at night when he heard it, to dash instantly out of the house, scarcely knowing whither he ran, and never stopping until he found himself at Newstead.' Twelve months afterward, on bidding Miss CHAWORTH adieu, with a convulsed heart but a compulsory calm air, he said, 'The next time I see you I suppose you will be married ;' and her answer was, 'I hope so.' It is possible, but not we think by any means certain, that had BYRON and Miss CHAWORTH been united, a new direction would have been given to the stormy energies of his character.

It is painful to remark the value which BYRON attached to his aristocratical pretensions. To have his early poems praised by a duchess seems to have afforded him more pleasure than the admiration of a thousand untitled readers. SCOTT, we grieve to say, had also this weakness. He 'reverenced a lord.' Some authentic writer relates of him that at Abbottsford one day at dinner, while SCOTT was in the richest vein, a Lord NOBODY was announced, when all ease and freedom at once subsided, and the Northern Wizzard' had not a 'spell' for any one save his newly-arrived titled guest. Of the great bard whom we are considering, his biographer says: Half adventurer, half lord; having a right to claim a relationship with some of the greatest names in the country, and yet ostensibly connected with only a vulgar and violent old woman, in the person of his mother; having no home but a coffee-house, and little immediate income beyond the debts he could create; totally unlinked from the society to which he was born, and just launched in a career which seemed as little likely to suit his abilities as his character; lord of himself, that heritage of wo;' there never was a man who appeared to owe less to Providence and more to fortune, or who, by the disadvantages he was assailed with, was so cast, in spite of himself, upon a glorious career.' He was outwardly occupied at this time by his passion for a prostitute, who accompanied him in man's clothes to Brighton, and laid the foundation of reports which subsequently blackened his reputation, in frequent visits to the rooms of vulgar pugilists, and in attendance upon the intellectual entertainments of the clown GRIMALDI. Mortified in his person, because the handsome intelligence of his countenance rather served to call a halt in his gait into notice than to extinguish its effects; mortified in his love, since the only person for whom he seems to have felt a real affection had treated his pretensions with a contempt not easily, under similar circumstances, to be forgiven; mortified in his ambition, since the effort which he made to show the injustice of the attack upon his muse proved his sensibility to it; mortified also, in a greater degree, where he was most likely to be susceptible, having been nursed up in all those ideas of family pride and feudal consequence which poverty allied to nobility, and unexpectedly called to assume its honors, is sure to engender; never had a man more elements in his mind out of which to form a satirist than young Lord BYRON, when he flung in the face of the critics he was answering and the country he was quitting his refutation of the one and his farewell to the other.' Every body knows the extensive foreign tour which BYRON took, after leaving England, with his friend HoBHOUSE; Crossing Portugal, traversing the south of Spain, visiting Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, and thence passing through Albania, Illyria, etc., over the Gulf of Acteum and the Achelous; tarrying in the Morea, visiting Thebes, Athens, Delphi, Parnassus and Constantinople; 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 life 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. His welcome back was not very inviting. In a letter to a friend, written at this time, he

says:

'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, I 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 coalpits. 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.'

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

But now, upshooting from these dark vexations, appeared the glories of his future career. He was now at the dawn of that fame which was soon to rise so brightly above all contemporary reputations. The success of the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold,' now published, was extraordinary. It was not the poem only that was admired; it was the poet himself 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. 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. Upon the CHILDE these were all so much appropriate drapery, and set off with a wilder horror the enchanting young lord who wrote such beautiful poetry, and who seemed to know 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 misdemeanor, and as he seemed to imply, of some dark and unutterable crimes; who had been to Lisbon and to Cadiz, to Athens, and to Con. stantinople, 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.' Now commenced a series of gallantries with the sex, beginning with the fascinating Lady CAROLINE LAMB, with whom he wished to elope, and whose refusal to do so, together with a subsequent offence to his personal vanity, embittered him against her for life. It certainly is not a pleasant thing to be made acquainted with the fact, that many of BYRON's most apparently inspired love-letters, written at this time, were nothing more nor less than actual translations from 'Les Liaisons Dangereuse,' a work which every libertine has studied, but of which few lovers have made so profligate a use.' It was the embar

woman.

rassments arising from his irregular liaisons and an ill-regulated fortune which first induced him to turn his thoughts toward marriage. There was something of seriousness in the regard he entertained for one of his inamorata, Lady FORBES, a very beautiful She was unable however to fix his wandering affections. 'I am indifferent,' he writes at this period to a friend of the lady in question, 'to all excitements. The slightest obstacles stop me. If a straw were in my way, I could not stoop to pick it up. If you think I have been trifling with you, 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.' His second proposal for his future wife, Miss MILBANKE, was made under circumstances not the most poetical: A person 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 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.' • Theu it shall go,' said Lord BYRON; and in so saying, sealed and sent off, on the instant, this fiat of his fate."

เ

The world knows the result of this most unfortunate marriage. We have never for a moment doubted that Lady BYRON was a piece of polished ice, alive to all the true rights of woman,' and something more. BYRON describes even his honey-moon as 'an effort on both sides to be peculiarly agreeable for a month, under the satisfactory consideration that there would be plenty of time afterward to be otherwise.' 'I think,' he said also, after what he called 'the treacle-moon' was over, 'one ought to marry upon a lease,' although he expresses a belief that in his own case he might renew it. BYRON had supposed that his union with Miss MILBANKE would have added to his pecuniary resources. He was sadly misled. His long-accumulated embarrassments, added to increased expenditures, precipitated the climax of his ill-fortune. At the top-most tide-mark of his troubles, his wife quitted him forever: a pleasant specimen of devotion to a husband contending with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune!' And now it was that BYRON left England for the last time; nor did ever man who had brought such glory to his country leave it under greater disgrace. He had in the course of one short year gone through every variety of domestic misery; had seen his hearth eight or nine times profaned by the visitations of the law, and been only saved from a prison by the privileges of his rank. Of his subsequent career abroad, his amours with the Venetian MARIANNA,' (whose beauty is said not to have been of that description which is beyond all price,') Countess GUICCIOLA, etc., we shall not at present speak. Abused, suffering under popular perversion and malignity in multiplied forms, we yet find him hastening to Greece, to take up arms in the holy cause of freedom; contributing liberally moreover of his means, now abundant through the extraordinary proceeds of the labors of his own pen, to the same noble end. He wrote his

own destiny, when he said: "The scoundrels who have all along persecuted me will triumph; and justice will only be done to me when this hand is as cold as the hearts which have stung me.' BYRON was actuated in the course which he adopted in relation to Greece by an honorable desire for enterprise, a carelessness for death in a good cause, a desire perhaps to be restored to the good esteem of his fellow countrymen, and an ardent aspiration for the freedom of a celebrated country and a gallant people, long placed under a degrading and intolerable yoke. The particulars of his death at Missolonghi, of fever, are not unknown to our readers. There is something very touching in his last words. He was heard faintly to repeat: 'My sister— my child ! These are things that make the world dear to me; for the rest, I am content to die.' He spoke also of Greece: 'I have given her my time, my means, my health; and now I give her my life: what could I do more?' Soon after, he said, 'Now I shall go to sleep; and turning around, he fell into the slumber which can know no waking until earth and sea heave at the trump of God.'

We have been much interested in reading, in the volume before us, the omitted stanzas from 'Childe Harold,' originally included, but stricken out on revision. In the good-night to his native land the second of the ensuing verses followed in its order:

'My father blessed me fervently,
Yet did not much complain;
But sorely will my mother sigh,
Till I come back again.'
'Enough, enough, my little lad!
Such tears become thine eye;
If I thy guileless bosom had,

Mine own would not be dry.

My mother is a high-born dame,
And much misliketh me;
She saith my riot bringeth shame
On all my ancestry :

I had a sister once, I ween.

Whose tears perhaps will flow;
But her fair face I have not seen
For three long years and moe.'

Originally the little page' and the 'yeoman' were introduced in the subjoined Spenserian stanzas:

' AND of his train there was a henchman page,

A peasant boy, who served his master well:

And often would his pranksome prate engage

CHILDE HAROLD's ear, when his proud heart did swell

With sable thoughts that he disdained to tell.

Then would he smile on him, and ALWIN smiled,

When aught that from his young lips archly fell

The gloomy film from HAROLD's eye beguiled;

And pleased for a glimpse appeared the woeful CHILDE.

'Him and one yeoman only did he take

To travel eastward to a far countrie;

And, though the boy was grieved to leave the lake

On whose fair banks he grew from infancy;

Eftsoons his little heart beat merrily

With hope of foreign nations to behold,

And many things right marvellous to see,

Of which our vaunting voyagers oft have told,

In many a tome as true as MAUNDEVILLE'S of old.'

Among the fac-similes of BYRON's 'hand of write' is the first copy of the well known stanza in the fourth canto of Childe Harold :'

THE sky is changed! and such a change! Oh night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,' etc.

The fierce dashes, the sprawling blots, the sudden erasures, the ragged interlineations, the whole well nigh illegible without the printed text in juxtaposition, bespeak the fact that that stanza must have been written at the very moment when

FAR along,

From peak to peak leapt the live thunder;
For every mountain then had found a tongue,
And Jura answered through her misty shroud,

Back to the joyous Alps, who called to her aloud!'

We confess to a little surprise at finding BYRON so sensitive to criticism, and to all animadversions upon his writings by his contemporaries. Of the notice of his first volume in the Edinburgh' his biographer remarks: The effect which the review produced upon the poet can with difficulty be conceived. A friend, who found him in the first moments of excitement after reading the article, inquired anxiously whether he had just received a challenge, not knowing how else to account for the fierce defiance of his looks.' Among the less sentimental effects of the critique upon his mind, he used to mention, that on the day he read it he drank three bottles of claret to his own share after dinner; that nothing however relieved him until he had given vent to his indignation in rhyme, and that 'aster the first twenty lines he felt himself considerably better.' A scorching letter of SOUTHEY's, in reply to some severe comments of BYRON upon his character and writings, so exasperated the noble bard that he could not wait for revenge in ink-shed, but on the instant despatched, through a friend in London, a cartel of mortal defiance to the poet-laureate; but KINNAIRD, the friend in question, had sufficient good sense to withhold the challenge. Among other autograph-letters, copied to the very acmé of perfection by the French artist, we find the following, addressed to GALIGNANI at Paris. Original letters, in the veritable handwriting of FRANKLIN, WASHINGTON, and Sir WALTER SCOTT, have been placed in type for these pages; and the following lacks only the original ink and paper, to be in the same category:

Venice, April 27th, 1819.

'SIR: In various numbers of your journal, I have seen mentioned a work entitled 'The Vampyre,' with the addition of my name as that of the author. I am not the author, and never heard of the work in question until now. In a more recent paper I perceive a formal annunciation of 'The Vampyre,' with the addition of an account of my 'residence in the Island of Mitylene,' an island which I have occasionally sailed by, in the course of travelling, some years ago through the Levant, and where I should have no objection to reside, but where I have never yet resided. Neither of these performances are mine, and I presume that it is neither unjust nor ungracious to request that you will favor me by contradicting the advertisement to which I allude. If the book is clever, it would be base to deprive the real writer, whoever he may be, of his honors; and if stupid, I desire the responsibility of nobody's dulness but my own. You will excuse the trouble I give you; the imputation is of no great importance; and as long as it was confined to surmises and reports, I should have received it, as I have received many others, in silence. But the formality of a public advertisement of a book I never wrote, and a residence where I never resided, is a little too much; particularly as I have no notion of the contents of the one nor the incidents of the other. I have, beside, a personal dislike to 'Vampyres,' and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to divulge their secrets. You did me a much less injury by your paragraphs about my devotion,' and 'abandonment of society for the sake of religion,' which appeared in your Messenger' during last Lent; all of which are not founded on fact; but you see I do not contradict them, because they are merely personal, whereas the other in some degree concern the reader.

'You will oblige me by complying with my request of contradiction. I assure you that I know nothing of the work or works in question; and have the honor to be (as the correspondents to Magazines say,) 'your constant reader,' and very obed't,

'To the Editor of Galignani's Messenger.'

'Humble serv't,

'BYRON.'

'It was a thought worthy of the great spirit of BYRON,' says the Edinburgh Review,'' after exhibiting to us his pilgrim - 'Childe' amidst all the most striking scenes of earthly grandeur and earthly decay; after teaching us, like him, to sicken over the mutability and vanity and emptiness of human greatness, to conduct him and us at last to the borders of the Great Deep.' It is there that we may perceive an image of the awful and unchangeable abyss of eternity, into whose bosom so much has sunk, and