first draft of this piece is characteristic of his habit of writing off his poems at a gush, and afterwards carefully elaborating them. The Waltz (page 365) was published anonymously in April, 1813. It was followed in May by the Giaour (page 50), the first of the flood of verse romances which, during the three succeeding years, he poured forth with impetuous fluency, and which were received with almost unrestrained applause. The Hebrew Melodies (page 370), written in December, 1814, are interesting, in connection with the author's early familiarity with the Old Testament, and from the force and music that mark the best of them; but they can hardly be considered an important contribution to the devotional verse of England. The Siege of Corinth (page 98) and Parisina (page 107), composed after his marriage, in the summer and autumn of 1815, appeared in the following year. The former is founded on the siege of the city, when the Turks took it from Menotti. Parisina, though unequal, is on the whole a poem of a higher order than the others of the period. Lord Byron. From the original painting by Westall, 1814. These romances belong to the same period of the author's poetic career as the first two cantos of Childe Harold. They followed one another like brilliant fireworks. They all exhibit a command of words, a sense of melody, and a flow of rhythm and rhyme, which mastered Moore and even Scott on their own ground. Fourteen thousand copies of the Corsair were sold in a day. But hear the author's own half-boast, half-apology: "Lara I wrote while undressing after coming home from balls and masquerades, in the year of revelry 1814. The Bride was written in four, the Corsair in ten days. This I take to be a humiliating confession, as it proves my own want of judgment in publishing, and the public's in reading, things which cannot have stamina for permanence." The pecuniary profits accruing to Byron from his works began with Lara, for which he received $3500. He had made over to Mr. Dallas, besides other gifts to the same ungrateful recipient, the profits of Childe Harold, amounting to $3000, and of the Corsair, which brought $2625. The proceeds of the Giaour and the Bride were also surrendered. During this period, 1813-1816, he had become familiar with all the phases of London society, "tasted their pleasures," and, towards the close, "felt their decay." His associates in those years were of two classes-men of the world and authors. Fêted and courted in all quarters, he patronized the theatres, became in 1815 a member of the Drury Lane Committee, "liked the dandies," including Beau Brummell, and was introduced to the Regent. Their interview, in June, 1812, in the course of which the latter paid unrestricted compliments to Childe Harold and the poetry of Scott, is naively referred to by Mr. Moore "as reflecting even still more honor on the Sovereign himself than on the two poets." Byron, in a different spirit, writes to Lord Holland: "I have now great hope, in the event of Mr. Pye's decease, of warbling truth at Court, like Mr. Mallet of indifferent memory. Consider, one hundred marks a year! besides the wine and the disgrace." We can hardly conceive the future author of the Vision of Judgment writing odes to dictation. He does not seem to have been much fascinated with the first gentleman of Europe, whom at no distant date he assailed in the terrible " Avatar," and left the laureateship to Mr. Southey. Among leaders in art and letters he was brought into more or less intimate contact with Sir Humphry Davy, the Edgeworths, Sir James Mackintosh, Colman the dramatic author, the elder Kean, Monk Lewis, Grattan, Curran, and Madame de Staël. Of the meeting of the last two he remarks, "It was like the confluence of the Rhone and the Sâone, and they were both so ugly that I could not help wondering how the best intellects of France and Ireland could have taken up respectively such residences." About this time a communication from Mr. Murray, in reference to the meeting with the Regent, led to a letter from Sir Walter Scott to Lord Byron, the beginning of a life-long friendship, and one of the most pleasing pages of biography. These two great men were for a season perpetually pitted against one another as the foremost competitors for literary favor. When Rokeby came out, contemporaneously with the Giaour, the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge ran races to catch the first copies, and laid bets as to which of the rivals would win. During the anti-Byronic fever of 1840-1860 they were perpetually contrasted as the representatives of the manly and the morbid schools. A later sentimentalism has affected to despise the work of both. The fact, therefore, that from an early period the men themselves knew each other as they were is worth illustrating. Scott's letter, in which a generous recognition of the pleasure he had derived from the work of the English poet, was followed by a manly remonstrance on the subject of the attack in the Bards and Reviewers, drew from Byron in the following month (July, 1812) an answer in the same strain, descanting on the Prince's praises of the "Lay" and "Marmion" and candidly apologizing for the "evil works of his nonage." "This satire," he remarks, "was written when I was very young and very angry, and fully bent on displaying my wrath and my wit; and now I am haunted by the ghosts of my wholesale assertions." This, in turn, called forth another letter to Byron, eager for more of his verses, with a cordial invitation to Abbotsford, on the ground of Scotland's maternal claim on him and asking for information about Pegasus and Par nassus. After this the correspondence continues with greater freedom, and the same display on either side of mutual respect. When Scott says, "the Giaour is praised among our mountains," and Byron returns, "Waverley is the best novel I have read," there is no suspicion of flattery-it is the interchange of compliments between men. They talk in just the same manner to third parties. "I gave over writing romances," says Scott, in the spirit of a great-hearted gentleman, "be from impulse, never from effort, and therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetic geniuses of my time, and of half a century before me. We have many men of high poetic talents, but none of that ever-gushing and perennial fountain of natural waters." Scott, says Lockhart, considered Byron the only poet of transcendent talents we had had since Dryden. cause Byron beat me. He hits the mark where I don't even pretend to fledge my arrow. He has access to a stream of sentiment unknown to me." The younger poet, on the other hand, deprecates the comparisons that were being invidiously drawn between them. He presents his copy of the Giaour to Scott, with the phrase, "To the monarch of Parnassus," and compares the feeling of those who cavilled at his fame to that of the Athenians towards Aristides. From those sentiments he never swerves, recognizing to the last the breadth of character of the most generous of his critics, and referring to him, during his later years in Italy, as the Wizard and the Ariosto of the North. A meeting LADY CAROLINE LAMB-MARRIAGE AND SEPARAwas at length arranged between them. Scott looked forward to it with anxious interest. They met in London during the spring of 1815. The following sentences are from Sir Walter's account of it: Report had prepared me to meet a man of pe culiar habits and quick temper, and I had some doubts whether we were likely to suit each other in society. I was most agreeably disappointed in this respect. I found Lord Byron in the highest degree courteous, and even kind. We met for an hour or two almost daily in Mr. Murray's drawing-room, and found a great deal to say to each other. Our sentiments agreed a good deal, except upon the subjects of religion and politics, upon neither of which I was inclined to believe that Lord Byron entertained very fixed opinions. Of politics he used sometimes to express a high strain on what is now called Liberalism; but it appeared to me that the pleasure it afforded him as a vehicle of displaying his wit and satire against individuals in office was at the bottom of this habit of thinking. At heart, I would have termed Byron a patrician on principle. His reading did not seem to me to have been very extensive. I remember repeating to him the fine poem of Hardyknute, and some one asked me what I could possibly have been telling Byron by which he was so much agitated. I saw him for the last time in (September) 1815, after I returned from France; he dined or lunched with me at Long's in Bond Street. I never saw him so full of gaiety and good humor. The day of this interview was the most interesting I ever spent. Several letters passed between us-one perhaps every half year. Like the old heroes in Homer, we exchanged gifts; I gave Byron a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the redoubted Elfi Bey. But I was to play the part of Diomed in the Iliad, for Byron sent me, some time after, a large sepulchral vase of silver, full of dead men's bones, found within the land walls of Athens. He was often melancholy, almost gloomy. When I observed him in this humor I used either to wait till it went off of its own accord, or till some natural and easy mode occurred of leading him into conversation, when the shadows almost always left his countenance, like the mist arising from a landscape. I think I also remarked in his temper starts of suspicion, when he seemed to panse and consider whether there had not been a secret and perhaps offensive meaning in something that was said to him. In this case I also judged it best to let his mind, like a troubled spring, work itself clear, which it did in a minute or two. A downright steadiness of manner was the way to his good opinion. Will Rose, looking by accident at his feet, saw him scowling furiously; but on his showing no consciousness, his lordship resumed his easy manner. What I liked about him, besides his boundless genius, was his generosity of spirit as well as of purse, and his utter contempt of all the affectations of literature. He liked Moore and me because, with all our other differences, we were both good-natured fellows, not caring to maintain our dignity, enjoying the mot-pour-rire. He wrote CHAPTER VI. TION-THE TWO CLERMONTS-LADY JERSEY'S Sir Walter Scott. to dream of." Coleridge writes to the same effect, in 66 Southern critics, as De Chasles, Castelar, even Mazzini, have dealt leniently with the poet's relations to the other sex; and Elze extends to him in this regard the same stretch of charity. "Dear Childe Harold," exclaims the German professor, was positively besieged by women. They have, in truth, no right to complain of him: from his childhood he had seen them on their worst side." It is the casuistry of hero-worship to deny that Byron was unjust to women, not merely in isolated instances, but in his prevailing views of their character and claims. "I regard them," he says, in a passage only distinguished from others by more extravagant petulance, "as very pretty but inferior creatures, who are as little in their place at our tables as they would be in our council chambers. The whole of the present system with regard to the female sex is a remnant of the barbarism of the chivalry of our forefathers. I look on them as grown-up children; but, like a foolish mamma, I am constantly the slave of one of them. The Turks shut up their women, and are much happier; give a woman a looking-glass and burnt almonds, and she will be content." In contrast with this, we have the moods in which he drew his pictures of Angiolina, and Haidee, and Aurora Raby, and wrote the invocations to the shade of Astarte, and his letters in prose and verse to Augusta; but the foregoing passage could never have been written by Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Shelley. The class whom he was reviling seemed, however, during "the day of his destiny," bent on confirming his judgment by the blindness of their worship. His rank and fame, the glittering splendor of his verse, the romance of his travels, his picturesque melancholy and affectation of mysterious secrets, combined with the magic of his presence to bewitch and Lady Caroline Lamb. Engraved from the Original, in the possession of Mr. Murray. bewilder them. The dissenting malcontents, condemned as prudes and blues, had their revenge. Generally, we may say that women who had not written books adored Byron; women who had written or were writing books distrusted, disliked, and made him a moral to adorn their tales, often to point their fables with. He was by the one set caressed and spoilt, and "beguiled too long; " by the other, "betrayed too late." The memoirs of Frances Ann Kemble present a curious record of the process of passing from one extreme to the other. She dwells on the fascination exerted over her mind by the first reading of his poetry, and tells how she "fastened on the book with a grip like steel," and carried it off and hid it under her pillow; how it affected her "like an evil potion," and stirred her whole being with a tempest of excitement, till finally she, with equal weakness, flung it aside, *In Aurora Raby, of Don Juan, Byron idealized Guiccioli. "resolved to read that grand poetry no more, and broke through the thraldom of that powerful spell." The confession brings before us a type of the transitions of the century, on its way from the Byronic to the anti-Byronic fever, of which later state Mrs. Jamieson, Mrs. Norton, and Mrs. Martineau are among the most pronounced representatives. Byron's freedom of speaking with regard to those delicate matters on which men of more prudence or chivalry are wont to set the seal of silence, has often the same practical effect as reticence; for he talks so much at large-every page of his Journal being, by his own admission, apt to "confute and abjure its predecessor"-that we are often none the wiser. Amid a mass of conjecture, it is manifest that during the years between his return from Greece and final expatriation (1811-1816), including the whole period of his social glory-though not yet of his solid famet--he was lured into liaisons of all sorts and shades. Some, now acknowledged as innocent, were blared abroad by tongues less skilled in pure invention than in distorting truth. On others, as commonplaces of a temperament "all meridian," it were waste of time to dwell. Byron rarely put aside a pleasure in his path; but his passions were seldom unaccompanied by affectionate emotions, genuine while they lasted. The verses to the memory of a lost love veiled as "Thyrza," of moderate artistic merit, were not, as Moore alleges, mere plays of imagination, but records of a sincere grief.g Another intimacy exerted so much influence on this phase of the poet's career, that to pass it over lightly would be like omitting Vanessa's name from the record of Swift. Lady Caroline Lamb, granddaughter of the first Earl Spencer, was one of those few women of our climate who, by their romantic impetuosity, recall the "children of the sun." She read Burns in her ninth year, and in her thirteenth idealized William Lamb (afterwards Lord Melbourne) as a statue of Liberty. In her nineteenth (1805) she married him, and lived for some years, during which she was a reigning belle and toast, a domestic life only marred by occasional eccentricities. She is thus described: 66 Her eyes were dark, and her countenance (in repose) was grave. Her complexion was fair, her figure slight, her hair fawn-flaxen, shot with gold." Rogers, whom in a letter to Lady Morgan she numbers among her lovers, said she ought to know the new poet, who was three years her junior, and the introduction took place in March, 1812. After the meeting, she wrote in her journal, "Mad-bad-and dangerous to know;" but when the fashionable Apollo called at Melbourne House, she "flew to beautify herself." Flushed by his conquest, he spent a great part of the following year in her company, during which time the apathy or self-confidence of the husband laughed at the worship of the hero. "Conrad" detailed his travels and adventures, interested her by his woes, dictated her amusements, invited her guests, and seems to have set rules to the establishment. 'Medora," on the other hand, made no secret of her devotion, declared that they were affinities, and offered him her jewels to relieve his financial difficulties. But after the first exherself, and could not praise her indifferent verses: citement, he began to grow weary of her talk about "he grew moody, and she fretful, when their mutual being removed for a season to her father's house in egotisms jarred." Byron at length concurred in her Ireland, on which occasion he wrote one of his glowing † See poem and foot-note, page 437. Foot-notes and poems, pp. 432, 433, 434, 435. Mr. Trelawny says that Thyrza was a cousin, but that on this subject Byron was always reticent. Mr. Minto, as we have seen, associates her with the disguised girl of 1807-8. farewell letters. When she came back, matters were little better. The would-be Juliet beset the poet with renewed advances, on one occasion penetrating to his rooms in the disguise of a page, on another threatening to stab herself with a pair of scissors, and again, developing into a Medea, offering her gratitude to any one who would kill him. "The 'Agnus' is furious," he writes to Hodgson, in February, 1813, in one of the somewhat ungenerous bursts to which he was too easily provoked. "You can have no idea of the horrible and absurd things she has said and done since (really from the best motives) I withdrew my homage. ...The business of last summer I broke off, and now the amusement of the gentle fair is writing letters literally threatening my life." With one member of the family, Lady Melbourne, Mr. Lamb's mother, and sister of Sir Ralph Milbanke, he remained throughout on terms of pleasant intimacy. He appreciated the talent and sense, and was ready to profit by the experience and tact, of "the cleverest of women." But her wellmeant advice had unfortunate results, for it was on her suggestion that he became a suitor for the hand of her niece, Miss Milbanke. Byron first proposed to this lady in 1813; his offer was refused, but so graciously that they continued to correspond on friendly, which gradually grew into intimate terms, and his second offer, towards the close of the following year, was accepted. After a series of vain protests and petulant warnings against her cousin by marriage, who she said was punctual at church, and learned, and knew statistics, but was "not for Conrad, no, no, no!" Lady Caroline lapsed into an attitude of fixed hostility; and shortly after the crash came, and her predictions were realized, vented her wrath in the now almost forgotten novel of Glenarvon,* in which some of Byron's real features were represented in conjunction with many fantastic additions. Madame de Staël was kind enough to bring a copy of the book before his notice when she met Byron on the Lake of Geneva, but he seems to have been less moved by it than by most attacks. We must, however, bear in mind his own admission in a parallel case. "I say I am perfectly calm; I am, nevertheless, in a fury." Over the sad vista of the remaining years of the unhappy lady's life we need not linger. During a considerable part of it she appears hovering about the thin line that separates some kinds of wit and passion from madness; writing more novels, burning her hero's effigy and letters, and then clamoring for a lock of his hair or a sight of his portrait; separated from, and again reconciled to, a husband to whose magnanimous forbearance and compassion she bears testimony to the last, comparing herself to Jane Shore; attempting Byronic verses, loudly denouncing and yet never ceasing inwardly to idolize the man whom she regarded as her betrayer, really only, with justice perhaps, in that he had unwittingly helped to overthrow her mental balance. After eight years of this life, lit up here and there by gleams of social brilliancy, we find her carriage, on the 12th of July, 1824, suddenly confronted by a funeral. On hearing that the remains of Byron were being carried to the tomb, she shrieked and fainted. Her health finally sank, and her mind gave way under this shock; but she lingered till January, 1828, when she died, after writing a calm letter to her husband, and bequeathing the poet's miniature to her friend, Lady Morgan. † "I have paid some of my debts and contracted others," Byron writes to Moore, on September 15, 1814; "but I have a few thousand pounds which I can't spend after my heart in this climate, and so I shall go back to the south. I want to see Venice and † See poem, page 602. See foot-note, page 488. the Alps, and Parmesan cheeses, and look at the coast of Greece from Italy. All this, however, depends upon an event which may or may not happen. Whether it will, I shall probably know to-morrow; and if it does, I can't well go abroad at present." "A wife," he had written, in the January of the same year, "would be my salvation." But a marriage entered upon in such a flippant frame of mind could scarcely have been other than disastrous. In the autumn of the year we are told that a friend, observing how cheerless was the state both of his mind and prospects, advised him to marry, and after much discussion he consented, naming to his correspondent Miss Milbanke. To this his adviser objected, remarking that she had, at present, no fortune, and that his embarrassed affairs would not allow him to marry without one, etc. Accordingly, he agreed that his friend should write a proposal to another lady which was done. A refusal arrived as they were one morning sitting together. "You see," said Lord Byron, "that after all Miss Milbanke is to be the person," and wrote on the moment. His friend, still remonstrating against his choice, took up the letter; but, on reading it, observed, "Well, really, this is a very pretty letter; it is a pity it should not go." "Then it shall go," said Lord Byron, and, in so saying, sealed and sent off this fiat of his fate. The incident seems cut from a French novel; but so does the whole strange story-the one apparently insoluble enigma in an otherwise only too transparent life. On the arrival of the lady's answer he was seated at dinner, when his gardener came in and presented him with his mother's wedding-ring, lost many years before, and which had just been found, buried in the mould beneath her window. Almost at the same moment the letter arrived, and Byron exclaimed, "If it contains a consent (which it did), I will be married with this very ring." He had the highest anticipations of his bride, appre- from the Cambridge undergraduates, when in the ciating "her talents, and excellent qualities," and say- course of the same month he went to the Senate House ing, "she is so good a person that I wish I was a bet- to give his vote for a Professor of Anatomy. ter." Without being beautiful, Miss Milbanke was by The most constant and best of friends was his sister, no means unattractive to those who were not repelled Augusta Leigh, whom, from the death of Miss Chaby her formality and coldness. Simple, unaffected, and worth to his own, Byron, in the highest and purest more likely to think too much than too little of her sense of the word, loved more than any other human dignity, she had the air of natural refinement rather being. Tolerant of errors which she lamented, and than of fashion. Her presence would have gained violences in which she had no share, she had a touch greatly in effectiveness by two, or even three, more of their common family pride, most conspicuous in an inches in stature, but "her figure" (to use Byron's almost cat-like clinging to their ancestral home. Her own words) was perfect for her height." Though early published letters are full of regrets about the her countenance was remarkable for the roundness threatened sale of Newstead, on the adjournment of which suggested to Byron the pet name of "Pippin' "which, when the first purchaser had to pay $125,000 for her, it had a piquant and sometimes slyly humor- for breaking his bargain, she rejoices, and over the ous expression. If they were wanting in regularity, consummation of which she mourns, in the manner of her features were delicate, feminine, and intellectual. Milton's EveThere was nothing in her face to indicate hardness of Ada. Drawn by F. Stone from the original miniature. 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. Campbell 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 slightest and most trivial essays in poetical composition were superior to the average poetry of the "Keepsakes," and other fashionable collections of "Vers de Société !"* About this date Byron writes to various friends in the good spirits raised by his euthusiastic reception See foot-note, page 459. "Must I then leave thee, Paradise?" In all her references to the approaching marriage there are blended notes of hope and fear. In thanking Hodgson for his kind congratulations, she trusts it will secure her brother's happiness. Later she adds her testimony to that of all outsiders at this time, as to the graces and genuine worth of the object of his choice. After the usual preliminaries, the ill-fated pair were united, at Seaham House, on the 2d of January, 1815. Byron was married like one walking in his sleep. He trembled like a leaf, made the wrong responses, and almost from the first seems to have been conscious of his irrevocable mistake. "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. He could see Not that which was-but that which should have been But the old mansion, the accustom'd hall. And she who was his destiny came back, Here we have faint visions of Miss Chaworth, mingling with later memories. In handing the bride into the carriage he said, "Miss Milbanke, are you ready?"-a mistake said to be of evil omen. Byron never really loved his wife, though he has been absurdly accused of marrying for revenge. On the other hand, it is not unfair to say that she was fascinated by a name, and inspired by the philanthropic zeal of reforming a literary Corsair. Both were disappointed. Miss Milbanke's fortune was mainly settled on herself; and Byron, in spite of plentiful resolutions, gave little sign of reformation. For a considerable time their life, which, after the "treacle moon," as the bridegroom called it, spent at Halnaby, near Darlington, was divided between residence at Seaham and visits to London, seemed to move smoothly. In a letter, evidently mis-dated the 15th December, Mrs. Leigh writes to Hodgson: "I have every reason to think that my beloved B. is very happy and comfortable. I hear constantly from him and his rib. It appears to me that Lady B. sets about making him happy in the right way. I had many fears. Thank God that they do not appear likely to be realized. In short, there seems to me to be but one drawback to all our felicity, and that, alas, is the disposal of dear Newstead. I never shall feel reconciled to the loss of that sacred, revered Abbey. The thought makes me more melancholy than perhaps the loss of an inanimate object ought to do. Did you ever hear that landed property, THE GIFT OF THE CROWN, could not be sold? Lady B. writes me word that she never saw her father † See page 381, stanza vi. |