I know that thou wilt love me: though to drain

My blood from out thy being were an aim

And an attainment-all would be in vain ;

Still thou wouldst love me, still that more than life retain."

This pathetic prophecy, inspired by the intense paternal sympathy of Byron for the child from whom he was severed, was fulfilled to the letter; and its fulfilment is the strangest of all the passages of his history. We have touched already on his deep affection for Ada. Madame Guiccioli tells us that the days in which he received a lock of her hair or her miniature were kept as days of solemnity, and hallowed with inexpressible sadness. Even when in Greece, news of an illness of Ada affected him so deeply that he was not able to continue his journal. "The mother of Ada," he would say to Madame Guiccioli, "has had the smiles of her childhood and her youth, but the tears of her womanhood will be for me." He felt them springing for him warm and fast, afar, across the dark valleys of time and through the frozen vapours of death.

Years after, Colonel Wildman, the successor of Byron in the proprietorship of Newstead Abbey, met Byron's daughter in the round of London society, and invited her to come and visit the seat of her ancestors. Sixteen months before her death, Lady Lovelace made a visit to Newstead Abbey. In the great library of the abbey Colonel Wildman read one of the finest passages of Byron to Byron's daughter. Touched with the beauty of the verse, she asked who was the author. "The author?" said Colonel Wildman. "There is his portrait" (pointto the picture of Byron by Phillips on the wall of the library); and he recited yet more of Byron's poetry to her. Lady Lovelace was mute with astonishment; a new revelation burst in upon her. "Do not think this is affectation," she said, "when I tell you that I have been brought up in complete ignorance of all that regards my father."

Lady Lovelace had indeed never seen her father's handwriting till Murray showed her a specimen.

From that moment a passionate enthusiasm for all that recalled the memory of Byron took possession of her. She loved to shut herself for long hours in the apartments he had lived in, and which still retained much of the furniture which Byron had touched and used. She loved to sleep in the room in which he had slept. She gave herself up to lonely meditations on his exiled fate and his premature end, and endeavoured, with intense yearning, out of the association of scenes over which his memory lingered, to extract some of that tenderness of which she had been deprived-some participation in the glory of a great existence. From that time all other charms of life became insipid and colourless before her. This child of Byron was inconsolable. She had been cruelly disinherited and robbed of the most priceless treasure which it was in the power of Heaven to bestow upon her the parental affection of the noblest, most generous,

truest, and most loving heart which ever beat in the bosom of man. She waned and pined and fell ill, very ill-so ill that she knew she must die; and then she wrote to Colonel Wildman a letter, begging him as a favour to let her be buried by the side of her father. "Yes, I will be buried there-not where my mother can join me, but by the side of him who so loved me, and whom I was not taught to love; and this reunion of our bodies in the grave shall be an emblem of the union of our spirits in the bosom of the Eternal." Byron was more than avenged. The father and daughter lie side by side in the village church of Hucknall.

As it was with Byron's. daughter, so it will be with posterity. The world has since his death measured his character and genius too much by the rule of Lady Byron. Too many "matter-of-fact paragons," too many self-sufficient and comfortable egotisms, have given the tone in literature and society for people to be able to appreciate tenderly the facts of Byron's life, or to sympathise with the sublimity of his aspirations and the generosity of his enthusiasm. Yet his time will come. His greatness and his glory have suffered a long eclipse; but eclipses are not lasting.

No doubt a good deal of the misconception which has arisen about Byron has been owing to himself-to that habit of self-depreciation and that momentary love of paradox in which he often indulged, and which resulted partly, as we have said, from his hatred of cant and hypocrisy, but also partly from his capacity for seeing two sides to every question; partly from his dislike to be taken himself as a poseur, and partly also sometimes from dislike of poseurs. Of Byron's way of giving vent to the latter feeling, Madame Guiccioli gives an example drawn from her own experience. A man who set up for a gentleman à bonnes fortunes took to discoursing on the fidelity and devotion of women. The inference which he wanted the company to draw was that they had always been faithful and devoted to him. Byron sustained the contrary thesis with vivacity, out of mere love of banter and contempt of conceit. We have shown how he declared on one occasion that he knew nothing of the paternal sentiment, although he sickened at the news of one daughter's illness, and his reason was feared for on the death of another. We imagine that, from the story of his friendships, it will be inferred he had no ordinary sense of the value and the charm of such relations. Yet he says in Don Juan:

"O Job, you had two friends; one's quite enough,

Especially when we are ill at ease;

They are bad pilots when the weather's rough,
Doctors less famous for their cures than fees.

Let no man grumble when his friends fall off,
As they will do like leaves at the first breeze.

When your affairs come round one way or t'other,
Go to the coffee-house and take another."

He takes care, however, in this place to give the antidote:

"But this is not my maxim; had it been,

Some heartaches had been spared me; yet I care not,

I would not be a tortoise in his screen

Of stubborn shell, which waves and weather wear not : 'Tis better, on the whole, t' have felt and seen

That which humanity may bear and bear not :

"Twill teach discernment to the sensitive,

And not to pour their ocean in a sieve."

We have dealt here alone with Byron the man, and not Byron the poet. The poetry of Byron, like his social reputation, has been also for some time under an eclipse in England; but throughout Europe his name is still a word of power. There is scarcely any corner so remote where his name has not still a musical charm for almost the humblest intelligence, or where it does not still vibrate from the tongue with an echo equalled by the name of Napoleon alone, but conjuring up purer imaginings of superhuman excellence and aspiration. No doubt there are certain graces of poetry not to be found in Byron. His poetry lacks the sensitive delicacy of language and the fine and fairy pencillings of Keats, and the ghostly tenuity, the starry splendour, and the transcendental mystic exaltations of Shelley. But such qualities would have no place in Byron's verse, and to complain of their absence is to ignore its spirit. Titian did not paint with the pencil of Bellini; nor can it be imagined that the prophets and the sibyls of Michael Angelo would have come to anything else than ruin under the pencil of a Carlo Dolce or Angelico da Fiesole. It was said the Spartan diet could not be tasted to advantage without the addition of the sauce-hunger; so too the finest pages of Byron are not suited for the intellectual nurture of those who do not bring to the banquet a hunger for that which is sublime in nature, and for all the most generous aspirations of man.

WILLIAM STIGAND.

BOUND TO JOHN COMPANY

OR THE

Adbentures and Misadventures of Robert Ainsleigh

CHAPTER XXVIII. THE TWO TREATIES.

SOME days elapsed before the arrival of a reply to the letter which Mr. Watts had written to Colonel Clive, setting forth in detail the iniquitous demands of Omichund. When Robert Clive's answer did come, I was at the first blush scarcely less astonished by it than I had been by the Gentoo's most impudent demand.

"I have received your last letter," wrote he, "and I must confess the tenor of it surprised me much. I immediately repaired to Calcutta, and, at a committee held, both the admirals and gentlemen agree that Omichund is the greatest villain upon earth, and that now he appears in the strongest light, what he was always suspected to be, a villain ingrain. However, to counterplot this scoundrel, and at the same time to give him no room to suspect our intentions, enclosed you will receive two forms of agreement, the one real, to be strictly kept by us, the other fictitious. In short, this affair concluded, Omichund will be treated as he deserves."

"Well, Ainsleigh," said Mr. Watts, after he had permitted me to read this letter, "what do you think of the colonel's plan ?"

"It is a bold expedient, sir; but-do you consider it an honourable one ?"

"No," replied my patron, "between man and man such a trick would be a consummate treachery. But remember that we deal here with nations. Omichund has it in his power not only to betray you and me, but to destroy the English in Bengal."

"Since we are so completely in his power, sir, would it not be best to give him his price, and suffer him to enjoy his ill-gotten gains, and the ignomony they will carry with them?"

"That is offering a premium to iniquity. You talk like a boy, my dear Ainsleigh. Is a man to make near a million of money by a stroke of treachery the most infamous ever hatched in the mind of a traitor? Were the sum less important, we might consent to his cheating Meer Jaffier, for remember it is from the future Nabob the money is to be plundered. I swear that Clive's notion is a masterstroke of genius. That man is all genius-in politics or in war he shines alike resplendent. His diplomacy is as intuitive as his military skill. Great

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LL

heavens, what a man-and he came to Madras scarce thirteen years ago as a clerk!"

"Yet I wish with all my heart he had hit upon any other plan than this, sir."

6

"So do I, Robert; but you see it is just because there is no other plan possible that this expedient is a masterstroke. That scoundrel pushes us into a corner. 'I will have my name in the treaty for close upon a million sterling, or I will betray you,' he says. He shows no mercy, you see; and we reply, Very well, you shall have your name in a treaty' but we do not say what treaty; and so the trickster will be nicely tricked. Do not ask me to pity him, Robert. It is but a puling sentiment that can plead for such a harpy. The wretch is rolling in wealth already. He has got half the hoarded rupees plundered from his house, and is now trying to extort the other half from Suraja Doulah's treasury. He will have full restitution of his losses in Calcutta, with the rest of the sufferers, native as well as English, should the revolution succeed. And are you going to plead for him because his treachery fails to extort an extra million? I tell you the man's greed of gold is a monomania; give him a million to-day, and you will but render him the more eager for another million to-morrow. A fictitious treaty! Yes, Robert, it is the only possible means of securing us from this scoundrel's treachery."

Reflection convinced me that Mr. Watts was right, and that a situation of peril so exceptional, a traitor so far beyond all common traitors, justified a deceit as desperate as that proposed by Clive. How this act may appear to the judgment of after-ages I know not; but it is scarce possible that the rigid moralists who may point to this deed as a blot upon Robert Clive's character should realise the difficulties of our position at this crisis. I have lived to hear the Colonel's policy in this matter questioned, as almost every other step in the career that gave India to England has been questioned; and to hear his bold justification of the deed. "I would do it again a hundred times," he told the Committee of the House of Commons; and though his humanity compassionated the disappointed miser's hapless ending, I think he gloried in the recollection of having successfully cheated so base a cheat.

Conciliated, and half-convinced by the apparent friendliness of the course which Clive had taken with regard to the Morattoe letter-a genuine document, and calculated to alarm his fears-Suraja Doulah at last consented to withdraw his army from Plassy, and Meer Jaffier returned to the capital at the head of his fifteen thousand troops. He was coldly received by the Nabob, whose insolence of manner so alarmed him that he withdrew to his palace in fear and trembling, not knowing what discoveries might have been made by Suraja Doulah during his absence. The frown of a despot is a menace of death, and Meer Jaffier knew the ways of his countrymen too well to be blind to his danger.