dace him in a manner becoming his birth. I saw that he felt the situation, and I fully partook of his indignation." This indignation, indeed, was not diminished by certain difficulties that had attended the proof of his birth, and consequently the ceremonial claim of his station; the marriage of Admiral Byron with Miss Trevanion having taken place in a private chapel at Carhais, from which no regular certificate of the ceremony could be produced. Speaking of this, and of his reception by the Chancellor, Lord Eldon, whose cordial welcome to him was not very welcomely received, Lord Byron himself says:"When I came of age, some delays, on account of birth and marriage certificates from Cornwall, occasioned me not to take my seat for several weeks; when these were over, and I had taken the oaths, the Chancellor apologised to me for the delay, observing that these forms were part of his duty. I begged him to make no apology, and added, as he had certainly shown no violent hurry, 'Your Lordship is exactly like Tom Thumb,' which was then being acted, 'you did your duty, and you did no more.'"

A few days after this, was published the bitter expression of those feelings which, even thus early, a variety of circumstances had excited: and now, wrapping himself up in his loneliness, and a desolation which his ardent temperament and poetic imagination led him naturally even to exaggerate, he retired to the seclusion of his cowl-haunted Abbey, in part to brood over the disappointments he had experienced, in part, perhaps, to indulge unchecked in those anticipations of brighter lands and more glorious days which the poem he was publishing, and the expedition he was undertaking, were likely to create. Not but that in his solitude-a solitude perhaps not the less lonely for a crowd-he was, if we may credit his own accounts (which his now sage companions do not disavow)—

"Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;

Few earthly things found favour in his sight
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree."

II.

In June he set sail with Mr. Hobhouse for Lisbon, describing the commencement of his undertaking in verses that do no disgrace to the author of Beppo.(1)

The following passage, in a prose letter to Mr. Hodgson, exhibits the same boyish and light-hearted spirit:-"I am very happy here (Lisbon), because I loves oranges, and talks bad Latin to the monks, who understand it, as it is like their own; and I goes into society (with my pocket-pistols), and I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass and

(1) See page 851.

a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhoea, and bites from the musquitos. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a-pleasuring." Few boarding-school misses would have received this as an autograph note from the romantic author of Childe Harold!

Lord Byron's travels at this time form an epochand not the least important epoch-in his life. There was naturally in his character a strange assemblage of different and, as some would imagine, incompatible qualities. He had in that character much romance : his early verses, his early loves, his early friendships and fights, his mysterious passion for parading fire-arms, and even the anecdote of his disinterring and drinking out of the old monk's skull, are all proofs of this. He had also much common sense. This we see in his admiration of Pope, in his horror of the Lakeschool, and the Cockney-school, in his careful imitation of the beauties of Shelley, and as careful abstainment from his faults. One of the memorialists of Byron has said, that he had much playfulness and satire; he might have said so from his works-from the English Bards, from Beppo, and from Don Juan: but this talent is far more visible in his incomparable letters, written evidently without effort or affectation, and totally free from that dressing and drapery for stage effect, which is seen in most of his other performances. Indeed, if Byron had one quality more naturally conspicuous than the rest, it was wit.

Had he not travelled at this time, left to the success of the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and to his own strong taste and inclination, which, even amidst the mountains of Albania and the temples of Athens, did not wholly yield to more lone and magnificent aspirations, (2) it is very probable, not that his fame would have been less, but that it would have rested on a totally different basis from that which now forms the mystic pedestal of his genius.

His travels at this period, when his mind was most likely to be susceptible to their impressions, developed the romantic part of his character in such a manner as to throw the other parts of it into the shade. Remembering, as I do, the sensations which even saluted me on my first visiting a southern climeremembering the strange and wild ecstacy with which I also at an early period of life first found myself on those shores, the images of which are, from their singularity as well as their associations, the most striking-remembering, as I well remember, the strange, exulting, and indescribable feeling with which I stood on the shores of Greece, hearing a new and yet half-familiar language, gazing on garbs wild and picturesque, and looking over, from the spot on which I stood, those plains so sacred to history and to song, and which mingled so naturally with all my youthful recollections and heroic reveries-remember

ing my own sensations, as I well remember them, at such a time and in such scenes, it is not difficult for me to imagine what must have been the sensations of a more poetic and impassioned mind, which a passage through Portugal and Spain must have already deeply excited.

In Cadiz' white walls, indeed, the young poet seems to have experienced some of the effects of that Spanish beauty which I, judging very differently from Mr. Galt (1) on this subject, think he has so voluptuously described. Among those women "of long black hair, dark languishing eyes, clear olive complexions, and forms more graceful in motion than can be conceived by an Englishman, used to the drowsy listlessness of his countrywomen," he found one to whom he made carnest love, by the help of a dictionary. At Malta again, the interesting and romantic Mrs. S. whom he has celebrated as Florence, drew from him those beautiful lines, which I still remember, though I have not read them since I was a boy at school:

"Though far from Albin's craggy shore,

Divided by the dark blue main,
A few brief rolling seasons o'er,
Perchance I view her cliffs again:

"But wheresoe'er I now may roam,
Through scorching clime, and varied sea,
Though time restore me to my home,

I ne'er may bend my eyes on thee," etc. etc. When I said that I could well conceive Lord Byron's feelings on this his first and least fatal visit to Greece, I ought to have added, that if one man was more likely than another to have deepened the impressions naturally produced by that land, and its people strange and wild, it was the Albanian chief to whose camp our Poet, on first arriving, directed his steps. On many of his subsequent pages fell the dark shadow of the daring Ruler of Albania; and, indeed, it is difficult to underrate the effect which such scenes as the following must have had upon a young and imaginative mind:

"I shall never forget the singular scene on entering Tepaleen at five in the afternoon, as the sun was going down. It brought to my mind (with some change of dress, however) Scott's description of Branksome Castle in his Lay, and the feudal system. The Albanians, in their dresses (the most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, gold-worked cloak, crimson velvet gold-laced jacket and waistcoat, silver-mounted pistols and daggers), the Tartars with their high caps, the Turks in their vast pelisses and turbans, the soldiers and black slaves with the horses, the former in groups in an immense large open gallery in front of the palace, the latter placed in a kind of cloister below it, two hundred steeds ready caparisoned to move in a moment, couriers entering or

(1) See Galt's Life of Byron.

(2) He returned from Constantinople again to Greece.

passing out with dispatches, the kettle-drums beating, boys calling the hour from the minaret of the mosque, altogether with the singular appearance of the building itself, formed a new and delightful spectacle to a stranger."

At last, after crossing Portugal, traversing the South of Spain, visiting Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, and thence passing through Albania, Illyria, and Chaonia, over the Gulf of Actium and the Achelous, tarrying in the Morea, visiting Thebes, Athens, Delphi, Parnassus, and finally Constantinople (2)-having lived with the highest and the lowest, been for days in a Pacha's palace, and nights in a cow-house,-having stored his mind with all that adventure, nature, art, and history, could pour into it,-having, moreover, stimulated and excited those passions which chimed in with the wild and wandering existence he had been leading,-the Childe returned to his native England, with much that had been doubtful in his destiny decided, and all that had been doubtful in his character confirmed. Before his journey, Lord Byron might have been any thing;-after it, he must have beena Poet.

His welcome back again was certainly not an inviting one; and affords a new proof of the almost perpetual unhappiness in which persons, eminent in literature, seem usually to pass their lives:-"Indeed, my prospects are not very pleasant. Embarrassed in my private affairs, indifferent to public, solitary without the wish to be social, with a body a little enfeebled by a succession of fevers, but a spirit, 1 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. In short, I am sick and sorry, and when I have a little repaired my irreparable affairs, away I shall march, either to campaign in Spain, or back again to the East, where I can at least have cloudless skies and a cessation from impertinence.”— Such were his feelings on arriving; nor did fate seem to brighten with his stay.

A short time after his return, died Mrs. Byron, at Newstead. She died suddenly. "I heard," he says, "one day of her illness-the next, of her death."-Nor was this all: besides the loss of his mother, he had to mourn, within a few weeks, two of his most valued friends, Mr. Wingfield and Mr. Matthews. "Some curse," he writes to Mr. S. Davies, "hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends is drowned (3) in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? Come to me, Scrope, I am almost desolate-left almost alone in the world." "Peace, however," he adds, in another

(3) Mr. Matthews. Mr. Wingfield died at Coimbre.

them.

i letter,-" peace be with the dead. Regret cannot wake With a sigh to the departed, let us resume the dull business of life, in the certainty that we also shall have our repose."

And now, upshooting from these dark vexations, appeared the glories of his future career; for we are at the dawn of that fame which was soon to rise so brightly above all contemporary reputations.

Returning from his travels, Lord Byron had brought with him a kind of light satire, similar in many respects to the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and another work which, as well, perhaps, from its novelty as its merit, created a sensation, which hardly any poem ever produced at its appearance. The first was called Hints from Horace, the second, Childe Harold; and, if we are to believe Mr. Dallas, the Poet gave his preference to the first, a very clever but by no means surprising performance. To account for this is not difficult; a writer who has been for some time employed over his work does not perceive the merits of its originality, while he trembles for his want of example; and Byron, seeing no existing model of his method, shrunk from doing that which nobody had done, nor saw that the very reason of his apprehensions would be the cause of his success.

Childe Harold succeeded more than, I think, the merits of the two first Cantos deserved; and not only was the success extraordinary, but of a description the most likely to please. It was not the poem that was admired only; it was the poet, about whom an interest was excited. The fictitious hero of the tale, between whom and the writer of it, we must confess, there was some kind of resemblance, was considered at once as an accurate portrait of the mysterious young noble who had just returned from the lands of romance and song, which he had been describing. If Lord Byron had been known in the world before his travels, the world would have viewed both himself and his travels differently; but, though a peer of England, he was unknown, as I have said, to English society; and those who for the first time now made inquiries respecting him, heard that he was the grand-nephew of the singular old lord who had been tried for killing Mr. Chaworth; that he had a ruined Abbey, and a damaged estate; that at college he had been known for keeping a bear; and on leaving college for drinking out of a skull; while numerous tales, not altogether without foundation, were circulated as to that life of licentiousness, under the satiety of which his pilgrimage was said to have been begun.

His previous satire, though popular and admired, had never awakened any of those stories, and Lord

(1) That Lord Byron had in all his passions a kind of premeditation is no where better proved than by a circumstance which I venture to state, namely, that many of the most apparently inspired letters which he sent about this time, as the outpourings of a deep attachment

Byron after it, in spite of his bear, in spite of his skull, might have passed for any thing he pleased. But upon THE CHILDE they were all so much appropriate drapery, and set off, with a wilder horror, the enchanting young lord who wrote such beautifu! poetry, and who seemed to have known every thing,-himself unknown. In a town always panting for novelty, and amidst that part of a town the curiosity of which is ever most alive, such a melancholy and romantic phoenix as the new poet, a gentleman who had been guilty of every misdemeanour, and, as he seemed to imply, of some dark and unutterable crimes; who had been to Lisbon and to Cadiz, to Athens, and to Constantinople, regions then much more unknown and remote than at the present time; and who, moreover, added to all these qualifications an old title, and a declaration that he had loved very much, and was determined never to love again; having, also, small ears and white hands, and curly hair, as he told the world Ali Pacha had told him, and a countenance peculiarly adapted to a frontispiece arrangement-was destined, for a year at least, to figure as the personage of the epoch.

It was at this time, however, when the moodiness of his supposed character added in no small degree, to his reputation, that Byron's real character became more amiable and composed. His manners, too, lost that unevenness, betwixt pride and playfulness, which had formerly distinguished them. He was no longer so proud of being a peer, because he found his rank at last attended naturally by all those circumstances which a patrician by birth expected, and which, as a plebeian by acquaintance, he did not formerly enjoy. It was now that a long series of gallantries began, the most notorious of which, as well on account of the singularities as the talent of the lady, was that of Lady Caroline Lamb.

Whatever might have been the subsequent faults of this lady, her affection for Lord Byron was the first; and, though not beautiful, it would be difficult to imagine a person who, from the originality of her mind, and the fascination of her manners, was more likely to have attracted the attention, and, if the volatility of her character had permitted it, to have riveted the affections, of the Poet. Deeply attached to her he was at one time, and an elopement was meditated, which the lady had the merit of refusing. This refusal, and an offence to his personal vanity, which was supposed to have followed at no great distance of time, Lord Byron never forgave, and, up to the last hour of his existence, the lady in question, who adored his memory, was treated by him with ridicule and contempt. (1)

were nothing more nor less than actual translations from a French novel, which every libertine has studied, but of which few lovers have made so profligate a use

• Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

It was during this period that Lord Byron was, and acquired, as he says, the reputation of being, a dandy, or fine gentleman. But though there is no doubt that he took to this existence at first, and retained a kind of respect for it afterwards, because it was one to which, however high his rank, he seemed originally to have been debarred by his want of connections, he had not, to use the common expression, been "long about town" before he was as much sickened by its finer vices and more fashionable follies, as he had been previous to his quitting England, by the grosser pleasures of a college and coffee-house existence.

In a letter to Mr. Bankes from Cheltenham, in 1812, he says: "I have been here some time drinking the waters, simply because there are waters to drink, and they are very medicinal, and sufficiently disgusting. In a few days I set out for Lord Jersey's, but return here, where I go out very little, and enjoy in its fullest extent the dolce far niente. What you are about I cannot guess, even from your date-not dauncing to the sound of the gittourney in the halls of the Lowthers. I heard that you passed through here, at the inn where I first alighted, the very day before I arrived in these parts. We had a very pleasant set here. At first the Jerseys, Melbournes, Cowpers, and Hollands, but all gone; and the only persons I know are the Rawdons and Oxfords, with some later acquaintances of less brilliant descent; but I do not trouble them much; and as for your rooms and your assemblies, they are not dreamed of in our philosophy." One can hardly see a better specimen than in this extract, of a dandy beginning to be tired of his vocation.

it was rather from a disease of the mind than of the heart that he sought a connection that would have opened to him a new species of life, and dissipated the satiety, if it did not add to the pleasure or fatigue, of existence. "I believe you think that I have not been quite fair with that alpha and omega of beauty, etc., with whom you would willingly have united me. But, if you consider what her sister said on the subject, you would still less wonder that my pride should have taken the alarm; particularly as nothing but the every-day flirtation of every-day people ever occurred between your heroine and myself. Had Lady appeared to wish it, or even not to oppose it, I would have gone on, or very possibly married (that is, if the other had been equally accordant) with the same indifference which has frozen over the Black Sea of almost all my passions. It is that very indifference which makes me so uncertain and appa- ! rently capricious. It is not eagerness of new pursuits, but that nothing impresses me sufficiently to fix; neither do I feel disgusted, but simply indifferent to almost all excitements. The proof of this is that obstacles, the slightest even, stop me. This can hardly be timidity, for I have done some impudent things too in my time; and in almost all cases opposition is a stimulus. In mine, it is not; if a straw were in my way, I could not stoop to pick it up. I have sent this long tirade, because I would not have you suppose that I have been trifling designedly with you or others. If you think so, in the name of St. Hubert (the patron of antlers and hunters) let me be married out of hand, I don't care to whom, so it amuses any body else, and don't interfere with me much in the day-time."

Sept. 5, 1814, he writes, with a mind more made up to the taking of that step, from which he seems, however, at the very last moment to have instinctively shrunk, and which, as it might have proved a bless

It was perhaps the not-to-be-satisfied satisfaction of a morbid mind, as well as the embarrassments of the irregular liaisons, and an ill-regulated fortune, which first induced him to turn his thoughts upon marriage; and there seems to have been something of seriousness in the admiration he entertained for Lady Elizabeth Forbes. Of this Byron speaks in a letter to Mr. Moore; and what he says indicates at once the state of his dispositions, and shows pretty clearly that

dawn, over his miserable though magnificent career. "Now for a little egotism. My affairs stand thus:To-morrow I shall know whether a circumstance of importance enough to change many of my plans will occur or not. If it does not, I am off for Italy next month, and London in the mean time next week." The circumstance of importance to which he alludes in this letter was his second proposal for Miss Milbanke, his marriage with whom took place under circumstances that were certainly not very poetical. "A person," says Mr. Moore, "who had for some time stood high in his affectionate confidence, observing how cheerless and unsettled was his mind and prospects, advised him strenuously to marry." This person was, I believe, Lady Melbourne. She suggested to him one lady, Lord Byron mentioned another, and that other was Miss Milbanke. "No," said Lady Melbourne, "Miss Milbanke will not suit you. In the first place, she has no fortune now,

and you want money immediately. In the next place, you want a person who will have a great admiration for your genius, and she for this has too great an admiration of her own." "Well," said Lord Byron," as you please;" and, sitting down, he wrote a letter to the lady recommended by Lady Melbourne. He received a refusal. "Now, you see," said Lord Byron, "that after all Miss Milbanke is to be the person I will write to her." He wrote to her on the moment, and, as soon as he had finished, his friend, remonstrating still strongly against his choice, took up the letter, but, on reading it over, observed "well, really this is a very pretty letter,—it is a pity it should not go. I never read a prettier one." "Then it shall go," said Lord Byron; and in so saying sealed and sent off, on the instant, this fiat of his fate.

It is rather ludicrous, after this very drawing-straw or head-and-tail way of making a selection, to hear him say, in a letter to Lady -, "Miss Milbanke is the good-natured person who has undertaken me, and of course I am very much in love, and as silly as all single gentlemen must be in that sentimental situation." "She is said to be an heiress," he says, "but of that I really know nothing, and shall not inquire." Yet the matter seems to have been pretty well canvassed over as to the young lady's fortune; nor does he forget her birth-" she is niece to Lady Melbourne, and cousin to Lady Cowper." His first meeting with this lady, who had, once before refused him, was at Melbourne House, where, from her quiet and unpretending air, he had taken her for a governess or companion; and she seems, as it often happens with those who are subsequently to have an influence over our fate, to have made, even at first sight, a peculiar impression upon him. Mr. Moore says, that at this time,-which is rather unfortunate, considering the advice he had so long and so eloquently bestowed, he discovered that his friend was not fit for matrimony, and comments thereupon very sagely and shrewdly through a certain number of pages, in a homily which would have been better addressed at an earlier period to his friend, than preached, somewhat pompously as it is, over his misfortunes: -"The very habits of abstraction and self-study, to which the occupations of men of genius lead, are in themselves of an unsocial and detaching tendency. Those images of ideal good and beauty which surround the poet in his musings soon accustom him to consider all that is beneath this high standard unworthy of his care, till at length, the heart becoming chilled as the fancy warms, it too often happens that, in proportion as he has refined and elevated his theory of all the social affections, he has unfitted himself for the practice of them. In looking back through the lives of the most illustrious poets, the class of intellect in which the characteristic features of genius are, perhaps, most strongly marked, we shall find that, with

scarcely one exception, from Homer down to Lord Byron, they have been, in their several degrees, restless and solitary spirits, with minds wrapt like silkworms in their own tasks, either strangers or rebels to the mystic ties, and bearing about with them a deposit for posterity in their souls, to the jealous watching and enriching of which almost all other thoughts and considerations have been sacrificed." It is easy to acknowledge the truth, without admiring the elevation of Mr. Moore's simile; and, though Lord Byron was not equally a silk-worm, it is difficult to imagine that he could, in the ordinary sense of the word, have been "a good husband." But a man like Lord Byron is not to be considered, even by the woman he marries, as an ordinary mortal. She must be content to sacrifice some of that passion which love in general attaches to the person, or rather not to sacrifice, but to bestow it on the reputation of her life's partner-a reputation in which she shares.-After all, however, that man is rash who encumbers a literary life with a matrimonial connection.

Poor Lord Byron himself found, upon arriving in town after his acceptance, and inquiring into the state of his affairs, that they were in so utterly an embarrassed condition as to fill him with some alarm. From the position in which he stood, however, there was no honourable retreat, and at the seat of Sir Ralph Milbanke, his wife's father, on the 2d of January, 1815, he was married, amidst, as he says himself, "the quivering recollections of the past, and melancholy reflections on the future." He could see, "Not that which was, nor that which should have been;" but the old mansion, the accustomed hall, and the remembered chambers, where in earlier years he had loved and wooed and been rejected, came back at this hour and thrust their dark shadows between him and the light of his bridal. There is nothing except a few silly stories, circulated apparently without foundation, to induce us to suppose Lord Byron's honeymoon was not, what most honey-moons are, an effort on both sides to be peculiarly agreeable for a month, under the satisfactory consideration that there will be plenty of time afterwards to be otherwise.

"Since I wrote last," says he, 2d February 1815, "I have been transferred to my father-in-law's, with my lady and my lady's maid, etc. etc., and the treaclemoon is over, and I am awake, and find myself married. My spouse and I agree to-and in-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 marry upon lease; but I am very sure I should renew mine at the expiration, though the next term were for ninety-nine years."

In the course of this spring, Lord Byron first became personally acquainted with Sir Walter Scott,