to expose it. The Countess Guiccioli, Lady Blessington, and others, assure us that in society few would have observed the defect if he had not referred to it; but it was never far from the mind. But 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 "Childe 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 comrade'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. In 1792 he was sent to a rudimentary day school of girls and boys, taught by a Mr. Bowers, where he seems to have learnt nothing save to repeat monosyllables by rote. He next passed through the hands of a devout and clever clergyman, named Ross, under whom, according to his own account, he made astonishing progress, being initiated into the study of Roman history, and taking special delight in the battle of Regillus. Long afterwards, when standing on the heights of Tusculum and looking down on the little round lake, he remembered his young enthusiasm and his old instructor. He next came under the charge of a tutor called Paterson, whom he describes as "a very serious, saturnine, but kind young man. He was the son of my shoemaker, but a good scholar. With him I began Latin, and continued till I went to the grammar | school, where I threaded all the classes to the fourth, when I was recalled to England by the demise of my uncle." Of Byron's early school days there is little further record. We learn from scattered hints that he was backward in technical scholarship, and low in his class, in which he seems to have no ambition to stand high; but that he eagerly took to history and romance, especially luxuriating in the Arabian Nights. He was an indifferent penman, and always disliked mathematics; but was noted by masters and mates as of quick temper, eager for adventures, prone to sports, always more ready to give a blow than to take one, affectionate, though resentful. When his cousin was killed at Corsica, in 1794, he became the next heir to the title. In 1797, a friend, meaning to compliment the boy, said, "We shall have the pleasure some day of reading your speeches in the House of Commons," he, with precocious consciousness, replied, "I hope not. If you read any speeches of mine, it will be in the House of Lords." Similarly, when, in the course of the following year, the fierce old man at Newstead died, and the young lord's name was called at school with "Dominus" prefixed to it, his emotion was so great that he was unable to answer, and burst into tears. Belonging to this period is the somewhat shadowy record of a childish passion for a distant cousin slightly his senior, Mary Duff, with whom he claims to have fallen in love in his ninth year.* We have a quaint picture of the pair sitting on the grass together, the girl's younger sister beside them playing with a doll. A German critic gravely remarks, "This strange phenomenon places him beside Dante." Byron himself, dilating on the strength of his attachment, tells us that he used to coax a maid to write letters for him, and that when he was sixteen, on being informed by his mother of Mary's marriage, nearly fell into convulsions. In the course of 1796, after an attack of scarletfever at Aberdeen, he was taken by his mother to Ballater, and on his recovery spent much of his time in rambling about the country. "From this period," he says, "I date my love of mountainous countries. I can never forget the effect, years afterwards, in England, of the only thing I had long seen, even in miniature, of a mountain, in the Malvern Hills. After I returned to Cheltenham I used to watch them every afternoon, at sunset, with a sensation which I cannot describe." The poet, owing to his physical defect, was not a great climber, and we are informed, on the authority of his nurse, that he never even scaled the easy attainable summit of the "steep frowning" hill of which he has made such effective use. But the impression of it from a distance was none the less genuine, and his "When I roved a young Highlander," page 336, reflects the poet's love for the latitudes.† Byron's allusions to Scotland are variable and inconsistent. His satire on her reviewers was sharpened by the show of national as well as personal antipathy; and when, about the time of its production, a young lady remarked that he had a little of the northern manner of speech, he burst out, "Good God! I hope not. I would rather the whole d-d country was sunk in the sea. I the Scotch accent!" In the autumn of 1798 the family, i. e., his motherwho had sold the whole of her household furniture for $375—with himself, and a maid, set south. The poet's only recorded impression of the journey is a gleam of Loch Leven, to which he refers in one of his latest letters. He never revisited the land of his birth. Our next glimpse of him is on his passing the toll-bar of Newstead. Mrs. Byron asked the old woman who kept it, "Who is the next heir?" and on her answer, "They say it is a little boy who lives at Aberdeen," "This is he, bless him!" exclaimed the nurse. "Never Returned to the ancestral Abbey, and finding it half ruined and desolate, they migrated for a time to the neighboring Nottingham. Here the child's first experience was another course of surgical torture. He was placed under the charge of a quack named Lavender, who rubbed his foot in oil, and screwed it about in wooden machines. This useless treatment is associated with two characteristic anecdotes. One relates to the endurance which Byron, on every occasion of mere physical trial, was capable of displaying. Mr. Rogers, a private tutor, with whom he was reading passages of Virgil and Cicero, remarked, "It makes me uncomfortable, my lord, to see you sitting there in such pain as I know you must be suffering.” mind, Mr. Rogers," said the child, "you shall not see any signs of it in me." The other illustrates his precocious delight in detecting imposture. Having scribbled on a piece of paper several lines of mere gibberish, he brought them to Lavender, and gravely asked what language it was; and on receiving the answer, "It is Italian," he broke into an exultant laugh at the expense of his tormentor. Another story survives, of his vindictive spirit giving birth to his first rhymes. A meddling old lady, who used to visit his mother and was possessed of a curious belief in a future transmigration to our satellite-the bleakness of whose scenery she had not realized-having given him some cause of offence, he stormed out to his nurse that he "could not bear the sight of the witch," and vented his wrath in a couplet. The poet himself dates his "first dash into poetry" a year later (1800), from his juvenile passion for his cousin Margaret Parker, whose subsequent death from See poem and foot-note, page 304. an injury caused by a fall he afterwards deplored in a forgotten elegy. "I do not recollect," he writes through the transfiguring mists of memory, "anything equal to the transparent beauty of my cousin, or to the sweetness of her temper, during the short period of our intimacy. She looked as if she had been made out of a rainbow-all beauty and peace. My passion had the usual effects upon me-I could not sleep; I could not eat; I could not rest. It was the texture of my life to think of the time that must elapse before we could meet again. But I was a fool then, and not much wiser now." Sic transit secunda. The departure, at a somewhat earlier date, of his nurse, May Gray, for her native country, gave rise to evidence of another kind of affection. On her leaving, he presented her with his first watch, and a miniature by Kay, of Edinburgh, representing him with a pro Byron. From a miniature by Kay, 1795. fusion of hair over his shoulders. He continued to correspond with her at intervals. Byron was always beloved by his servants. This nurse afterwards married well, and during her last illness, in 1827, communicated to her attendant, Dr. Ewing, of Aberdeen, recollections of the poet, from which his biographers have drawn. In the summer of 1799 he was sent to London, entrusted to the medical care of Dr. Baillie (brother of Joanna, the dramatist), and placed in a boarding-school at Dulwich, under the charge of Dr. Glennie. The physician advised a moderation in athletic sports, which the patient in his hours of liberty was constantly apt to exceed. The teacher-who continued to cherish an affectionate remembrance of his pupil, even when he was told, on a visit to Geneva in 1817, that he ought to have made a better boy of him"-testifies to the alacrity with which he entered on his tasks, his playful good-humor with his comrades, his reading in history beyond his age, and his intimate acquaintance with the Scriptures. "In my study," he states, "he found many books open to him; among others, a set of our poets from Chaucer to Churchill, which I am almost tempted to say he had more than once perused from beginning to end." One of the books referred to was the Narrative of the Shipwreck of the "Juno," which contains, almost word for word, the account of the "two fathers," in Don Juan. Meanwhile Mrs. Byronwhose reduced income had been opportunely augmented by a grant of a $1,500 annuity from the Civil List-after revisiting Newstead, followed her son to London, and took up her residence in a house in Sloane-terrace. She was in the habit of having him with her there from Saturday to Monday, kept him from school for weeks, introduced him to idle company, and in other ways was continually hampering his progress. Byron, on his accession to the peerage, having become a ward in Chancery, was handed over by the Court to the guardianship of Lord Carlisle, nephew of the admiral, and son of the grand-aunt of the poet. Like his mother, this earl aspired to be a poet, and his tragedy, The Father's Revenge, received some commendation from Dr. Johnson; but his relations with his illustrious kinsman were from the first unsatisfactory. In answer to Dr. Glennie's appeal, he exerted his authority against the interruptions to his ward's education; but the attempt to mend matters led to such outrageous exhibitions of temper that he said to the master, "I can have nothing more to do with Mrs. Byron; you must now manage her as you can." Finally, after two years of work, which she had done her best to mar, she herself requested his guardian to have her son removed to a public school, and accordingly he went to Harrow, where he remained till the autumn of 1805. The first vacation, in the summer of 1801, is marked by his visit to Cheltenham, where his mother, from whom he inherited a fair amount of Scotch superstition, consulted a fortune-teller, who said he would be twice married, the second time to a foreigner. Harrow was then under the management of Dr. Joseph Drury, one of the most estimable of its distinguished head-masters. His account of the first impressions produced by his pupil, and his judicious manner of handling a sensitive nature, cannot with advantage be condensed. "Mr. Hanson," he writes, "Lord Byron's solicitor, consigned him to my care at the age of thirteen and a half, with remarks that his education had been neglected; that he was ill prepared for a public school; but that he thought there was a cleverness about him. After his departure I took my young disciple into my study, and endeavored to bring him forward by inquiries as to his former amusements, employments, and associates, but with little or no effect, and I soon found I that a wild mountain colt had been submitted to my management. But there was mind in his eye. In the first place, it was necessary to attach him to an elder boy; but the information he received gave him no pleasure when he heard of the advances of some much younger than himself. This I discovered, and assured him that he should not be placed till by diligence he might rank with those of his own age. His manner and temper soon convinced me that he might be led by a silken string to a point, rather than a cable: on that principle I acted." After a time, Dr. Drury tells us that he waited on Lord Carlisle, who wished to give some information about his ward's property and to inquire respecting his abilities, and continues: "On the former circumstance I made no remark; as to the latter I replied, 'He has talents, my lord, which will add lustre to his rank.' Indeed!' said his lordship with a degree of surprise that, according to my feeling, did not express in it all the satisfaction I expected." With, perhaps, unconscious humor on the part of the writer, we are left in doubt as to whether the indifference proceeded from the jealousy that clings to poetasters, from incredulity, or a feeling that no talent could add lustre to rank. In 1804 Byron refers to the antipathy his mother had to his guardian. Later he expresses gratitude for some unknown service, in recognition of which the 66 second edition of the Hours of Idleness was dedicated* by his obliged ward and affectionate kinsman," to Lord Carlisle. The tribute being coldly received, led to fresh estrangement, and when Byron, on his coming of age, wrote to remind the earl of the fact, in expectation of being introduced to the House of Peers, he had for answer a mere formal statement of its rules. This rebuff affected him as Addison's praise of Tickell affected Pope, and the following lines were published in the March of the same year: "Lords too are bards! such things at times befall, No muse will cheer, with renovating smile, In prose he adds, "If, before I escaped from my teens, I said anything in favor of his lordship's paper-books, it was in the way of dutiful dedication, and more from the advice of others than my own judgment; and I seize the first opportunity of pronouncing my sincere recantation." In a letter of 1814 he expressed to Rogers his regret for his sarcasms; and in his reference to the death of the Hon. Frederick Howard, in Childe Harold, he endeavored to make amends in the lines "Yet one I would select from that proud throng, This is all of any interest we know regarding the fitful connection of the guardian and ward. Towards Dr. Drury the poet continued through life to cherish sentiments of gratitude, and always spoke of him with veneration. "He was," he says, "the best, the kindest (and yet strict too) friend I ever had; and I look on him still as a father, whose warnings I have remembered but too well, though too late, when I have erred, and whose counsel I have but followed when I have done well or wisely." Great educational institutions must consult the greatest good of the greatest number of commonplace minds, by regulations against which genius is apt to kick; and Byron, who was by nature and lack of discipline peculiarly ill-fitted to conform to routine, confesses that till the last year and a half he hated Harrow. He never took kindly to the studies of the place, and was at no time an accurate scholar. In the Bards and Reviewers, and elsewhere, he evinces considerable familiarity with the leading authors of antiquity, but it is doubtful whether he read any of the more difficult of them in the original. Comparatively slight stress was then laid on modern languages. Byron learnt to read French with fluency, as he certainly made himself familiar with the great works of the eighteenth century; but he spoke it with little ease or accuracy. Of German he had a smattering merely. Italian was the only language, besides his own, of which Byron was a master. But the extent and variety of his general reading was remarkable. His list of books, drawn up in 1807, includes more history and biography than most men of education read during a long life; a fair load of philosophy; the poets en masse; among orators, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Parliamentary debates from the Revolution to the year 1742; pretty copious divinity, including Blair, Tillotson, Hooker, with the characteristic addition-"all very tiresome. I abhor books of religion, though I reverence and love my God without the blasphemous notions of sectaries." (See foot-notes, pages 151, 256, † See page 24, stanza xxix. * See page 303. sean. 263, 497.) Lastly, under the head of "Miscellanies," we have Spectator, Rambler, World, etc., etc.; among novels, the works of Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Mackenzie, Sterne, Rabelais, and RousHe recommends Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy as the best storehouse for second-hand quotations, as Sterne and others have found it, and tells us that the great part of the books named were perused before the age of fifteen. Making allowance for all exaggeration, we can believe that Byron was an omnivorous reader-"I read eating, read in bed, read when no one else reads "-and, having a memory only less retentive than Macaulay's, acquired so much general information as to be suspected of picking it up from Reviews. He himself declares that he never read a Review till he was eighteen years oldwhen he himself wrote one, on Wordsworth. At Harrow, Byron proved himself capable of violent fits of work, but of "few continuous drudgeries." He would turn out an unusual number of hexameters, Lord Clare. From a family Miniature. and again lapse into as much idleness as the teachers "Where are those honors, Ida, once your own, See poem, page 309. The appointment was generally unpopular among the an accomplished clergyman and minor poet, and has boys, whose sympathies were enlisted in favor of Henry left some pleasing reminiscences of his former patron. Drury, the son of their former master, and Dr. Butler The prodigy of the school, George Sinclair, was in the seems for a time to have had considerable difficulty in habit of writing the poet's exercises, and getting his maintaining discipline. Byron, always "famous for row-battles fought for him in return. His bosom friend ing," was a ringleader of the rebellious party, compared was Lord Clare. To him his confidences were most himself to Tyrtæus. On one occasion he tore down the freely given, and his most affectionate verses adwindow-gratings in a room of the school-house; with dressed. In the characteristic stanzas entitled the remark that they darkened the hall; on another he "L'amitié est l'amour sans ailes," we feel as if beis reported to have refused a dinner invitation from the tween them the qualifying phrase might have been master, with the impertinent remark that he could omitted; for their letters, carefully preserved on either never think of asking him in return to dine at New-side, are a record of the jealous complaints and the stead. On the other hand, he seems to have set limits reconciliations of lovers. In 1821 Byron writes, "I to the mutiny, and prevented some of the boys from never hear the name Clare without a beating of the setting their desks on fire by pointing to their fathers' heart even now; and I write it with the feelings of names carved on them. (Page 329.) Byron afterwards 1803-4-5, ad infinitum." At the same date he says expressed regret for his rudeness; but Butler remains of an accidental meeting: "It annihilated for a moin his verse as "Pomposus, of narrow brain, yet of ment all the years between the present time and the a narrower soul." days of Harrow. It was a new and inexplicable feeling, like a rising from the grave to me. Clare too was much agitated-more in appearance than I was myself for I could feel his heart beat to his fingers' ends, unless, indeed, it was the pulse of my own which made me think so. We were but five minutes together on the public road, but I hardly recollect an hour of my existence that could be weighed against them." They were "all that brothers should be but the name;" and it is interesting to trace this relationship between the greatest genius of the new time and the son of the statesman who, in the preceding age, stands out serene and strong amid the swarm of turbulent rioters and ranting orators by whom he was surrounded and reviled. Of the poet's free hours, during the last years of his residence, which he refers to as among the happiest of his life, many were spent in solitary musing by an elm-tree, near a tomb to which his name has been given a spot commanding a far view of London, of Windsor "blossomed high in tufted trees," and of the green fields that stretch between, covered in spring with white and red snow of apple blossom. (See footnotes and poems, pages 312, 338.) The others were devoted to the society of his chosen comrades. Byron, if not one of the safest, was one of the warmest of friends, and he plucked the more eagerly at the choicest fruit of English public school and college life, from the feeling he so pathetically expresses,— "Is there no cause beyond the common claim, Before leaving Harrow the poet had passed through the experience of a passion of another kind, with a result that unhappily colored his life. Accounts differ as to his first meeting with Mary Ann Chaworth, the heiress of the family whose estates adjoined his own, and daughter of the race that had held with his such varied relations. In one of his letters he dates the introduction previous to his trip to Cheltenham, but it seems not to have ripened into intimacy till a later period. Byron, who had, in the autumn of 1802, visand attracted attention by the liveliness of his manited his mother at Bath, joined in a masquerade there, ners. In the following year Mrs. Byron again settled at Nottingham, and in the course of a second and longer visit to her he frequently passed the night at the Abbey, of which Lord Grey de Ruthven was then a temporary tenant. Of his Harrow intimates, the most prominent were the Duke of Dorset,* the poet's favored fag; Lord Claret (the Lycus of the Childish Recollections) (page 337); Lord Delawarrt (the Euryalus); John Wingfield (Alonzo), who died at Coimbra, 1811; Cecil Tattersall (Davus); Edward Noel Long? (Cleon); Wildman, afterwards proprietor of Newstead; and Sir Robert Peel. Of the last, his form-fellow and most famous of his This was the occasion of his remates, the story is told of his being unmercifully beaten for offering resistance to his fag master, and Byron rush-vited him to their seat at Annesley. He used at first newing his acquaintance with the Chaworths, who ining up to intercede with an offer to take half the blows. Peel was an exact contemporary, having been to return every evening to Newstead, giving the exborn in the same year, 1788. It has been remarked take revenge on him for his grand-uncle's deed, a cuse that the family pictures would come down and that most of the poet's associates were his juniors, and, less fairly, that he liked to regard them as his sat- fancy repeated in the Siege of Corinth. Latterly he ellites. But even at Dulwich his ostentation of rank consented to stay at Annesley, which thus became his had provoked for him the nickname of "the old Eng-headquarters during the remainder of the holidays of lish baron." To Wildman, who, as a senior, had a right of inflicting chastisement for offences, he said, "I find you have got Delawarr on your list; pray don't lick him." "Why not?" was the reply. "Why, I don't know, except that he is a brother peer.' Again, he interfered with the more effectual arm of physical force to rescue a junior protégé-lame like himself, and otherwise much weaker-from the illtreatment of some hulking tyrant. "Harness," he said, "if any one bullies you, tell me, and I'll thrash him if I can;" and he kept his word. Harness became * See poem and foot-note, page 310. See poem, page 337. sumed in an excursion to Matlock and Castleton, in the 1803. The rest of the six weeks were mainly conception of prologue and epilogue, embraced the whole same companionship. This short period, with the exstory of his first real love. Byron was on this occasion in earnest; he wished to marry Miss Chaworth, an event which, he says, would have "joined broad lands, healed an old feud, and satisfied at least one heart." The intensity of his passion is suggestively brought before us in an account of his crossing the Styx of the the boat. In the same passage he informs us that he Peak cavern, alone with the lady and the Charon of had never told his love; but that she had discoveredit is obvious that she never returned-it. We have another vivid picture of his irritation when she was waltzing in his presence at Matlock; then an account of their riding together in the country on their return to the family residence; again, of his bending over the piano as she was playing the Welsh air of "Mary Anne;" and, lastly, of his overhearing her heartless speech to her maid, which first opened his eyes to the real state of affairs-"Do you think I could care for that lame boy?"-upon which he rushed out of the house, and ran, like a hunted creature, to Newstead. Thence he shortly returned from the rougher school of life to his haunts and tasks at Harrow. A year later the pair again met to take farewell, on the hill of Annesley-an incident he has commemorated in two short stanzas, that have the sound of a wind moaning over a moor. "I suppose," he said, "the next time I see you, you will be Mrs. Chaworth?" "I hope so," she replied (her betrothed, Mr. Musters, had agreed to assume her family name). The announcement of her marriage, which took place in August, 1805, was made to him by his mother, with the remark, "I have some news for you. Take out your handkerchief; you will require it." On hearing what she had to say, with, forced calm he turned the conversation to other subjects; but he was long haunted by a loss which he has made the theme of many of his verses.* In 1807 he sent to the lady herself the lines beginning "O had my fate been joined with thine."† In the following year he accepted an invitation to dine at Annesley, and was visibly affected by the sight of the infant daughter of Mrs. Chaworth, to whom he addressed a touching congratulation in the poem, "Well! thou art happy." Shortly afterwards, when about to leave England for the first time, he finally addressed her in the stanzas ""T is done, and shivering in the gale, ing star of Annesley" passed under a cloud of mental darkness. She died, in 1832, of fright caused by a Nottingham riot. On the decease of Musters, in 1850, every relic of her ancient family was sold by auction and scattered to the winds. Miss Chaworth. CHAPTER III. -HOURS OF IDLENESS-BARDS AND REVIEWERS. [1808-1809.] Some years later, having an opportunity of revisiting the family of his successful rival, Mrs. Leigh dissuaded him. "Don't go," she said, "for if you do you will certainly fall in love again, and there will be a scene." The romance of the story culminates in the famous Dream, a poem of unequal merit, but containing passages of great beauty and pathos, written in the year 1816 at Diodati, as we are told, amid a flood of tears. || CAMBRIDGE, AND FIRST PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP Miss Chaworth's attractions, beyond those of personal beauty, seem to have been mainly due to the poet's ardent imagination. A young lady, two years his senior, of a lively and volatile temper, she enjoyed the stolen interviews at the gate between the grounds, and laughed at the ardent letters, passed through a confidant, of the still awkward youth whom she regarded as a boy. She had no intuition to divine the presence, or appreciate the worship, of one of the future master-minds of England, nor any ambition to ally herself with the wild race of Newstead, and preferred her hale, commonplace, foxhunting squire. "She was the beau ideal," says Byron, in his first accurate prose account of the affair, written 1823, a few days before his departure for Greece, "of all that my youthful fancy could paint of beautiful. And I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of women from the perfectiory ay imagination created in her. I say created, for found her, like the rest of the sex, anything but angelic." Mrs. Musters (her husband afterwards asserted his right to his own name) had in the long-run reason to regret her choice. The ill-assorted pair, after some unhappy years, resolved on separation; and falling into bad health and worse spirits, the "bright morn * See poem and foot-note, page 311. IN October, 1805, on the advice of Dr. Drury, Byron was removed to Trinity College, Cambridge, and kept up a connection with the University for less than three years of very irregular attendance, during which we hear nothing of his studies, except the contempt for them expressed in some of the least effective passages of his early satires. He came into residence in bad temper and low spirits. His attachment to Harrow characteristically redoubled as the time drew near to leave it, and his rest was broken "for the last quarter, with counting the hours that remained." He was about to start by himself, with the heavy feeling that he was no longer a boy, and yet against his choice, for he wished to go to Oxford. The Hours of Idleness, the product of this period, are fairly named. He was so idle as regards "problems mathematic," and "barbarous Latin," that it is matter of surprise to learn that he was able to take his degree, as he did, in March, 1808. Of his Harrow friends, Harness and Long** in due course followed him to Cambridge, where their common pursuits were renewed. With the latter-who was drowned in 1809, on a passage to Lisbon with his |