ness, waste, and arrogance, by the allowed habits of those establishments, one and all.

The death of his grand uncle, the fifth Lord Byron, in 1795, (this lord's grandson having died the year before,) gave him the title. The old lord was reputed, in his own neighborhood, to be a furious madman. He always carried loaded pistols, and the country was filled with stories of his insane violence.

He let his house go to ruin, endeavored to dilapidate the family estate, and died, with the popular impression of his having gone straight to Erebus.

Lord Byron having now become a ward in Chancery, the Earl of Carlisle, the husband of the deceased lord's sister, was appointed his guardian. It was an uneasy guardianship for the unfortunate earl. Mrs. Byron was a virago, who flew into paroxysms of fury on the slightest contradiction, and with whom the earl was obliged to draw an immediate line of demarcation. The young lord availed himself of the first use of his pen to fix him conspicuously in a lampoon.

The biographer's anecdotes of the scenes between the son and the mother are sufficiently extraordinary. Mrs. Byron, in her rage, was in the habit of flinging the poker and tongs at the head of the young disputant; and the hostility at length became so deadly, that an instance occurred, in which they were known each to go privately, after one of those nights of dispute, to the apothecary's, anxiously inquiring whether the other had gone to purchase poison!" After an uneasy sojourn at Harrow, he went to Cambridge, where he amused himself according to his whim; bred up a bear, which he pronounced that he kept to sit for a fellowship; and published his first volume of poems by a "Minor."

Here his life was like that of his contemporaries, and be suitably begins one of his letters with-" My dear Elizabeth Fatigued with sitting up till four in the morning, for the last

two days at Hazard, I take up my pen." Moore in his note animadverts upon "that sort of display and boast of rakishness, which is but too common a folly at this period of life. Unluckily, this boyish desire of being thought worse than he really was, remained with Lord Byron, as did some other failings and foibles of his boyhood, long after the period when with others they are past and forgotten."

Byron's description of Cambridge in this letter is emphatic enough. "A villainous chaos of dice and drunkennesss, nothing but hazard and Burgundy, hunting, mathematics and Newmarket, riot and racing."

His tastes for adventure had now begun to take a form. "Next January, (but this is entre nous, for my maternal persecutor will be for throwing her tomahawk at any of my curious projects,) I am going to sea for four or five months, with my cousin, Captain Bettesworth, who commands the Tartar, the finest frigate in the navy. I have seen most scenes, and long to look at a naval life. going probably to the Mediterranean, or to the West Indies, or to the d--l." He finishes the letter by saying, that he has written the first volume of a novel, and a poem of 380 lines," which formed the ground work of the

66

We are

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." The satire thus having been written before the affront, though probably some additional pungencies were thrown into its enlarged shape.

In his visits to London, about 1808, he became acquainted with the Mr. Dallas, of whom we have heard so much in the noble Lord's dealings with Murray. Dallas seems to have made his way by giving him opinions of his " Minor" poems, and to have tried to turn his influence to advantage, by lecturing him, probably with sincerity, upon the bard's absurdities in scepticism. But Byron asked no higher opportunity than to make the most of his infidel fame, and he loaded his adviser with letters full of the most daring nonsense, for the purpose, as Moore says, of astounding

his adviser. He thus prefers "Socrates to St. Paul, and Confucius to the Ten Commandments, believes that virtue is a mere feeling, not a principle, and that death is an eternal sleep."

Of this farrago, Moore pronounces, that if it was meant for his usual purpose "of displaying his wit at the expense of his character;" it must be recollected, that it was addressed to "one of those officious, self-satisfied advisers, whom it was at all times the delight of Lord Byron to astonish and mystify." It was one of those "tricks with which, through life, he amused himself at the expense of the numerous quacks, which his celebrity drew round him." So much for the biographer's homage to Mr. Dallas.

His first literary event was in 1808; the Edinburgh Review critique on the "Hours of Idleness." He had notice of it, and mentions it to one of his correspondents, Mr. Becher:-"I am of so much importance, that a most violent attack is preparing for me in the next number of the Edinburgh Review. This I had from the authority of a friend, who has seen the proof and MS. of the critique. You know the system of the Edinburgh Review gentlemen is univer. sal attack. They praise none, and neither the public nor the author expects praise from them. They defeat their object by indiscriminate abuse, and they never praise any except the partizans of Lord Holland and Co."

But

The critique came out, and it vexed him for the moment. A friend who found him in the first moments of excitement, after reading the article, inquired anxiously whether he had just received a challenge!" (By the by, not a very complimentary question to his Lordship's nerves.) Byron's Satire," in petto, fortified him against the shock. On that day he tried his double allies, wine and ink; drank three bottles of claret, and reinforced his "Satire," by twenty lines." When a man has nothing else for it, he has, as Shylock says,

"revenge." Lord Byron had already anticipated the insult by "380 lines of revenge;” the additional "twenty made him feel himself considerably better," and he proceeded forthwith to cut up the critics with the delight of a fresh stimulus for "savagery."

At this time he writes to his friend Becher :-"Entre nous, I am cursedly dipt; my debts, everything inclusive, will be nine or ten thousand before I am twenty-one." He had the early fondness for travel natural to everybody, boobies and all. But his fondness was for regions beyond what the Travellers' Club call Postchaiseland. He longed to sun himself in India, or at least in Persia. But India, probably as being the further off, was his favorite. He writes to his mother in 1808 :-" I wish you would inquire of Major Watson (who is an old Indian) what things it will be necessary to provide for my voyage. I have already procured a friend to write to the Arabic Professor at Cambridge for some information I am anxious to possess. After all, you see my project is not a bad one. If I do not travel now, I never shall, and all men should one day or other. have at present no connexions to keep me at home, no wife, no unprovided sisters, brothers, &c."

I

But first of the first, he was to bring out his Satire, and silence the critics forever. This none would have blamed; but he freighted his

shippe of fooles" with the name of every poet, and almost every man of his acquaintance. He frequently too changed his coloring in the course of his revisions; and Lord Carlisle who flourished in the MS.,

"On one alone Apollo deigns to smile, And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle,” having returned a cold answer to a hint that Lord Byron was ready to take his seat in the Peers, was hitched into a bitter rhyme. Others were stung in the MS., and balmed in the book. Thus,

"I leave topography to coxcomb Gell," was smoothed down to classic Gell.

Byron was always in love with somebody or other, like all boys that are left to themselves, and not kept in awe by the solemnity of a papa. His flames began with a peasant, Mary Duff, at eight years old; and proceeded from one idol to another, until he fell into something like real passion with that person of the most unloveable name of Chaworth, who affronted him by calling him "a lame boy," and whom he continued to adopt as Petrarch his Laura, and Dante his Beatrice, for a poetic beau ideal, or commodious lay-figure to dress his future verses on.

Byron's life at Newstead was little calculated to charm him with England; it was the rude, self-indulgent, rough life of a boy, spoiled by a fool of a mother, and left his own master when he should have been at school. His companions were as singular as himself. One of them, the Charles Skinner Matthews, whom he celebrates in the "Childe Harold," a bon vivant, an oddity, a boxer, a rambler, and unhappily a boaster of atheism, gives this sketch in a letter to a female correspondent:

"Ascend with me the hall steps, that I may introduce you to my lord and his visitants. But have a care how you proceed be mindful to go there in broad daylight, and with your eyes about you. For, should you make any blunder, should you go to the right of the hall steps, you are laid hold of by a bear; and should you go to the left, your case is still worse, for you run full against a wolf. Nor, when you have attained the door, is your danger over; for, the hall being decayed, and therefore standing in need of repair, a bevy of inmates are very probably banging at one end of it with their pistols; so that, if you enter without giving loud notice of your approach, you have only escaped the wolf and the bear to expire by the pistol-shots of the merry monks of Newstead.

"Our party consisted of Lord Byron and four others; and was now and then increased by the presence of 2 ATHENEUM, VOL. 4, 3d series.

a neighboring parson! As for our way of living, the order of the day was generally this :-For breakfast, we had no set hour, but each suited his own convenience-everything remaining on the table till the whole party had done though, had any one wished to breakfast at the early hour of ten, one would have been lucky to find any of the servants up. Our average hour of rising was one. I, who was generally up between eleven and twelve, was always, even when an invalid, the first of the party, and was deemed a prodigy of early rising. It was frequently past two before the breakfast party broke up. Then for the amusements of the morning : there was reading, fencing, singlestick, or shuttlecock in the great room; practising with pistols in the hall; walking, riding, cricket, sailing on the lake, playing with the bear, or teasing the wolf. Between seven and eight we dined, and our evening lasted from that time till one, two, or three, in the morning. The evening diversions may be easily conceived.

"I must not omit the custom of handing round, after dinner, a human skull, filled with Burgundy. After reveling on choice viands, and the finest wines of France, we adjourned to tea, where we amused ourselves' with reading or improving conversation, each according to his fancy; and, after sandwiches, &c., retired to rest. A set of monkish dresses, which had been provided, with all the proper apparatus of crosses, beads, tonsures, &c., often gave a variety to our appearance and to our pursuits."

Gaming is a sort of apprentice fee, which all young men of rank, and multitudes of no rank at all, pay for their entrance into that miserable and silly life called fashionable. Byron, who took his share of everything, good and bad, dashed into gaming like the rest. But he made the affair one of principle.

a

"I have," says his journal, notion that gamblers are as happy as many people, being always excited. Women, wine, fame, the table, even ambition, sate now and then. But

every turn of the card, and cast of the die, keeps the gamester alive: besides, one can game ten times longer than one can do anything else. I was very fond of it when young, that is to say, of Hazard, for I hate all card games, even Faro. When Macco (or however they spell it) was introduced, I gave up the whole thing, for I loved and missed the rattle of the box and dice, and the glorious uncertainty, not only of good luck or bad luck, but of any luck at all, as one had sometimes to throw often to decide at all. I have thrown as many as fourteen mains running, and carried off all the cash upon the table occasionally; but I had no coolness, no judgment, no calculation." His lordship's delicacy never perceived that gambling is robbery, the taking the purse of some fool, foolish enough to risk his money on the throw of a die: his sensibility felt too much, to feel the radical baseness of the act of taking a man's money out of his pocket, when, in nine instances out of ten, the process was the direct road to his beggary and suicide. Gambling is the fashion, as all the world knows; but it is impossible to connect the idea, in any instance, with dignity, feeling, or delicacy of mind. It is the meanest form of avarice!

Moore makes the most of his noble friend's melancholy. But how much of this must be attributed to the night's debauch, the glasses of pure brandy, and the dash and rattle of the dice, with dashing of all other kinds, to the amount of bankruptcy, is left untold. The bard's constitution was originally a bad one he made it worse by indulgence in all shapes and shades of whims; he quarreled with the world; he had a daily headach, and a dozen daily duns; and, if this is not enough to account for heavy spirits, without either the sublime or the profound, the problem is beyond solution.

laughing at his friend Hobhouse, who seems to have taken the journey in the fiercest resolution of authorship. "Hobhouse has made woundy preparations for a book on his returnone hundred pens, two gallons of japan ink, and several volumes of best blank, are no bad provision for a discerning public."

He landed at Lisbon, and rode through Spain to Cadiz. With Cadiz he was delighted, for many reasons: the first of which he gives in the words, "Cadiz is a complete Cythera. Many of the grandees who have left Madrid during the troubles, reside here; and it is the prettiest and cleanest town in Europe. The Spanish women are all alike,-their education the same. The wife of a duke is in information as the wife of a peasant; the wife of a peasant is in manner equal to a duchess. Certainly they are fascinating; but their minds have only one idea, and the business of their lives is intrigue." This character of the Spanish ladies was dashed off after a week's acquaintance with a single town, on the principle of Matthews's story of the French officer in prison at Portsmouth; who wrote down in his journal, that all the English ladies boxed, gave each other black eyes, and drank gin. It must be allowed, however, that a larger knowledge of the Peninsula might not have much altered his opinion. Absolution is cheap, and frailty, of course, fashionable.

adventurer, the Marquis De Salvo, from some prison or other, though, as the lady declared, with an unimpeachable character,-believed herself a public victim to the security of the continent and took to herself the flattering belief that she was the object of peculiar horror to Napoleon. This was just the woman to captivate the quick fancy of a man like Byron; and he embalmed her in his first foreign

verses.

In his letters he keeps up a regular detail of his movements, with now and then an anecdote. The following is well told.

"You don't know D-s, do you? He had a farce ready for the stage before I left England. When Drurylane was burned to the ground, by which accident Sheridan and his son lost the few remaining shillings they were worth; what doth my friend D- do? Why, before the fire was out, he writes a note to Tom Sheridan, the manager of this combustible concern, to inquire whether this farce was not converted into fuel, with about two thousand other unactable MSS. Now was not this characteristic ? The ruling passions of Pope are nothing to it. While the poor distracted manager was bewailing the loss of a building only worth £300,000, in comes a note from a scorching author, requiring at his hands two acts and odd scenes of a farce!"

After two years travel he returned, in 1811, and luckily escaped publishing a "paraphrase" on Horace, which Moore pronounces heavy enough to have sunk his lordship below the possibility of recovering a poetic reputation. Dallas was the lucky critic on the occasion, and he was rewarded by the MSS. of Childe Harold.

In another month his mother died, "characteristically," of a fit of rage, brought on by reading over the upholsterer's bills!

He now, probably warned a little by the suddenness of this death, made his will, the most striking point of which is, his determination that nobo

dy should mistake him for anything but what he was.

"The body of Lord B. is to be buried in the vault of the garden of Newstead, without any ceremony or burial service whatever, or any inscription, save his name and age. His dog not to be removed from the vault." So much for bravado; too boyish for Byron's time of life; to say nothing of the profaneness. It was in this spirit, that the wretched coxcomb, Shelley, whose only apology can be, that he was insane, scribbled himself down, Atheist, in the album of Mont Blanc. The whole was vulgar bravado-that was not content with being impious unless all the world knew it; that felt insult to Heaven an empty indulgence, unless the insult was blazoned to man ; and that found its triumph in calling on society to stare at the courage which could defy common sense, and outrage decent virtue. We are neither Methodists nor Muggletonians, but we have knowledge enough of the Shelley tribe to know that threefourths of their taunts and insolence are adopted merely to catch the world's wonder.

His next tidings were of the death of another atheist, his friend Matthews, who was drowned at Cambridge. But this worthless personage was fortunately replaced in the same year by a different kind of friend. The burlesque in the notes to the "Edinburgh Bards" on Moore's duel with Jeffrey, had drawn on a correspondence, the result of which was a meeting, not with sword and pistol, "and other wild animals," but over coffee; and the two poets became companions. Byron's nature was haughty and bitter; there is no use in denying it. But Moore's, setting aside the little retorts natural enough to a stranger and an Irishman, thrown loose among the proudest aristocracy that pride ever made at once insolent and ridiculous, has always been touched with human good nature. His satires on the great, in and out of power, we can heartily forgive, for the