sisters-in-law for a document penned by the one to be mistaken for a transcript made by the other. Having no familiarity with the penman- ship of the two ladies, and probably being no nice connois- seur and expert in caligraphy, Trelawny was likely enough to make this mistake. He may, of course, have had posi- tive evidence that the document was a transcript ; but on the bare statement of an often careless narrator, readers are not required to believe that Augusta troubled herself to copy out the long epistle and send the transcript when (there is reason to believe) she was aware of her brother's wish to have an agreeable example of his wife's handwriting and literary style. Anyhow, here is a case of noteworthy and civil (if neither affectionate nor quite friendly) correspondence be- tween the separated husband and wife. The one seeks information from the other respecting their chUd; the infor- mation thus sought is given in a way sufficiently indicative of a desire that the information should be foil and effectual. 480 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. Another thing to be observed is that the profile of Ada referred to in the letter, and found by Trelawny, " with other tokens that the Pilgrim had most cherished, scattered on the floor," came to the poet jTrom Lady Byron's hand. She sent him at Pisa a lock of their child's hair ; she sent him at Missolonghi a letter (original or transcript) which, albeit addressed to Augusta, was in fact a letter of information for and to him, and together with this letter, she sent him their child's profile. This gift may perhaps be regarded as Lady Byron's answer to his overture through Lady Blessington's friend ; and it is conceivable that had Lepanto fallen into his hands, she would have sent him a congratulatory letter, together with the portrait, for which he had sued so deli- cately. The unfinished letter to Augusta ran in these words : — Missolonghi, Feb. 23, 1824. Mt dearest Augusta: — I received a few days ago your and Lady B.'s report of Ada's health, with other letters from England ; for which I ought to be, and am (I hope) sufficiently thankful, as they are of great comfort, and I wanted some, having been recently unwell — but am now much better, so that you must not be alarmed. You will have heard of our journeys and escapes, and so forth, perhaps with some exaggera- tion ; but it is all very well now, and I have been some time in Greece, which is in as good a state as could be expected, considering circum- stances. But I will not plague you with politics, wars, or earthquakes, though we have had a rather smart one three nights ago, which produced a seene ridiculous enough, as no damage was done except to those who stuck fast in the scuffle to get first out of the doors or windows ; amongst whom some recent importations from England, who had been used to quieter elements, were rather squeezed in the press for precedence. I have been obtaining the release of about nine-and-twenty Turkish pris- oners- — men, women, and children, and have sent them, at my own expense, home to their friends ; but one pretty little girl of nine years of age, named Hato or Hatagee, has expressed a strong wish to remain with me or under my care ; and I have nearly determined to adopt her, if I thought Lady B. would let her come to England as a companion to Ada (they are about the same age), and we could easily provide for her, — if not, I can send her to Italy for education. She is very lively and quick, and with great black Oriental eyes and Asiatic features. All her brothers were killed in the revolution. Her mother wishes to return to her husband, who is at Previsa; but says that ^he would rather entrust the child to me in the present state of the country. Her extreme youth and sex have hitherto saved her life, but there is no saying what might happen in the course of the war (and of such a war). I shall probably commit her to the care of some English lady in the Islands for the present. The child herself has the same wish, and seems to have a MISSOLONGHI. 481 ■ decided character for her age. You can mention this matter, if you think it worth while. I merely wish her to be respectably educated and treated; and if my years and all things be considered, I presume it would be difiScult to conceive me to hare any other views. With regard to Ada's health, I am glad to hear that she is so much better ; but I think it right that Lady B. should be informed (and guard against it accord- ingly) that her description of much of her disposition and tendencies very nearly resembles that of my own at a similar age, — except that I was much more impetuous. Her preference of prose (strange as it may now seem) was, and indeed is mine (for I hate reading verse — and always did) ; and I never invented anything but " boats and ships," and gen- erally something relative to the ocean. I showed the report to Colonel Stanhope, who was struck with the resemblance of parts of it to the paternal line, even now. . . . But it is also fit, though unpleasant, that I should mention that my recent a-ttack, and a very severe one, had a. strong appearance of epilepsy ; why, I know not — for it is late in life, its first appearance at thirty-six, and, so far as I know, it is not heredi- tary ; and it is that it may not become so that you should tell Lady B. to take some precautions in the case of Ada. My attack has not re- turned, and I am fighting it off with abstinence and exercise, and thus far with success ; — if merely casual it is all very well. ..." By those who would see Byron's disposition towards his wife in these last weeks of his existence, and apprehend the way by which he hoped to regain her favor and confidence, this letter should be perused attentively. The letter is also noteworthy for its evidence touching the relations existing between the sisters-in-law, and the influence which Byron be- lieved his sister to have over his wife. It is curious to observe how he hoped to manage Lady Byron through his sister, very much as Lady Byron, some eight years since, used to influence him through her sister-in-law. He would scarcely have thought of aslang Lady Byron (through Augusta) to re- ceive Hatag^e and educate her with Ada had he not felt himself nearing the time when he might ask a kindness and considerable service of her. The suggestion would not have been made had he mistrusted Augusta's discretion and tact, or questioned the sufficiency of her influence over Lady By- ron. It speaks little for Byron's delicacy, much for the low opinion he knew his sister and wife had of his domestic morality, that he anticipated their suspicion that he regarded Hatagee as his future mistress, whilst proposing that she should be educated with his daughter. On the other hand, the hint that his age and experience should preclude the sus- picion, was a prudent mtimation that time had tempered his 482 THE REAL LORD BYRON. passions and disposed him for orderly living, that he had sowed the last of his wUd oats and meant to settle down into a sober and decorous middle age, — an intimation that was of course intended to bear fruit in his wife's regard for and action towards him. In other particulars the letter was skilfully designed to conciliate Lady Byron. The admission that if Ada resembled him in disposition, the child necessarily had tendencies to be guarded against, coupled as it was with a hint of the writer's opinion that Lady Byron was peculiarly qualified to correct those tendencies, could not fail to reassure the jeal- ous mother and tend to soften the injured wife. It is also worthy of observation that in this unfinished letter of the 23d of February the writer speaks of himself as having had only one epileptic attack. In the letter of the 20th of April, Fletcher does n"bt give the date of the second attack, and the writer of. the " Westminster" article (who, doubtless, gained his knowledge from the poet's medical attendants, Bruno and Milliagen) only speaks of the four subsequent attacks as having taken place in February. It may therefore be as- sumed that Byron had the four subsequent fits during the last six days of the troublous month. From the middle of February to the hour of his death on the 19th of April, 1824, Byron's position in a miserable town, lying on the border of pestiferous marshes, and reek- ing with the ordure of its miserable streets, was, in the highest degree, dismal and pitiful. Disheartened by the mutinous spirit of the Suliotes, whose misconduct necessitated the post- ponement of the operations against Lepanto, he was afflicted by the apprehension that the convulsive seizure of the 15th of February was only the first of a series of similar attacks, that, after weakening his mind, would in the end destroy his reason. It was by playing on this fear that Bruno and Mil- lingen eventually extorted from him a reluctant consent to be bled with the lancet. Whilst tortured with this foreboding of a fate far more repugnant to his imagination than any other kind of death, he endured a succession of petty annoyances and serious mortifications. For weeks together, every day may be said to have brought him a new trouble. A few days after the first fit a Suhote warrior, in sudden MISSOLONGHI. 483 resentment at a well-deserved but imprudently-delivered blow, shot the Swedish officer, Captain Sass, dead at the entrance of the seraglio, to the cordial approval of his tribal comrades, who refused to surrender the murderer to justice, on the ground that by SuUote law ' a blow justified any retaliation. In his reasonable alarm at so serious an affair, Colonel Stanhope urged Mavrocordatos and Byron to compel the Suliotes to leave the town ; but, probably because Byron and Mavrocordatos had no power to carry out the advice, the Suliotes continued to swagger about the town and fill the surrounding country with alarming rumors. At one time it was rumored that three hundred of these picturesque cut-throats were marching on the town ; at another time some of them were said to have seized Basiladi, a fortress commanding the port of Missolonghi ; a third rumor was that the Suliotes were in secret agreement with the growing party of malcontents of the Morea, who were believed to be meditating immediate insurrection and to have an increasing force of sympathizers within the town. Whilst such things were rumored of the Suliotes, who would, of course, have been aided, if not openly joined in any'mischief by Byron's " lads," — even by the fifty picked lads who, occupying a barrack in the rear of the Commander-in-Chiefs dwelling, were his peculiar body-guard, — a large party of Cariascachi's fol- lowers, coming in canoes from Anatolico to Missolonghi to avenge some tribal affiront, threw the town into a panic, and made prisoners of two of the Primates, who were forthwith carried off to Anatolico. Catching the spirit of the natives, the foreigners who had been imported by the Liberators be- came a source of embarrassment to their employers. The mechanics, brought from England by Captain Parry on the understanding that he would find them good quarters in a safe place, had barely made acquaintance with Missolonghi when they entertained reasonable mistrust of its safety, and insisted on being returned to England. Blockaded by Turkish vessels, Missolonghi was shaken by earthquake, agitated by alarms of treason, stirred to terror by antici- pations of the plague. The plague stayed away ; but typhus fever, typhoid fever, and malarial fever, decimated the miser- 484 THE KEAL LOED BYEON. able multitudes of the unhappy town. Fletcher used no bold figure of speech when he wrote to England that the people were dying by scores in the day of fevers, referable chiefly to the marshes about and the filth within the town. Perhaps the unhealthiest point of this fever-trap was the spot covered by the Commander-in-Chiefs comfortless house, that stood on the marge of the shallow creek whose surface was a chief contributor to the unwholesomeness of the town. When Colonel Stanhope had gone off to Odysseus and the Eastern chiefs, Byron was left in this wretched station, with- out a single Englishman who was either his friend, or in any way qualified to live on a famUiar footing with him. Mavrocor datos and the Greeks of the Prince's staff were persons with whom he could act with complaisance and cordiality, but he cannot be said to have had a single friend amongst those recent acquaintances. Though he appears to have regarded him with kindliness when they were in Cephalonia, it would have been strange had the poet attached himself strongly to little Bruno, whose highest title to respect was that he was an imperfect master of his vocation. Pietro Gamba was still by the poet's side, — but in spite of all the fine things that have been written of the poet's grateful appreciation of theyoung count's devotedness, and, notwith- standing the attachment that existed between them at Ravenna, it is difficult to believe that Teresa Guiccioli's brother was in Greece an altogether congenial comrade to the Liberator, who rated him so roundly and " nagged " at him so incessantly for squandering the money on scarlet cloth. There is no question that want of congenial society must be placed on the list of the depressing circumstances of Byron's life at Missolonghi. Under the circumstances it is not wonderful that he made much of William Parry — the " fine rough subject," as his patron styled him — who, with a natural vein of humor and a strong talent for mimicry, amused the poet with his droll stories and. impudent fabrica- tions, and was well "worth his brandy" in so doleful a place. So many examples have been given of the way in which Byron's spirits rose under conditions the least conducive MISSOLONGHI. 485 to cheerfulness, it will occasion readers no surprise to be told that even in this fever-den on the marge of a muddy creek, flanked by pestilential swamps, he bore up bravely, and for a few weeks seemed none the worse ; on the contrary, almost seemed something the better for his repeated attacks of epilepsy. AU through that miserable March and later he continued to use his pen, — sometimes using it with pathetic lightness and pleasantry. Once and again he indulged his old propensity for practical joking. To scare the buffoon, Parry, who was comically timorous about earthquakes, he instructed his Suliotes (the body-guard of fifty) to roll barrels, containing loose cannon-balls, over the higher floors of his house, and by leaping at the same time on the floors to shake the whole building. Suffering much from the wetness of the season, which precluded him Irom taking as much horse-exercise ia the open air as he desired for pastime and needed for health, he spent much of his time daily — playing with his pistols and fencing-foUs in the big guard-room, in which he housed the fifty picked Suliotes, who, when the weather permitted him to mount horse, used to attend him over the neighboring country on foot, running as fast as the horses galloped. The order maintained in these exercises deserves notice. The captain of the Suliotes with a division of his men went first ; then came the horsemen, — Byron, with Pietro Gamba on his one side, and the' Greek interpreter on the other, followed by the two grooms (Tita, and the negro whom Byron begged from Trelawny) in rich liveries ; the cavalcade being brought up by a rear-guard of running Suliotes. All this while Byron persisted more rigorously than ever in the suicidal regimen, — persisting in it, however, not so much from dread of obesity, as from dread of the recurrence of epilepsy, which he imagined he would provoke by even moderate indulgence in flesh and wine. " I am fighting it off with abstinence and exercise," he wrote to his sister on the 23d of February ; and persisting in the common mistake of dyspeptic persons, who are so apt to imagine that because food burdens them they ought to eschew it as a kind of poison, he persisted in "fighting off" the epilepsy by ab- 486 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. stinence, when he ought to have cossetted his stomach into better behavior, by giving it moderate quantities of light but substantial nutriment, and at the same time have ceased to irritate it with strong cathartic medicines. Refusing to take meat in any way but that of weak broth, he also refused to eat fish, — one of the few viands to be had in excellent condi- tion at Missolonghi. Henceforth he lived chiefly on tea, toast, and vegetables ; sometimes taking a little thin soup, and sometimes a little cheese. In fact, he never starved himself more rigorously than in these last weeks of his existence, when every breath of air that came into his body was loaded with marsh-poison. And there never was a time when he took more pills and Epsom salts. "He almost every morning," says Moore, " measured himself round the wrist and waist, and whenever he found these parts, as he thought, enlarged, took a strong dose of medicine." In former time, curbing his propensity to fatten, chiefly for the preservation of his personal comeliness, he now watched it with jealous anxiety as the indication whether he was carry- ing out with sufficient resoluteness the rigorous regimen by which he hoped to " fight off" epilepsy. Whilst things went thus ill with Byron at Missolonghi, affairs were growing brighter for the Greeks, both in their own country, where arrangements were in progress for the Congress of the Chiefs of both the great divisions of Greece at Salona, — and also in London, where the Greek Loan was being successfully negotiated, mainly through the influ- ence of the poet's name. At the same time, stirred by the poet's celebrity and example, friends of the Greek cause — some of them being men of affluence, with the power and dis- position to contribute largely to the fund needful for pushing the conflict to a successful termination — were hastening to Greece from England. Much good was anticipated from the Salona Congress. Much advantage could not fail to come to Greece from the streams of enthusiastic volunteers mov- ing towards the Levant. Something must be said of the circumstances under which Odysseus, the most powerful and energetic of the Eastern Chiefs, determined to invite the Chiefs of the two divisions MI8SOLONGHI. 487 of the country to a conference that should aim at the settle- ment of existing dissensions and the unanimous arrangement of measures for the ensuing campaign. With all his anxiety and pains to avoid even the appearance of partisanship Byron had been drawn into the position, though he was in no degree warmed by the passions of a partisan of the Western Chiefs. At Cephalonia he foresaw that the mere accident of residence would probably expose him to a suspicion of favoring the one party more than the other ; and from the moment when he landed from the mistico, circumstances had tended to impose upon him the char- acter he was most desirous of avoiding. Whilst the Western Chiefs regarded him as their peculiar patron, the governor of Western Greece favored the notion that, as the posses- sor of Lord Byron's unreserved confidence he would be the administrator of his influence. It was natural for Mavrocor- datos to take this pleasant view of his relations with Lord Byron, who had every purpose to act cordially with him, but no disposition to be used by him as a tool. It was no less natural for Odysseus to be jealous of his rival's authority over the Enghsh peer, and to conceive that, by luring Lord Byron to his side, the wily Mavrocordatos, with a craft surpassing even the subtlety of Greeks, was drawing into his hands the stranger's influence — in other words, the whole English in- fluence. Of course the Chiefs, who followed Odysseus, took the same view of the position. Byron was the bone for which the two Chiefs and their respective parties were contending. Moore represents that Byron's difficulties during March and the earlier days of April were "not a little heightened by the part taken by Colonel Stanhope and Mr. Trelawny, who, having allied themselves with Odysseus, the most powerful of these Eastern Chieftains, were endeavoring actively to detach Lord Byron from Mavrocordatos, and enlist him in their own views." Moore had a strong opinion that the English in- fluence suffered severely from this action by Trelawny and Stanhope, which the biographer even ventured to stigmatize as an " ill-timed and unfortunate schism." In truth, how- ever, Trelawny and Stanhope were just then far more desirous of detaching Byron from Missolonghi, lest he should die 488 THE REAL LORD BYRON. there, than of detaching him from Mavrocordatos, lest he should become a mere creature of the wily Greek's ambition. To those who can read between the lines of diplomatic cor- respondence and see beneath the surface of diplomatic intrigues, it is obvious that Trelawny and Colonel Stanhope were loyally playing into Byron's hands, and that Byron had every reason for secret contentment at the doings of his two friends, who, instead of wishing to thwart his designs and diminish his authority, were furthering his interest amongst the Eastern Chiefs. Wishing to keep Byron as far as possible to himself and his party, Mavrocordatos disliked the project for the Salona Congress ; and Byron was too sufficient a dip- lomatist to dismiss the Prince's objections with contemptuous haste. Dallying with Odysseus' envoy (Mr. Finlay), he yielded to Colonel Stanhope's agent (Captain Humphries), and made Mavrocordatos promise to accompany him to the meeting of the Chiefs. "My dear Stanhope," he wrote on March 19, 1824, just a month before his death, "Piiuce Mavrocordato and myself will go to Salona to meet Ulysses, and you may be very sure that P. M. will accept my prop- osition for the advantage of Greece." Four days later (March 23d) he wrote to Mr. Barff, " In a few days P. Mavro- cordato and myself, with a considerable escort, intend to proceed to Salona at the request of Ulysses and the Chiefs of Eastern Greece, and take measures offensive and defensive for the ensuing campaign." Three days later (March 26th) he had received (from Mr. Barff) intelligence of the successfiil negotiation of the loan, and (from Prince Mavrocordatos) the information of his appointment to be one of the three Commis- sioners of the loan, which it was hoped would put an end to the dissensions that were mainly, though not altogether due to the want of means for paying fleets and armies. Unfortunately the Congress was postponed for sufficient reasons or on fair pretexts till the 1 6th of April , when Byron was dying. Had Byron left Missolonghi within " a few days " of the 23d of March, he might perhaps have escaped the malarial fever that gave the final blow to his failing powers. Had he appeared at Salona on the 16th of April, 1824, he would have stood there between two rival groups of Chieftains, both of them eager MISSOLONGHI. 489 to conciliate the Chief Commissioner of the loan, each of them bent on surpassing the other in utterances of gratitude and devotion to their benefactor. Trelawny (as conversant as any living man in the intrigues and counsels of the two con- tending parties) certainly was not without grounds for his strong opinion that, " had Byron lived to reach Salona as commissioner of the loan, the dispenser of a million crowns would have been offered a golden one." The sure consequence of Byron's suicidal measures for fighting off the epilepsy came no sooner than intelligent and fully informed observers of his case expected it to come. Caught in a heavy rain-shower on the 10th of April, when he was riding with Pietro Gamba, he returned to his house, wet to the skin. On the morrow (April 11th) he again mounted horse and rode in the olive woods, though he was suffering from chilly tremors and rheumatic pains. In the evening of the 11th he was in the grip of the fever that never loosed its hold of him. There is no need to tell how his youthful and incompetent doctors (Bruno and Millingen) did at the same time their best and their worst for him. In justice to these sorry physicians it must be admitted that they treated their patient no worse than he had treated him- self. On the 16th, his dread of insanity was so worked upon that he consented to be bled with the lancet. "It is true," these young doctors said to him, " you care not for life ; but who can assure you that, unless you change your resolution, the uncontrolled disease may not operate such disorganization in your system as utterly and forever to deprive you of reason." After recording that he spoke these words to his patient, Millingen adds triumphantly, " I had hit at last the sensible chord, and partly annoyed by our importunities, partly persuaded, he cast at us both the fiercest glance of vexation, and, throwing out his arm, said, in the angriest tone, "There, — you are, I see, a damned set of butchers, — take away as much blood as you like, and have done with it." Twenty ounces of blood were taken forthwith from the man who for the last five weeks had been living on toast and tea, and reducing himself with violent medicine. On the next day (April 17th), when the bleeding had been repeated 490 THE EEAL LORD BYEON. twice, blisters were put on his legs above the knees, — i blisters that would have been applied to the soles of his feet had he not hinted his repugnance to exhibit his feet to the medical attendants. Of course he was weaker and in every respect worse on the 18th, but he managed to totter from his bed to the adjoining room, leaning on his servant's (Tita's) arm ; — and when there he even amused himself for a few minutes with a book, before he returned to his bed. In the evening, Millingen brought two other doctors (Dr. Fresiber and Luca Vaya) to look at him. At first Byron refused to see the strange doctors, but afterwards out of respect for Mavro- cordatos' wish permitted them to look at him. " Very well," he said, " let them come ; but let them look at me and say nothing." To one of them, who, after feeling his pulse, was about to put him a question, Byron said, curtly, "Recollect your promise, and go away." There was no woman to attend upon the dying poet. The men about him were too many- and hysterical. Fletcher, Tita, Millingen, Parry, and Pietro Gamba could not have wept more copiously had there been a prize of a thousand guineas for the one who wept most. All of them seem to have regarded it as an occasion for exhibiting their sensibility at the cost of their patron's com- posure. The weeping of these men would alone have shown Byron his case was hopeless, and probably he learned the fact from their misbehavior. Anyhow, he does not seem to have realized that he was dying till the strange doctors had taken their departure, when he was within two hours of breathing his last intelUgible utterance. Before he took the first of the powerful anodyne drinks, which gave him a long slum- ber, there was a painful conversation (to which further refer- ence will be made) between the sinking sufferer, who could not express his desires intelligibly, and the valet, Fletcher, who tried in vain to apprehend his master's wishes. It was about six o'clock in the evening of the 18th of April, when he said, " Now I shall go to sleep ! " the last words that ever passed his lips. After lying another four-and-twenty hours in a state of unconsciousness, he surprised his watchers at 6.15 P.M. of April 19, 1824, by opening his eyes and then instantly shutting them. He died at that instant. MISSOLONQHI. 491 People are apt to assign excessive value to the utterances of the dying. There are, however, occasions when the speeches of the death-bed reveal strange secrets. The occa- sions are more frequent when in its last efforts to exercise its failing powers the mind declares with singular and pathetic clearness its deepest and most enduring affections. When individuals are named by dying lips, it is never difficult for the listener to determine whether the persons so mentioned engage the speaker's affectionate concern or are the objects of his antipathy ; for whilst it soothes a dying man or animates him with tender emotion to remember those whom he loves, it . causes him visible distress to remember those whom he still abhors. Byron's last words to Fletcher are memorable for pointing to a group of persons whom he regarded affec- tionately in the brief interval between the moment when he knew he was sinking and the moment when he fell under the influence of the narcotic drinks. Disputes about Byron's last words to his servants having arisen from ignorance that the authoritative accounts of the pathetic conversation vary in several particulars, it is well to bring together the various published versions of the affair, for which Fletcher — an honest and devoted, though a dis- solute and illiterate fellow — was altogether or partly ac- countable. (1.) The account of the poet's last illness, drawn by Trelawny (from Fletcher's spoken words) immediately after he had made the post-mortem examination of the poet's feet, gives the talk to the valet thus : " He was worse after this, and became delirious and violent ; began to talk and give directions ; took hold of one of Fletcher's and one of Tita's hands. Fletcher said, 'Shall I write'? Byron muttered to him for half an hour, his lips moving, but indistinct. He said, 'Now I have told you everything; four thousand dollars for the — and — but 'tis too late. I have said all; do you understand me? If you don't obey me, I will haunt you, if I can ! '— ' I have not under- stood a word,' said Fletcher. — ' That's a pity,' Byron re- plied, ' for 'tis now too late. You will go to Mrs. Leigh — and tell her anc^ say — and everything, and her 492 THE REAL LOED BYEON. children,' etc. 'And tell Lady Byron '^ — heavily sighing, but only muttered — ' these are dying words ! ' Fletcher said again he did not understand. — 'Good God ! ' he said, and tried to repeat it, hut his lips only moved. He under- stood Fletcher, and seemed to strain hard to make himself understood, and to feel his inability." Trelawny, be it observed, does not offer his narrative as a full and precise report, either of all Fletcher had to tell or of all he did tell him, but merely as a collection of " fresh rough notes " of the principal particulars. (2.) In "Mr. Fletcher's Account of Lord Byron's Last Moments," published in the Appendix to Medwin's " Con- versations" (1824), the valet's report of the last words (a report that exhibits in every line the artifice of the common- place litterateur, who puts the servants statements into shape) runs thus : " Although his lordship did not appear to think his dissolution was so near, I could perceive he was getting weaker every hour, and he even began to have occa- sional fits of delirium. He afterwards said, 'I now begin to think I am seriously ill ; and, in case I should be taken off suddenly, I wish to give you several directions, which I hope you will be particular in seeing executed.' I answered that I would, in case such an event came to pass ; but ex- pressed a hope that he would live many years to execute them much better himself than I could. To this my master replied, 'No, it is now nearly over'; and then added, 'I must tell you all, without losing a moment ! ' I then said, ' Shall I go, my lord, and fetch pen, ink, and paper? ' 'Oh, my God ! no, you will lose too much time, and I have it not to spare, for my time is short,' said his lordship ; and imme- diately after, ' Now, pay attention ! ' His lordship com- menced by saying, ' You will be provided for.' I begged him, however, to proceed with things of more consequence. He then continued, ' Oh, my poor dear child ! — my dear Ada ! My God ! could I but have seen her ! Give her my blessing, and my dear sister Augusta and her children. And you will go to Lady Byron and say — tell her every- thing ; you are friends with her.' His lordship appeared to be greatly affected at this moment. Here my master's voice MISSOLONGHI. 493 failed him, so that I could only catch a word at intervals ; but he kept muttering something very seriously for some time, and would often raise his voice and say, 'Fletcher, nov/ if you do not execute every order vrhich I have given you, I will torment you hereafter if possible.' Here I told his lordship, in a state of the greatest perplexity, that I could not understand a word of what he said, to which he replied, ' Oh, my God ! then all is lost, for it is now too late I Can it be possible you have not understood me ? ' — ' No, my lord,' said I ; ' but I pray you to try and inform me once more.' — 'How can 1?' rejoined my master; 'it is now too late, and all is over ! ' I said, ' Not our will, but God's be done.' And he answered, 'Yes, not mine be done — but I will try — ' His lordship did indeed make several efforts to speak, but could only repeat two or three words at a time, such as ' My wife ! my child ! my sister ! — you know all — you must say all — you know my wishes ; ' the rest was quite unintelligible." (3.) In Moore's narrative of the death-bed scenes, the conversation between the poet and his valet assumes this shape : " It was now evident that he knew he was dying ; and between his anxiety to niake his servant understand his last wishes, and the rapid failure of his powers of utterance, a most painful scene ensued. On Fletcher asking whether he should bring pen and paper to take down his words, ' Oh, no,' he replied — ' there is no time — it is now nearly over. Go to my sister — tell her — go to Lady Byron — you will see her, and say ' — Here his voice faltered, and became gradually indistinct ; notwithstanding which he continued still to mutter to himself, for nearly twenty minutes, with much earnestness of manner, but in such a tone that only a few words could be distinguished. These, too, were only names. — ' Augusta ' — ' Ada ' — ' Hobhouse ' — ' Kinnaird.' He then said, 'Now, I have told you all.' 'My lord,' replied Fletcher, ' I have not understood a word your lord- ship has been saying.' — 'Not understand me?' exclaimed Lord Byron, with a look of the utmost distress; 'what a pity ! — then it is too late ; all is over ! ' — 'I hope not,' answered Fletcher ; ' but the Lord's will be done ! ' — ' Yes, 494 THE RKAL LORD BYRON. not mine,' said Byron. He then tried to utter a few words, of which none were intelligible, except ' My sister — my chUd.' " Each of these versions leaves the reader in regret for its sketchiness and want of details that might have been given. All are unsatisfactory. Trelawny's memorandum consists of rough notes (hastily jotted down) of what he deemed the most important particulars of Fletcher's rambling state- ments. At a time so near the death, Fletcher remembered his master to have said, " And tell Lady Byron," and after sighing and muttering to have added, " These are dying words ! " The version of Medwin's Appendix is a vamped- up performance ; but it may be deemed a trustworthy state- ment of Fletcher's recollections in respect to the words actually assigned to Byron. It follows that immediately after his return to England the valet was under the impres- sion that his master thought of Lady Byron with kindness : for the servant cannot have conceived his master likely to finish an unkind message to his wife with the words, "Tell her everything, — you are friends with her." It may be assumed that Moore questioned Fletcher, and aided his mem- ory with suggestions. Time and space being matters of no consideration with Moore, he should have-given a record, in question and answer, of his discourse with the servant. The biographer was too much set on making this part of the story read prettily. For the sake of dramatic eiFect and theatrical pathos he even garnished his death-bed scenes with scraps of Pietro Gamba's romantic sentimentalities, — such as the one which makes the poet ejaculate in his last hour respect- ing Greece, "I have given her my time, my means, my health — and now I give her my life ! What could I do more ? " It is more to the purpose that the count, writing to the Hon. Mrs. Leigh in 1824, assured her that in his dying moments her Byron " named his dear daughter, his sister, his wife, Hobhouse, and Kinnaird." The irftportant facts of the miserably inadequate reports of the miserably insufficient words are, — (1) That Lady Byron was present in the poet's mind ; (2) That he remem- bered her without a sign of animosity ; (3) That he spoke MISSOLONGHI. 495 of her in the same hreath with his daughter and sister ; (4) That he tried to send her a message by the servant who was " friends with her." He made no effort to send a message to Teresa Guiccioli. Her name did not come to his lips. The woman, whom according to Moore he loved devotedly, was forgotten. But his wife was in his thoughts. Immediately after Byron's death it was proposed to inter his body at Athens, in the Temple of Theseus. Odysseus urged that this should be done, and Colonel Stanhope fa- vored the same proposal, which seems at first to have been acceptable to most of the poet's friends in Greece. On con- sideration, however, another course was deemed preferable, and the great mistake was made of sending the embalmed body to England. The persons accountable for this ill-advised step were, of course, under the impression that in sending the corpse to England they were sending it to Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's Cathedral. Had they anticipated the refusal to admit the poet to the Abbey, they would, of course, have buried him in Greece, where, resting in the country he had glori- fied by his writing, and in which he had found an honorable death, he would, in these days of quick travel, have rested within a view of his native land. With the best intentions, however, the lamentable mistake was made, and under Colonel Stanhope's charge the corpse (which had received in Greece the funeral honors accorded to princes) came in the "Florida " to the Downs on the 29th of June, 1824. After lying in state for two days (Friday and Saturday, the 9th and 10th of July) at Sir Edward KnatchbuU's house in Great George Street, Westminster, where it was viewed by a large number of mourners,^ the pilgrim's body was taken out of town at mid-day of the following Monday, — the hearse 1 The accounts of the poet's appearance, to those who saw him in his coffin, are curiously Tariant. Whilst some of his old frienils were of opinion that, with the exception of the look of care and distress which pervaded his features, death had wrought no great change in his countenance, others, who had known him no less intimately, were painfully stnick by the alteration. Mrs. Leigh could scarcely recognize the features of her brother, so greatly had they been disfigmed to her by the means used for their pi'eseiwation. And Hobhouse found his old friend's face so completely altered that he was less affected by it than by the sight of hand- writing or aught else he could recognize as having belonged to him. 496 THE KEAL LOED ETEON. being followed as far as St. Pancras Church by a long train of carriages belonging to people of noble rank or other social eminence. Passing the humble house tenanted by Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams in Kentish Town, the hearse, attended by a diminished cortege, made its slow way to the northern road, and then onwards by tedious stages to the county where the landed . possessions of the Byrons had dwindled from thousands of fair acres to the few square feet of earth in which the poet and a few of his ancestors sleep their last sleep. To her brother's memory Mrs. Leigh placed in the chancel of Hucknall-Torkard Church, the mural tablet inscribed with these words, — In The Vault Beneath, Wheeb Mant Op His Ancestors And His Mother Abe Buried, Lie The Eemains Op George Gordon Noel Btbon, Lord Byron Of Rochdale, In The County Op Lancaster, The Author Op " Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." He Was Born In London On The 22d op January, 1788. He Died At Missolonghi, In Western Greece, On The 19th Op April, 1824. Engaged In The Glorious Attempt To Restore That Country To Her Ancient Freedom And Renown. His Sister, The Honourable Augusta Maria Leigh, Placed This Tablet To His Memory. Since Byron's interment in an insignificant church of a county where he was little known during his life and did not possess an acre of land at the time of his death, the exclu- sion of his body from Westminster Abbey has been the occasion for many severe reflections on the illiberality of ecclesiastical persons, and on their want of Christian charity for those from whom they differ on matters of religious opinion. But the asperity of these reflections is more mani- fest than their justice. The denial of a grave to the greatest poet of the nineteenth century, — in the judgment of many persons, the greatest of all our national poets after Shakes- MISSOLONGHI. 497 peare, — is doubtless a reason (though scarcely a strong one) for raising an edifice for the enduring commemoration of celebrated persons, without respect to their religious views or domestic virtues. It may even be a reason (though surely a weak one) for depriving the Deans of "Westminster of their power of denying sepulture within the walls of the Abbey to persons whom they deem undeserving of so great a distinction. But so long as they are required to decide to whom the honor should be awarded or denied, it will be alike unreasonable and unjust to charge them with odious passions because their decisions are made with conscientious reference to matters which they are trained to think, and by their official obligations are bound to think, matters of paramount importance. On being nioved to open the doors of the Abbey to a poet whose literary fame was only one side of his reputation, and whose writings had not been uniformly favorable to religion and morality, it is not sur- prising that, taking the strictly ecclesiastical view of the question, the Dean of Westminster declined to act as though interment in the historic church were nothing more than a conventional way of recognizing genius. Having for years thought the poet's life scandalous and his influence a force making for evil, it is not obvious that the Dean should have changed his opinion in deference to a change of social senti- ment. Perhaps there was as much intolerance in the Byronic enthusiasts who accused the Dean of bigotry, as in the Dean who had vexed them by acting in accordance with his sense of duty. 498 THE REAL LORD BYKON. CHAPTER XXVI. THE DBSTEUCTIOlSr OF THE "MEMOIRS." The many persons who hope that a copy of Byron's autobiographic " Memoirs " will be found amongst the Hob- house MSS., lying under seal at the British Museum, may dismiss the hope. Lord Broughton's papers will be found to comprise letters having reference to the " Memoirs " and their destruction. They wUl probably be found to contain correspondence that passed between Byron and Hobhouse respecting the " Memoirs." They will probably give the world a statement by Hobhouse of the reasons for destroying the " Memoirs " and of his part in their destruction. But it is not likely that the man who used to speak of the " Me- moirs '' as foolish documents, and was of opinion that their publication would be hurtful to the poet's reputation, made a copy of the autobiography, and took measures for its publication in the twentieth century to the injury of his friend's fame. Moreover, John Cam Hobhouse was more accountable than any other person concerned in the business for the destruction of the famous papers. Had it not been for him, it is more than probable that Byron's story of his own life would stUl be in existence in his own handwriting. It is not too much to say that John Cam Hobhouse was him- self the destroyer of the " Memoirs." It is, therefore, in the highest degree improbable that he took care to transmit to posterity a copy of the writings which he was at so much pains to destroy. It is, of course, in the reader's memory that Byron gave the manuscript of the greater part of the " Memoirs " to Moore at Venice, ia October, 1819. Moore's account of the circumstances under which the gift was made runs thus : " A short time before the dinner he left the room, THE DESTRUCTION OF THE "MEMOIRS." 499 and in a minute or two returned, carrying in his hand a white leather bag. 'Look here,' he said, holding it up — 'this would be worth something to Murray, though you, I dare say, would not give sixpence for it.' — 'What is it?' I asked. ' My Life and Adventures,' he answered. On hear- ing this I raised my hands in a gesture of wonder. ' It is not a thing,' he continued, ' that can be published during my lifetime, but you may have it — if you like — there, do ■whatever you please with it.' In taking the bag, and thank- ing him most warmly, I added, ' This will make a nice legacy for my little Tom, who shall astonish the latter days of the nineteenth century with it.' He then added, 'You may show it to any of your friends you think worthy of it ; ' — and this is nearly, word for word, the whole of what passed between us on the subject." Several references to the " Memoirs " occur in the subsequent (published) correspondence between Moore and Byron ; from some of which it appears that the autobiographer made additions to the narrative whilst he was at Ravenna. "Have you," he wrote to Moore on October 17, 1820, " got my ' Memoirs ' copied ? I have begun a continuation. Shall I send it you so far as it is gone?" — "I told you in my last," he wrote on November 5, 1820, "that I have been going on with the ' Memoirs,' and have got as far as twelve more sheets. But I suspect they wiU be inter- rupted. In that case I wUl send them by post, though I feel remorse at making a friend pay so much for postage, for we can't frank here beyond the frontier." On the 9th of Decem- ber, 1820, Byron wrote to his friend, "Besides this letter, you will receive three packets, containing in all, eighteen more sheets of memoranda, which, I fear, will cost you more in postage than they will ever produce by being printed in the next century. Instead of waiting so long, if you could make anything of them now in the way of reversion (that is, after my death) I should be very glad, — as, with all due regard to your progeny, I prefer you to your grandchildren. Would not Longman or Murray advance you a certain sum now, pledging themselves not to have them published till after my decease, think you? — and what say you? Over 500 THE REAL LOED BYRON. these latter sheets I should leave you a discretionary power ; because they contain, perhaps, a thing or two which is too sincere for the public. If I consent to your disposing of their reversion now, where would be the harm? Tastes may change. I would, in your case, make my essay to dispose of them, not publish, now ; and if you (as is most likely) survive me, add what you please from your own knowledge ; and, above all, contradict anything, if I have mis-stated; for my first object is the truth, even at my own expense." In a note to the discretionary power here granted, Moore re- marks in the "Life," "The power here meant is tha^of omit- ting passages that might be objectionable. He afterwards gave me this, as well as every other right, over the whole of the manuscript." In April, 1821, Byron was still adding to the " Memoirs." On the 28th of that month he wrote from Eavenna to Moore, "I have written- a sheet or two more of the memoranda for you ; and I kept a little journal for about a month or two, till I had filled the paper-book." On June 4, 1821, he inquired of his future biographer, "Did you re- ceive my letters with the two or three concluding sheets of Memoranda?" It is, therefore, obvious that the "Memoirs" grew considerably after the gift to Moore. As the " Memoirs " dealt at some length with the particu- lars of his "domestic troubles" (to use the phrase of Byronic biographers) , Byron directed that they should be submitted to Lady Byron before publication. On the anniversary of his wedding-day, he wrote to Moore from Eavenna, "January 2, 1820, My dear Moore, — " To-day it is my wedding-day ; And all the folks would stare, If wife should dine at Edmonton, And I should dine at Ware. " Or thus,— " Here's a happy new year ! hut with reason, I heg you'll permit me to say — Wish me many returns of the season, But as few as you please of the day. THE DESTEUCTION OF THE "mEMOIES." 501 " My this present writing is to direct you that, if she chooses, she may see the MS. Memoir in your possession. I wish her to have fair play, in all cases, even though it will not be published till after my decease. For this purpose, it were but just that Lady B. should know what is there said of her and hers, that she may have full power to remark on or respond to any part or parts, as may seem fitting to her- self. This is fair dealing, I presume, in all events." On the previous day (January 1, 1820), Byron had written to Lady Byron, offering her the perusal of the " Memoir," — an offer which she declined in the letter of March 10, 1820, printed on a previous page of this work. The manuscript having been offered to the Longmans, who declined to purchase it, Moore carried the " Memoirs " to Murray, who bought them in November, 1821, of the song-writer for the large sum of two thousand guineas, it being stipulated in the joint assignment, by the two poets who conveyed their property in the papers to the publisher, that Moore should, at the proper time after Byron's death, edit the documents and continue the narrative up to the date of the autobiographer's death. As Byron was not expected to die within two and a half years of the execution of the deed (though none of his familiar acquaintance could have anticipated longevity for a man of his suicidal habits), the sum paid for the MSS., not to be published during their author's life, was liberal and courageous. It was probably none the less so, because of the publisher's wish to recover his influence over his famous poet, with whom he had recently been at discord. Byron was gratified and surprised by the largeness of the payment to Moore. "Your conduct to Moore," he wrote to Murray, on August 10, 1821, from Ravenna, soon after Murray made the proposal, and some three months before the execution of the deed of assignment, " is certainly very handsome, and I would not say so if I could help it, fdr you are not at present by any means in my good graces." It should be observed that Byron, Moore, and Murray all speak of the sum as one of guineas instead of pounds, — the extra shillings being probably thrown in by the publisher, for the purpose of pleasing the poet who was 502 THE REAL LOED BYKON. apt to be quarrelsome about " sizings." "I am glad," Byron wrote to Moore, from Ravenna, August 24, 1821, "you are satisfied with Murray, who seems to value dead lords more than live ones. I have just sent him the following answer to a proposition of his : — " 'For Orford and for Walgrave, etc' " The argument of the above is, that he wants to ' stint me of my sizings,' as Lear says, — that is to say, not to propose an extravagant price for an extravagant poem, as is becom- ing. Pray take his guineas by all means — I taught him that. He made me a filthy offer of pounds once ; but I told him that, like physicians, poets must be dealt with in guineais, as being the only advantage poets have in association with