been uniformly regular; and his conversation, though entirely free from solemnity, strictly correct. In all the higher duties of morality no one could be more unblameable. His kindness towards his family and friends, his scrupulous integrity, his disdain of every thing base and servile, were conspicuous to all who had opportunities of observing his character, though never ostentatiously displayed. The last months of his life called forth other qualities, which support and dignify the hours of sorrow and suffering; a steady fortitude, that uttered no complaint, and betrayed no infirmity; with a calm and pious resignation, in that spirit of Christian philosophy he had always cultivated, to the pleasure of his Creator.

George Gordon Byron.

BORN A. D. 1788.-DIED A. D. 1824.

LORD BYRON was born at London, on the 22d January, 1788. He was the grandson of Admiral John Byron, and succeeded his great-uncle, William, Lord Byron, while at school, in 1798. His father was the admiral's only son, Captain John Byron, of the guards, notorious for his gallantries and reckless dissipation. By the eccentricity and misconduct. of the old Lord Byron, and of the captain his nephew, the reputation of the family of Byron, so ancient and honourable in English history, had been considerably tarnished. The former was tried by his peers for killing his relation, Mr Chaworth, in a combat with swords, after a tavern dispute, under circumstances so equivocal that he was indicted for murder, and only saved from the penalty attendant on manslaughter by pleading his peerage-an escape which did not prevent him from being consigned, by public opinion, to a life of seclusion and obscurity. Captain Byron, the poet's father, was so dissipated, that he obtained the name of 'mad Jack Byron.' He was one of the handsomest men of his day, but so immersed in all the fashionable vices, that, at length, to be seen in his company was deemed discreditable. In his twenty-seventh year, he seduced Amelia, marchioness of Carmarthen, daughter of the earl of Holdernesse, to whom, on a divorce following, he was united in marriage. This ceremony the ill-fated lady did not survive more than two years, when he took, for a second wife, Miss Gordon of Gight in Aberdeenshire, whose fortune he quickly dissipated, leaving her a destitute widow, in 1791, with a son, the celebrated subject of this article, then only three years of age.

Previously to the death of her husband, having been deserted by him, Mrs Byron retired, with her infant son, to Aberdeen, where she lived in narrow circumstances and great seclusion. The singular circumstances attendant upon the early childhood of Byron seem to have operated very materially in the formation of his very striking character. Until seven years of age, the care of his education rested solely on his mother, to whose excusable, but injudicious indulgence some of the waywardness by which it was subsequently marked, was, even by himself, attributed. Being then of a weakly constitution, that disadvantage, added to a slight malconformation in one of his feet, naturally rendered him an object of peculiar solicitude; and to invigorate his constitution, he was not sent

to school, but allowed to brace his limbs upon the mountains in the neighbourhood, where he early acquired associations, and encountered a mass of legendary lore, which indisputably nurtured his poetical tendencies. At the age of seven, he was sent to the grammar-school at Aberdeen, where he was more distinguished for great occasional exertions, in order to make up for the intervals of absence rendered necessary by his delicacy of health, than by his general application. In all boyish sports, however, the ardour of his temperament enabled him to surmount his natural disadvantages.

In 1798 the death of his great-uncle, without issue, gave him the title and estates of the family; on which, being then ten years of age, he was removed from the immediate care of his mother, and placed under the guardianship of the earl of Carlisle, who had married the sister of the late Lord Byron, a lady of considerable poetical abilities. On this change, the youthful lord was placed at Harrow, where he distinguished himself more by his love of manly sports, and by his undaunted spirit, than by attention to his studies, or submission to the school discipline; but, although in a subsequent part of his life he indulged in some animadversion upon the tendency of the system in public schools, he always cherished an affectionate remembrance of Harrow, and of its master, Doctor Drury. He had scarcely seen anything of the quiet graces of domestic life, when, in the course of a short residence at Newstead, in the summer of 1804, he became known to the family of Chaworth of Annesley, the descendants of the gentleman who was killed by his great-uncle. The heiress of Annesley was then a beautiful girl, some two years older than Lord Byron. There was something to touch a colder fancy in the situation, and he soon became intoxicated with the deepest and purest passion his bosom was ever to know. A young lady of eighteen is as old, all the world over, as a man of five-and-twenty; and she amused herself with the awkward attentions of a lover whom she considered as a mere school-boy. Little did she guess with what passions, and with what a mind, her fortune had brought her into contact. "In the dances of the evening (says his biographer) Miss Chaworth, of course, joined, while her lover sat looking on, solitary and mortified. It is not impossible, indeed, that the dislike which he always expressed for this amusement may have originated in some bitter pang, felt in his youth, on seeing 'the lady of his love' led out by others to the gay dance from which he was himself excluded. During all this time he had the pain of knowing that the heart of her he loved was occupied by another;-that, as he himself expresses it,

'Her sighs were not for him; to her he was

Even as a brother-but no more.'

"If at any moment, however, he had flattered himself with the hope of being loved by her-a circumstance mentioned in his Memoranda' as one of the most painful of those humiliations to which the defect in his foot had exposed him-must have let the truth in, with dreadful certainty, upon his heart. He either was told of, or overheard, Miss Chaworth saying to her maid, 'Do you think I could care anything for that lame boy?' This speech, as he himself described it, was like a shot through his heart. Though late at night when he heard it, he instantly darted out of the house, and, scarcely knowing whither he rau, never

stopped till he found himself at Newstead. The picture which he has drawn of this youthful love, in one of the most interesting of his poems, The Dream, shows how genius and feeling can elevate the realities of this life, and give to the commonest events and objects an undying lustre. The old hall at Annesley, under the name of the antique oratory,' will long call up to fancy the maiden and the youth' who once stood in it; while the image of the 'lover's steed,' though suggested by the unromantic race-ground of Nottingham, will not the less conduce to the general charm of the scene, and share a portion of that light which only genius could shed over it. With the summer holidays ended this dream of his youth." This episode is to the story of Byron, though in a different way, what that of Highland Mary' is to Robert Burns's. This was his one "true love,"—perhaps no truly imaginative mind ever had room for two. But instead of ending, like Burns's early dream of love and innocence, in pure humanizing sorrow, this blossom was cut off rudely, and left an angry wound upon the stem. His profoundest pathos is embodied in the various poems which his maturer genius consecrated to the recollections of Annesley; and it is all interwoven with a thread of almost demoniacal bitterness: "A disposition on his own side, to form strong attachments, and a yearning desire after affection in return, were the feeling and the want," says Mr Moore, "that formed the dream and torment of his existence. We have seen with what passionate enthusiasm he threw himself into his boyish friendships. The all-absorbing and unsuccessful love that followed was, if I may so say, the agony, without being the death, of this unsated desire, which lived on through his life, filled his poetry with the very soul of tenderness, lent the colouring of its light to even those unworthy ties which vanity or passion led him afterwards to form, and was the last aspiration of his fervid spirit in those stanzas written but a few months before his death :

When between sixteen and seventeen, he was entered of Trinity college, Cambridge; and here, as at Harrow, his dislike of discipline drew upon him much unavoidable rebuke, which he repaid with sarcasm and satire; among other practical jokes, he kept a bear, which, he observed, he was training up for a degree. At the university he fell, according to every account, including his own, into a course of reckless profligacy. The following is an extract from a letter, written in his twentieth year:-" My pretensions to virtue are unluckily so few, that though I should be happy to merit, I cannot accept your applause in that respect. One passage in your letter struck me forcibly; you mention the two Lords Lyttleton in the manner they respectively deserve, and will be surprised to hear the person, who is now addressing you, has been frequently compared to the latter. I know I am injuring myself in your esteem by this avowal, but the circumstance was so remarkable from your observation, that I cannot help relating the fact. The events of my short life have been of so singular a nature, that, though the pride commonly called honour has, and, I trust, ever will, prevent me from disgracing my name by a mean or cowardly action.

I have been already held up as the votary of licentiousness, and the disciple of infidelity. How far justice may have dictated this accusation I cannot pretend to say, but, like the gentleman to whom my religious friends, in the warmth of their charity, have already devoted me, I am made worse than I really am."-The following is from a subsequent letter to Mr Dallas:-"I once thought myself a philosopher, and talked nonsense with great decorum; I defied pain, and preached up equanimity. For some time this did very well, for no one was in pain for me but my friends, and none lost their patience but my hearers. At last, a fall from my horse convinced me that bodily suffering was an evil; and the worst of an argument overset my maxims and my temper at the same moment, so I quitted Zeno for Aristippus, and conceive that pleasure constitutes the ro zadov. In morality, I prefer Confucius to the Ten Commandments, and Socrates to St Paul, though the two latter agree in their opinion of marriage. In religion I favour the Catholic emancipation, but do not acknowledge the pope; and I have refused to take the sacrament, because I do not think eating bread or drinking wine from the hand of an earthly vicar will make me an inheritor of heaven. I hold virtue in general, or the virtues severally, to be only in the disposition, each a feeling, not a principle. I believe truth the prime attribute of the Deity; and death an eternal sleep, at least of the body. You have here a brief compendium of the sentiments of the wicked George Lord Byron; and, till I get a new suit, you will perceive I am badly clothed." At nineteen, he quitted the university, and took up his residence at the family-seat of Newstead abbey, where he employed himself chiefly in amusement, and especially in aquatic sports and swimming.

The

In 1807, while still at Newstead, he arranged his early productions, which he caused to be printed at Newark, under the title of Hours of Idleness, by George Gordon Lord Byron, a Minor.' These poems, although exhibiting some indication of the future poet, also betrayed several marks of juvenility and imitation, which induced the Edinburgh reviewers to notice the book in a style of insulting criticism. ridicule produced by this critique roused the anger of the poet, who took revenge in his celebrated satire of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The spirit of resentment is seldom very just; and the anger, rather than the judgment of Byron, guided his pen on this occasion. It happened, too, singularly enough, that, owing to party and other predilections, a number of the persons satirized in this poem, no long time after, were numbered among the friends of the author; for which reason, after it had passed through four editions, he suppressed it. It is unpleasant to relate, that, about this time, Byron gave in to a career of dissipation, too prevalent among the youthful possessors of rank and fortune, when altogether uncontrolled. Thus his fortune became deeply involved before he had attained legal maturity, and his constitution much impaired by the excesses in which he spent it. This, however, was not a course to last; and, in the year 1809, he determined to travel. Accordingly, in company with his fellow-collegian, John Cam Hobhouse, Esq., he embarked at Falmouth for Lisbon, and proceeded through the southern provinces of Spain to the Mediterranean. His subsequent peregrinations in Greece, Turkey, &c. need not be detailed here, having been rendered so famous by his noble poem of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.