THE REAL LORD BYRON VOL. I. THE REAL LORD BYRON NEW VIEWS OF THE POET'S LIFE. JOHN COBDY JEAFFRESON, AUTHOK OF ■A BOOK ABOUT THE CLEKGY,' 'A BOOK ABOUT DOCTORS 'A BOOK ABOUT LAWYEES,' &c. &c. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, 13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1883. .411 Rights reserved. LONDON: Printed bj- Stranobwats & Sons, Tower Street, Upper St, Martin's Lane CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE Misconceptions about Byron .... 1 Byron's Temper— His Personal Characteristics — His Freedom from Aristocratic Insolence— His Early Friendships- Homage to Eank— Leigh Hunt's Malice— Familiar Pride. CHAPTER II. The Byrons of Rochdale and Newstead . . 9 MedifBval Buruns— Sir John the Little with the Great Beard — Filius Naturalis — Thoroton's 'Nottinghamshire ' — EHzabeth Halghe's Slip— Knight of the Batli— The Byron Barony— By- ronic Fecundity and Longevity— Thomas Shipman's Patron— The Byron-Chaworth Duel— The Berkeley Strain— Taste for the Fine Arts. CHAPTER III. Byron's Near Ancestors 27 Admiral Byi-on —' Foul-Weather Jack' — Mad Jack Byron — The Marchioness of Carmarthen (Lady Conyers)— Augusta Byron's Birth— Miss Gordon of Gight— The Poet's Birth— His Lameness. CHAPTER IV. More of 'Mad Jack Byron' .... 38 Holies Street, Cavendish Square— Augusta's Grandmother— 'Baby Byron' — Mad Jack in Scotland — Catherine Gordon's Characteristics — Mad Jack's Death. VI CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. PAGE Aberdeen 51 The Widow's Poverty — The Poet's Childhood — May Gray's Calvinism — Catherine Gordon's Treatment of her Boy — His Scotch Tutors — His Lameness — Banks of Dee — Heir Presump- tive — Aberdeen Grammar School — The Fifth Lord's Death — Byron's First Love : Mary Duflf — His Temper in Childhood — His Girlishness — 'Auld Lang Syne.' CHAPTER VI. Nottingham and London 72 The Sixth Lord— His First Visit to Newstead— The Abbey — Tutor at Nottingham — Lavender, the Bone-setter — Dulwich Grove — Dr. Glenuie — A Very Troublesome Mamma — Guardian and Ward — Byron's First Dash into Poetry — His Second Love ; Margaret Parker — His Later Attachments — His Sensibility, Memory, and Imagination — Malvern HiUs and Scotch Moun- tains. CHAPTER YII. Harrow 91 Dr. Drury— ' Good-bye, Gaby '—The Fat Boy— His Hatred and Love of Harrow — 'All the Sports' — Cricket and Eebellion — Passionate Friendships — Girlish Sentimentality — Tender-hearted Harrovians — The Poet's Affection for his Schoolmaster — 'The Butler Eow ' — * Little Latin and Less Greek ' — Declamations — Lord Carlisle's * Indeed ! ' CHAPTER VIII. Harrow Holidays 112 Lady Holderness's Death — ' Baby Byron' — His Sister Augusta — Her Plain Face and Sweet Nature — Life at Southwell — Mary Anne Chaworth — Matlock and Castleton — Annesley Hall — Who was Thyrza ? — * The Dream ' — Its Falsehood and Malice. CHAPTER IX. Lord Byron of Trinity 138 Despondency — Eddleston, the Chorister — Dr. William Lort ManseU — College Friends — Hobhouse on Byron's Nature — CONTENTS. Vll PACK Eighteen Long Years Hence — * Hours of Idleness ' — Lord Car- lisle — College Debts — Cambridge Dissipations — The ' Edinburgh Article' — Walter Scott's Opinion of the Article — Who Wrote It ? — The Poet's Regard for Cambridge — Honour done the Poet by the University. CHAPTER X. Cambridge Vacations . . . . . .161 In London — ' The Noble Art of Self-defence ' — Swimming in the Thames — Byi-on's Life at Southwell — His Quarrels with his Mother — Harrowgate — First and Second Editions of the South- well Poems — ' The Prayer of Nature ' — Byi-on's Scepticism — His Height and Fatness — Starvation and Physic — Their Results — Tobacco and Laudanum, CHAPTER XI. Peer and Pilgrim 187 The Rochdale Property — Brompton and Brighton — ' Brother Gordon' — Life at Newstead — The 'Coming of Age' — Byi'on's Quarrel with the Earl of Carlisle — INIissing Evidence — The House of Lords — 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' — Ne ither Whig nor Tory — The ' Pilgi-image ' — Homeward Bound. CHAPTER XII. ' Childe Harold * 205 ' Hints from Horace ' — The Valley of the Shadow of Death — Melancholy Poetry — Sam Rogers's Dinner — Newstead and London — First Speech in ' The Lords ' — Sudden Fame — Social Triumph — The Poet's Demeanour — The Prince Regent — The Season of 1812 — Cheltenham — Pecuniary Affairs — Dissentient Voices. CHAPTER XIII. The Rival Cousins-in-Law 238 The World of Fashion — Lady Caroline Lamb — Her Looks and Nature — 'Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know' — Platonic Love— Miss Milbanke — Her Fortune and Expectations — Her Influence over Byron — Lady Caroline ' Playing the Devil ' — Love turned to Hate. Vm CONTENTS. CHAPTER XIV. PAGE The Turning of the Tide 268 Bennet Street— Mrs. Mule— 'The Albany'— The Poet's Clubs — 'The Giaour' — The Marquis of Sligo's Testimony — Horse- monger Lane Gaol — The Seasons of '13 and '14 — ' The Bride of Abydos' — 'The Corsair' — 'Anti-Byron' — Disgust for Literature — Renewal of Industry. CHAPTER XV. Byron's Married Life 281 Byron's spirits during the Engagement — The Wedding at Seaham — Art of ' Bamming '—Duck, Pippin, and Goose — Qiuet time at 13 Piccadilly Terrace — Lord Wentworth's Death — Matrimonial FeUcity — The Poet's Will — Commencement of Bickerings — ' An Unhappy sort of Life ' — ' Causes of Quarrel.' CHAPTER XVI. The Separation 312 Ada's Birth — Augusta, the Comforter — Lady Byron's With- drawal from London — Her Case against her Husband — Written Statement for Doctor and Lawyer — Lady Noel's Inter-view with Dr. Lushington— Lady Byi-on's 'Additional Statement' — Mrs. Clermont, the Mischief-maker — Jane Clermont, Allegra's Mother —The ' Fare Thee Well'— Results of its Publication. CHAPTER XVII. The Storm 343 ' Simple Causes ' — Lady Byron's Justification — Her abundant Frankness — The ' Quarterly Review ' Letter — Byron's Surprise at his Wife's Resolve — His First Action on the Intelligence — His subsequent Behaviour — Extravagances of Social Sentiment — Observations on the 'Remarks on Don Juan' — 'Glenarvon' — Lady Jersey's Farewell Party — The Poet's Withdrawal from England. THE REAL LORD BYROK CHAPTER I. MISCOXCEPTIONS ABOUT BYRON. Byi'on's Temper — His Personal Characteristics — His Freedom from Aristocratic Insolence — His Early Friendships — Homage to Hank — Leigh Himt's Malice — Familiar Pride. In great things and small things it was Byron's lot to be misunderstood during his Ufe, and misrepresented after his death. AVith the exception of the few, perhaps the few hundred, ])ersons who, with sufficient discrimination for the task, have taken care to se]iarate the few flicts from the many fictions of his numerous l)iographers and tlie many facts from the few fictions of his pubhshed letters and journals, and out of the reliable data to make a memoir of him for themselves, the man is still almost as little known to the students of his poetry as he was to the people avIio on the eve of his withdrawal from England froMTied at liim in London drawing-rooms or murnmred against him in the London streets. After all that has been written about him, readers have still to learn the qualities of his temper, the real VOL. I. B 2 THE REAL LORD BYRON. failings of his nature, the pecuharities of his manner, and even the most conspicuous points of his personal appearance. They have been taught to regard him as a man of mysteries, tortured by remorse for crimes too terril)le for confession and 2:uardin2; secrets too revolting for avowal ; whilst in simple truth he went through life from first to last with his heart and all its frailties upon his sleeve, and lived from boyhood to his last hour under glass, that, whilst it magnified all his faults, put all his virtues in miniature. With all his perverse and baneful delight in mystifying people about trifles, this man of mystery could not to save his life, or what was far dearer to him — his fame, — hold within his own breast a single secret that vexed it seriously. Inspired at times by vanity to make himself the enigma of his period, even in his most perplexing moods he was nothing more than a riddle to be solved by any one of ordinary shrewd- ness with a brain clear of romantic fancies. What marvellous stuff has been written of the stern and cruel spirit of the misanthrope, who with the sensi- bility and impulsiveness of the gentler sex could not in his softer moments see misery without weeping over it and seeking to relieve it ! Who has not been invited to ponder on the habitual melancholy of the man, who in his brighter time brimmed over with frolic, and even in the sadness of his closing years made the world ring with laughter, and delighted in practical jokes? Who has not heard of his gloomy brow, black locks, dark eyes, and club foot? And yet, hia face was not more remarkable for the beauty of its features than for the brightness of its smiles ; his hair, light chestnut in childhood, never darkened MISCON'CEPTIONS ABOUT BYRON. 3 to the deepest brown of auburn ; his eyes were irrc}-- blue ; and he hadn't a club foot. One of the fictions is tliat, valuing himself in- ordinately on his birth, he was less proud of the genius that gave us ' Childe Harold ' and ' Don Juan,' than of the accidents that made him a Lord of the Upper House. Due in some measure to the biographers who, like Leigh Hunt and Tom Moore, could never lose sight of his patrician quality, this misconception of a nature, innocent of all such miser- able weakness, is referable chiefly and in an equal degree to the simplicity and obsequiousness of the man)' readers, who would have honoured him for being an insignificant peer, even if they had not reverenced him for being a great poet. It is not usual for those, who plume themselves on their ances- tral advantages, to attach themselves strongly to persons of inferior extraction. Though he may admit persons of plebeian birth to his intimacy, the noble, who is greatly prouder of his pedigree than his natural endowments, never fails to draw a line between the acquaintances who are beneath hini and the friends who are his equals, and whilst cultivating the former for the entertainment they afford him, to give his warmest affection and perfect confidence only to those who are of liis own order. AVith the single exception of Lord ('lare, Byron's closest comrades were found in ranks something or great! v l)eneiith his own. There were times, doubtless, when Hobhouse was justified in thinking his friend gave too ready an ear to flatterers whom he should have kept at a distance. But there never was a time of his wliole 4 THE REAL LORD BYRON. career when the particular insolence, that biographers are pleased to call ' pride of race,' precluded Byron from sympathismg cordially with his social inferiors. In boyhood, whilst composing some of the weakest lines of the ' Hours of Idleness ' to the honour of those ' mail-covered Barons who proudly to battle led their vassals from Europe to Palestine's plain ' (ances- tors, by the way, who are not known to have donned armour in the Crusades or set foot in the Holy Land), he cherished a romantic fondness for the son of one of his Newstead tenants. At Cambridge he con- ceived a similar affection for the college-chorister (Eddleston), of whom he wrote in his nineteenth year to Miss Pigot of Southwell, ' During the whole of my residence at Cambridge we met every day, summer and winter, without passing one tiresome moment, and separated each time with increasing reluctance.' Though they were gentlemen by birth, culture, taste and purpose, Hobhouse, Hodgson, Scrope Davies, Charles Skinner Matthews and the other members of his particular set at Trinity, were not the persons, to whom he would have attached himself, had he rated his descent at more than its proper worth. The pleasant terms on which lie lived durino- his Cambridsre vacations with the Bechers, the Pigots and the other modest gentry of a small pro- vincial town, are evidence that the youthful peer Avas not so largely animated by a sense of his patrician magnificence, as some of his biographers would have us believe. In later time this aristocrat with all his <:)verweening arrogance took for his peculiar intimate the son of a Dublin tradesman. Though the main pui'pose of his almost unpardonably spiteful book MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT BYRON. 5 WHS to render Byron contemptible and ludicrous by magnifying his weaknesses, and putting them in the strongest and fiercest light, Leigh Hunt was held to truth on this matter by enmity that was even keener and more rancorous than his animosity against the author of ' Don Juan.' Smarting under the slights })ut upon him and the injury done him by the men who were of opinion that Byron would suffer in dignity and reputation from his connection with the Hunts, the author of ' Rimini ' remarked in a vein scarcely consistent with his affectation of a republican superiority to aristocratic prejudices, ' The manner of such of his lordship's friends as I ever happened to meet with ^vere in fact, with one exception, nothing superior to their birth .... It is remarkable (and, indeed, may account for the cry about gentility, which none are so given to as the vulgar) that they were almost all persons of humble origin ; one of a race of booksellers ; another, the son of a grocer ; another, of a glazier ; and a fourth, though the son of a baronet, the grandson of a linen-draper.' Nor can it be fairly urged, though it has often been unfairly suggested, that Byron surrounded him- self with men beneath him in rank, because they rendered deference to his social superiority, and fi'd him with flattery. Now and again sycophants ap- proached him, as they never fail to approach men of eminence ; now and agahi, in a season of weakness, he yielded more than he should have yielded to their addresses ; but the weakness was always transient, and the ascendancy so gained over him was never lasting. A'ehement in all things, Byron was es])e- cially vehement in his fiiendships ; and despite all 6 THE REAL LORD BYRON. that may be urged to tlie contrary, on the strength of cynical flippancies uttered to astonish his hearers, and bitter words spoken or written under the spur of sudden resentments or the torture of exasperating suspicions, it may be averred stoutly that in choosing his friends and dealing with them, he was altogether controlled by his heart. As for the way in which his friends treated him, it is not more unjust than ludi- crous to attribute subserviency to the men who were wont to criticise his writings severely in words spoken to his face, oi' letters sent to him through the post. Tom Moore certainly 'noble lords' and 'noble friends' him through six rather tedious volumes, in a fashion that to readers of the present day is not a little laugh- able and offensive. But in fairness to the biographer it should be remembered that what offends us in this matter was less due to the writer's idolatry of rank than to the etiquette of the period in which he figured as a man of fashion, and first warbler of aristocratic drawmg-rooms. In the first twenty years of the present century, when rank was honoured at least verbally in a degree not easily imagined in these last twenty years of the same epoch, it was the mode of our grandfathers to seize every occasion to remind lords of their nobility. The Irish ballad-writer was not singular in this respect. Himself the heir of an ancient and dignified family, and a man whose way of living and thinking had altogether disqualified him for courtly service, Shelley — absolutely devoid of respect for mere conventional nobility — was no less careful to give Byron his title in the written page, and like the author of 'Lalla Rookli' refers to him in letters as his 'noble friend.' Had the author of 'The Cenci' MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT BYUON. 7 employed himself at Pisa in writing six small-octavo volumes about his ' noble friend's ' life and adven- tures, the performance would have contained almost as many ' lords ' and ' noble lords ' and ' my noble friends ' as may be counted in Moore's occasionally dishonest pages. Whilst literature honoured i)eers in this obsolete and curious fashion, and the world at every turn bowed before hereditary rank far lower than it bowed to rank of any other kind, it was not in the nature of things that Byron should be indifferent to the dis- tinction that, coming to him from his ancestors, made him a personage before he had laid aside his High- land petticoats. Naturally it pleased the child to listen to brave stories of the Byrons of olden time, who may (for all any one can say) have led their vassals to the Holy Land, and certainly might have done so for pay or piety had they been so disposed. On taking a poetic turn in his boyhood, it Avould have been strange had he not written verses on the four brothers who fell at Marston. Nor is it wonder- ful that, towards the close of his short career, when art required of his pen the picture of a lordly English home, he travelled in memory from his Italian vil- legiatura to the old fimiliar abbey (from which Childe Harold had so few years since set forth on his pilgrimage) and sung again, tenderly as in former days, but far more strenuously, of ' The gallant cavaliers, who fought in vain For those who knew not to resign or reign.' This wholesome pride in his domestic annals peeps forth now and then in all his writing's, from his 8 THE REAL LORD BYRON. earliest boyish verses to liis last dying soiig, but it never made him insolent or in any other way foolish. Though it was powerless to save him from many errors and much avoidable misery, he had, with all his waywardness and perilous sensibility, too liberal a store of ' saving common sense ' to commit the blunders of a pure simpleton. Possibly his arms were set in Italy over his bed, in the manner de- scribed by Mr. Leigh Hunt, who records the unim- portant fact in the spirit of a discharged valet. Fifty years since beds of state were often so adorned in England, as well as Italy, just as spoons, and hall- chairs and carriage-panels are still ornamented in like manner by owners who have not gone crazy with ancestral msolence. Though Hunt's malice mspires him to reproduce a piquant story of the anger with which Byron returned a box of pills to an apothecary, because the packet was directed to ' Mr.' instead of ' Lord ' Byron, the malice of five hundred detractors would induce no discriminatino- reader to believe so egregious and manifest a fabrication. If family pride had been inordinately strong in Byron, he would not have sold Newstead, for the sake of adding a few hundreds yearly to an already sufficient in- come. Nor was the sentiment in him a peculiar and disting'uishinof characteristic. In the fulness of its force it was nothins: more than a fair share of the almost universal sentiment that causes many an ordinary, undistinguished English gentleman . to resemble General Braddock of ' The Virginians,' in being as proud of his no family in particular, as any peer can well be of his particular family. CHAPTER II. thp: byijons of rochdale and newstead. Mediaeval Buruns — Sir John the Little with the Great Beard — Filius Naturalis — Thoroton's ' Nottinghamshire ' — Elizabeth Ilalghe's Slip — Knight of the liath — The Byron Barony — BYri)uic Fecundity and Longevity — Thomas Shipman's Patron — The Byron-Chaworth Duel — The Berkeley Strain — Taste for the Fine Arts. Other considerations discountenance the notion that the poet regarded his pedigree and the annals of his house with unquahfied complacence. For though the Byrons of Newstead co. Xotts, and Rochdale CO. Lancaster, were a family from which a modest squire of George the Third's England might well have been proud to trace his descent, their annals were deficient in lustre, and their pedigree was not stainless. There are peerages and peerages, — those that contribute to our national glory, and those that are mere affairs of county history. There are peers whose several dignities are the memorials of their ancestors' achievements in the successive generations of successive centuries. There are also peers whose nobility, instead of growing in honour and gathering lustre from the flying decades, has acquired nothing but age fi'om the time that has slowly obscured the services for which it was created. To say of the Byron barony that, on coming to the poet at the close of the last century, it was a specimen of this fruitless, leafless, lifeless nobility, is not to say all 10 THE REAL LORD BYRON. that could be urged to its discredit. It is recorded by his not invariably accurate biographers that Byron's school-fellows nick-named him ' the Old English Baron,' in derision of his practice of vaunt- ing how superior his ancestral dignity was to modern creations of a higher grade. If he was guilty of such boastfulness, the boy knew strangely little about the matter. Too old to be called a mushroom peerage, his dignity was far too young to be rated witli ancient baronies. Given in 1643 by Charles the First to Sir John Byron, in acknowledgment of the knight's zeal and devotion, and in the hope that it would lure other gentlemen to their sovereign's standard, it had not completed the hundred and fifty-sixth year of its existence, when it devolved on Catherine Gordon's son ; and it certainly had not grown in social esteem during its passage from its first to its sixth possessor. Against the antiquity of the Nottinghamshire Eyrons nothing can be urged, with the exception of a certain matter to which the reader's attention will be called m another minute. The poet may have had no better authority than his fancy and Collins 's ' Peerage ' for the precise number of his ancestors' manors when he wrote in Don Juan's ' 10th Canto,' ' a sort of doomsday scroll, Such as the conqueror William did repay His knights with, lotting others' properties Into some sixty thousand new knights' fees. ' I can't complain, whose ancestors are there, Erneis, Radulphus — eight-and-forty manors (If that nriy memory doth not greatly err) Were their reward for following Billy's banners : THE BYRONS OF ROCIIDALK AND NEWSTKAD. 1 1 And though I can't help thinking 'twas scarce fair To strip tlie Saxons of their Injdts, like tanners ; Yet as they founded churches with the produce, You'll deem, no doubt, they put it to a good use.' But whilst there is sufficient evidence that the Byrons came from Normandy in William's train, it is cer- tainly 'as true as ever truth hath been of late' that Erneis de Burun got from the Arch- Invader a grant of lands in Yorkshire and Lancashire, and that Ralph with same surname found his proper share of real estate in Nottinghamshire. Nothing more can be told of this pair of rather mythical adventurers. Nor is history much more communicative respecting those of their descendants who were the first Byrons to acquire possessions in Derbyshire, and in later time (under Edward the First) yet more land in Rochdale CO. Lancaster. Save that they were great land- holders, little is known of these fortunate Byrons during the next eight or nine generations. If any of them went to Palestine they missed the poet to celebrate their achievements until the dawn of the present century, when all their descendant could say of them was that they went thither, arrayed and attended in the manner already mentioned. Now and again one of the broad-acred clan shows himself for ii moment, and then passes from the cognizance of history. The name ai)pears in the records of the siege of Calais under our third Edward. Byrons fought at Cressy, and a Byron was at Bosworth on Richmond's side. From the general silence of the chroniclers about their doings it is not unfitir to assume that these descendants of Ralph and Erneis were more intent on keeping their old lands, and 12 THE KEAL LORD BYRON. adding to the number of their manors, than on win- ning new honours. And this inference from their historic unobtrusiveness is countenanced by their good fortune in retaining their acres in their hands and keeping their heads on their shoulders, in those troublous times that were so disastrous to adven- turous men and ambitious families. Anyhow it is noteworthy how much oftener a Byron is mentioned in connection with a stroke of peaceful acquisitiveness than with an essay of martial daring. Their good for- tune in getting and keeping was, however, coming to an end when, on the suppression of the religious houses, Sir John Byron — styled more familiarly and pictur- esquely ' Sir John the Little with the Great Beard ' — received from Henry the Eighth a grant of the church and priory of Newstead : a property that after remain- ino; for somethino; less than three centuries in the hands of the Byrons passed by sale and purchase from the poet to his former schoolmate, Colonel Wildman. With this parting benefaction, fortune seems to have turned her back on the family who had enjoyed her favour for so many years, whilst doing so little to deserve it. Hitherto they had been rich and undis- tinguished. Henceforth they went to ruin and nobility. Had Sir John the Little with the Great Beard either inherited or acquired an hereditary dignity, the honour would not have passed from him to his son, for the simj)le and sufficient reason that this son — through whom the poet and the five preceding Lords Byron traced their descent from the Norman Buruns — was a bastard. On this point there is no uncer- tainty. The record of the Herald's visitation of the County of Lancaster (1567 A.u.) leaves no room for thp: byrons of rochuale and newstead. 13 doubt on this matter. Here is wliat tlie Elizabethan record says of Sir John the Little witli the Great Beard, the poet's direct lineal ancestor : — ' S""- John Byron of Clayton aforesayd Kniglit, Sonne and heire to S""" Nycholas, maried to his iirste wiefe Isabell daughter to Peter Shelton of Lynne in Norfolke, and by her had no yssue. After the said S'- John maried to his second AViefe Elizabetlie daur to W"- Costerden of Blakesley in Com Lane and Wydowe to George Halghe of Halghe Com Lane Gent, and by her hathe yssue John Byron, his eldest Sonne and heire filius naturalis. John Byron of Clayton in Com Lane ar, sonne and heire by deade of gifte to Sir John Byron knt., maried Alyce daughter to Sir XyclioLas Strelley of Strelley, &c.' This is explicit and altogether devoid of am- biguity. Sir John Byron, the great-grandfather of the first Lord Byron, was of illegitimate birth ; and the Norman blood on which the poet unquestionably reflected with complacence, though never with the absurd pride attributed to him by his biographers, Avas tainted with the defilement of bastardy, — a matter of no moment to the physiologist ; but a matter of high moment to churchmen, heralds, and lawyers, and to all persons who accept the doctrine of churchmen or the sentiment of heralds. Though he is not in possession of the facts that countenance his opinion, Dr. Karl Elze (Byron's German biographer, and the ])est of all the poet's biographers) declares it inconceivable that the author of ' Childe Harold ' was ignorant of this serious defect of his Xorman pedigree. On the other hand. Dr. Elze's anonymous English translator insists that 14 THE RKAL LORD BYRON. Byron may be presumed to have been ignorant of a circumstance that was mentioned in no Book of the Peerage or other genealogical work published during his life. Hence the translator argues that the poet should be acquitted of the meanness and imposture of vaunting his Norman blood, whilst he was well aware of its defilement, and of its consequent inability to bring him honour or estate from any of his ancestors preceding the son of Sir John the Little with the Great Beard. It happens, however, that this dis- qualifying incident of the Byron lineage is alluded to by Thoroton in the ' History of Nottinghamshire' (1677 A.D.), a work that certainly was not unknown to the poet, and probably afforded him his earliest know- ledge of the main features of his ancestral story, and even his first acquaintance with those prime heroes of his house — Erneis and Radulphus. In Thoroton's notice of the Nottinghamshire Byrons, it is observed with quaint caution and delicacy that Sir John the Little with the Great Beard took to him a second wite, 'on whom he begot (soon enough) Sir John Byron of Newstede, who married Alice, the daughter of Sir Nicholas Strelley, of Strelley.' On reading the bracketed words, Byron could not fail to see their meaning. If he needed further enlightenment, he could have obtained it from his lawyer, who was well aware that mstead of holding Newstead by inheritance from Sir John the Little with the Great Beard, his client inherited it from Alice Strelley's husband who ac- quired the estate by deed of gift from his father, from whom he could, as a bastard, have inherited nothing. Or the poet might have gained the needful informa- tion from the officers of the Heralds' College, his THE BYRONS OF ROCHDALK AND XEWSTEAD. 15 neighbours of the county, or the curate of Hucknall- Torkard. In Nottinghamshire there were scores of people capable of informmg him of the matter that was no secret. If the Newstead Byrons of Charles the Second's time were unaware of the blemish in their pedigree before 1677, none of the family can be sus- pected of the same ignorance after the publication of Thoroton's Nottinghamshire — a book to be found in every library of the county. Whilst he is right in maintaining that Byron cannot have been ignorant of this dark page of his familiar history, Dr. Elze errs in imagining that the poet was meanly sensitive and discreditably reticent on the subject. Byron was not the man to attach undue importance to sacerdotal sanction of any kind. Had he lost an estate or a dignity through Sir John's libertinism, he would have thought himself unfor- tunate, and spoken angrily of his ancestor's morals. Of course he would have preferred a stamless roll. But it was not in his nature to trouble himself seriously about such an accident, or to think less honoural)ly of himself because one of his remote an- cestors loved his Avife something too soon, and sought the priest's blessing on their union something too late for decorum. Instead of reflectmg upon it from the priest's point of view, or the herald's point of view, he regarded his Norman descent from the physiolo- gist's stand -point, which was not affected by the naughty behaviour of Madam Elizabeth Halghe m'e Costerden (or Conf}ronized schoolboys became men of common sense ; and the Apostle of ' passionate friendship ' was deserted by his disciples. All this is told by Harness, where he says of his former ])atron at Harrow, — ' Of his attachment to his friends, no one can read Moore's " Life," and entertain a doubt. He required a great deal from them — not more, periiaps, than he, from the abundance of his love, freely and fully gave — but more than they had to return.' But there was another side to the boy's Harrow life, to which it is a relief to turn, after thmking of its girlishness. If they are honourable to the master, the poet's feehngs for Dr. Drury throughout his school days and to the end of his life are no less creditable to the pupil. Nothing more is required to show how gentle, and docile n creature Byron would have been in his childhood under proper management, and how amenable he was in his older infancy to 102 THE REAL LORD BYRON. authority, that commended itself to his sense of right and justice, than his consistent and unwavering gratitude to the great schoohnaster, who governed him for four years with sympathy and at the same time with firmness. 'Dr. Drury,' he says, in the autobiographic Journal, ' whom I plagued suffi- ciently too, was the best, the kindest (and yet strict, too) friend I ever had — and I look upon him still as a father.' The letter, in which the poet announced his acceptance by Miss Milbanke and his approaching marriage to his old master, is in the same vein of filial confidence and afi^ection. Of the other examples of the poet's regard for his famous preceptor, there are two that may not be omitted from these pages. The schoolboy had be- come a man ; and the man had almost in an hour mounted to a giddy eminence of celebrity, and was still in the full enjoyment of his first intoxicating triumphs, when, on being asked by Dr. Drur}^ why he had not sent his old master copies of his works, he answered with unaffected modesty and simple truth, ' Because, sir, you are the only man I never wish to read them.' Years later, — when he had withdrawn from his native land for ever, under the thunder of the loud calumny to which he grew by degrees com- paratively indiff:erent, and the fire of ' the si^eechless obloquy,' that never ceased to work like poison in his soul, — on putting into the Fourth Canto of ' Childe Harold ' some lines to the discredit of the system of education that prevails in English schools, he was careful to guard the verses with a note of homage and reverential explanation, so as to spare his dear old master the pain that might come to him HARROW, 103 througli misappreliension of the author's purpose. The words of the poem, thus guarded from miscon- struction, are — ' not in vain May he, who will his recollections rake And quote in classic raptures, and awake The hills with Latian echoes ; I abhorr'd Too much, to conquer for the poet's sake. The drill'd dull lesson, forced down word by word In my repugnant youth, with pleasure to record ' Aught that recalls the daily drug which tum'd Mj sickening memory ; and, though Time hath taught My mind to meditate on what it learn'd, Yet such the fix'd inveteracy of thought That, with the freshness wearing ovit before My mind could relish what it might have sought, If free to choose, I cannot now restore Its health ; but what it then detested, still abhor.' The note runs thus, ' I Avish to express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty ; that we learn by rote before we can get by heart ; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed, by the didactic anticipation, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of composition which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish, or to reason upon. For the same reason we can never be aware of the fulness of some of the finest passages of Shakespeare ("To be, or not to be," for instance), from the habit of having them hammered into us at eight years old, as an exercise, not of mind but of memory, so that when we are old enough to enjoy them, the taste is gone, and the appetite palled. In some parts of the Con- 104 THE REAL LORD BYRON. tinent, young persons are taught from more common authors, and do not read the best classics till their maturity. I certainly do not speak on this point from pique or aversion towards the place of my edu- cation. I was not a slow, though an idle boy : and I believe no one could, or can be more attached to Harrow than I have always been, and with reason ; — a part of the time passed there was the happiest of my life; and my preceptor (the Rev. Dr. Joseph Drury) was the best and worthiest friend I ever 2)ossessed, whose warnings I have remembered but too well, though too late — when I have erred, and whose counsels I have but followed when I have done well or wisely. If ever this imperfect record of my feelings towards him should reach his eyes, let it remind him of one who never thinks of him but with gratitude and veneration — of one who would more gladly boast of having been his pupil, if, by more closely folio wmg his mj unctions, he could reflect any honour upon his instructor.' Not with standino' all this evidence of the aiFec- tionate dutifulness, which distinguished Byron's con- duct to his principal school-master, both during his stay at Harrow and throughout the years of his man- hood, there exists a notion that he was chiefly remark- able at Harrow for unruliness and a taste for rebellion. The people, whose ingenuity has especially delighted in drawmg indictments against him from scraps of his writings and in dealing with the figures of his poetry as though they were facts of his personal story, have even found testimony of the poet's naughtiness at school in the following lines, of ' The Address to the Duke of Dorset,' — HARROW. 105 Ah ! though myself, by nature haughty, wikl, Whom Indiscretion hail'd lier favourite child ; Though eveiy error stamps me for her own, And dooms my fall, I fain would fall alone ; Though my proud heart no precept now can tame, I love the virtues which I cannot claim.' Evidence of a sensitive conscience and spiritual modesty, rather a stronf^ propensity to evil, evidence especially interesting to biographers for showing at hoAY early a date Byron's practice of magnitying his own misdeeds began — these woras of an imaginative boy, playing the part of a stern moralist, shonld scarcely be taken as a culprit's confession. The witness agrainst himself should at least be allowed the benefit of his avowal of ' loving the virtues.' Apart from the misdemeanours of which he was unquestionably guilty towards Dr. Butler, there was as Httle reality in the ' rebelling ' as there was in the ' cricketing,' to which the poet refers so jauntily in his journal; and on examination, even those misde- meanours are found altogether insufficient to sustain the grave charge of a propensity for rebellion. The whole business of ' the Butler Row ' grew out of a trivial affair. AVhen Dr. Drury retired from the Mastership of Harrow in 1805, there were three candidates for the office, — Mark Drury, Evans, and Butler; and naturally enough Byron came to the fore of the boys, who from affection of their old master entertained a strong opinion, that the office which a Drury had filled so honourably ought to descend to a Drury, Avho, of course, as he was a Drury, would fill it with equal honour. Each candidate had his party of well-wishers amongst the boys, who — of course, without seriously supposing their voices 106 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Avould or should determine the issue of the contest — • behaved as though the election rested with them. The parties lampooned and hooted one another, and worked themselves mto a prodigious excitement about a matter, that was no more their affair than the choice of the next President of the United States. On the election of Dr. Butler, the beaten parties united in imagining themselves very badly treated. In the excitement Byron behaved badly, and was guilty of at least one overt act of rebellion, for which he would of course have been severely punished, had not the new Head Master wisely determined to take a lenient view of misconduct, committed without calm deliberation and in consequence of his own success. Byron (a boarder in Dr. Butler's house) pulled down the gratmgs before some of the Master's windows, and on bemg called upon to answer for his conduct, had the impudence to say without a w^ord of apology, that he tore down the gratings ' because they darkened the hall.' On the other hand, the poet ranged himself on the side of order, when some of his confederates proposed to burn down one of the class-rooms, — an outrage from which they were with- held by their leader, who reminded them that m doing so they would destroy the desks, illustrated with the names of their fathers and grandfathers. But though he saved the class-room, he persisted to the last in sho^^dng disrespect to Dr. Butler ; even gomg the length of declining at the end of the term to accept the invitation to dinner which the Doctor sent to him as an upper boy, m accordance with etiquette of ancient usage. Moore even goes so far as to assert, on the authority of one of Byron's school- HARROW. 107 fellows, that on beiiifj" asked liis reason for (leclinina" the invitation, the poet replied to his interrogator, ' Why, Dr. Butler, if you should happen to come into my neighbourhood when I was staying at Newstead, I certainly should not ask you to dine with me, and therefore I feel that I ought not to dine with you,' As Dr. Butler, on seeing this story in Moore's ' Life,' assured the biographer that the anecdote had very little foundation in fact, it may be assumed that the explanation was worded less offensively. Byron's Avorst act in the whole of this puerile busmess was the last of his offences. Instead of dismissinsr his dislike of Dr. Butler on leaving Harrow, he was so wrong-headed as to publish in the ' Hours of Idle- ness ' some offensive verses a2:ainst the Master, who had given him no grounds for enduring dis])leasure. But though Byron cannot be acquitted of be- having badly in this affair, much may be said in jialliation of his misbehaviour. Devotion to his old master was the cause of his strong feeling about the election, that occasioned so much excitement in the school. Instead of being the originator of the riotous movements, that arose in the school immediately after the election, he was actually holding aloof from his party when he was entreated to command it. Indis- cretion is venial ' even in an Upper Boy,' whose pride is tickled by an invitation to ' lead his comrades.' There is no doubt he believed the new Master to be unworthy of his office, and conceived he was under no moral obligation to accept the ruler who had been imposed upon him. His most mutinous acts resulted from the heats of contention. The sensitive and quick-tempered boy imagined he had been insulted 108 THE REAL LORD BYRON. by a chief, who in order to humiliate him had ex- ceeded the limits of his authority. The offensive verses were inserted in the ' Hours of Idleness,' when the poet was under the exasperatmg impression that the Master was in the habit of holding him up to the reprobation of his former schoolmates, as a dangerous companion and a discredit to the school. Under these circumstances the indignant boy may be pardoned for behaving for a while with the perversity and vehemence of youth. Anyhow, to wipe out every speck of the discredit put upon his character by the affair, it was only needful for Dr. Drury's tractable and loyal-hearted pupil to repent of his folly, and express the feeling to Dr. Drury's successor. Byron did both. On coming to his right mind, the young poet hastened to Dr. Butler and made him an ample apology. Before leaving England the poet was on good terms with his former enemy ; and he started for Greece with the purpose of withdrawing the offensive lines from the ' Hours of Idleness ' in the next edition of the poems. In the same spirit, on coming to re- view his life in his twenty-sixth year, he wrote in the Journal of reminiscences, ' I was a most unpopular boy, but led latterly, and have retained many of my school friendships, and all my dislikes — except to Dr. Butler, whom I treated rebelliously, and have been sorry ever since.' These are the facts of Byron's misbehaviour — a passage of boyish efferv^escence, fol- lowed by amjDle atonement and generous repentance — to which some of his calumniators have pointed in evidence that he was from his youth an ill-conditioned fellow. 2^ote 40 to the 4th Canto of ' Childe Harold' HARROW. 109 tells how little Byron profited by the classical in- struction of the school, that is so largely indebted to him for its celebrity. Had he come to the school at an early age and after better preparation the note would probably never have been written, and the poet would probably have taken a more favourable view of the educational method of England's public schools. He miffht not have entertained the ambition of editino* Greek and Latin classics, but it is more than possible he would have been delighted to — ' . . . quote in classic raptures, and awake The hills with Latian echoes.' Coming to the school in a state of ignorance, that put him at a disadvantage with class-mates, greatly his inferiors in natural quickness, he never had the heart for the steady labour that could alone enable him to compete with them for the honours of the term. Perhaps no boy ever brought less Latin and Greek to Harrow, or after rising to the highest form carried less of those learned tongues away with him to his university. The very volumes of Greek plays, which he gave to the library on his departure for Cambridge, aiford evidence in his own handwriting of the insignificance of his ' classical attainments ' at the time when, in the technical and strictly scholastic sense of the words, they were at their highest. To mathematics he had a strong repugnance ; — his nat- ural inaptitude for even the most familiar processes of arithmetic being so unusual that, in the later period of his life when it was his humour to watch his domestic expenditure with a jealous eye, he experienced no little difiiculty and distress of brain in 'auditing' his ' weekly bills.' Had he distinguished himself in the 110 THE REAL LORD BYROX. Latin and Greek classes, it would have been less re- markable that he went to Cambrid2:e without havino; acquired facility and exactitude in the spelling of his mother-tongue ; for in the earlier years of the present century, it was almost a point of honour with a public-schoolboy, who knew Homer well, to spell his own language indifferently. The bad spelling of the Harrovian, who prided himself on his considerable knowledge of English literature, deserves notice ; for whilst it may be regarded as indicative of the literal carelessness with which he perused the pages of his favourite authors, the deficiency may also be regarded as evidence that he was not altogether free from the particular kind of intellectual mdolence, that is often united with mental sprightliness and seldom fails to characterise in some degree the poetic dreamer. But if he was weak in his Latin and still weaker m his Greek, Byron distinguished himself at Decla- mations, — a scholastic exercise in which the elder boys of the school delivered as orations, in Dr. Drury's presence, the essays which they had pre- viously written on given subjects. In these exercises, so excellently designed to qualify the youthful orators for one department of public life, Byron was success- ful in attitude, gesture, and vocal address ; and on one occasion he distinguished himself in a way that greatly impressed his most critical hearer. After delivermg the earlier part of his composition with his usual address, he suddenly broke away from the restraint of the written words, and no less to the Doctor's surprise than sympathetic apprehension for the boy's failure passed to extempore utterances that, without any kind of impediment, floAved through well- HAKROW. ni balanced periods to a felicitous conclusion. ' I questioned liim,' Dr. Drmy told Moore, 'why he had altered his declamation? He declared he had made no alteration, and did not know, in speaking, that he had deviated from it one letter. I believed him ; and from a knowledge of his temperament am convinced, that, fully impressed with the sense and substance of the subject, he was hurried on to ex- pressions and colourings more striking than what his pen had expressed.' Byron had probably displayed this power of strenuous speech, when Dr. Drury said of him to Lord Carlisle, ' He has talents, my Lord, which will add lustre to his rank ; ' praise that, to the Doctor's disappointment, only drew from the Earl a look of surprise and a significant ' Indeed ! ' 112 CHAPTER VIII. HARROW HOLIDAYS. Lady Holderness's Death — 'Baby Byi-on' — His Sister Augusta — Her Plain Face and Sweet Nature — Life at Southwell — Mary Anne Chaworth — Matlock and Castleton — Annesley Hall — Who was Thyrza P — ' The Dream ' — Its Falsehood and Malice. However good his school may be, and however efficient his tutors, they are seldom the most im- portant, never the only, forces of a boy's education. To observe the influences that are usually more powerful over his nature than his official and recog- nised teachers, one must follow the lad of quick feelings and lively intelligence from the class-room and the play-ground to his home, and be the sharer of his holidays. In Byron's case it is the more necessary to do this, because the pleasures of his Harrow holidays were more influential in the development of his affections and genius, than they would have been, had the shy, sensitive, meditative boy been strongly interested in the severer pursuits of his school. In those holidays he learnt to love his sister, and conceived his passion for Mary Chaworth. In those holidays he explored (in the saddle — not on foot, as his biographers suggest) some of the loveliest parts of Nottingham- shu'e, and durino; hours of solitarv "iadness studied the tranquil beauties and stately aspects of New- HARROW HOLIDAYS. 113 stead. In those times- of vacation he had alyo L^r<'-er opportunities for reading novels, — those toys of the frivolous, those comforters of the aged, and those l^owerful teachers of the young. Immediately after her son's departure for his first term at Harrow, Mrs. Byi'on went to Brighton for several months. She was still breathing by turns the sea-air and the breezes from the downs, when, on the old Countess of Holderness's death, she came to the opinion it would be well for her boy and his sister to come together. So long as he remained at Aberdeen, no painful question arose respecting the separation of the children. But it was otherwise when on comino- to Sloane Terrace, Mrs. B}Ton discovered that, thougli the Countess had no disposition to refuse Mrs. Byron's boy occasional access to his sister, she had no wish for Mrs. Byron's acquaintance. It is not surprising that the aged lady, with little cause to think tenderly of Mad Jack Byron, had no intention to be troubled Avith visits from his second wife, whose least agreeable qualities were not unknown to tlie dame of high degree. And had Mrs. Byron been a sensible woman, and more thoughtful for her child's welfare than her own dignity, she would have waived a few points of social etiquette, in consideration of the Dowager's age and infirmities, and have allowed the boy the pleasure and benefit of associating with his sister on terms, to which the Countess could consent. But Mrs. Byron, after spcakmg proud words of the Gordons and scornful words of the Dutch woman's presumption, determined to keep the chil- dren asunder. This state of things, however, came to an end in 1802 ; and henceforth Byron had, VOL. I. I 114 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. in his holidays, sufficient though by no means frequent opportunities of associating with his sister, who during their separation had never ceased to think of him as ' the baby ' that he was when she last kissed him in Holies Street, and who for that reason, as well as from a humorous percep- tion of the poet's least manly though by no means least agreeable qualities, used to call him ' Baby Byron ' after he had become famous. When the fourteen-years old boy began to know and love his sister (the only person of her sex, whom he ever regarded for any considerable period, with deep, steady and unchanging affection), she was eighteen years of age, and it is probable that he was at their first interview disappointed by her appearance, which cannot in a single particular have accorded with his boyish conceptions of feminine loveliness. For even at the age, when girlish charms are most apparent, the Honourable Augusta Byron would have been rated as a decidedly plam girl, or over- looked altoo;ether on account of her insio-nificance. Notably wanting in beauty of feature, her appearance — from the day of her presentation at Queen Char- lotte's court, to which she was in later time officially attached — was chiefly remarkable for the want of ' style ' and of taste in dress, that made her (to use Mrs. Shelley's well-chosen expression) ' the Dowdy- Goody ' of all her acquaintance. It speaks not a little for Byron's affectionateness that, from the first hour of his intercourse with her, he was the fond brother of so unattractive a sister. In one respect only was Augusta BjTon fortunate in her personal endowments. Her not unhitelligent countenance had HARROW HOLIDAYS. 115 an expression altogether accordant with the sweetness of disposition, the womanly goodness and the unaf- fected piety, that, unaided by any kind of cleverness, made her from first to last the chief influence for good in her brother's life. From Brighton Mrs. B3^ron moved to Bath, where she was joined by her son during the summer holi- days of 1802 ; when in the costume of a Turkish boy, with a diamond crescent in his turban, he attended her to Lady Riddle's masquerade. Returning soon after the Bath season to Nottingham, where she resumed her former lodgings, IMrs. Byron resided there till she moved to Southwell m the later half of 1804, and established herself at Burgage Manor, a pleasant roomy house on ' the Green,' and drew about her the neighbours, amongst whom the poet made several congenial acquaintances. A better place of abode could not have been found for a gentlewoman in Mrs. Byron's rather peculiar circumstances than this pleasant little town, with its collegiate church and picturesque vicinity, its public coffee-room with papers and gossip for the gentlemen, its assembly room for concerts and dances, and its coterie of clergy and other local gentry — such as the Pigots, the Lea- crofts and the Ilousons — who, in their simple contentment at finding the youthful peer within their borders, were lenient to Mrs. Byron's want of refine- ment, and concealed their disapproval of her vagaries. Near enough to Newstead, for its story and beauties to be known to every inhabitant of the town, the Byrons enjoyed at Southwell all the homage due to their patrician quality and territorial greatness. r>L'forc his Cambridge career, Byron had of course 116 THE REAL LORD BYRON. seen enough of the town's provincial pettiness, and spoken sharp words of its dullness and delight in scandal ; but after his return from Greece, when needy Mr. Dallas was looking out for a place of cheap and agreeable seclusion, tlie poet wrote to him from Newstead Abbey (Oct. 11th, 1811). ' Now I know a large village, or small town, about twelve miles off, where your family would have the advantage of very genteel society, without the hazard of being annoyed by mercantile affluence ; where you would meet with men of mformation and independence ; and where I have friends to whom I should be proud to introduce you My mother had a house there for some years, and I am well acquainted with the economy of Southwell, the name of this Httle commonwealth.' Mrs. Byron, however, was still in the lodgings at Nottingham, when, in the summer of 1803, her son came to her from the school, which he had not yet ceased to ' hate.' How the boy must have enjoyed his solitary rides about Nottinghamshire on his clever horse, — in the fleckered shade of green lanes and in the sun that was never too hot for him ; far away from those ungenerous enemies to his peace of mind, who thought meanly of him for his lameness and imperfect acquaintance with the Greek irregular verbs ! It was a memorable vacation (this year) for the boy who, in its course, put himself on pleasant terms with Lord Grey de Ruthen, the tenant under chancery and occupier of Newstead, till the heir was on the point of ' commg into his own.' That the schoolboy might have some present enjoyment of the property, that would be in his hands six years hence. Lord Grey de Ruthen gave him a standing invitation to HARROW HOLIDAYS. 117 tlie Abbey, and even assigned him a room in the mansion, for his use at pleasure. At the same time the doors of Annesley Hall, the home of his cousins — the Chaworths, were thrown open to the young peer, who had already seen the heiress of the fair domain in London. Little thmking what trouble would come of it. Miss Mary Chaworth — with her sweet voice, piquant air, strangely beautiful face, and all the gaiety of girlhood in its eighteenth year — covering the boy with kindness and tilling him with gladness, inspired him with his third grand passion. She was all the more benignant to him, on the first occasion of his crossing her threshold, m order that he should be the less likely to remember that hideous duel which had now for nearly half a century kept Chaworths and Byron s asunder. A bed at Annesley was put at the service of the visitor, who was already provided with a sleeping apartment at Newstead. So the young peer passed the hours pleasantly between the two houses, spending however less time under the shadow of the ancestral ruins, than m the drawing- room where the youn^' heiress suno^ ao'ain and a^xain, for his particular delight, the song (with a pleasant air) of ' Mary Anne,' — a name of witchery and music, surely, to any j^oet loving a particular Mary Anne. The heiress made up a party for a trip to Matlock and Castleton, and invited the schoolboy to join it. Of course he joined it ; and the young people — four girls, two gentlemen, the young lord from Harrow, with a chaperon of suitable years and complaisance — went off to the Derbyshire springs, and did as people used to do at Matlock and Castleton, and at the 118 THE REAL LORD BYRON. delightful spots round about them. At Matlock there was much dancing that afforded the lame lad poignant misery ; for in his ina1)ility to dance, he could only stand or sit in a corner of the ball- room, whilst his goddess danced with the partners who were easier to lead her out. Still he would rather endure anguish in the corner of the hot room, than vainly seek happiness where she was not. For he was possessed with a passion, — the third and greatest of all his grand passions. On her return from Derbyshire, Miss Chaworth was attended by the schoolboy, who, having slept at Annesley before the trip, resumed the room, which had been assi2:ned to him. Instead of availino; him- self, at first, of the permission to pass the nights under his cousin's roof, he preferred to sleep at Newstead, because of a fancy that the portraits of the departed Chaworths would in the hours of silence and darkness descend from their frames, and as restless ghosts disturb the slumber of the Byron, Avho had ventured to enter the house long closed to the bearers of his name. But after encounterins; ' a bosfle ' on his darksome way from Annesley to Newstead, he thought he might as well speak with ghosts at home as with ghosts at large. Though trivial, this story deserves notice, as it points to a nervous weakness that attended Lord BjTon throughout life. In his weaker and more indolent moods, Byron was superstitious. A believer in presentiments and unlucky days, in apparitions and ghostly warnings, he would some- times discover prophetic significance in strange coin- cidences, and refer to supernatural agency what he should have referred to indigestion. HARROW HOLIDAYS. ll'J It is not surprising that Miss Cliaworth was slow to detect her young visitor's ' passion,' and that for a moment she found it difficult to refrain from laughter, when the shy boy, of ' rough and odd ' manners (if Moore may be trusted), blurted out his staggering proposal for the union of their hearts and their ' lands rich and broad.' In their pity for the boy, who suffered so long and acutely from his entertainment of a preposterous hope, people have felt less than proper concern for the feelmgs and embarrassment of the young heiress, on finding herself with so strange a suitor on her hands. Divided between the fear of giving pain by treating the affair too lightly, and the fear of causing the boy deeper and more enduring distress by treatmg the affair too seriously, she may Avell have been perplexed, and in her perplexity must more than once have "\Adshed the lad at — Harrow. The care she had for his feelings is the more com- mendable, as there was nothing in his appearance to win from her even the kind of favour, with which bright and well-looking school-boys are usually regarded by grown women. If his countenance, ' notwithstanding the tendency to corpulence derived from his mother,' already ' gave promise of that peculiar expression mto which his features refined and kmdled afterwards,' the famt indications were accompanied with an air that betrayed he was more than duly conscious of them. Moore learnt from several quarters that, at this point of his boyhood, the young Lord of Newstead was ' by no means popular among girls of his own age ; ' and it was less due to his want of personal comelmess than to his self- consciousness and vanity that the young ladies found 120 THE REAL LORD BYROX. him ' insufferable ' and a ' perfect horror.' In truth, the kid who appeared a laughable gaby to Miss Pigot in the summer of 1804, must have seemed an egregious gaby to Miss Chawortli in the summer of 1803. The very devices, by which he sought to plant himself in the heiress's affections, were more likely to offend than to conciliate a young woman with a proper sense of her own dignity, and a fairly quick sense of the ridiculous. In his egregious vanity, he tried to play the part of a lady-killer, and to pique his coldly benignant mistress into loving him by a boastful exhibition of a locket, given him by a fair adorer, whom the heiress of Annesley was thus invited to regard as her rival. If this locket was given him, as Moore suggests, by his cousm Margaret Parker, the use to which he now put it shows how completely his latest passion had for the moment driven from his breast all generous tenderness and chivalric regTet for the girl, whose elegy he had written some eight or nine months since, — and whose image some eight years later became the chief, if not the only, inspirmg force of the ' Poems to Thyrza.' But however droll and amusing they may be to cynical spectators of his proceedings, the absurdities of a boy's fierce love, whether it be for the high-born heiress of a great estate or for an obscure actress of a provincial theatre, are little calculated to assuage the first anguish or lessen the subsequent annoyances of the fiiilure of his suit. It did not comfort Arthur Pendennis for losing the fah' Fotheringay, to think how his uncle was chuckling in his sleeve, and to know that even Emily's papa thought him a sim- pleton. Though he may be presumed to have ordered HARROW HOLIDAYS. 121 his pony and ridden ofi to Xewstead, instead of 'dart- ing out of tlie house' and making at full speed for the Abbey on his feet, in the fashion described by half-a- dozen different historians, no one with sym})athy for the griefs of beardless boys — certainly no man who can recall how he himself sickened long syne and all but died of 'calf-love' — will suspect the biographers of exaggeration in recording that the fifteen-years old peer carried away from Annesley a heart full of scaldino- ano-uish, after hearino; either from the vounir lady's lips, or from the tongue of a spiteful tale-bearer, those torturing words — 'Do you think I could care anything for that lame boy?' The disappointment was followed quickly by clear and agonizing recog- nition of all the folly of his futile suit, as well as of the madness of his baffled hopes. Quick to wound its possessor long before it taught him how to wound others, the boy's sense of the ludicrous, acting like acid on the etcher's plate, helped to bite Mary Cha worth's picture deeper into his memory. The recollection of his ignoble hunger for her 'lands broad and rich ' and the gold that could restore the rumous mansion in his park, intensified the torture of re- flecting on his brief, insane, ennobling desire for her beauty and love. Turning his irdle clieek scarlet, and in an instant covermg his brow with cold beads of wetness, as it came to his mind, that mean desecra- tion of Margaret Parker's love-token, gave sharper pomt and surer poison to the stinging words — 'Do you think I could care anything for that lame boy ? ' Possibly this cruel misadventure was largely, if not altogether, accountable for the fervour with which the boy, on his return to Harrow, in his strong yearning 122 THE REAL LORD BYRON. for S3'"mpatliy and in liis despair of being loved by womankind, threw himself into those ' friendships ' that were so curious a feature of his later time at school. In the ensuing summer — the holidays of 1804, which he passed chiefly at Soutlnvell — the boy visited Annesley, and wrote in one of Miss Chaworth's books the set of verses, for which he was mdebted to another poet, — ' Oil Memory, torture me no more, The present's all o'ercast ; JVIy hopes of future bliss are o'er, In mercy veil the past. Why bring those images to view I henceforth must resign 1 Ah ! why those happy hours renew, That never can be mine 1 Past pleasure doubles present pain, To soi'row adds regi'et, Eegret and hope are both in vain, I ask but to — forget.' Soon after he transferred these verses from a printed book to the leaf, that would be almost cer- tain to come agam mider her gaze, Byron (now in the middle of his seventeenth year) bade Miss Chaworth farewell on the hill (near Annesley), to which ' The Dream ' had given the twofold mterest of poetry and history, — ' the hill . . . crown'd with a peculiar diadem Of trees, in circular ai-ray, so fix'd, Not by the sport of nature, but of man.' It can readily be believed that, though his counte- nance was calm, the feelmgs which he held well under control at this interview were feelings of unutterable misery and hopelessness. HATIROW HOLIDAYS. 123 ' The next time I see you, I suppose you will be Mrs. Chaworth?' he said at the moment ofpartmg. ' I hope so,' was the lady's only answer. In the August of the following year (1805), when Byron— no longer a Harrow hoy, but a man who had already chosen his university and college— w^as staying at his mother's house on Southwell Green, Mary Anne Chaworth was married to Mr. John Musters, a hand- some man and notable sportsman, who after taking the bride's name on the occasion of the marriage and bearing it for a few years, resumed his former surname. Perhaps a more foolish story never passed from a mendacious prattler to a serious biography than the anecdote told by Moore of the manner in which Byron was informed that this marriage had taken place, and of the self-possession he displayed on the unexpected announcement. It runs thus, on the authority of some person who was of course present at the scene that can hardly have taken place: — 'His mother said, " Byron, I have some news for you." — "Well, what is it?" "Take out your handkerchief, I say." He did so, to humour her. "Miss Chaworth is married!" An expression very pecuhar, impossible to describe, passed over his pale face, and he hurried his handker-^ chief into his pocket, saying, with an affected air of coldness and nonchalance, " Is that all?"— "Why, I expected you would have been plunged in grief." He made no reply, and soon began to talk about some- thing else.' Is it credible that even Mrs. Byron (with clear' recollection of the painful agitation she had in former time caused her son by an abrupt announce- ment of Mary Duff's marriage) behaved in so cruel a fashion to her boy, whilst he was still suffering ti-om 124 THE REAL LORD BYROX. the disappointment of his passion for Mary Chaworth ? A woman mnst be far worse-tempered and worse-bred even than Mrs. Byron to behave so brutally to a love- stricken son. The woman, who, in a fit of passion with the child, could swear at him, and call him 'lame brat!' could not amuse herself thus malignantly with the bitter anguish of the man. Even when full account is taken of the propensity, which made Mrs. Cardurcis so eager for just ' one glass of Lady Annabel Herbert's ' mountain,' there is no evidence to justify even a suspicion that Catherine Byron could without provocation act so atrociously. Again is it conceivable that the news of Mary Chaworth's marriage came in this fashion as a surprise to the young lord, who was living within twelve miles of her park -fence. The heiress had been engaged to Mr. Musters for two years : Mr. Musters had obtained Letters of Licence to take the name of Chaworth before the marriage ; all Xottinghamshire had been talking for weeks over the arrangements for the ap- proaching weddmg ; the Byrons themselves would have been at their kinswoman's marriage, had not delicacy forbidden Miss Chaworth to invite her dis- carded suitor to the celebration. Li the name of whatever little common sense may be found in this mad world, outside lunatic asylums, is it conceivable that under all these circumstances Byron can have first heard of the wedding in the alleged manner? The whole story is nothing more than a clumsy re- production (with variations) of the story of the way in which Byron was suddenly informed of Mary Duff's marriage, — which took place in the j^ear before Miss Chaworth's marriage. Either the narrator who was HARROW HOLIDAYS. 125 present at the scene ' mixed the two Maries,' so as to substitute the wrong one for the right one ; or ]\Ioore was himself the maker of the mistake. It is quite conceivable that Moore muddled the story, which ' the narrator ' told correctly. Byron did not see his cousin ]\lary Chaworth after her marriage, till he dined with her at Annesley, at her husband's invitation in 1808 ; when he was deeply stirred by the appearance of her little girl, — the infant and the incident alluded to in the lines, dated from Newstead on 11th October, 1811 : — ' I've seen my bride another's liride, — Have seen her seated by his side, — Have seen the infant which she bore, Wear the sweet smile the mother wore, AVhen she and I in youth have smiled, As fond and faultless as her child : — Have seen her eyes, in cold disdain, Ask if I felt no secret pain ; And / have acted well my part. And made my cheek belie my heart, Return'd the freezing glance she gave, Yet felt the while that woman's slave ; — Have kissed, as if without design, The babe which ought to have been mine, And show'd, alas ! in each caress Time had not made me love the less.' And now comes the question who was ' Tliyrza,' — to wdiose spirit in heaven Byron penned the five poems (to be found in the ' Occasional Pieces '), during the deepest gloom of the sorrow, that covered him in the closing months of 1811 and the earlier months of 1812 ? Moore says that Thyrza was a creation of the poet's imagination, and that the poems addressed to 126 THE REAL LORD BYRON. this ' imaginary object ' of the poet's affection ' were the essence, the abstract spirit, as it were, of many griefs.' On the other hand, the Editor of Mr. Murray's one-volume edition of Byron's works is of opinion that Thyrza was the person, to whose death the poet referred in a letter dated October 11th, 1811 (the exact date assigned to the first set of verses to Thyrza ), in the following words, ' I have been again shocked with a death, and have lost one very dear to me in happier times ; but " I have almost forgot the taste of grief" and "supped full of horrors," till I have become callous ; nor have I a tear left for an event which, five j^-ears ago, would have bowed me to the earth.' Surely the death (just heard of), for which Byron had not a single tear left, cannot have been the death of the person to whom the first poem to Thyrza — a poem written in tears and not to be read with tearless eyes — was addressed. The identity of the dates is not important : — for the dates assigned to their performances by writers may not be taken too precisely. The same date (October 11th, 1811) is also given to the ' Epistle to a Friend,' containing the last quoted verses about Mary Chaworth. But it can scarcely be supposed that the ' Epistle to a Friend,' the first poem to Thyrza, and the long letter to Mr. Dallas were written on the same day. Moore speaks so confidently on the question, which had for 3'ears stirred the curiosity of Byron's admirers, that he may be presumed to have good reasons, pos- sibly even Byron's own assurance, for the statement that Thyrza was an imaginary being. But even if Byron was himself the authority for the biographer's statement, it does not follow that Thyrza was mere E ARROW HOLIDAYS. 127 creation. If she was the ofFsprmg of the poet's tender recollections of two separate objects of his affection in former times, — say of two f^irls, each of whom had died after inspiring him with love, — he would be justified in speaking of the heroine of the poems as a thing of imagination, and certamly would not be justified in speaking of her as the poetical por- traiture of a single individual. In that case Thyrza, though a creation, would not be a mere conception ; and the question would remain, — of whom was the })oet thinking alternately or together when he wrote the successive sets of verses? In one of Byron's journals reference is made to ' a violent, though pure love and passion ' that possessed him in the summer of 1806, the summer of his first year at Cambridge, and co-existed with his vehement friendship for Edward Noel Long, who three years later w^as drowned on his voyage for Lisbon with his regiment. After speaking of the pleasant hours he spent with Long at Cambridge, the poet says, ' Uis friendship, and a violent, though pure, love and passion — which held me at the same period — were the then romance of the most romantic period of my life.' Nothing more is known of this passion. Its cause and object may have survived the sentiment, and also the man whose pulses it quickened. It is not known whether Byron had on his departure for Greece survived the passion — in so far as a young man so strangely constituted could survive any vehe- ment affection. It is, however, conceivable that the love was fervid when he started for the East, that he thought of this (to history nameless) girl often during his travels, and that she died in Enu'land durino- his 128 THE REAL LORD BYRON. ]:)ilgrimage. But even if all this and other things could be shown in a way to make it obvious that she was an inspiring force of the jDoems to Thyrza, it would still remain certain that Margaret Parker was also an inspiring force of the same unutterably tender and pathetic poems. Thyrza is dead ; so is IMargaret Parker. Thyrza died when the poet was far away from her ; so did Margaret Parker. Thyrza had been the poet's companion in these deserted towers of Newstead ; Margaret Parker had also been his companion there. The mutual love of Thyrza and the poet was known only to themselves, their smiles being ' smiles none else might understand : ' so it was with Byron and Maro-aret. AVhen ' i\Iaro;aret coloured throuo-h the paleness of mortality to the eyes ' at the casual mention of her lover's name, Augusta (his sister) 'could not conceive,' says the poet in his journal, ' why my name should affect her at such a time.' Thyrza and the poet exchanged love-tokens : Byron and Margaret Parker did the same. The poet wore Thjrrza's love-token ; Byron wore Margaret Parker's locket next his heart. He is said to have shown the locket with vile vanity to Mary Chaworth ; but he valued it enough to w^ear it next his heart in Italy, towards the close of his career. The mutual affection of Thyrza and the poet was the sentiment of young people, so innocent of desire, that ' even Passion blushed to ^ilead for more.' So was the mutual devotion of Margaret and her cousin. In her peculiar beauty, alike delicate and eva- nescent, HARROW HOLIDAYS. 129 * A star that trembled o'er the deep, Then turn'd from earth its tender beam,' Thyrza resembled Margaret Parker, who is styled ' one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings ' by her lover, who adds in the autobiographic memoir, ' I do not recollect scarcely anything equal to the transparent beauty of my cousin She looked as if she had been made out of rainbow — all beauty and peace.' Besides dying at a distance from her lover, Thyrza dies before the poet has heard of her illness. In like manner Margaret died before Byron had even a hint of her danger. ' I knew,' he says, ' nothing even of her illness till she was no more.' On the other hand, the poems contain lines that seem to point to some other person than M irgaret. At the time of her death, she and her youthful lover (at Harrow) were not ' by many a shore and many a sea divided.' Margaret having been dead for some years, Byron, ' when sailing o'er the iEgean,' can scarcely have thought of her as bemg alive, and gazing at the moon. And, for the same reason, whilst he was lying ill of fever at Patras, he cannot be imagined to have found comfort in thinking that Margaret knew nothing of his pain. Though some license is permitted to interpreters of poetry, as well as to poets, these touches cannot be construed as pointing to the poet's cousin. They may have no historical significance, and have been introduced only for pathos or mystification. But if they point to a girl, whom he hoped whilst in Greece to see on his return to England, the girl so pointed at cannot have been his cousin Marcfaret. VOL. I. K 130 THE REAL LORD BYRON. None the less certain however would it be that the poems pomt to Margaret Parker, and that she Avas at least an inspiring force of the verses. All the points of similitude between Margaret's story and Thyrza's story being taken into consideration, it can- not be questioned that, if the course of the Cambridge ' passion ' resembled in any great degree the course of the poet's passion for Thyrza, its object would be inseparably associated m his mind with the girl whom she resembled so closely in beauty and fate. The two loves would be so linked and blended m his memory, that it would be impossible for him to thmk of the one without thinking also of the other. The poems inspired by either of the dead girls would be inspired by both. In that case the girl, whose name is unrecorded, would be no less accountable than the girl whose name we know, for the strains of love and desolation. On the other hand, to show that Byron after Margaret's death never loved a girl, whose fate resembled hers, would be to prove that she alone was Thyrza. It yet remains to state the strongest piece of evidence that Margaret was the sole inspiring force of the famous series of poems. One of those curious personal revelations, which escaped the poet during the last months of his exist- ence, was the revelation that the original of Thyrza was one of his cousins who died of consumption. On the voyage from Genoa to Cephalonia (1823), Byron said to Trelawny, ' When I first left England I was gloomy. I said so in my First Canto of " Childe Harold." I was then really in love with a cousin.' [Thyrza, he was very chary of her name], Trelawny observes, ' and she was in a decline.' Byron's cousin HARROW HOLIDAYS. ]3| Margaret Parker died of a decline, and was the only one of his cousins to die of tJiat malady after in.pir ing hnn witli love. True that she died long before he left England ; but to his j^oetic fancy she was still living and fading away when he thought of her on his travels. The mystification and historic inaccuracy of the poet's statement do not weaken the evidence afforded by the words, that Margaret and Thyrza were the same person in his mind. And now, after passing his eyes over a few dates, the reader must consider a remarkable fact which though pointed to in a previous chapter, has been withheld from prominence, till his mind should have been fully prepared to accept so strange a matter In 1797, when he was only nine years old, Byron fell m love with Mary Duff, -his love for hei^ being no ordinary childish fondness for a cono-enial playmate, but a consuming passion. ^ In the summer of 1800, when he was twelve and a half years old, he conceived a stronger passion for Margaret I arker, who nine years after her death became a cliief (if not the only) inspiring force of the poems to Thyrza. In November 1802, he wrote Margaret Parker's elegy, just about two years and four months after tailing m love with her. In the summer of 1803, when he was in the middle of his sixteenth year, he fell in love with Mary Chaworth. In 1804 — (and here is the marvellous fact)— when he was still in an early stage of the lono-endur- mg anguish caused by the disappointment of his passion for Mary Chaworth-tlie news of Mary l.')2 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Duff's marriage, coming too suddenly upon liim through his mother's defective sensibihty and want of caution, moved him so strongly that he was within an ace of falling into convulsions. ' My mother,' Byron says in the autobiographic memoir, so often referred to in previous pages, ' used always to rally me about this childish amour; and, at last, many years alter, irhen I iims ftixteen, she told me one day, "Oh, Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh, from Miss Al^ercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to a Mr. Co " And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much, that, after I grew better, she gene- rally avoided the subject — to me — and contented herself with telling it to all her acquaintance.' Out of this incident, and Mrs. Byron's habit of talking about it, arose the absurd cock-and-bull story of Byron's behaviour at Southwell on hearing of Mary Chaworth's marriage. Hence it appears that Byron had not only survived his first great love sufficiently to entertain a still stronger love for another object, but had also sur- A^ived the second passion sufficiently to conceive a still more vehement passion for a third object, and was even yet in the anguish consequent on the dis- appointment of this third passion, when the memory of the earliest of the three precocious attachments so nearly overpowered him. It will be said by many a reader that all this is very strange, — so unusual and unlike ordinary human nature, as to be almost incredible. Byron's HARROW HOLIDAYS. lo3 nature, with its feminine sensibility and masculine combiitiveness, was far outside the lines of ordinary- human kind. ' Childe Harold,' ' Cam,' and ' Don Juan ' could not have come from a mind constituted in the usual way of human nature ; and to under- stand and know the poet, people must be able to accept unusual things, that are not in accordance with their personal experience of human feelings and actions. The reader knows how to account for the stronii- emotion, that was inexplicable to Byron himself, by referrhig it to the strongly retentive memory, lively imagmation, and quick sensibility of the mind that, after heightening the beauty of its recollections by the exercise of poetical fancy, made no distinction between tlie remembered facts and the loveliness im- parted to them by its own action, but with all the results of quickened sensibility dealt with the remem- brances, that were partly fictitious, as though they were altogether real. Memory, fancy and feeling were the three forces that enabled the poet to derive a far larger measure of gladness from the remem- brances of his native hills than the joy that had come to him in childhood from the sight of the hills them- selves, — and rendered the sorrows of former time even more afflicting to his sensibility, when he re- flected upon them, and by reflection intensified them, than they were in actual experience. They were the three prime forces of a machine M'hich, though often — perhaps most often — set in action by cu'cum- stances independent of its possessor, could also be put in motion, and certamly sometimes was put in motion by his own will. Washington Irvmg was right in 134 THE REAL LORD BYROX. suspecting that the poet in dealing with his memory was the cunning farmer of a fertile soil, and deliber- ately brooded over the past for the sake of the stimulus which came from the process to his sensi- bility and creative energy. Whilst thus reviving the past, for the uses to be had of its joys and sorrows, Byron could rearrange and modify his recollections in order to turn them to better poetical account, and could even weave pieces of pure fiction into them. Examples of the way, in which he would thus manipulate his tenderest and saddest recollections, even to the falsification of his own personal history, may be found in the poems and the passages of poams, which readers are most ready to regard as so many passages of autobiography in verse. To those who, instead of regarding the poet's marriage as a mere aiFair of convenience, believe that his regard for Miss Milbanke was one of genume affection, it must appear more than probable that even the most touch- ing of all the unutterably pathetic pictures of ' The Dream,' — the picture which Moore thought himself 'justified in introducing historically ' into his account of the wedding — owes quite as much to the writer's imagination as to his memory : — * 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 ; — as he stood Even at the altar, o'er his brow there came The self-same aspect, and the quivering shock That in the antique Oratory shook His bosom in its solitude ; and then — As in that hour — a moment o'er his face The tablet of unutterable thoughts HARROW HOLIDAYS. 135 Was traced, — and then it faded as it came, And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke The fitting vows, but heard not his own words, And all things reel'd around him ; he could see Not that which was, nor that which should have been — But the old mansion, and the accustom'd hall, And the remember'd chambers, and the place The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade. All things pertaining to that place and hour. And her, who was his destiny, came back And thrust themselves between him and the light : — What business had they there at such a time?' And liow about the account of the wedding in the i)oet's memoranda, with which these doleful verses are said by Moore to correspond ' in so many of its circumstances.' From the biographer's abstract of the prose account, it appears that on waking on the nuptial morning the poet was held by the ' most melancholy reflections, on seeing his wedding-suit spread out before him ; ' that before the ceremony he 'wandered about the grounds alone;' and further it is told — 'He knelt down, he repeated the words after the clergyman ; but a mist was before his eyes, — his thoughts were elsewhere ; and he was but awakened by the congratulations of tlie bystanders, to find that he was — married.' This is all. Hence, the account in the poet's note-book agrees witli the picture of the poem, in some of the unimportant, but in none of the important particulars of the latter. The whole affair was over before the bridegroom could collect his wandering thoughts, and he had a vague feeling of surprise at finding himself married : — The same may be said of fifty out of every hundred bridegrooms. He knelt down and repeated the words after the 136 THE REAL LORD BYRON. clergyman : — -and he was quite right in doing so. What bridegroom does otherwise? He walked about the garden till he was summoned to the celebration of the marriage : — what better place for walking can be imagined ? or what better way of whiling away the time till the bride should be dressed? He w^as low-spirited at the dawn of the eventful day : — it is not unusual for a bridegroom to be so, if he is a nerv(ius man. Though he has decided on it de- liberately, and may be confident he is about to take a wise step, a nervous man is apt to have misgivings wlien he is on the point of doing a momentous and ir:'e vocable act. But in what important points does th^s account resemble the passage of the poem? The prose account had no single word of reference to Annesley and its well-remembered chambers, to the old mansion or to 'her, who was,' the poet's 'destiny.' From the memoir, of which Moore talks so absurdly, it does not appear that Byron, either before or at or after the ceremony, had a single thought about Mary Chaworth on his wedding-day. And, as readers will see shortly, there are grounds for a strong opinion that she never approached his mind, to trouble it, at any moment of the honey-moon. Readers of ' The Dream ' should bear in mind that it was written at Geneva, just a year and a half after the marriage, and about six months after Lady Byron left her Lord for ever. It was written (in July 1816) when the poet was in a mood to persuade himself that after all he had never really cared much for the lady, who had dismissed him so unceremo- niously ; — and when he was also in the humour to slap the lady's face with a poem, which should tell HARROW HOLIDAYS. lo7 her and all the world that another woman had years before and all through his matrhnonial time possessed his heart. The labour of -writing ' The Dream ' was an effort of art ; the poem is a work of an incom- parable art ; the publication of it was an act of reveno-e. And after the wont of acts of veni>-eance, the deed of spite recoiled on the doer's head, — by- making the world believe he had never loved his wife, and confirming the world in its opinion that he had treated her very badly. Byron is believed never to have seen Mary Cha- w^orth after dining with her in 1808. Once (whilst he and Lady Byron were on loving terms) he thought of visiting her, but was saved from the false and perilous step by the advice of his good sister — ever his Guardian Angel. But though he never again saw Mrs. Musters (Mr. Chaworth had by this time returned to his old surname). Lady Byron — Avhen she and her husband were still a mutually loving couple — met the heiress of Annesley in society. How the two women eyed one another, what they thought of each other are matters for the imagination. Men's wives are apt to think lightly and suspiciously of their husbands' ' old flames,' On seeing his bride for the first time, a woman seldom fails to discover her former suitor has made a poor choice. 138 CHAPTER IX. LORD BYRON OF TRINITY. Despondency — Eddleston, the Chorister — Dr. William Lort Mansell — College Friends- — Hobhouse on Byron's Nature — Eiji-hteen Long Years Hence — 'Hours of Idleness' — Lord Carlisle — College Debts — Cambridge Dissipations — The ' Edinburgh Article' — AValter Scott's Opinion of the Article— Who Wrote It? — The Poet's Re- gard for Cambridge — Honour done the Poet by the University. Going up to Cambridge reluctantly in October 1805, Bja-on left the Universit}^ in the beginning of 1808, after taking the honorary degree to which, as a noble- man, he was entitled. To account for the heaviness of heart with which he approached the seat of learning and passed his first terms in it, he says that it pained him to c[uit Hari'ow, tliat he had wished to go to Oxford, that his sense of lonelmess in the world oppressed him, and that it made him miserable to think he was no longer a boy. The gaiety of his companions only deepened the melan- choly of the freshman, who wanted the homage of his Harrow ' favourites,' and was still pining for the bride who was another's bride. Holdmo; aloof from most of the undergTaduates, who offered themselves to his acquamtance, as soon as he had taken possession. of a set of rooms appropriate to his dignity, the young peer, during his first year at Trinity, spent much of his time m solitude, and most of his other time in the society of his former schoolfellow, Long, or in com- LORD BYKOX OF TKINITY. 139 iimnioii with the sweet-voiced chorister, for whom he conceived a regard that may not be referred altogether to tliat vulo-arest kind of amiable insolence, — the de- light of patronising one's social inferiors. Probabl}' it flattered the yomig lord's self-esteem to take so humble a person under his protection ; and doubtless the fortunate youth, of whom J^yron wrote to Miss Pigot, ' I certainly love him more than any other liuman being,' was at much pains to retain his patron's favour. But arrogance on the one side and obsequi- ousness on the other would not of themselves have sustained the curious friendship that endured, without any apparent diminution of fervour and steadiness, till Eddleston's death in 1811. Being to an hour two years younger than the poet, this well-mannered and affectionate boy was still in his sixteenth year, when he first won Byron's regard. Had Byron brought from Harrow enough Latin and Greek to place him creditably with the studious men of his year, he Avould possibly have come to Trinity with a lighter heart, and left Cambridge on better terms with its Professors. In every race so much depends on ' the start,' it is not surprismg that the young peer — who with better preliminary training and a lairer prospect of success might have entertained a desire for academic honours, and justified the ambi- tion by winning them — determined to avoid the course, in which, at the outset of the running, he would have competed under vexatious and humiliating dis- advantages with young men, inferior to him alike in rank and natural ability. To his tutor it was soon apparent that the young nobleman, Avho lived chiefly with an old Harrow schoolfellow and one of the 140 THE REAL LORD BYROX. youngest of the college choristers, meant to attend as few lectures as possible, and to hold aloof from the more serious pursuits of the University. After the Long Vacation of 1806, when he had gradually become less shy and more sociable, the peer dis|)layed a pur- pose of running the usual career of a Trinity nobleman. As they seem to have heard nothing of his two previous volumes of verse, printed by a Nottingham- shire bookseller for private circulation, it was not sur- prising that, till he published, for sale to all who cared to buy it, a third book of poetry, containing some equally feeble and saucy satire on his University, Lord Byron of Trinity was mistaken by the Master (Dr. William Lort Mansell) and the tutors of his College for a young man of ordinary endowments, who differed in nothing more important than his lame- ness from the other lads of birth and affluence, who thought it good fun to make night hideous by roaring m chorus under the Master's bedroom window, ' We beseech thee to hear us, good Lort! Good Lort, de- liver us ! ' Like other young nobles and fellow-com- moners, with whom he co-operated in equally riotous and common-place exhibitions of puerile hilarity. Lord Byron occupied luxuriously furnished rooms, gave ' breakfasts ' and ' wine-parties,' and ' suppers,' and was waited on by a valet instead of a college 'gyp.' The proprietor of two big dogs, — the superb New- foundland (Boatswain) and the ferocious bull-dog (Nelson), — Lord Byron of Trinity kept a couple of horses (one of them a large-boned grey animal) on Avhich he rode fairly well, and a coronetted carriage in which he posted to and fro between Cambridge and London, London and Southwell. On returning to LORD BYROX OF TRIXITY. 141 the University after the Long Vacation of 1807, he brought up ' the bear,' destined (as he averred with appropriate seriousness) to compete for a Trinity fel- lowship, — the same bear that two years later guarded one pillar of the chief entrance to the mansion at New- stead, whilst a wolf kept watch at the other post of the stately portal. Of course, at a time when all modish gentlemen were duellists, and the use of deadly wea- pons was a part of every .young nobleman's education, pistol-cases and fencing-foils were always conspicuous in Lord Byron's rooms ; and it being understood at the beginning of the present century that a gentleman should know how to use his fists, as well as ' the hair- trigger ' and ' small sword,' it was needless for his lordship's visitors to ask whether he could provide them with ' the gloves,' when it was their humour to have a set-to at boxing on his Turkey carpets. In these and a score other matters Lord Byron of Trinity did like the other young gentlemen who had the entree of his college-rooms. He may, perhaps, have been a little more ostentatious of his fire-arms, and rapiers, and boxing gloves, — for even in his early boyhood he made a favourite toy of the pistol, which he liked to think would put him with his lameness on equal terms with adversaries of the steadiest footing ; and in his constant desire to divert attention from the infirmity, which telling heavily ^gRW|yt him in sword-exercise j)laced him even more at the mercy of competent ' bruisers,' the lame poet was sometimes comicallj- boastful of his prowess with the blunt sword and 'the gloves.' The unquestionable excellence of his swimming was a matter in which he differed from most of his associates at the Univer- 142 THE REAL LORD BYRON. sity. And whilst he was distinguishable from the other mounted 'gownsmen' by the colour of his large- boned grey steed, he was still further distinguishable by the eccentricity of his riding costume, — the '"white coat ' and ' white hat,' that made Hobhouse regard the poet with hot dislike, and even brought the two young men to arrangements for a duel, before they joined hands in a friendship that survived even the poet's death. But these trivial shades of difference could not be expected to affect the judgment of the college tutors who, havino- o-ood reason to reo'ard Byron as a common-place Trinity lordling and still better reason (after the publication of ' The Hours of Idleness ') for deeming him a lordlmg with no very strong genius for satire, had the best reason for asto- nishment on finding he ' had it in him ' to produce such keen, strenuous, scorching and irresistibly comi- cal verse as the best things of the ' English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.' But whilst playing, in this common-place way, the part of a conventional ' Trinity tuft,' and associat- ing with Fellow- Commoners whose chief distinction throughout life was the honour of having been Fel- low-Commoners of so famous a college, Byron had a small circle of peculiar friends, w^ho would never have cared to know him intimately had his rank been his strongest note of introduction to their favour, and whom he would never have conciliated so studiously and drawn so closely to his heart had he valued men chiefly for their hereditary distinctions. Instead of being the ' snob ' of noble degree that biographers have represented him, valuing himself less on his deeds than his descent, and overflowing with secret LOUD BYRON OF TRINITY. 143 (lisdnin for people of ordinary orii^in, B3rrun tliroiioh- out life chose his familiars from considerations alto- gether pare of the petty patrician insolence, that has been attributed to him on no better grounds, than the boyish verses to the glorification of his Norman progenitors and his occasional exhibitions in later time of an altogether reasonable and wholesome re- spect for his ancestral dignity. After Long's with- drawal from the university, the poet's most intimate friends at Cambridge were — Charles Skinner Mat- thews, a man of infinite humour and an intellect of the highest order, who was regarded by all his con- temporaries as a person designed by nature for a career of high achievement ; Scrope Berdmore Da vies, a man no less remarkable for elegance of taste than for a generous high-mindedness ; Francis Hodgson, the exemplary Latinist and future Provost of Eton ; William Bankes, whose letters and enduring attach- ment to his former schoolfellow are matters of history ; and John Cam Hobhouse (Lord Broughton), who after holdmg firmly to his ' fellow-traveller in Greece,' through good report and evil report, with undimin- ished aflfection and admiration for him from this time of their riper boyhood to the hour that made Misso- longhi a name of mourning throughout the whole world, stood forth the vindicator of his memory, when twice ten years had passed over the poet's grave. After declaring that truth was more precious to him than even his friend's honour, Lord Broughton de- livered himself of these words, ' Lord Byron had failings — many failings certainly, but he was un- tainted with any of the baser vices ; and his virtues, his good qualities were all of a high order.' 144 THE REAL LORD BYRON. The reader sliould take to heart the words, thus transferred to this page for a definite purpose. From his early manhood to his premature death, Byron was known more fully and precisely to liOrd Broughton than to any other person. His familiar at Cam- bridge, his guest at Newstead, his comrade in Greece, his constant associate in Ijondon, his ' best man ' at his wedding, his confidant at every point and turn of liis domestic troubles, John Cam Hobhouse was at the poet's side from the commencement of their fi'iendship at Cambrido;e to the moment of Byron's withdrawal from England. A few months later Hobhouse joined Byron at Geneva, and after accompanying him on the Swiss trip went with him to Italy. In the years of Byron's exile Hobhouse was with him repeatedly. Every incident that contributed to the poet's estrange- ment from his wife was known to Hobhouse. With every opportunity for knowing him thoroughly, in every minutest particular of his character and career, it is not conceivable that Hobhouse was uninformed or deceived respecting his friend's nature or respecting any important matter of his friend's conduct up to the time of his withdrawal fi^om his native land ; for whilst the poet's friend was a shrewd, discreet, judi- cious man of the world, — an excellent man of busi- ness, as Byron always called him ; a man, moreover, of the strictest honour and truthfulness, as all his acquaintance knew, — Byron was frankness itself, in- capable of keeping either his own secrets or even the confidences of a friend, and ever blabbing to gossip- mongers of whom he knew scarcely anything the matters which his own interest required him to keep strictly to himself Is it likely that the observant LORD BYRON OF TRINITY. 145 man of tlie world would not know everytliing of the affairs and temper of the friend, one of whose most charming characteristics was his absolute mcapability of reserve ? ' Part of this fascination,' Lord Brought on remarked, wdien Byron had been dead twenty years, ' may, doubtless, be ascribed to the entire self-aban- donment, the incautious, it may be said the dangerous, sincerity of liis private conversation ; but his weak- nesses were amiable ; and, as has been said of a portion of his virtues, were of a feminine character — so that the affection felt for him w\as as that for a favourite and sometimes fro ward sister.' Hobhouse was by no means blmd to the serious nature of some of his friend's failings. He often had occasion to observe and took occasion to deplore the selfishness, Mdiich he regarded as the dark blot and doleful blemish of the poet's character. There were occasions, when Lord Broughton referred sorrowfully to this serious and incorrigible defect of an otherwise noble nature after the poet's death ; one of the persons to whom he sometimes ventured to express the regret being the poet's sister Augusta, whose love of her father's son never blinded her to his lailings. Of this defect more will be said hereafter. Eighteen long years hence, — eighteen long years,, during which so many of those who are now living will have gone from this life, — the world will have under its eye the book which will afford the proofs, that Byron's college friend was more than justified in saying what he said well-nigh forty years since, in the poet's defence against the charges preferred against . him in the House of Lords by the Bishop of London. If eighteen long years were no more than eighteen VOL. I. L 146 THE REAL LORD BYRON. short months, this book would not have been written. But why should hundreds of thousands of people during the next eighteen years be required to live and die under false, hideous, and depraving notions of what is possible in Christian human nature in this nineteenth century, — and all because the evidence, left by Lord Broughton for a happier century, is with- held from them ? The time must, however, be waited out ; people in the meanwhile comforting themselves as they best can with Lord Broughton's assurance that though ' Lord Byron had failings — many failings certainly, he was untainted with the baser vices ; and his virtues, his good qualities, were all of the higher order.' Let it not, however, be mferred from what appears on a former page that, in associating himself so closely with the five other members of his particular ' Trinity set,' the young peer can be credited with any sort of condescension, or that it could possibly have entered into the head of any one of those five gentlemen to thmk of himself, even for a moment, as being honoured by the peer's regard, because he was a peer. By birth and circumstances as well as by scholarly attainments and refinement the five men were gentlemen, who would have smiled at the notion that their friend's rank could affect either their opinion of him, or their disposition to be intimate with him. Had it been otherwise, the fact of Byron's ' set ' of six containing no other nobleman would be less satisfactory evidence that he selected his college friends from motives and for considerations altogether disconnected from aris- tocratic sympathies. For had they been persons of Eddleston's social condition, it might be suspected LORD BYRON OF TRINITY. 147 that, whilst the young nobleman's conduct m the matter was determined by the delight of condescend- ing to his inferiors, the others repaid his condescension with complaisance. The social condition no less than the intellectual quality of the five men precludes either suggestion. It was not in the nature of thmgs for Byron to imagine he was descending from his nobility in attaching himself to them. On the other hand, it was not in the nature of things for his rank to be any considerable attraction to them. They joined hands with him because they liked liim ; and he chose them for his familiars because as men of taste and literary discernment they were congenial to him. Towards the end of June 1807, when Cambridge was bright with girls from country parsonages, and Cantabs were on the point of 'going down for the Long,' Byron, havmg kept the terms for his honorary degree, bethought himself whether he should ' come up ' agam for further residence in a place of which he was grow- ing weary. Several of his friends were ' going down ' with no intention of ' coming up ' again. Eddleston — the well-looking and well-mannered young chorister, whom Byron had christened Cornelian, in reference to the cornelian heart which the lad had given to ' his patron!' — was no longer a member of the Trinity choir, having obtained through his patron's influence a clerkship in a house of business in London. Under these circumstances it is not wonderful that the poet thought of giving up his handsome rooms, and of with - drawmg from the University till the beginnmg of the year, when he would run up for his degree, and after takhig it would bid Alma Mater adieu for ever. ' I am almost superannuated here,' he wrote to Miss 148 THE REAL LORD BYRON. (' Good-bye, Gaby ') Pigot, of Southwell, dating from Cambridge, 30th June, 1807. ' My old friends (with the exception of a very few) have all departed, and I am preparing to follow them, but remain till Monday to be present at three Oratorios^ two Concerts, a Fair, and a Ball I quit Cambridge with little regret, because our set are vanished, and my musical protege before mentioned has left the choir, and is stationed in a mercantile house of considerable eminence in the metropolis. You may have heard me observe he is exactly to an hour two years younger than myself. I found him grown considerably, and, as you will suppose, very glad to see his former Patron. He is nearly my height, very tlmi, very fair complexion, dark eyes, and light locks The University at present is very gay from the fetes of divers kinds. .... The Masters and Fellows are very polite, but look a little askance — don't much like lamipoons — truth always disagreeable.' The lampoons, which caused the Trinity dons to look askance at the young poet, were the pieces of by no means strenuous satire on the University, her system of education, her professors, and the Trinity choir, that had recently appeared in ' The Hours of Idleness,' — published by Ridge, the Newark bookseller, with a dedicatory inscription to the Right Honourable Frederick Earl of Carlisle, by ' His Obliged Ward and Affectionate Kinsman, The Author.' Probably the boyish ' lampoons ' of this far from contemptible collection of youthful poems were not more to his guardian's taste than to the taste of the dons, who cannot have felt themselves treated with fairness or civility in the following lines, — LORD BYRON OF TRINITY. 149 ' The sons of science these, who, thus repaid, Linger in ease in Granta's sluggish shade ; Where on Cam's sedgy banks supine they lie, Unknown, unhonour'd live, unwept for die : Dull as the pictures w^hich adorn their halls, They think all learning fix'd within their walls : In manners rude, in foolish forms precise, All modern ai-ts affecting to despise : Yet prizing Bentley's, Brunck's, or Porson's note, More than the verse on which their critic wrote ; Vain as their honours, heavy as their ale, Sad as their wit, and tedious as their tale : To friendship dead, though not untaught to feel When Self and Church demand a bigot zeal. With eager haste they court the lord of power. Whether 'tis Pitt or Petty rules the hour ; To him, with suppliant smiles, they bend the head, While distant mitres to their eyes are spread. But should a storm o'erwhelm him with disgrace. They 'd fly to seek the next who fill'd his place. Such are the men who learning's treasures guard ! Such is their practice, such is their reward ! This much, at least, we may presume to say— The premium can't exceed the price they pay.' But if Lord Carlisle regarded such satire with disapproval, he never told the author so. Acting on Sir Walter Scott's well-known rule for the acknow- ledgment of 'presentation copies,' and acting on it prohably from a presentiment that after reading the poems he would find it more difficult to write civilly to the author, the Earl hastened to thank his ward for the copy and the dedication, before perusing the volume, in a letter which, though not devoid of polite- ness or cordiality, failed to satisfy the poet, who wrote to Miss Pigot of Southwell from London on 13th July, 1807, 'Lord Carlisle, on receiving my poems, 150 THE REAL LORD BYRON. sent, before lie opened the book, a tolerably handsome letter : — I have not heard from him since. His opinions I neither know nor care about : if he is the least insolent, I shall enrol him with Butler and the other worthies. He is in Yorkshire, poor man ! and very ill ! He said he had not time to read the contents, but thought it necessary to acknowledge the receipt of the volume immediately. Perhaps the Earl "bears no brother near the throne," if so^ I will make his sceptre totter in his hands. ^ The poet's purpose of leaving Cambridge ' for good,' and visiting it again only to take his degree, was relinquished within a week after its announce- ment to Miss Pigot. ' Since my last letter,' he wrote to that young lady from Trinity, on 5th July, 1807, ' I have determined to reside another year at Granta, as my rooms, &c. &c. are finished in great style, several old friends come up again, and many new acquaintances made ; consequently my inclination leads me forward, and I shall return to colleo-e in October if still alive. ^ On returning to the rooms, which upholsterers had ' finished in great style,' Lord Byron of Trinity was in the gayest spirits, and in the humour to ' lead ' the modish undergraduates till next July, just as he had ' led ' the boys at Harrow during his last year upon ' the hill.' Bringing with him ' the bear,' destined for a college fellowship. Lord Byron had also brought up with him the sense of dignity appropriate to a nobleman of wit, whose poems had been praised in critical reviews and bought by duchesses, — at least, by ' Her Grace of Gordon,' who (as the happy youngster wrote to his fair correspondent at South- LORD BYRON OF TRINITY. 151 well) ' bought my volume, admired it exceedingly, in" common with the rest of the fashionable world, and wished to claim her relationship with the author.' A nobleman of wit and fashion, Lord Byron of Trmity had now only to achieve a reputation for rakishness, to be as famous as he desired. Hazard being a favourite pastime just then with the ''jeunesse doree ' of the university. Lord Byron of Trinity seized the dice-box, and played away night after night till four in the morning. ' I have thrown as many as fourteen mains running,' he recorded at a later period in one of his journals, ' and carried off all the cash upon the table occasionally ; but I had no coolness, or judgment, or calculation. It was the delight of the thing that pleased me. Upon the whole, I left off in time, without being much a winner or loser. Since one-and-twenty years of age, I played but little, and then never above a himdred, or two or three.' When a gamester prates of having ' left off in time, without being much a winner or loser,' it may be taken for certain that he did not leave off in time, or without losing much more than he won. Byron's losses at hazard were doubtless, largely accountable for the enormity of the debts that weighed upon him and harassed him painfully, on his coming of age. ' Entre nous,'' he wrote to his always sympathetic and judicious counsellor, the Rev. Mr. Becher of Southwell, on 28th March, 1808, when only twenty 3^ears and two months old, ' I am cursedly dipped ; my debts, every thmg inclusive, will be nine or ten thousand pounds before I am twenty -one.' The twelve or fifteen hundred a-year from the New- stead property after paying some of the charges of 152 THE REAL LORD BYRON. the long" suit (still in progress) for the Rochdale property, of course, could not afford the young peer a sufficient allowance for what may be called his legitimate expenses. A youngster, — continually posting in liis own carriage to and fro between (Jambridge and London and between London and Southwell, keeping two riding-horses, a groom and a valet, and spending money on two editions of poems printed for circulation amongst his friends, and another collection of poems for public sale, — could not be expected to live within an allowance of perhaps a thousand a-year. But to account for the 10,000/. of debt contracted in two years, one must suppose that Lord Byron of Trinity lost more at hazard than he cared to confess in a journal made up for his biographer's convenience. If rumour of the high play, that went on in his rooms and in the rooms of his more reckless friends, came to the ears of the dons, it may well have made tliem continue to ' look askance ' at the young peer, who wrote to Miss Pigot on 26th October, 1807 : 'We have several parties here, and this evening a large assortment of jockeys, gamblers, boxers, authors, parsons and poets sup with me, — a precious mixture, but they go on well together ; and for me, I am a sjnce of everything except a jockey.' The social gaieties of undergraduates are seldom remarkable for orderliness and freedom from noise ; and it may be imagined that when the cheers and u|)roar of the jolly good fellows in Lord Byron's rooms broke in upon the studious hours of serious students, with no turn for jollity and no admiration for the kind of good- ness that is best described in the small hours of the LORD BYRON OF TRINITY. 153 morning by 'three times three — and one more!' they must have wished his lordship had not ' come up ' for another year. And in this feeling the dons and other grave personages of the learned societ}' must have been confirmed by report, whicli passed from gownsman to gownsman in the later days of October, that this troublesome and audacious lordling, who had sneered in verse at the Master's ' ample front sublime,' and most irreverently called the college-choir 'a set of croaking sinners,' was already at work on another satire, — and had in fact already turned off three hundred and eighty lines of the new poem, which would exhibit to public ridicule the worthiest of living men. It was thus Lord Byron's friends, and his friends' friends whispered of the poem, that would put an end to Walter Scott's popularity, and make Southey rue his rashness in becoming an author by profession. For though the ' English Bards and Scotch Reviewers ' was Byron's answer to the article which did not appear in the ' Edinburgh Review' till January, 1808, and doubtless owed the greater part of its force and most vicious stabs to the anger stirred within the poet's breast by the ludicrously insufficient assault on his reputation, the groundwork of the satire was laid weeks before he received his ' early intelligence ' of the rod that had been pickled for his back. Left to himself. Lord Byron of Trinity would have produced a satire, something stronger than the satirical stuff of the ' Hours of Idleness,' somethinjT: weaker than the satire of the ' Hints from Horace,' that might have caught the public attention for an hour, on its way to the oblivion that claims all satire that does not rise to a high standard of ex- 154 THE REAL LORD BYRON. cellence. Fortunately for the poet, and no less fortunately for countless later sufferers from unjust criticism, the ' Edinburgh Review ' came to his aid with an article that stung him to an exhibition of strength, that placed him, boy though he was, amongst the masters of a kind of literature, in which the young so often try to distinguish themselves, and so rarely excel. It is not easy to sit in judgment on the notorious article, which has proved so prejudicial to the authority and influence of professional critics, with- out tlimking of the satire which gave it enduring notoriety. And to remember the boyish daring, and malicious sportiveness and irresistible humour of the ' English Bards,' is to lose the power of regarding impartially the outrage that stirred the youngster's wrath. But when the satire is put as much as possible out of recollection, and the attention confined as strictly as possible to the failings of the ' Hours of Idleness ' and the faults of the review, there is little to be urged in palliation of the intemperance and excessive harslme.ss of the latter. When all reason- able excuses have been made for the reviewer, it remains that he was signally deficient in good feeling, good judgment, and good taste, — that this article is alike reprehensible for its want of kindliness, its want of critical discernment, and its vulgarity. In sneer- ing at the young lord for being a young lord the reviewer at least showed a curious want of breeding. In striking a youngster so heavily, and at the same moment deriding his modest appeal for consideration on the score of his youth, the censor showed, to put the case mildly, a discreditable lack of sympathy for LORD BYRON OF TRINITY. 155 youthful ambition. In loftily bidding the young aspirant to ' forthwith abandon poetry,' as a field for which he had not a single natural quaUfication, the critic showed a singular unfitness for his ofiice ; for though they comprised many weak verses, and several exhibitions of boyish, even childish, indiscretion and inexpertness, the jDoems afi"orded numerous indications of poetic feeling, and several passages of thouglitful and strenuous writing. Walter Scott, who had already looked through the poems, might well be astonished at the ' undue severity ' of the ' offensive article,' which caused him to protest to Jeffrey against its scandalous harshness, and even to think of writing a note of sympathy and consolation to tlie author. And Scott was not the only reader of ' The Edinburgh ' to regard with equal surprise and dis- approval its treatment of a book of poems, which ' contained some passages of noble promise,' though 'they were written like all juvenile poetry, rather from the recollection of what had pleased the author in others than what had been suggested by liis own imagination.' It still remains a question with many persons whether Jeff'rey or Brougham wrote this unfortunate review ; it being assumed by the questioners that the article proceeded from the pen of the one or the other. As it rests on the assumption, that, if the article had not been of his own writing, he would, sooner or later, have disassociated himself from the discreditable performance by revealing the real blunderer or at least disclaiming the authorship of the essay, the case against Jeffrey is so weak that it should not injure his reputation. Jeffrey had his fiiilings ; but he was not the man to 15G THE REAL LORD BYRON. betray a coadjutor, or sneak out of an editorial scrape under cover of an undignified avowal. Moreover, if Med win's book may be trusted (and on such a matter the ' Conversations ' are trustworthy in some degree), Jeffrey disclaimed the authorship m so far as he could do so with dignity, by assuring Byron in con- fidence that though responsible for the deed he was not its doer. That Jeffrey ever promised (m the manner alleged in the ' Conversations ' ) to put Byron in the way to discover his aggressor is more than improbable. The case against Jeffrey must be allowed to perisli. Discredited by various circum- stances, the notion that Brougham wrote the article is nothing more than a suspicion, hugged to the last by Byron who, with several good reasons for hating the lawyer, was not unwilling to strengthen them with a poor one. ' I have no loves,' Byron said to Trelawny, as they were sailing to Cephalonia, ' I have only one friend, my sister Augusta, and I have reduced my hates to two — that venomous reptile Brougham, and Southey the apostate.' The poet's opinion that the review proceeded from the venomous reptile, because it contained some legal jargon about ' mmority pleas ' ' plaintiffs ' and ' grounds of action,' was mere childishness. If Brougham wrote the offensive stuff, he wrote it when he was half asleep. It is possible the article — so unworthy of ' The Edmburgh,' and so significantly different in tone and style from the acknowledged compositions of the ' Review's ' principal and regular writers — was the production of an occa- sional contributor who, as a resident member of the University of Cambridge, seized a tempting oppor- tunit}" for administering a seasonable chastisement to LORD BYRON OF TRINITY. 157 tlie young satirist of college tutors. The ' dons,' who looked askance at Lord Byron of Trinity before the long vacation, may well have come to a strong and unanimous opinion in the ensuing November that the young nobleman's presence at the university was neither for his own advantage, nor the good of the young gentlemen who gathered about him. On hearing of the ' new satire ' already on the stocks, the tutors may well have wished for some one, enjoying the confidence of a powerful editor, to give his lord- ship a lesson in the art of saying unpleasant things of one's neighbours, and to show him with equal prompti- tude and energy that satire, like stone-throwing, was a game at which two persons could play, — a game in which no one should be allowed to have all the play to himself. And as this view of what would be best for Lord Byron of Trinity and also for his academic superiors grew more general and strong, at the high- tables of the colleges, it would naturally occur to any one of the Fellows, who had friendly relations with the Edinburgh editor, that he would do a good turn to his university and more especially to its junior members, by paying Lord Byron off in his own coin, and showing all undergraduates of a froward and malapert temper that even a young peer of the realm could not ridicule ' dons ' and other duly constituted authorities with impunity. Whilst all this appears alike natural and probable, the tone and very structure of the article point to the same conclu- sion. Written throughout in a vein of supercilious ' donnishness,' the review reminds one alternately of a college-tutor who regards sarcasm as the most effective vehicle of instruction, and of a schoolmaster 158 THE KEAL LORD BYRON. who more in sorrow than in anger condescends to chastise a naughty boy with an implement of torture, far larger and more terrifying than the author's goose-quill. After administering the flagellation to the last cut, the pedagogue forbears to dismiss the humili- ated culprit till he has pointed the moral of the incident, for the edification of youthful Hsteners, by reading aloud some of the weakest verses of his never felicitous satire on academic persons and practices. With this cue to the possible origin and purpose of the review, which caused the poet to drink three bottles of claret at a single sitting, most readers of its insolent phrases will perhaps be inclined to think with the present writer that, though the blow was delivered from Edinburgh, the impulse of the blow came from Cambridge. If the offensive article proceeded from a Cambridge tutor, chiefly desirous of driving Lord Byron from Trinity before the summer terms, the reviewer had reason for a brief while to congratulate himself on the success of his essay. In London where he hastened from his punishment to his claret, Lord Byron was in no humour to pass another term at Cambridge, where for the moment the laughter was all on the side of the reviewer and the dons. The poet, who in later tune could not endure with calmness the speech- less obloquy of London drawing-rooms, had not the heart to fiice the Masters and Fellows who, instead of merely eyeing him askance as they j)assed him m Plall or Quadrangle, were now prepared to confront him with faces brightened with smiles of triumphant malice. So far as his university career is concerned, the 'Edin- burgh Review' simfl'ed out the poet, who had meant to LORD BYRON OF TRINITY. 159 stay on at Trinity till the following Midsummer. From the date of that number of the ' Edinburgh Review,' Lord Byron ceased to be Lord Byron of Trinity. He 'went up 'indeed to take his degree in 1808; but having taken his grade amongst the graduates, he withdrew immediately from the university, to nurse his wrath and bitterness in London and at Newstead, — till he should find verse for their adequate expression. Referring to his wilder time at Trinity, towards the close of his time on earth, Byron said to Med- win, ' I had a great hatred of College rules, and con- tempt for academical honours. How many of their wranglers have ever distinguished themselves in the world ? . . . I believe they were as glad to get rid of me at Cambridge, as they were at Harrow.' Though they come to us through a no more reliable reporter than Medwin, it can be readily believed that Byron spoke these words, and that they fau-ly represent the feeling of the Trinity tutors, in finding themselves well rid of so troublesome an inmate of their College. But though his time at Cambridge ended thus abruptly and ingloriously, Byron bore his university no ill-will. On the contrary, in the darker periods, and also in the brigliter periods, of his life he held Alma Mater in tender recollection, thanking her in his affectionate heart for the friends she had eiven him. Towards the close of October 1811, little more than three months after his return fi'om the East, he roused himself from the sorrow of the preceding weeks, and went to Cambridge to pass a few days with Hodgson. Four months later, when he and Hobhouse were thinking of running from London to Cambridge, to look round the old familiar 160 THE REAL LORD BYRON. haunts and exchange greetings with the few of their former friends, still lingering in them, the poet — now in the morning of his fame — wrote sadly to Hodgson, ' Cambridge will bring sad recollections to him, and worse to me, though for very different reasons. I believe the only human being that ever loved me in truth and entirely was of, or belonging to Cambridge, and, in that, no change can now take place.' And whilst Byron loved the university which he left at the moment of his discord with her chiefs, even as he loved the school which he quitted under somewhat similar circumstances, the younger Cantabs were quick and the older Cantabs by no means slow, to hail him as one of the brightest ornaments of their seat of learning. When Byron went to Cambridge in October 1814 to vote for Mr. Clarke, the Trinity candidate for Sir Busick Harwood's Professorship, his appearance in the Senate House was the occasion of an outburst of applause from the undergraduates, that brought tears of joy to his strangely lustrous eyes and the crimson of sudden gladness to his pale face. And just upon thirty years later. Trinity College conferred honour on herself and rendered meet homage to the poet, as one of her own great sons of genius, by placing in her library the statue of Thorwaldsen, which would not have found a fitter or more honourable home had it been admitted to West- minster Abbey. 161 CHAPTER X. CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. In London — * The Noble Art of Self-defence ' — Swimming- in the Thames — Byron's Life at Southwell — His Quarrels with his Mother — Harrowgate — First and Second Editions of The Southwell Poems — 'The Prayer of Nature' — Byron's Scepticism — His Height and Fatness — Starvation and Physic — Their Results — Tobacco and Laudanum. Whilst keeping his terms at Cambridge, first as a sliy, retiring undergraduate, then as a lad of Hvely liumour and sociable disposition, and lastly as one of the most hilarious and unruly men of his year at Trinity, Lord Byron enlarged his knowledge of human nature and human manners by visits to London, where he saw life much as Tom and Jerry saw it, from pohits of view best known to gentlemen about town, and some- times with companions whose society was not calcu- lated to inspire him with a generous admiration of his species. Not that he had a morbid preference for unworthy associates, or a keen appetite for any of the grosser vices. On the contrary, eating less than a squeamish school-girl, and seldom drinking more wine than he could carry with composure on his naturally unsteady feet, he found his chief daily en- joyment in reading the best poets and in writing such poetry as may be found in the ' Hours of Idleness.' But though his favourite drink was soda-water, in days when sottishness ranked with the line arts and VOL. 1. M 162 THE REAL LORD BYRON. it was a point of honour with nine out of every ten Enfjlishmen to fuddle tliemselves with strono; wines and stronger spirits at least once in every four-and- twenty hours, Lord Byron went ahout town with merry fellows who, instead of emulating their friend's abstemiousness, bantered him on not caring to ' drink like a lord.' In their wanderings about town — wan- derings made almost wholly upon wheels, on account of the poet's inability to walk far and freely — Lord Byron and his friends went of course to the theatres, and afterwards to places w^here the play was high or the dancing wild, and doubtless to other places into which the readers of this page would not care to follow them. In simple truth, they went about and saw life, as young gentlemen of all the social grades from peers to law students, were expected and even admonished by their fathers to go about and see it, in the earlier decades of a century that has grown more virtuous and much more decorous, as it has grown in years. One of the circles they often attended was the gathering of fops and dandies to be found every after- noon at Jackson's (Angelo and Jackson's) School of the Noble Art of Self- Defence. ^ The friend and correspondent of royal princes, and of dukes who without being of royal degree, were august personages, Mr. Jackson had too many lords on his visiting list to feel himself greatly honoured by the civilities lavished upon him by the nobleman from Trinity College. But the great Professor of Pugilism had too genuine and warm an admiration for ' pluck ' and 'bottom,' whenever they came under his observa- tion, not to be touched to the heart by the spirit and address with which the lame peer (who was said to CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. li)6 write as fine poetry as ' any man who did it for a living') handled the gloves — striking out from the shoulder, and ' coming up ' on his tottering pins for round after round with the best ' millers ' of the school, till he was forced to give in from the unen- durable pain that came to his right foot from the violent exercise. And in truth, for a beholder to be stirred with generous emotion at so pathetic an exhi- bition of courage and resoluteness it was not needful for him to be either a professor or connoisseur of ' the noble art.' Byron, still in his minority, and Jackson, still at the highest point of his professional eminence, became close friends ; and for a while Eddleston, if the gentle youth was capable of jealousy, must have been troubled to see how much the young lord, who de- li o-hted in a chorister's affection, could also delio-ht in a prize-fighter's friendship. AVhen the one was in London and the other in the country, the poet and pugilist wrote letters to one another ; the professor of ' the noble art ' being styled ' Dear Jack ' by his noble correspondent. Jackson was one of the few greatly eminent persons to visit Byron at Newstead ; and in 1808, when the poet stayed for several weeks at Brighton, the Professor made a weekly journey to the Sussex coast, for the purpose of carrying on his young patron's pugilistic education. In the previous year (August 1807) when Leigh Hunt saw the author of the ' Hours of Idleness,' swimming for a wager from Lambeth to Blackfriars Bridge, he ' noticed a respect- able-looking manly person, who was eyeing some- thing in the distance.' The something in the distance was the poet's head, bobbing up and down, as he 1(J4 THE REAL LORD BYRON. rehearsed the part of Leaiider ' in the London river ; and the ' respectable-looking manly person ' was Mr. Jackson, the prize-tighter, who took occasion to in- form the hy-standers who the swimmer was, and to expatiate on the virtues of his noble pupil. ' Last week,' Byron wrote to Miss Pigot on lltli August, 1807, ' I swam in the Tliames from Lambeth through the two bridges, Westmmster and Blackfriars, a dis- tance, including the different turns and tacks made in the way, of three miles.' But though he spent much of his Cambridge vacations m London, Lord Byron of Trinity passed the greater part of the successive holidays at South- well, where he was singularly fortunate in the neigh- bours Avith whom he associated on terms of the closest intimacy. If it was well for the poet that in his infancy he made the acquaintance of people placed only a few degrees above the poor, it was even better for him that, instead of being brought so soon into the higher world as he would have been had it not been for his mother's peculiarities nnd Lord Carlisle's consequent distaste for her, he was on the threshold of his manhood placed into familiar relations with persons of the gentle middle class, — a class that is generally too little known to people of noble rank. Li the drawing-rooms of the modest homes of South- well, which he entered almost daily to sing songs and gossip with young ladies, who probably in their whole lives never exchanged words with another peer of the realm. Lord Byron learnt more of the finer qualities of human nature, and more particularly of feminine character, than he learnt a hw years later in the London salons, where dames and maidens of the CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 165 highest birth and fashion thronged and pressed towards him, to scan his features and catch his lightest words. It was in those country-town par- lours and in the gardens on which their windows opened, that the young Byron, excluded by more benignant than cruel circumstances from the homes of his social equals, encountered men and women whose conversation weaned him from his shyness, relieved his manners of their rusticity, and taught him the art of pleasing. And it speaks no little for the refinement and efficiency of his teachers that on passing from them, after a brief interval of foreign travel, into the brightest and stateliest circles of the English aristocracy, he was not more applauded for his genius than for his noble air and perfect breeding. At Southwell Byron lived almost wholly with the gentry of the little town. Once in a while he received a call from a gentleman of ' the county,' or an invi- tation to a ' county house.' But partly from the knowledge that his pecuniary circumstances would not permit him to visit the territorial families of his ancestral shire on equal terms, and partly from a feeling that his mother would be less acceptable to the ladies of the county than to the gentlewomen of the Green, the poet declined the invitations, and sometimes omitted to return the calls, — alleging, in excuse of the incivility of such negligence, either that the calls had been too long deferred, or that the callers should have brought their womankind to see Mrs. Byron. The young man's shyness was also largely accountable for his disinclination to make the acquaintance of his county neighbours. To Mr. liecher's sensible advice that he should go more into 166 THE REAL LORL BYROX. the world, and seek friends beyond the boundaries of his mother's parish, he replied, — ' Dear Becher, you tell me to mix with mankind, — I cannot deny such a precept is wise ; But retirement accords with the tone of my mind, And I will not descend to a world I despise. ' Did the Senate or Camp my exertions require, Ambition might prompt me at once to go forth ; And, when infancy's years of probation expire, Perchance, I may strive to distinguish my birth. * The fire, in the cavern of Etna concealed, Still mantles unseen, in its secret recess ; — At length, in a volume terrific revealed, No torrent can quench it, no bounds can rei)ress. ' Oh thus, the desire in my bosom for fame Bids me live but to hope for Posterity's praise ; Could I soar, with the Phoenix, on pinions of flame, AVith him I would wish to expire in the blaze, * For the life of a Fox, of a Chatham the death. What censure, w^hat danger, what woe would I brave 1 Their lives did not end Avhen they yielded their breath, — Their glory illumines the gloom of the grave ! ' But whilst Byron's intercourse with his neigh- bours of the Green was ahke social and salutary, the Buro-ao'e Manor-house was too often the scene of ludicrous disputes between the mother, who had not the good sense to relax the reins of maternal authority as her offspring neared the time for becommg his own master, and the son who, having never submitted graciously to his mother's violent temper, became less tolerant of her vexatious conduct on ceasinof to be a school-boy. With down darkening his lip, and with a growmg sense of what was due to liis dignity CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 167 as a man and a peer of the realm it was not to be expected that Lord Byron of Trinity, who had fought Dr Butler at Harrow, would consent any longer to be 'rated by his mother in the l^earing of her servants as she used to rate him in Inn chddhood. On the other hand, Mrs. Byron was resolved to forego none of the enjoyment that came to her from the exercise of the most congenial of her maternal pnvdeges 1 he scandal of this state of things of course spread beyond the walls of Burgage Manor. Even if the servants of the manor-house had refrained from telling what they naturally told to all the other servants of the breen the Fi-ots and Leacrofts and the other gentlefolk ot the town would have known no less of the unseemly quarrels of the mother and son. For whilst Mrs. Bvron hastened with tears in her eyes, after every battle, to tell her neighbours what a wretched woman she was to have so undutiful a boy, Byron -like the Byron of later time-laid his domestic troubles before the world, and entreated society to join with him m weeping over them. An equally farcical and truthful story is told of the way in which one of the South- well apothecaries received early intelligence of a more than usually vehement combat, from which each ot the two belligerents withdrew with a strong teelmg that the other would commit suicide before the morn- ino-. Having good reason to think his mother ^;lolent and mad enough to do all her words implied Byron went off to the apothecary the same night, and begged him on no account whatever to supi^ly Mrs byron with the means of putting an end to herself. And the apothecary ha,l scarcely dismissed his patron with an assurance that his wish should be respected, when 168 THE REAL LORD BYRON. he received a nocturnal visit from Mrs. Byron, who had come — not to buy poison, but to beg that no kind of deadly stuff should be sold to her son. Soon after this comical incident, the Pigots were sitting late one evening in their drawing-room — debating possibly what would be the end of these wretched disputes — when Lord Byron came in upon them with a petition that they would give him a bed for the night, as he had resolved to go uj) to London in the morning, without bidding his mother farewell, and to stay away from Southwell till she had with due expressions of penitence promised to amend her faulty manners. Only a few minutes earlier a stormy altercation between the two habitual disputants had ended in a manner, that occasioned Lord Byron the less surprise as Mrs. Byron had in former times thrown the fire-tongs at his head. On the present occasion the eccentric gentlewoman, stirred probably by ' mountain ' as well as maternal indignation, had attempted to silence her adversary with the poker. Hence the young nobleman's determination to keep away from Southwell, till his mother should promise never again to have recourse to so dangerous and objectionable a form of argument. In the morning, before Mrs. Byron had a suspi- cion of his purpose, Byron was well on his way towards London, having left Southwell under circum- stances that caused him to write to Miss Pifrot on 9th August, 1806, from his lodgings at 16 Piccadilly: ' Seriously, your mother has laid me under great obligations, and you, with the rest of your family, merit my warmest thanks for your kind connivance at my escape.' It was the fugitive's desire that his CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 169 place of retreat should not be revealed to ^Irs. Byron, to whom he sent word, through Miss Pigot, that should she venture to pursue him she would do so at the risk of driving him ' immediately to Portsmouth,' a sufficiently plain hint that to avoid her, till she should have come to a proper view of her behaviour, he was prepared to go abroad. P>ut the young man's wish was disappointed. On learning her son's address (probably through the disloyalty or indiscretion of the groom who was ordered to go to London with the peer's horses), Mrs. Byron went up to to\ATi at fullest posting speed, and in due course had an inter- view with him at his Piccadilly lodgings, from which she retired with a clear perception that her lame brat of a boy had passed out of her government. ' I cannot exactly say with Caesar, "Veni, vidi, vici," ' the poet wrote to young Pigot, — Miss Pigot's brother, an Edinburgh medical student ; ' however, the most important part of his laconic account of success applies to my ])resent situation ; for, though Mrs. Byron took the trouble of " cominf/'' and ''seeing,'' yet your humble servant remained the victor' Hence- forth, so far as his lamentably incompetent mother was concerned, Lord Byron of Trinity was his own master. ' The enemy,' as the conqueror undutifully styled his jiarent, having retired to her entrenchments in Nottinghamshire, Lord Byron with his servant and horses made a trip to Worthing and Little- hampton on the Sussex coast ; whence he returned in two or three weeks' time ' with all the honours of successful war' to Southwell, for a brief visit of courtesy to the vanquished ' enemy,' before he set out for Harrowgate, with young Pigot for his companion. 170 THE REAL LORD BYRON. At HaiTOwgate — whither they posted m his lord- ship's carriage, and were preceded by his lordship's saddle-horses — the young men found little diversion in the gaieties of an unusually ' gay season.' Whilst the student was thinkino; more of his Edinburo-h studies than of the amusements of the water-drmkers, the poet thought chiefly of his verses when he was not playmg with his big dogs. ' Harrowgate,' Mr. Pigot wrote to his sister at Southwell, ' is still extremely full ; Wednesday (to-day) is our ball-night, and I meditate going into the room for an hour, although I am by no means fond of strange faces. Lord H., you know, is even more shy than myself.' Twenty years later, on being asked for particulars of the visit that might be serviceable to the poet's authorised biographer, Dr. Pigot wrote, ' We were at the Crown Inn, at Low Harrowgate. We always dined in the public room, but retired very soon after dmner to our private one ; for Byron was no more a friend to drinking than myself. We lived retired, and made few acquaintances ; for he was naturally shy, very shy, which people who did not know him mistook for pride.' On their homeward journey from the Yorkshire springs, whilst his friend maintained the silence that was asked of him, Byron — as the post-horses covered the distance between Chesterfield and ALansfield, ' spun the prologue for our play' (published in the 'Hours of Idleness ' ), that was delivered in due course at the dramatic entertainment that took place in Mr. Lea- croft's drawing-room towards the end of September ; the entertainment at which the poet, in his delivery of the epilogue by Mr. Becher, distinguished himself, CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 171 more perlia})S to the surprise than the delight of some of the audience, by an exhibition of the talent for mimicry that in later time enabled him to play the part of a racy and irresistibly comic raconteur. Towards the close of November, copies of the volume of poems, which the young man had been seeing through the press during the summer and autumn of 1806, were sent to Mr. Becher of Southwell and Mr. Pigot at Edmburgh ; but these copies had no sooner passed from his possession, than the author was induced to bum all the remaining volumes of the edition, by Mr. Becher's equally prompt and judicious expression of his opinion that the sixteen stanzas ' to Mary ' were disagreeably animated with the spirit of Little's amatory verses. That the clergyman had good reason for the protest may be ascertamed by a perusal of the single extant copy of the poem ; but the justice of the censure detracts in no degree from the praise due to the poet for the graceful docility and good temper with which he accepted it. Had he declined to profit by the good counsel, and laughing at his friend's squeamishness persisted in sending out the books on which he had expended so much care, Byron would only have acted hke a youngster of ordinary wilfulness and self-sufficiency. But in yielding so readily to the clergyman, whose judgment he respected and whose affection he valued, P>yron at least justified Dr. Drury's testimony to his manage- ableness, and showed that, however quick he might be to pull against the cable of harsh and tyrannical government, he was still to be led by the silken thread of wise and symi)athetic authority. In truth his behaviour in a matter, so likely to provoke the 172 THE REAL LORD BYRON. pride and obstinacy of youthful nature, is no slight evidence that his insubordination to Drury's successor Avas more due to the master's want of tact than the pupil's want of temper, and that the Cambridge ' dons ' would have found him less unruly if they had been better qualified to govern him. That the young man's submission to Mr. Becher's judgment involved a considerable sacrifice of his inclination appears from the quickness, with which he brought out the second collection of verses for the amusement of his friends, and for the gratification of his eager appetite for the distinction of ' being an author.' The proofs of this second volume of poems, printed for private circulation, were undergoing revision, when IJyron, still in his nineteenth year, wrote ' The Prayer of Nature,' — a composition that shows with interest- ing clearness the character and limits of the religious scepticism, which made the young poet an object of mingled terror and pity to many, perhaps the majority, of his acquaintance: — THE TRAYER OF NATURE. ' Father of Light ! gi-eat God of Heaven ! Hear'st Thou the accents of despair 1 Can guilt hke man's be e'er forgiven 1 Can vice atone for crimes by prayer 1 * Father of Light, on Thee I call ! Thou see'st my soul is dark within ; Thou who canst mark the sparrow's fall, Avert from me the death of sin. * No shrine I seek, to sects unknown ; Oh point to me the path of truth ! Thy dread omnipotence I own ; Spare, yet amend, the faults of youth. CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 173 ' Let bigots rear a gloomy fane, Let superstition hail the pile, Let priests, to spread their sable reign, With tales of mystic rites beguile. ' Shall man confine his Maker's sway To Gothic domes of mouldering stone 1 Thy temple is the face of day ; Earth, ocean, heaven Thy boundless throne. ' Shall man condemn his race to hell Unless they bend in pompous form ; Tell us that all, for one who fell. Must perish in the mingling storm 1 ' Shall each pretend to reach the skies. Yet doom his brother to expire, Whose soul a different hope supplies, Or doctrines less severe inspire 1 ' Shall these, by creeds they can't expound. Prepare a fancied bliss or woe 1 Shall reptiles, grovelling on the ground. Their great Creator's purpose know ] ' Shall those, who live for self alone, Wliose years float on in daily crime — Shall they by Faith for guilt atone. And live beyond the bounds of Time 1 ' Father ! no prophet's laws I seek, — 1^11/ laws in Nature's works appear ; — I own myself corrupt and weak, Yet will I pray, for Thou wilt hear ! ' Thou, who canst guide the wandering star Through trackless realms of ^Ether's space ; Who calm'st the elemental war, Whose hand from pole to pole I trace : ' Thou, who in wisdom placed me here. Who, when Thou wilt, can take me hence, Ah ! whilst I tread this earthly sphere, Extend to me Thv wide defence. 174 THE REAL LORD BYRON. ' To Thee, my God, to Thee I call ! Whatever weal or woe betide, By Thy command I rise or fall. In Thy protection T confide. ' If, when this dust to dust restored, My soul shall float on airy wing. How shall Thy glorious name adored, Inspire her feeble voice to sing ! * But, if this fleeting spirit share With clay the grave's eternal bed, While life yet throbs, I raise my prayer, Though doom'd no more to quit the dead. * To Thee I breathe my humble strain. Grateful for all Thy mercies past. And hope, my God, to Thee again This erring life may fly at last.' In the following year (1807), at a time when he was anticipating speedy death, Byron in his twentieth year wrote, * Forget this world, my restless sprite. Turn, turn thy thoughts to Heav'n ; There must thou soon direct thy flight, If errors are forgiven. To bigots and to sects unknown, Bow down beneath the Almighty's throne : — To Him address thy trembling prayer ; He, who is merciful and just, Will not reject a child of dust, Although his meanest care. * Father of Light ! to Thee I call. My soul is dark within; Thou, who canst mark the sparrow's fall. Avert the death of sin. Thou, who canst guide the wandering star. Who calm'st the elemental war, CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 175 Whose mantle is yon boundless sky, My thoughts, my words, my crimes forgive ; And, since I soon must cease to live, Instruct me how to die.' Had it been composed a few months later, when Byron was living under the inflnence of Charles Skhmer ]\Iatthews, ' The Prayer of Nature ' would probably have contained more to shock orthodox readers. Written in the Christmas-tide of 1806, the poem gave utterance to a scepticism that differed in no important particular from the religious opinions he professed less precisely at Harrow, where he fought Lord Calthorpe for accusing him of atheism. Ex- hibiting abundant faith in the existence of a personal Deity, vigilant of the actions and attentive to the prayers of human beings, and showing no disposition to question the doctrine of man's personal existence after death, the Prayer, in its heterodoxy, is but a cry of revolt against certain of the doctrines imposed on the writer's mind in its infancy ; — doctrines that had become intolerable to a mind, so sensitive and imaginative. Differmg from the infidelity of Hume and Gibbon and Voltaire, with whose writings he had already a slight acquaintance, almost as widely as it differs from the devout unbelief of Darwm, this scepticism, whose single aim is to escape from agonizing imaginations, has little in common with the cold doubt of the philosophic thinkers of the poet's own period, and scarcely anything at all with the free thought of recent scientific inquirers. And it will be seen by-and-by that these remarks are not more applicable to Byron's infidelity in its earlier than to his infidelity in its later exhibitions. The scepticism of ' Childe Harold ' differs notably 176 THE KEAL LOKD BYKON. from the scepticism of ' The Prayer of Nature ; ' the scepticism of the second instahnent of the poet's first great poem is in many particulars out of harmony with the scepticism of the earlier cantos ; and the bolder and cynical scepticism of ' Don Juan ' .is in several respects strangely unlike the scepticism of the ' Pilgrimage.' Although Shelley believed himself incapable of influencing his friend in respect to religious questions, the man who had held daily com- munion with so fearless and subtle a reasoner was other than the Byron, who loitered with so sober and matter-of-fact a scholar as Hobhouse throug-h the ruins of ancient Athens. In like manner the pilgrim of the Eastern tour, with Hobhouse at his elbow, was other than the Byron who delighted at Cam- bridge and Xewstead to talk with Charles Skinner Matthews on the mysteries of existence and the per- plexities of faith. And the Byron, with whom Matthews talked, was other than the Byron who in 1806 wrote ' The Prayer of Nature.' But in all the variations of his unbeUef, Byron is always the sceptic of emotion, — never the cold and calmly speculative free-thinker. More referable to the feminine than the masculine forces of his nature, his scepticism is an affair of sensibility and passion, instead of logic and convic- tion. Whether he rails in bo^dsh verse at ' priests ' and ' bigots,' or in a loftier strain compassionates the ' poor cliild of doubt and death, whose hope is built on reeds,' or exclaims with cynical vehemence, ' P^or me, I know nought ; nothing I deny, Admit, reject, contemn ; and what know you. Except perhaps that you were born to die ? And both may after all turn out untrue;' CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 177 he is the sceptic of feeling and excitement, whose pro- foundest reasonings are familiar arguments of ' common sense,' and whose confidence in his own conclusions sinks as his pulse suhsides. Begotten of anxiety for himself and sympathy for human kind, — the selfish fear bemg far less powerful in his generous breast than the concern for others, — this feverish, impulsive, tim- orous scepticism was fruitful of repudiations of unen- durable dogmas ; but every repudiation was attended by an uneasy feelmg that the rejected doctrine might in the end prove a true one. In the agitation which followed his death, people perplexed themselves with the question, whether he had in his later time been a Christian ? Answering this question in a way that left the question unanswered, Leigh Hunt remarked, ' He M'as a Christian by education: he was an infidel by read- ing. He was a Christian by habit : he was no Christian upon reflection.' But Byron, with his keen sensitive- ness and strong memory, was so constituted that his later reading (never severe) could not altogether over- come the influence of early education. Shelley was less powerful over him thanMay Gray. Hovering and oscillating even in the periods of his boldest sceptic- ism, between Christianity and disbelief, he never after his boyhood rested either on the one or the other. There were moments when he could speak and write as though he had passed altogether from his early faith ; but to the last he was an anxious and hesitatinir unbeliever, and the religious opinions of the man, who in Italy and Greece was an habitual reader of the Piible given him by his sister on the eve of his with- drawal from England, resembled the religious opinions of the boy who wrote ' The Prayer of Nature.' VOL. I. N 1 1 8 THE HEAL LORD BYRON. Tlie period of the production of this rehgious poem was also the time at which the young man first set himself earnestly to combat the tendency to cor- pulence of which Moore speaks so daintily. It was no mere disposition to inconvenient stoutness, but a burdensome and disfio'urinjT; g-rossness of which Byron resolved to rid himself at the commencement of his twentieth year ; and as he has been unfairly ridiculed and persistently exhibited to contempt for the vanity, which caused him to sacrifice bodily health to personal appearance, it is but fair to display in all its repulsiveness the extravagance of the disease that made him employ such violent mea- sures for its abatement. The matter is the more deserving of consideration, because the regimen, in which he persisted with a resoluteness and persever- ance that may almost be called heroic, affected his temper and happiness, his character and even his genius. So long as he continued to grow in stature, this vicious habit of body was fruitful of no serious incon- venience. Nor was it attended with humiliatmg and embittering results. But as soon as he ceased to grow higher, the youth who had been a thick-bodied, heavy-featured lad, expanded with fat till he became ludicrous and repulsive to beholders, — especially to those beholders, the young and lovely of the gentler sex, of whose approval he was most keenly desirous. Let it be remembered that on attaining its full mea- sure his stature barely escaped shortness. It was his humour and weakness to maintain that he stood five feet and eight a72d a half inches high. In questions of height, it may be laid down as a sure maxim CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 179 that the man who claims credit for the extra half-inch, claims credit for what he does not possess. In his Loots Byron stood a trifle over five feet eight inches ; but this was the height of a man — standing on his toes, with heels raised by boots of peculiar make. His actual height was midway between five feet seven inches and five feet eight inches. And on the nineteenth anniversary of his birthday this young man of barely average height w^eighed fourteen stone and six pounds. Of this burden of flesh more than an average propor- tion pertained to the trunk and superior limbs, as his inability to take much walking exercise was unfavour- able to the development of the legs. The young man, of abnormal girth and large shoulders, tottering unsteadily on spindle limbs and small, distorted feet, had a face swollen to unsightliness with fatty tissue. Is it wonderful that his visage was disgustful to liim ? and that he resolved to mortify his keen appetite for food, to abstain from fattening drinks, to weaken himself b}^ the daily use of drastic medicines, to quicken his skin's action with hot baths, and to deny himself several of the most important pleasures of sense, in order to escape such hideous disfigurement and to look like other young men r Surely it was more honourable than contemptible in him that he could make such a daily and hourly sacrifice of bodily indulgence and delights for which he had keen zest, in order to emerge from such a swinish state of ])hysical depravity ? It is best for a man to be natural in his habits and outward show. But Avhen a man cannot be natural without lookin"- like a hoo-, he does well to be unnatural for the sake of looking like a man. Let it be granted that the motive was 180 THE REAL LORD BYRON. vanity, and tliat vanity is no heroic quality. — albeit, u finality that is seldom wanting in heroes, and often contributes not a little to their heroism. Still the fact remains that, his only choice lying between the part of a pig and the part of a peacock, it is creditable to him that he declined the part of the pig. In the April of 1807, he wrote from Southwell to his friend Pigot at Edinburgh, ' Since we met, I have reduced myself by violent exercise, much physic, and hot bathing, from fourteen stone six pounds to twelve stone seven pounds. In all I have lost twenty-seven pounds. Bravo ! ' On going up to Cambridge he was so changed in shape and show that even his familiars of Trinity did not recognise him at first sight. ' I was obliged,' he wrote to Miss Pigot from Cambridge on 30th June, 1807, 'to tell everybody my name, nobody having the least recollection of my visage or person.' The mild-mannered Eddleston was ' thunderstruck ' at the change in his patron. A fortnight later the poet wrote to Miss Pigot from London, ' Though I am sorry to say it, it seems to be the mode amongst gentlemen to grow/a^, and I am told I am at least fourteen pounds below the fashion. However, I decrease instead of enlarging, which is extraordinary, as violent ^exercise in London is im- practicable.' Violent exercise, however, can at no time have been a chief factor of the regimen, Avhicli owed most of its efficacy to starvation, Epsom salts, and the sweating bath. Such exercise as he could take, he took. In the sunmier and in the cold seasons he swam for long distances daily ; but that is no exercise for the reduction of fat. He was daily for hours in the saddle ; but as soon as the muscles, which it CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 181 affects especially, have accommodated themselves to the strain, horse exercise ceases to be either a violent or a reducing exercise. AVere it a remedy for grossness of bodily habit, one would not see so many pot- bellied troopers, and hunting-men who ride sixteen stone. At Cambridge in these later days such a man, if he could bring himself to sacrifice the beauty of his hands, would sweat the fat from his ribs in an out- rigger, and Byron, with his broad shoulders, muscular neck and thewy arms, would have been a superb oars- man, and led the Cam in a sport where his lameness would have put him at no disadvantage. But m Byron's days at Trinity, the Cam knew nothing about eight-oars, and four-oars, and sculling matches. The only violent exercise to be of much service to him in his war against fat was long-continued exercise on foot ; — and that exercise was impossible to him. He could rush about for a few minutes at a time in Jackson's boxing-room ; but he could maintain the exertion only for short spurts, and at the cost of intense pain. For the sacrifices, which he made for the attain- ment of his object, Byron was repaid nobly. He sub- mitted to starvation and physic, in order to escape loathsome unsiHitliness ; and besides reUevinf]^ him of the repulsive aspect, the regimen — to his astonish- ment and delight — endowed him with the beauty of loveliness ; beauty that became proverbial. Xo longer big and puffy, his eyelids and cheeks became fine, and firm, and delicate, with curves as clear in outline as the curves of sculpture. Ceasing to be thick and heavy, his lips and chin assumed the peculiar sweet- ness and softness, that made him in the lower part of liis countenance a bewitchingly charming woman 182 THE REAL LORD BYRON. rather than a handsome man. The nose — even in his comeliest period something too hroad, and havmg (as Leigh Hunt spitefully remarked) the appearance of having been put upon the face, mstead of coming- out from it — was relieved of its clumsiness, and re- fined into harmony with the rest of a profile singularly suo-o-estive of hi2;h breedino-. At the same time the blue-gray eyes, fi-inged with dark (almost black) lashes, acquired a brightness and subtlety of ex- pression that had never before distmguished them. His complexion was purified to transparency, and his auburn hair, playing over his brow in short, feathery curls, became richly lustrous. The man, who with the fine touch of a delicate and naturally sensitive hand takes in his fingers a lock of Byron's hair for the first time, experiences a curious surprise from the feather-like softness of the filaments. Thus much starvation and medicine did for the aspect of his face. The transformation of his figure was no less striking, — a body of grace and dignified elegance being substituted for a bod}^ of almost loutish clumsiness. At the same time, the regimen was even more beneficent to his sensations than to his appear- ance. Relieved of the burden of his superfluous flesh he could walk with comparative ease and security. The body, that had oppressed him, was no longer un- wieldy and unmanageable. Obeying his will, it filled him with delight. And what is even more noteworthy than all the other results of the regimen taken toge- ther, is that this discipline of starvation and drastic depletives quickened his brain to such a degree, that the man of intellect for the first time knew himself to be somethinof far hio-her than a man of mere intellect. CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 183 The goads and whips of the regimen had affected the nervous system, so that he had become a man of o^enius. He had ffone to druo-s and starvation at the instigation of personal vanity. Henceforth he per- sisted in using them for the sake of the delights of that highest life, to which they had raised him, and from which he soon sunk surely and quickly witliout their assistance. It is not difficult to show how it was that starva- tion and medicine affected Byron in so remarkable a manner. Though he may not be aware of the process by which it operates for his immediate gratification and ultimate injury, the absinthe-drinker takes his pernicious beverage for the sake of the mechanical irritation it causes to the linino- membrane and nerves of the stomach, and the consequent sympathetic ex- citement of the brain. Byron with Epsom salts and starvation did for his stomach and brain what the absinthe-drinker accomplishes by means of the essence of wormwood. He kept the mucous membrane of the stomach in constant irritation, and the nerves of the stomach in constant and abnormal activity, the im- mediate effect of their excitation being a sympathetic action of the brain, alike agreeable to his whole nervous system and conducive to mental sprightli- ness. The state to which he thus brought himself was attended with the pleasurable sensations of in- toxication, and indeed differed chiefly from vinous exhilaration in being followed by no serious depres- sion. ' A dose of salts,' Byron remarks in one of his journals, ' has the effect of a temporary inebriation, like light champagne, upon me.' Wine made him gloomy and savage, as soon as the momentar}'- ex- 184 THE REAL LORD BYRON. liilaration had passed ; the irritation of the medicine affected his brain as alcohol affects men whose nerves suffer no painful consequences from it. And to the last, starvation and medicine operated in the same way on his mental forces. ' By starving his body,' says Trelawny, speaking from his observation of the poet in his closing years, ' Byron kept his brains clear : no man had brighter eyes or a clearer voice.' The sacrifices, which Byron thus made for quick- ness of brain and freedom from bodily grossness, were too heavy and grievous to be made daily throughout successive years, without reluctance and with no occa- sional relaxations of the stern discipline. But as soon as he wavered in this ascetic course, so far as to eat and drink like other men, he began to fatten and (in his earlier manhood) wax dull ; and it was only by returning to the severe regimen that he could recover his vio;our and intellectual brightness. What it cost him in discomfort and effort thus ' to clap the muzzle on his jaws ' (to use his own words), ' and like the hybernatmg animals consume his own fat,' he alone knew. He spent the great part of his manly time under the goads of keen hunger, living for days together on biscuits and soda-water, till overcome by gnawing famine he would swallow a huge mess of potatoes, rice and fish, drenched with vinegar, and after recovering from the indigestion occasioned by such fare would go in for another term of qualified starvation. Fortunately for the man who was con- strained to take this ascetic course, the desire for food was not sharpened by an epicurean yearning for de- licate flavours. Like Walter Scott, Byron had a strangely insensitive palate. Sir Walter preferred CAMBRIDGE VACATIONS. 185 whisky to wine, and could not distinguish one kind of claret from another ; and Byron thought no dinner of the rarest viands could surpass a meal of jjoached eggs and bacon and bottled beer. In other matters besides food he was strano;el\- abstinent. From a few boastful passages of his journals, it might be thought that Byron's practice; was to drink freely. But the evidence is conclusive that, whilst his excesses in wine were rare and excc])- tional incidents even in his times of indulgence, liis usual moderation in alcohol would be thoucrht exem- plary even in these days when sobriety is the fashion. The gin-and-water, of which he spoke whimsically as the source of the wit of ' Don Juan,' was a single glass of weak, — sometimes very weak — toddy on nights of unusual weariness and exhaustion. Once in a long while he smoked a cigar, to see if he liked it ; but at no time was he ' a smoker.' Drinking laudanum, he used also (at times) to chew tobacco, to stay the pain of hunger biting at his vitals. In Italy he was often seen witli his tobacco-box in his hand and a quid in his mouth. But all through life, from Southwell to Missolonghi (with the exception of two exceptional periods of excess ), his rule in regard to meat and alcohol was to ' live low ' that he miji'lit ' tlihik high.' 'Tlie regimen ' of starvation and physic answered well for a time, but ill in the long run, like absinthe-drinking which, operating pleasantly for a time, results in ruined stomach, shattered nerves, and all the distresses of mind and body that attend failure of the digestive powers and the nervous forces. For some months in 181G — tlie months of his heaviest domestic troubles — he took brandy in excess, 186 THE REAL LORD BYROX. and was at the same time a laudanum-drinker. And at Venice — during his period of depravation — he was for several months ev^en sottish in his use of spirits. But these passages of intemperance contrast strongly with the temperance for which he was at other times remarkable. His most vicious and baneful habit in the way of drinking was the use of laudanum. The abundant evidence of his journals and letters that it was his practice to consume opium in this form, is not the only extant evidence that, like De Quincy and Coleridge and several other chiefs of our nineteenth century literature, he was so much addicted to lauda- num, that he may without exaggeration be said to have been a laudanum-drinker. 187 CHAPTER XI. PEER AND PILGRIM. The Eochdale Property — Brompton and Brighton — ' Brother Gordon'-- Life at Newstead — The ' Coming of Age ' — Byron's Quarrel with the Earl of Carlisle — Missing Evidence — The House of Lords — ' English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' — Neither Whig nor Tory— -The * Pilgrimage ' — Homeward Bound. Whilst he was spending money during his minority at the rate of five or six thousand a-year, Byron looked to the Rochdale property to pay his debts, put the Xewstead mansion in habitable condition, and still give him ten, twenty, thirty, or forty thousand pounds, to begin housekeeping with in the seat of his forefathers. Whenever he meditated gloomily on his growing em- barrassments, Rochdale with its coal was the mine of wealth that, on the termination of the Chancery suit next year, or at the furthest two years hence, would free him from his little difficulties, enable him to dis- miss the money-lenders, and put him in easy circum- stances. His notions of the value of this charmin"- property were elastic ; its worth growing with the difficulties it was to dissipate. In August 1806, im- mediately after a favourable finding at Tiancaster As- sizes, the property was worth 30,000/. ; in February 1807, the value of the estate had risen to 60,000/. Fourteen years later, when the young lord's hair was beginning to turn grey, he said to Medwin, ' The 188 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Lancashire property was hampered with a hiwsuit, which has cost me 14,000/., and is not yet finished.' The Rochdale property may therefore be left out of the calculation, when the reader is considering his lordship's sources of income from the attainment of his majority till his residence at Pisa, when Medwin made his acquaintanjce. On coming of age, the poet was more than 10,000/. in debt, whilst his income from Newstead — his sole revenue — was less than 1500/. a-year. It was however in his power to sell Newstead, — the picturesque property for which he Avas offered a few years later 140,000/. by a gentleman who forfeited 25,000/. on his failure to com])lete the purchase, and which was eventually sold for 94,000/. Mr, Hanson (the poet's solicitor) told his client, that he should not think of selling the Rochdale pro- perty which, pending the litigation, would not bring in a good price, but should lose no time in parting with Newstead, where he could not live in any stjde whatever. But the young peer would not entertain, still less act upon the judicious advice. His honour was concerned in keeping Newstead ; and for once he and his mother were of one mind. Mrs. Byron was longing to move from Southwell to the Abbey. Her son also was pining to dwell in his ancestral halls. And in his desire to live there, he was so imprudent as to repair some rooms of the dilapidated mansion at a considerable expense, and then to furnish them at great charge (on credit) of 1500/., when he was still in his minority. Taking up his abode at Newstead in September 1808, when he was four months under age, he spent much of his time there till the June of the next year, when he started for Greece. As he would PEER AND PILGRIM. 189 not allow Mrs. Byron to live with him at the Abbey, his establishment was settled for the needs of a bachelor ; but thoudi it was hxed on a modest scale, the house- liold, consisting of an old butler, a valet, the groom, and three or four female servants, was an establishment far beyond his means. Nearly every requisite for this establishment was obtained on credit from tradesmen, Avho in consideration of risk were entitled to charge their customer at high rates. The wine was sent in on credit ; the coals were supplied on credit ; the money needful for the young lord's current expenses was obtamed from lenders at usurious interest ; and soon after coming of age, his lordship borrowed of the Jews — to whom he referred long afterwards in ' Don Juan ' — the considerable sum of money for the charo-es of his Eastern tour, which he made in a style more in harmony with his rank than his means. In the earlier months of 1808, before going into residence at Newstead, he had spent money freely in London on the ordinary pleasures of a young gentle- man of quality ; a chief cause and object of his pro- fuseness being the girl who, living with him in lodg- ino-s at Brompton, used to ride about town with him, habited in male attire. Dressed like a boy, this person accompanied him to Brighton, where he had the folly to introduce her to his acquaintance as his ' brother Gordon ; ' and a few months later she was at least for a short time an inmate of Newstead. And it shows the difference in certain matters of taste and morality be- tween English society in this year of grace and English society at the beginning of the present century, that in- stead of provoking loud censure by this display of his intimacv with a saucy \fille de joie.' young Lord Byron 190 THE REAL LOKD RYRON. was thought to be amusing himself quite within the lines of permissible license, and was even commended for his address in giving an air and flavour of piquant eccentricity to an otherwise uninterestmg arrangement. Instead of passing the young peer and ' his brother ' on the Brighton Parade ^\^thout appearing to notice them, the lady of rank and fashion, to whom Moore refers, entered freely into conversation with ' the brothers,' and was vastly amused when, in answer to a com- plaisant speech about the beauty of her horse, the girl in boy's clothes remarked, ' Yes, it Avas gave me by my brother.' A still more remarkable illustration of the same difl'erence in taste and morality between the English of to-day and the English of seventy years since is found in the affectionate interest and absolute freedom from dismay, with which the first readers of ' Childe Harold ' accepted au pied de la lettre the poet's ' reve- lations ' of his way of living at Newstead before he set out for his travels. It shocks the nerves to conceive what thunderbolts of reprobation would be hurled by every newspaper of the land at the young gentleman who, in a book of verse or prose havmg every appear- ance of autobiographical sincerity, should now-a-days assure the world that, in chagrin at his refusal by a young lady on whom he had set his affections, he filled his country house with loose women and well-bred mauvais siijets, and spent several weeks with them in drunkenness and voluptuous enjoyments, till sated and exhausted with debauchery he came to loathe himself for his abandonment and excesses. But Byron said all this of himself in a way that caused the whole world to take his statements literally ; and instead of PEER AND PILGRIM. 191 being horrified by his evidence against himself, the only regret of his readers was that the confessions were not more full and particular. Byron's avowals of surprise and displeasure at his readers' perverseness in taking ' Childe Harold ' for himself, and in regarding the Childe' s career at home and on his travels as the author's career, are merely so many laughable ex- amples of the way in which a writer, after describing himself or his friends in a work of fiction, is always blind to his achievements in portraiture. The Childe is a young spendthrift of lineage long and glorious ; the Childe has sighed in vain to the heiress of goodly lands ; the Childe's ancestral hall is a vast and vener- able pile, where superstition once had made her den ; the Childe has a mother and a single sister ; the Childe visits the same places as the author visited ; to fix the Childe's personality yet more closely on himself, Byron had christened the poem ' Childe Burun,' and was not easily persuaded to substitute Harold for his own surname ; — and yet, when he had taken all tiiese pains to identify himself with tlie hero of the poem, the author was at a loss to understand why he was universally supposed to have been writing about himself. But the disavowals of the identity of the author and the hero do not touch the point, to which the readers of this page are asked to give their attention, — that Byron's contemporaries were uni- versally of opinion that his doings at Newstead re- sembled the Childe's riotous excesses in his ' father's hall,' and that far from causing them to revolt from him or regard him with disapproval, the opinion disposed most of them to think of him with favour and even with admiration. 1 92 THE REAL LORD BYRON. The comedy of the whole business is heightened l)y the slightness of the poet's grounds for the super- sensational description of his naughty behaviour in his own house. The only ' Paphian girls .... to sing and smile ' at Newstead for the delight of a master ' sore given to revel and ungodly glee ' were the cook and housemaid of the bachelor's staff of servants, and the girl whose boyish dress and horse- manship had a few weeks earlier made a stir on the Brighton cliff. Dallas indeed was so completely possessed by the fictions of the poem, as to write seriously of the considerations which determined the young lord to ' break up his harams ' ; but in sober ])rose the ' harams ' of Byron's worst biographer were the young woman who cooked the poet's frugal meals, the young woman who kept his rooms tidy, and the girl from Brompton who came and went in the garb and under the name of ' brother Gordon.' The ' revellers from for and near ' were three or foiu' of the neighbouring clergy, half-a-dozen of the poet's old friends at Southwell, and his former chums at Cam- bridge — Matthews, Scrope Davies, Hodgson and llobhouse ; the last of these 'heartless parasites of l)resent cheer ' being the true and trusty comrade, ^vitli whom the poet had already arranged to travel for a couple of years. Unless he had his eye on some of the Southwell folk, who may be suspected of treating him somewhat reverentially when they came to look over the Abbe}', it is impossible to conceive who were the 'flatterers of the festal hour,' of whom the Childe speaks so disdainfully. For a week or two the poet thought of ha^'ing ' private theatricals ' in the great hall, and of inviting a lot of peoi)le to see PEER AND PILGRIM. 193 the performances ; but if he had not relinquished the project, the young lord would have been compelled to invite his tenants and their children and the villasrers from Ilucknall-Torkard, in order to escape the shame of playing to empty benches. For till he went abroad, he could have counted on his fingers all the persons he knew of Nottinghamshire 'county families.' Once only was there any serious effort in the way of hospitality on a large scale. On the twenty-first anniversary of his lordship's birthday, Newstead was stirred ' by such festivities as his narrow means and society could furnish.' An ox was roasted for the farmers and their families and the humbler peasantry of the estate ; and in the evenino-, there was some- thing of iJie^'tiature of ' a ball.' But the dance must have been a sorry affair, as Moore was unable to dis- cover that anyone of greater importance than Mr. Hanson (the solicitor) figured amongst the dancers. This ball, without ladies and gentlemen of quality, or a single carriageful of county neighbours, was in truth a dance for the farmers and servants ; and it seems to have been the sole realistic foundation for the lines about 'concubines and carnal companie, and flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.' AVhen the poet entertained four of his Cambridge friends at his Abbey in May 1809, shortly before his departure for foreign lands, the life of tlie old mansion went merrily, with good stories and songs over cham- pagne, and just the faintest possible flavour and savour of profanity in the monastic masquerades and mummery with which the young men amused them- selves. Rising late from their beds, tliey breakfasted at noon, and whiled away five or six hours with VOL. I. O 194 THE REAL LORD BYRON. reading, fencing, singlestick, shuttlecock, pistol- practice, riding, walking, and sailing on the lake, till the time came for the host and his guests to array themselves for dinner, — a repast that always ended with the ' loving cup ' of burgundy : the wine being- passed round in the big skull, which Byron had ex- humed from the burial-ground of the monks of olden time, and put to this rather profane use. At dinner Byron with exquisite humour played the part of my Lord Abbot in full abbatial costume, whilst his friends played the fool no less cleverly in their monastic dresses, with a fitting show of crosses, beads and tonsures, as monks of inferior degree. Doubtless, wild things were said and done in the small hours of the morning ; but the party of five young men ( ' now and then increased by the presence of a neighbouring parson ' ) dispersed after a few days of these humor- ous ' high jinks,' ^^dthout doing anything to justify the extravagant rumours that went about the country of their impious usages and wild orgies. Men of culture and refinement, these ' heartless parasites of present cheer ' may once and again have ' vexed with mirth the drowsy ear of night,' but the recollection of all their wildest pranks and extravagances would not have plunged the poet in remorse for associating so closely with such a crew of tipplmg reprobates. Even when he plied his pen in obedience to the stern requirements of his muse, the poet thought of them far better than he ventured to write of them. In the absence of his few guests, whose visits were rare and brief and at considerable intervals, Byron's life at Newstead was a life of study, meditation, and strenuous labour. Pope had long been his favourite PEER AND riLGRIM. 10.5 poet, and now he studied the great artist of words and malice, to extort from him the secret of his peculiar department of literary art, — to learn how to produce verse that should inflict the acutest pain on his enemies, and at the same time afford the keenest delight to tlie witnesses of their sufferings. He was hard at work, — working passionately and yet at the same time calmly, — on the satire that was destined to fill his foes with silent fury, and put him in the front rank of the new generation of men of letters. On an early day of 1809, he went up to London with his satire, polished and pointed and poisoned for the press ; his guardian being one of the few persons for whom it contained an expression of homage or courtesy. In the author's ' copy ' the Earl was down for this compliment, ' On one alone Apollo deigns to smile, And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle.' But when the poem came to public view, for this graceful and not undeserved couplet the poet had substituted, ' Lords too are bards, such things at times befall, And 'tis some praise in peers to write at all. Yet, did or taste or reason sway the times, Ah ! who would take their titles with their rhymes 1 Roscommon ! Sheffield ! with your spirits fled, No future laurels deck a noble head ; No muse will cheer, with renovating smile, The paralytic puling of Carlisle. The puny schoolboy and his early lay Men pardon, if his follies pass away ; But who forgives the senior's ceaseless verse, Whose hairs grow lioary as his rhymes grow worse 1 What heterogeneous honoui-s deck tlie peer ! ' 196 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Lord, rhymester, petit-maitre, pamphleteer ! So dull in youth, so drivelling in his age, His scenes alone had damn'd our sinking stage ; But managers for once cried, " Hold, enough ! " Nor drugg'd their audience with the tragic stuff. Yet at their judgment let his lordship laugh. And case his volumes in congenial calf; Yes ! doff that covering, where morocco shines, And hang a calf-skin on those recreant lines.' One peculiarly offensive line of this attack would not have been penned, had the writer known that his former guardian was suffering fi'om a nervous malady. What had happened since the beginning of the year to account for the change of feeling towards the Earl, to whom the poet was required by respect for himself, and by regard for his own action in the Dedication of the ' Hours of Idleness,' to wear at least a front of formal civility ? On going up to town to publish his satire, Byron also went thither to take his seat in the House of Lords ; and whilst under the misconception that the etiquette of the House required that a peer on taking his seat should be introduced to the chamber by one of its members, he wrote to Lord Carlisle that he should be of age at the openmg of the next parliamentary session. Instead of evoking from the Earl a cordial offer to introduce his }'oung kinsman to the House, this letter only drew from its receiver a cold epistle of information respectmg the course the poet must take in the business. The Earl's young kinsman was nettled, — construing the formal note as an mtimation that the writer had no wish to be closely associated in the world's regard with the author of the ' Hours of Idleness.' This annoyance was followed quickly by PEER AND PILGRIM. 197 a more serious vexation. On finding that in order to take his seat he would have to produce evidence of liis grandfather's (Admiral Byron's) marriage witli Miss Trevanion of Caerhayes in Cornwall, Byron di- rected his soUcitor to get the needful evidence at once. l^ut it is sometimes more difficult to obey an order than to give it. At first it was uncertain where the marriage was celebrated ; and when after some delay it was discovered that the Admiral's weddino; had been solemnized in a private chapel at Caerhayes, Byron was informed to his dismay that it was necessary to discover the record of the event. Before Lord Hard- wicke's Marriage Act the records of irregular marriages, and also of regular marriages celebrated in private chapels, were kept so carelessly, that it was no un- common thing for people to be without legal evidence of their wedlock. Till the evidence of the Admiral's marriage should be obtained, Lord Byron could not take his seat. Should the evidence be irrecoverable, he would be in a position of discredit. For the world would not believe the marriage had taken place, and Byron, so far as his peerage was concerned, would be accounted as a pretender claiming to enter the House of Lords through a sire of illegitimate birth. The case was so alarming, that the nervous, sensitive, ex- citable Byron, who never attained the cahnness of philosophy or the sang-froid of patrician breeding, may be pardoned for showing extreme agitation. Whilst the hunt was going on for the missing evi- dence, Lord Carlisle was applied to for information about his mother's family, — information which he wouldn't give or couldn't give. To Byron's heated imagination it seemed that he was the victim of his 198 THE REAL LORD BYRON. former guardian's cynical insolence and malignity. The Earl was chuckling in his sleeve at the thought that the young man, whom he had disliked from his' early boyhood, would be shut out from the House of Lords, and be degraded from the highest place of his ancient family. Thinking all this of the Earl (who doubtless would have given every information in his power to the point, though he may have declined to give information that was beside it) Byron, white with rage, seized his pen for vengeance. Hence the withdrawal of the civil couplet, and the substitution of the abusive verses. If he was altogether in the wrong, Byron could at least plead in palliation of his misbehaviour the fierce and torturmg excitement caused by his painful position. That he was very much in the wrong may be inferred from the fact that his sister Augusta thought him ■ so and had the courage to tell him so. With all her devotion to and admiration of her brother, and all her consequent readmess to humour him in matters that involved no sacred principle, the Honourable Mrs. Leigh never shrunk from telling him the truth. She had the daring of goodness, and she displayed it in opposmg him when he did ill, no less than in clinging to him when he suffered ill. And in this business of the Carhsle quarrel — on which he felt so bitterly and hotly — she never ceased to tell him that he ought to make the generous amende to the Earl. It was long before Augusta succeeded on this point. But at length the amende was made nobly in the tribute of affectionate homage to ' young gallant Howard,' with its hne, — ' And pai-tly that I did his sire some wrong,' PEER AND PILGRIM. 199 penned by the baffled exile, when all his kindred had turned against him, with the exception of the brave woman who demanded the atonement to the man he had wronged. Byron was still in the first fierceness of his rage against the Earl of Carlisle, when, the evidence of the Caerhayes marriage having been obtained, he took his seat in the House of Lords on the 13th March (within a few days of. the appearance of the famous satire), going thither for that purpose with his friend Dallas. Had not Dallas called on him accidentally at an op- portune moment, Byron would have driven from his lodgings in St. James's Street to Westminster without a companion. It shows how completely he had lived outside the lines of his ' order ' that, when I^ord Car- lisle failed him, there was no other peer to whom he could look to introduce him to the House. Dallas has recorded how frigidly the young peer touched the Lord Chancellor's (Eldon's) proffered hand, and how on leaving the House he said, ' If I had shaken hands heartily, he would have set me down for one of his party — but I will have nothing to do with any of them on either side.' At Cambridge B}i'on had played at being a Whig, and there can be no question that his mind and tem- perament qualified him for action with the more popular of the two aristocratic parties. Possibly dis- gust at his treatment by the ' Edinburgh ' was the chief cause of his present coldness to the Whigs. Possibly he was only actuated by a prudent feeling that he had better hold aloof from both parties till he knew more of politics and of himself. Anyhow the words he spoke to Dallas on leaving the House after 200 THE REAL LORD BYRON. taking his seat accorded with words spoken by him on the same subject to other people in the earlier months of 1809. To those who sounded him as to his political sentiments and purpose just a week before his coming of age, the young peer, affecting to be neither Whig nor Tory, declared he should take time to think before espousing the cause and committing himself to the policy of either party. In his ill-humour with his former friends, there were occasions when he spoke of them as a weak army, commanded by blundering subalrerns. At heart, however, on the eve of his departure for foreign lands, he was more ambitious of fifj^urino; amonost statesmen than of out-singing the poets. Nothing was further from Byron's forecast at this time than that literature would be his vocation. Dr. Drury's high opinion of his declamatory address M^as influ- ential with the young poet, who looked to public life as the arena in which, after a few years of foreign travel, he would achieve greatness. Having entertained his Cambridge friends at Newstead in the manner set forth on previous pages, dropped a parting tear on Boatswain's grave, gathered together the portraits of his Harrow ' favourites,' signed his will, settled his mother in the Abbey man- sion, shaken hands with Dr. Butler, seen his satire into a second edition, and made inadequate arrange- ments for remittances to foreign bankers, the young- lord, whose whole income was by this time insuffi- cient for the payment of the interest of his debts, sailed for Lisbon at the end of June, 1809, with a suite of three men-servants and a wardrobe of gor- geous and costly clothing, — one of the brave habili- TKER AND riLGHlM. 201 ments being the 'scarlet coat, richly embroi.lered with gold, in the style of an English aide-de-canip s dress uniform,' which he wore on occasions of state, and at least once in the bazaar at Constantinople. Leaving England in the summer of 1809, he was back again in his native land in the summer of 1811, after an absence of two years and three weeks. From Lisbon he rode on horseback through Portugal and the corner of Spain to Cadiz, whence he journeyed leisurely and luxuriously to Malta, Previsa, through Albania to Tepalsen and back to Previsa. Thence to Missolonghi, Athens, Smyrna, Constantinople, and back to Athens, where he had his head-quarters in a Franciscan convent, whilst making excursions through Attica and the Morea. With plenty of time and, during the earlier period of his travels, enough money at his'^disposal, he moved hither and thither by routes not easily traceable from his letters and memoranda ; but the above-given names indicate with sufficient clearness his way-bills and devious wanderings till he reappeared at Malta, whence he set sail for England on the 3rd of elune in the ' Volage ' frigate. In these days of railroads and steamships and sure postal intercommunication, when tourists can name almost to an hour the time for their arrival at any pomt of their journeyings, and never need to linger for days and weeks at a single place, waiting for more money, the whole tour, with all its supplementary trips and minor excursions, seems a strangely matter-of-course and hazardless business to designate a pilgrimage. Now-a-days it would be the affair of a lawyer's long vacation, and be made at a tenth or twentieth of the money it cost this Pilgrim of the English peerage. 202 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Every month of the year young ladies by the score set out from London on travels of greater distance, interest, and adventure ; and on returning to their English homes they do not look to be credited with having done something remarkable. In these matters the world has changed greatly since Byron went on board ' the good ship, Bristol packet.' The long wars of the Napoleonian period, and the revolutionary troubles which preceded them, had disposed our great- grandfathers and great-grandmothers to prefer security and ease at home to the diversions of roaming ; and the Childe's ' pilgrimage,' made though it was in the easiest and most enjoyable manner, with congenial comrades and obsequious servants, was sufficiently daring and venturesome to entitle the pilgrim of lordly condition to a modest measure of approval, even if he had not produced so fascinating a memoir of his travels. To tell again how his intellect and fancy were quickened and delighted by the scenes he visited would be to reproduce in ordinary prose the finest passages of ' Childe Harold.' But the tour was attended with one or two incidents of biographical value to which passing reference may be made in these pages, as the poet omits to mention them m the 'Pilgrimage.' Whilst journeying from Patras in the Morea, he fired at an eaglet and brought it. down on the shore of the Gulf Lepanto near Vostizza ; when the brightness and beauty of its eyes filled him with pity for the wounded bird, and made him anxious to save it. ' But,' he remarks, with characteristic sensibility in his brief note of the occurrence, ' it pined and died in a few days ; and I never did since, and never will, PEEU AND PILGRIM. 203 atteiii])t the death of another bird.' At I'atras, near the end of September 18U), he was struck down by a sharp though short attack of marsh-fever, — the malady that assailed him so often in later years, and was no less accountable than the regimen against fiitness for his premature death. And during his second stay at Athens he conceived an affection for a poor Greek boy, that resembled in vehemence and condescending benignity the friendship he hoped to renew on his return to London with Eddleston, and the friendship he had entertained for the farmer's boy at Newstead. The object of this third, outbreak of afFectionateness to a youth so far beneath him in rank was the Nicolo Giraud of Athens, to whom he made a handsome gift of money, on bidding him flirewell at Malta, and a few months later bequeathed a legacy of 7000/. Having left home with the hope of seeing Persia and India during the course of his travels, Byron, whilst staying at Athens in 1811, took measures for an excursion to Egypt ; but like the schemes for visiting Persia and India, this later and less ambitious project for the extension of his wanderings was given up for want of money. Instead of the needful remit- tances the pilgrim received letters from England, which made him see clearly that he must take prompt ste2)s to satisfy his more importunate creditors, and that to satisfy them he had better sell the Kochdale coal-pits or even the Newstead ruins than go to the usurers for another large loan. Writing to his mother in February 1811, he said, ' If it is necessary to sell, sell Rochdale.' Seven months earlier he had written to the same lady, ' I trust you like Newstead, and 204 THE REAL LORD BYRON. agree with your neighbours ; but you know you are a I'ixen, — is not that a dutiful appellation ? Pray take care of my books and several boxes of papers in the liands of Joseph ; and pray leave me a few bottles of champagne to drink, for I am very thirsty : — but I do not insist on the last article, without you like it.' From the ' Volage frigate,' when he hoped with a fair wind to arrive at Portsmouth on the 2nd of July, the poet wrote to Hodgson, ' Indeed, my prospects are not very pleasant. Elmbarrassed in my private affairs, indifferent to public, solitary without the wish to be social, with a body 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 hiwyer, the next a creditor, then colliers, farmers, surveyors, and all the agreeable attachments to estates out of repair, and contested coal-pits.' The home for which Byron sailed in this melancholy temper was the house in which there had been an execution in the previous year for the upholsterer's bill of 1500/. It was the home of the mother who was a vixen, with a thirst for champagne. 205 CHAPTER XII. ' CHILDE HAROLD.' * Hints from Horace' — The Valley of the Shadow of Death — Melanchoir Poetry — Sam Rogers's Dinner — Newstead and London — First Speech in 'The Lords' — Sudden Fame — Social Triumph — The Poet's De- meanour — The Prince Regent — The Season of 1812 — Cheltenham — Pecuniary Affairs — Dissentient Voices. Returning to England, with the first two Cantos of ' Childe Harold ' and the ' Hints from Horace ' almost ready for the press, Byron reached Portsmouth none too soon for the exigencies of his afFairs, and so late that he might have been met on landing from the ' Vola":e ' with dismal news. Youno; Eddleston, on whom the poet had lavished such affection as his nature would under other circumstances have expen- ded on a younger brother, was no more. Dead also was the poet's former schoolmate, the Honourable John Wingfield of the Guards, who had perished of fever at Coimbra, meeting a soldier's death but miss- ing its glory. The chorister and the peer's son had died in the same month. The loss of tlie former touched Byron more acutely than the death of his Harrow friend, whose fate inspired the stanzas of ' Childe Harold,'— ' And thou, my friend — since unavailing woe Bursts from my heart and mingles with the strain, — Had the sword laid thee with the mighty low, Pride had forbid e'en Friendship to complain : 206 THE REAL LORD BYRON. But thus unlaurel'd to dcsceud in vain, By all forgotten, save the lonely breast, And mix unbleeding with the boasted slain, While Glory crowns so many a meaner crest ! What hadst thou done to sink so peacefully to rest ! ' Oh, known the earliest, and esteem'd the most ! Dear to a heart where nought was left so dear ! Though to my hopeless days for ever lost, In dreams deny me not to see thee here ! And Morn in secret shall renew the tear Of Consciousness awaking to her woes, And Fancy hover o'er thy bloodless bier, Till my frail frame return to whence it rose, And mourn'd and mourner lie united in repose.' Of the spirit in which the young man of fervid but placable temper had come by this time to regard his satire and the provocation that had occasioned it, a noteworthy indication may be found in the letter he wrote Dallas, dating from the ' Volage Frigate, at sea, June 28, 1811.' 'My satire,' he said, 'it seems is in a fourth edition, a success rather above the mid- dling run, but not much for a production which, from its topics, must be temporary, and of course be suc- cessful at first, or not at all. At this period, when I can think and act more coolly, I^ regret that I have written it, though I shall probably find it forgotten by all except tliose whom it has offended.' Twelve months later, wh'en he was receivmg civilities and expressions of their generous admiration of his genius from the very persons who had most reason to resent the satirist's wrath and injustice, this regret grew so strong that he stopped the sale of the ' English Bards ' when the fifth edition was going ofi" steadily, and took every occasion to make the amende to indi- ' CHILDE HAROLD.' 207 viduals wliom it had outraged. Calling it one of the ' evil works of his nonage,' he wrote to Walter Scott on July 6, 1812, ' The satire was written when I was very young and very angry, and fully bent on displaying my wrath and wit, and now I am hannted by the ghosts of my wholesale assertions.' That Byron thought more highly of the ' Hints from Horace ' than of ' Childe Harold ' is less per- plexing than curious. When the fever of composition has subsided, it is not unusual for the writer of lively satire and fine sentiment, to prefer the smart writing that flatters him by its cleverness, to the pathetic writing that only commends him for right feeling. Moreover the adverse judgment of the first critical reader of the greater of the two works was quite enough to put so sensitive and diffident an author out of conceit with the performance, that, quickening the heart by its emotional fervour and charming the ear by language alike strenuous and musical, stirred the earliest generation of its readers to a degree not to be easily realized or accounted for at this distance of time. On the other hand, it is no less perplexing than strange that the first critical peruser of the manuscript should have failed to see that the poem was peculiarly qualified to seize the world's attention and cause what is termed now-a-days ' a sensation.' Dallas certainly was no prophet ; but the novelist and poetaster (to whose hands Byron committed the MS. of the ' Hints from Horace ' on 15th July, 1811, and the MS. of 'Childe Harold' on the following day, at Reddish's Hotel, St. James's Street) had enough literary feeling and discernment to see at once that ' Childe Harold,' the work of a writer in his twenty- 208 THE REAL LORD BYRON. third year, would prove one of the memorable poems of its period. Talkmg about the poems with Dallas, discussing less agreeable matters (one of them being the prose- cution of the editor of the ' Scourge ' for two libels on himself and his mother) with Mr. Hanson, and receiving visits from callers especially uncongenial to the man who described himself as ' hating bustle as he hated a bishop,' Byron remained at Reddish's Hotel in St. James's Street, London, for a fortnight, when, just as he was on the point of leaving town with his solicitor (Mr. Hanson) for Lancashu-e, with the intention of calling at Newstead en passant, alarm- ing intelligence came to him from the Abbey. His mother was seriously ill. The next day (August 1 1811), before leaving town, he received the announce- ment of her death. On the morrow (August 2), on the road from town to Nottinghamshire, he wrote a brief letter from Newport Pagnell to his friend Pigot (now Dr. Pigot), giving the intelligence of his mother's death, and saying that the sad event would not affect the measures for punishing the libellous editor of the ' Scourge.' ' I am told,' said the writer, ' she was in little pain, and not aware of her situation. I now feel the truth of Mr. Gray's observation, " That we can only have one mother!" Peace be with her!' The right feeling of these words is moderately ex- pressed ; but there was no moderation in the grief to which Byron gave way at Newstead for a brief hour, after hearing the particulars of his mother's death ; which was the result of apoplexy, caused by a fit of violent rage at the magnitude of an upholsterer's bill. In the middle of night, hearing a noise in the chamber ' CHILDE HAROLD.' 209 of death, Mrs. By, the waiting- woman of the deceased lady, entered the apartment, where she found Lord Byron sitting by the side of his lifeless mother. ' Oh, Mrs. By,' he exclaimed, burstmg into tears, ' I had but one friend in the world, and she is gone.' To account for the veliemence of this grief for a mother, whom he had regarded with an aversion at the same time natural and most unnatural, — the mother of whose cruelty he had spoken with passionate repug- nance to the Marquis of Sligo, as they were dressing after swimming in the Gulf of Lepanto, — readers must remember what was said in a former chapter of the way in which Byron's memory, sensibility and imagination acted upon one another. Coarse, harsh, violent creature though she was, the woman, who had nursed her little step-daughter Augusta with affec- tionate devotion in France, had not been wanting m the same womanliness to her own child in his times of infantile sickness. In a certain way, she had loved him ; and now the recollection of long unremembered and remote exhibitions of maternal tenderness rose to his mind, and unmanned him. Grief is no precise measurer of its own intensity : — a fact to be remembered in considering Byron's grief by those who would not do him the injustice of ques- tioning the smcerity of its extravagant exhibitions. What he said truly of his early friendships, lie could no less truly have said of all the movements of all his affections. They were passions. His loves, hatreds, friendships, griefs were so passionate, that as long as any one of them was in full force and ac- tivity, it possessed him completely, and caused him for the moment to imagine he had never loved or VOL. L 1' 210 THE REAL LORD BYRON. abhorred any one else. Touched by grief for the death of his Newfoundland dog, the young man, who could not go abroad for a couple of years without taking miniatures of his Harrow ' favourites' with him, wrote of the animal : — ' To mark a friend's remains these stones arise ; / never knew hut one, and here he hes.' Stirred by sudden tenderness for the mother, whom he had regarded with excusable dislike, he discovered in a moment, not that after all he had a lingering fondness for her, hut that he never ' had hut one friend in the worlds and she was gone.' For the moment, whilst thinking of him with tearful eyes, he took the same view of John Wingfield : — ' Oh, known the earUest, and esteem'd the most ! Dear to a heart where nought was left so dear ! ' The ink with which these lines were written was not dry, — in truth, they had not been penned (the sentiment of the written words being only recollected emotion), — when the poet's grief for Wingfield 's death becomes trivial in comparison with his grief for some one far dearer. ' In Matthews,' he writes to Dallas on September 7, 1811, ' I have lost my " guide, philo- sopher, and friend ;" in Wingfield a Mend only, but one whom I could have wished to have preceded in his long journey.' It is notable also how in the ex- travagance of passionate sorrow for the loss of a friend, Byron used to tell his surviving friends that their regard for him was something far inferior to real friendship. ' I believe,' he wrote to his true, loving, and grateful friend Hodgson, — thinking probably of * CHILDE HAROLD.' 211 Eddleston, when he })enned the words, ' the only liuman being that ever loved me in truth and entirely was of, or belonging to, Cambridge, and, in that, no change can now take place.' The violence of his grief for his mother was na- turally of no great duration. Instead of following her coffin to the grave, he watched the hearse and train of mourners from the Abbey door, and, as soon as they Avere out of sight, ordered his servant (young Rush- ton) to fetch 'the gloves.' While the service was being read over Catherine Gordon Byron, her son was sparring with the servant, — throwing, as the boy noticed, unusual force into his blows. Doubtless in the exercise he sought escape from mental distress, due in some degree to filial affection and also m some deo-ree to uneasiness at feelinff so little reo;ret for his mother's departure. In a few minutes, as though the exercise failed in its object, he suddenly threw down the gloves, and went from the servant's sight. Byron had scarcely received the news of his mother's death, when Charles Skinner Matthews was drowned whilst bathing in the Cam on August 2, 1811, close upon the very time at which the poet was w^riting from Newport Pagnell to Dr. Pigot. A man of brilliant academic distinctions, Matthews was intending to offer himself at the next election as a candidate for the honour of representing his university in Parliament, when an attack of cramp ended his career in all the brightness of its promise. The second of Byron's Cambridge friends to die of drown- ing, Charles Skinner Matthews had on the day before his death written the poet a letter, that forwarded from London reached Newstead on the 5th, whither 212 THE REAL LORD BYRON. it was speedily followed, if indeed it was not preceded by the intelligence that its writer was no longer with the living. ' Some curse,' Byron wrote from New- stead to Scrope Davies on August 7, 1811" 'hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house ; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch.' Exactly a fortnight later he wrote to Dallas, ' You did not know Matthews : he was a man of the most astonishing powers, as he sufficiently proved at Cam- bridge, by carrying off more prizes and fellowships, against the ablest candidates, than any other graduate on record; but a most decided atheist, indeed noxiously so, for he proclaimed his principles in all societies.' To realise fully the quickness with which these successive blows by Death's cold hand fell on Byron, the reader should know that the poet received the confirmation of the intelligence of Wingfield's death in Coimbra, only a few hours before he left town. ' You may,' he wrote to Hodgson on August 22, 1811, ' have heard of the sudden death of my mother, and poor Matthews, which, with that of Wingfield (of which I was not fully aware till just before I left town, and mdeed hardly believed it), has made a sad chasm in my connexions.' The news of his mother's illness came to him on July 31st ; the confirmation of the report of Wingfield's death and the intelligence of his mother's death reached him almost at the same hour on the night of August 1st, or early in the following morning ; on the 7th of August, probably sooner, he knew that Skinner was dead. He was already mourning for his protege, Eddleston ; and it has been told how, in October 1811, he wrote to a friend that between the beginning of May and the ' CHILDE HAROLD.' 213 end of August of that year, lie liad lost by death six of his nearest associates. It can cause no astonishment that after so remark- able a 'series of bereavements, which would have shaken the fortitude and stirred the feelings of the liardest and coklest nature to transient sadness, Byron was for several months the prey of sorroAv that alternated between the agitations of hysterical vehemence and the gloom of profound melancholy. The man of feminine softness and emotionality was not the man to walk with firm step and stoical com- posure through the terrors and darkness of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. He was still in an early stage of tliis appalling journey when, in the week immediately following his mother's interment, he gave instructions for the will, — with its legacy of 7000/. to the Greek boy (Xicolo Giraud), and its provision for his own interment, by the side of his dog, Boatswain, ' in the vault of the garden of Xewstead, without any ceremony or burial-service whatever;' and with its codicil enjoining that his body should on no account be removed from the vault, imd providing that ' in case any of his suc- cessors within the entail (from bigotry or otherwise) should think proper to remove his carcass, such proceeding should be attended by forfeiture of the estate, which in such case should go to the testator's sister, the Honourable Augusta Leigh and her heirs on similar conditions.' The day on which he gave the first instructions for this will was the day on which he wrote to Dallas, ' It is strange that I look on the skidls wliich stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, but I cannot 214 THE REAL LORD BYRON. strip the features of those I have known of their fleshy covering, even in idea, without a hideous sensation ; but the worms are less ceremonious.' Two months later, he is dating- the first of the poems to ' Thyrza ' (October 11th, 1811); and the doleful letter to Dallas (October 11th, 1811); and the Epistle to a Friend (beginning ' Oh, banish care' — October 11th, 1811) with the frantic threats and hysterical foolishness of its concluding verses ; and the six concluding stanzas of the second canto of the ' Pilgrimage,' the last of them being also dated October 11th, 1811, whilst the third and fourth of the same stanzas (Stanzas xcv. and xcvi. of Canto II.) are part of the outpourmg of song to Thyrza, — ' Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one ! Whom youth and youth's affections bound to me ; Who did for me what none beside have done, Nor shrank from one albeit unworthy thee. What is my being 1 thou hast ceased to be ! Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home, Who mourns o'er hours which we no more shall see — Would they had never been, or were to come ! Would he had ne'er returned to find fresh cause to roam ! ' Oh ! ever loving, lovely, and beloved ! How selfish Sorrow ponders on the past, And clings to thoughts now better far removed ! But Time shall tear thy shadow from me last. All thou couldst have of mine, stern Death ! thou hast ; The parent, friend, and now the more than friend ; Ne'er yet for one thine arrows flew so fast, And grief with grief continuing still to blend. Hath snatch'd the little joy that life had yet to lend.' Why Byron selected the 11th of October in preference to any other day for the date to be assigned ' CHILDE HAROLD.' 215 to the letter and several pieces of song, the writer of this page can offer no suggestion — unless it may be assumed that the 11th of October was chosen because it was the last da}'^ of his literary labours at Newstead — the day of drawing together the threads of sorrow- ful thought and solitary effort — before he went to Cambridge and London. It is not to be supposed that so much work of brain and heart and pen was accomplished on one day. It is, however, only reasonable to suspect that literary mystification — a game in which Byron delighted — was one, if not the only, object of the fictitious dating. After spending something more than ten weeks at Newstead in sad seclusion, Byron went to Cam- bridge, where (on the 29th of October) he wrote Tom Moore a letter on the subject of the Irish poet's reasonable demand for some kind of satisfaction for the ridicule put upon him in the ' English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.' From Cambridge he went to St. James's Street, London, and stayed there till he returned to Newstead for the Christmas holidays, when he entertained Hodgson and Harness in the rooms, whose crimson hangings and cheerful fires caused Harness soon to lose ' the melancholy feeling of bein": domiciled in the wino; of an extensive ruin.' Of the weeks s])ent in London (where Byron used his club ' Tlie Alfred,' to which he had been elected during his absence in Greece) the most memorable incident was the dinner (a partie carree) at Sam Rogers's table, where the author of ' Childe Harold ' met his host, Moore and Thomas Campbell for the first time; — the dinner at which Byron, to the surprise of his three companions who had heard 216 THE REAL LORD BYRON. nothing of his eccentric diet, declined the banker's fish and meat and wine, and, in default of biscuits and soda-water, stayed his hunger with potatoes and vinegar. At Newstead the poet and his two guests, Hodgson and Harness, spent the hours of their intercourse chiefly indoors, in literary work and literary chat, the weather of the singularly dark and dreary season affording them no inducement to leave rooms ample enough for the mild exercise of carpet- walking. Rising late the trio went to bed late ; and after a lapse of more than half a century, Harness remembered how on several occasions their more serious conversation, turning on questions of religion, gave him opportunities for observing how strongly and lamentably the extreme Calvinism of the poet's early religious training in Scotland had affected his regard for the principles of Christianity ; — the chief result of the discipline being ' a most miserable pre- judice, which appeared to be the only obstacle to his hearty acceptance of the Gospel.' There was of course nothing in the poet's way of entertaining the young Cantab, who was reading hard for his degree and holy orders, to afford a colour of probability to the strange tales told in later time of Byron's wild and voluptuous life in the halls of his ancestors, — tales for which the merry doings in the May 1809 were less accountable than the fictions of ' Childe Harold.' It must, however, be conceded that, if Harness could have looked beneath the decorous surface of life at the Abbey, he would have seen one Or two things to disapprove in his old schoolmate's domestic arrangements. To justify its title this book must glance for a moment at unedifying circum- ' CHILDE HAROLD.' 217 stances, tliat will jar rudely against the feelin«»s of readers who would prefer to think of the poet, durin<:; his ffrief for the vanished Thvrza, or at least so soon after its subsidence, as indifferent to the charms of ordinary womankind. Paphian girls with natty caps and bright ribbons on their servile heads still sung and smiled in the galleries of the Abbey mansion, one of whom (to use ]\Ioore's words) 'had been supposed to stand rather too high in the favour of her master ; ' and the Christmas holidays were scarcely over when this young serving-woman and one of her companions were sent off to their relations in consequence of acts of levity and disloyalty duly proved against them. To Moore, holding the views of his generation on domestic morals, which fortunately are not the views of decent people of the present age, this affair was remarkable only for the degree to which ' the young- peer allowed the discovery of the culprit's misbe- haviour to affect his mind.' After speaking of his w^eakness in respect to these faithless young Avomen as ' a two months' weakness,' Byron adds vehemently in a letter to Hodgson, ' I have one request to make, which is, never mention a woman again in any letter to me, or even allude to the existence of the sex ; ' — the fervour and extravagance of the entreaty showing that even in so discreditable a lousiness ])yron was more influenced by sentiment than most young men would have been. On the 27th of February, 1812, just eleven days after the date of the last-mentioned letter to Hodgson, the young peer delivered his maiden speech in the House of Lords in the debate on the Nottingham Frame- breaking Bill ; — a speech tliat made a favour- 218 THE KEAL LORD BYRON. able impression on the crowded assembly, that had been brought together not more by the importance of the subject under discussion than by desire to see the poet, whose verse and travels had already made him an interesting personage. Having prepared himself for the essay, by writing his oration with care, as he had been wont m his boyhood to prepare for the Harrow ' declamations,' he entered the House with sentiments worthy of consideration, and on rising to his feet he soon made it obvious he would fail neither from want of elocutionary address nor from want of presence of mind. There was a generous disposition in the auditors to give him an encouraging reception and a full meed of applause ; and he at least proved himself not undeservino; of their indul":ence. If not a success, the speech was so nearly successful, that the orator left the house with the elation of triumph. Lord Eldon and Lord Harrowby had paid him the compliment of answering his arguments ; Lord Holland and Lord Grenville had praised him in their speeches, — and commended him still more cordially in private chat. AVhilst Lord Holland said, ' You'll beat them all if you persevere ; ' Lord Grenville's complaisance went to the length of saying, that in their construction some of the maiden orator's periods resembled Burke's. Sir Francis Burdett declared it ' the best speech by a Zort/ since the "Lord knows when;"' — a compliment that delighted the Lord of Newstead, though it came from a politician of whom he had often spoken with sincere contempt. Meetmg Dallas in the passage to the Great Chamber with an umbrella in his right hand, Byron exclaimed joyfully, ' What ! give your friend your left hand upon such an ' CHILDE HAROLD.' 219 occasion?' To Hodgson he wrote, 'I have had many marvellous eulogies repeated to me since, in person and b}' prox}', froni divers persons ministerial — yea m-inis-teriaU No wonder that he was delighted with the stir and approving hum of the House, which he had entered three years before without an introducer. No longer faltering in the choice of his party, he threw himself into the arms of the Opposition, and was welcomed to Holland House, Melbourne House and all ' the best Wliio' houses.' o Having made his debut in ' the Lords ' to his own conteni;ment, though scarcely to the satisfaction of his most sanguine admirers, Byron made a second essay to achieve parliamentary distinction on April 21, 1812, in the debate on the Earl of Donoughmore's motion for a Committee on the Roman Catholic Claims, but without placing himself higher in the opinion of the peers, or in the regard of politicians outside the here- ditary chamber. It was felt that his manner was too theatrical and ' stagey,' and that the effect of his fine voice was diminished by ' the chanting tone ' in which he delivered his periods ; — the same tone that had so disagreeable an effect in his recitations of poetry. Poets are seldom good reciters of poetry, from their disposition to 'sing' what they ought only to 'say ; ' and in this respect liyron was a flagrant offen- der against elocutionary art. Later in the session, the poet was at the meeting of the Opposition peers, sitting next the Duke of Grafton who, in reply to his question ' What is to be done next ? ' begged him to ' wake the Duke of Norfolk,' — snoring away in his seat. Two days after the poet's maiden speech in ' the Lords ' appeared ' Childe Harold. ' For a month 220 TIIK REAL LORD BYRON. early sheets of the poem had been in the liands- of a few favoured persons, — poets of the first rank and people of the highest fashion. A few copies had also been distributed in confidence to critics, who could be i^Tcatly powerful in giving the work immediate popu- larity. Rogers had received his early copy in January, and ])lcascd with the compliment of the gift he had for Aveeks been telling the drawing-rooms of 'the great' what a treat was in store for them. ' It was,' says Moore, ' in the hands of Mr. Rogers I first saw the sheets of the poem, and glanced hastily over a few of the stanzas which he pointed out to me as beautiful.' Lady Caroline Lamb, then in the zenith of her fashionable celebrity, thus got a view of the poem, — not in manuscript (as countless Avriters have asserted on the authority of the lady herself, who after Byron's death Avrote to Lady Morgan that Rogers ' offered her the MS. of " Childe Harold " to read'), ^?^^ in the 'early printed copy,' lent her by Rogers, under strict seal of secresy. Lady Caroline was delighted, and went about her bright quarter of the town, telling every one she had seen the forth- coming poem and was ' in the secret,' though she was bound in honour to tell no one where or how she had seen the book. The novel or poem of which Lady (^^arolinc spoke so highly could not fail to make a stir and run throuixh editions in a sin<>:le season. ' I must see him, — I am dying to see him! ' she exclaimed to Rogers, in her impatience to behold the new poet and hasten to her doleful fjite. ' He has a club-foot, and bites his nails,' said Rogers. ' If he is as ugly as jEsop, I nuist know him,' returned the impulsive lady of irresistible beauty, high birth, highest fashion. ' CHILDK HAROLD.' -21 No wonder that the poem, thus introduced to ' the ^voi.ia;_the poem that comin.iv into the worhl from the shop of the meaiuvst bookseller and under the most inauspicious circumstances would have made its mark in two days,— was no sooner published (on February 29, 1812) by ^Ir. Murray, the rapidly rising publisher of ' society,' than it was seen every- where, read by everybody. No wonder that the author 'awoke one mornino- and found himself famous,' that statesmen and ])hilosophers wrote him urave utterances of their homage, that the Queens ot Society rained biUets-chmx down upon him, that St. James's Street was blocked with carriages pressing to his door, that talk of ' Byr'n, Byr'n,' was audible over the babble of every dinner-table and .sahm ot ^layfair. Marvellous stories were told in the literary cliques of the price paid for the poem by its publisher ; «ome of the gossips, who of course had their ' inform- ation on the very best authority,' asserting that Alurray had paid at the rate of a guinea a line for the poem. The price really i^aid by the publisher was GOO/, (more than six shillings a line) ; and the poet, who of course could not descend so tar from his nobility as to take n bookseller's money for his own use, gave the 600/. to his poor relation and literary 'devil,' Dallas, who had negotiated the terms with i\Ir. ]\[urray and seen the verses through the press with exemplary care nnd assiduity. At the present time one mav Well smile at the sensitiveness which made Byi'on', burdened with debts and clogged with mortgages, decline to spend on himself the earnings of hi"^ pen. A few years later he stood out stoutly for the extra shillings of the guineas from his pub- 222 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. lisher, counted them carefully, and pocketed them with complacence. But m 1812 the world still held to antiquated notions touchmg the pecuniary obliga- tions of ' noblesse.' A nobleman in those days would have flushed scarlet at a proposal that he should become a sleeping partner in a wine business or a Manchester warehouse, and would have put a bullet through his head rather than see his name hiiurino; on the prospectus of a joint-stock company. It was a question whether a peer could take interest for money lying at his banker's ' on deposit,' without sullying his nobility with a tamt of trade. Whilst peers felt in this way, the populace had a strong opinion that it was unutterably ' mean ' for a lord to earn money in any way but fighting, gaming, political jobbery, the very highest official employment, and (through the medium of well-salaried agents) the clever management of land. Far firom being peculiar on the point of dignity, Byron was not more certain than the ignoble journalists of his acquaintance that, as a peer, he could not honourably take to his own use the pecuniary fruits of his literary toil. No sooner had the tide turned against him, and the fashion of de- crying him replaced the fashion of extolling him, than one of his fiercest assailants in the press charged him with making large sums of money by his pen, and spending the money so earned on his own pleasures. And this monstrous accusation seemed so sure to lower the poet in the esteem of all right-minded people that, whilst Dallas wrote a public denial and disproof of the calumny, Byron's friends went about the clubs and drawing-rooms, assuring ' the town ' that he was quite incapable of such baseness of spirit and manners. ' CHILDE HAROLD.' 223 'Cliilde Harold,' the poem which people of fashion praised madly, was published on the same day as Lord G. Greville's poem which every one abused badly. On June 7, 1812, Lady Morgan, already 'in the swim' of success and the brightness of butterfly celebrity, aV' rote to Mrs. Lefanu, ' When I was in London, Lord G. Greville read me a poem of his own on the same subject as " Childe Harold." The rival lords published their poems the same day ; the one is cried up to the skies, the other, alas, is cried down to ! ' Lord G. Greville was the poet ' to bite his nails ; ' Byron had every reason to be proud and careful of the tips of his shapely fingers. On entering the great world with the glory of ' Childe Harold ' on his brow, the earnestness of it in his eyes, the melody of it flowing from his lips, Byron was in the perfection of his personal attractive- ness. He was not a handsome man, — he was beautiful. The glowing fire overpowered the brown- ness of his auburn hair, that gradually deepened almost to the deepest and richest brown of auburn, before- it turned grey. The blue-grey eyes were elo- quent of emotion through their long, fine, almost black lashes. The brow, over and about which the feathery auburn curls played in tiny wavelets, was white as marble ; his usually pale complexion was delicate even to transparency, and at moments of joyous excitement was touched with the faintest sanguine glow. His mouth, with its white and dainty teeth, with its lips of feminine sweetness and something of feminine voluptuousness, and his delicately modelled chin, strong enough for fascination — far, far too weak for moral robustness — were the lips and chin of a lovely 224 THE REAL LORD BYKON. sensitive, capricious, charining woman, rather than the lips and chin of a man. It has been already remarked that his countenance, especially in the mouth and eyes, was remarkable for mobility and expressiveness, — curiously in harmony with the quickness and vehemence of his emotional temperament. His long broad throat, broad chest, and square set shoulders were, however, abundantly expressive of masculine strength. The shapeliness of his small, white hands did not escape observation at a time Avhen it was the fashion for modish people to have models of their hands in marble on their drawing-room tables. In their smalLness these delicate hands accorded with the poet's feet, that were not wanting in apparent shape- liness, though they suffered from the lameness which no one could exactly describe or satisfactorily account for. Sweeter, and richer and more tender even than his verse, Byron's voice was in his ordinary conversa- tion, perhaps, more musical than the voice of any other man or woman of his period. To the children of the houses, where he was a most frequent and familiar guest, he was the ' gentleman who speaks like music' Enough of his looks, for the present. Let something be said of the manner of this young nobleman who had been trained in the parlours of a little country town for conquest in London drawing-rooms. Fortunately he has left us his own account of his bearing and de- meanour towards men and women, at this point of his career, in the following stanzas of ' Don Juan : ' — * His manuex" was perhaps the more seductive, Because he ne'er seem'd anxious to seduce ; Nothing aftected, studied, or constructive Of coxcombry or conquest : no abuse * CHILDE HAROLD.' 225 ' Of his attractions marr'd the fair perspective, To indicate a Cupidon broke loose, And seem to say, ' Resist us if you can ' — Which makes a dandy while it spoils a man. ' They are wrong — that's not the way to set about it ; As, if they told the truth, could well be shown. But, right or wrong, Don Juan was without it ; In fact, his manner was his own alone : Sincere he was — at least you could not doubt it, In listening merely to his voice's tone. The devil hath not in all his quiver's choice An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice. ' By nature soft, his whole address held off Suspicion ; though not timid, his regard Was such as rather seemed to keep aloof, To shield himself than put you on your guard : Perhaps 'twas hardly quite assured enough, But modesty's at times its own reward, Like virtue ; and the absence of pretension Will go much farther than there 's need to mention. ' Serene, accomplish'd, cheerful but not loud ; Insinuating without insinuation ; Observant of the foibles of the crowd, Yet ne'er betraying this in conversation ; Proud with the proud, yet courteously proud, So as to make them feel he knew his station And theirs : — without a struggle for priority, He neither brooked nor claimed superiority. ' That is, with men : with women he was what They pleased to make or take him for ; and their Imagination's quite enough for that : So that the outline's tolerably Hxir, They fill the canvas up — and ' verbum sat.' If once their phantasies be brought to bear Upon an object, whether sad or playful, They can transfigure brighter than a Raphael.' VOL. 1. r. 226 THE REAL LORD BYRON. A clever man's manner is always so nearly what lie wishes it to be, that one could rely on the general fidelity of this portraiture, even if its testimony were unsupported by other evidence. Fortunately, how- ever, the poet's account of his own demeanour during liis brief hour of social triumph is sustained by those of his biographers who knew him in this period, and half-a-hundred other persons of his acquaintance to whom we are indebted for gossip about him, — by Moore, Dallas, Hunt, Hobhouse, Harness, Lady Morgan, Lady Caroline Lamb, and a throng of other sure witnesses. By the men and women, who regarded him from a distance or knew him only slightly, he was thought undemonstrative and taciturn, at times even frigid. That even Lady Caroline was not in- sensible to the coldness and reserve of his demeanour at their first meeting, appears from the passage of ' Glenarvon ' which says, — ' A studied courtesy in his manner, a proud humility, mingled with a certain cold reser\'e, amazed and repressed the enthusiasm his youth and misfortunes excited.' ' Lord Byron,' Lady Morgan wrote in June 1812, *tlie author of delightful " Childe Harold" (which has more force, fire and thought than anything I have read for an age), is cold, silent and reserved in his manners.' But Lady Morgan had only met the poet in crowded rooms, and probably had never even exchanged the courtesies of introduction with him. At most she was one of the multitudes of worshipful womankind, who regarded the new poet with reverential curiosity wherever he went. The remains of the poet's constitutional shy- ness were observable in his coldness and severe formality to strangers. These characteristics of his * CHILDE HAROLD.' 227 ordinary bearing in throngs were sometimes — perhaps too often for his advantage — mistaken for indications of pride, never for signs of insolence. In truth, though he was accused of superciUousness after he had begun to fall m social favour, and though he sometimes provoked the accusation by his bearing to men whom he held in disesteem or aversion, nothing was more foreign than msolence to his demeanour or temper in the brief summer of his triumph in his native land. Appealing to Time the Avenger, after his banishment, he could exclaim with an unreprovmg conscience, — * If thou hast ever seen me too elate, Hear me not : but if calmly I have borne Good, and reserved my pride against the hate Which shall not whelm me, let me not have worn This iron in my soul in vain — shall they not mourn 1' And whilst bearing himself courteously and modestly, though with guarded speech and a show of coldness to the many of whom he knew little or nothing at all, to the men, with whom he wt/fe inti- mate, Byron was a very fountain of joyousness and genial humour, — brimming with quaint anecdote, bubbling over with frolic and merriment, and not seldom running out into the practical jokes of a jolly schoolboy. ' Nothing, indeed,' says Moore, ' could be more amusing and deliglitful than the contrast which his manners afterwards, when we were alone, presented to his proud reserve in the brilliant circle we had just left, it was like the bursting gaiety of a boy let loose from school, and seemed as if there was no extent of fun or tricks of which he was not capable.' With women he was what they pleased to make or 228 THE REAL LORD BYRON. take liim for. But lie Avas most pleased with tliem, Avhen they treated him as nearly as possible like ' a favourite and sometimes fro ward sister.' The reader may smile but must not laugh : — it was as 'a favourite and sometimes froward sister ' that he was thou2:ht of and treated by Holjhouse and other men. What then more natural for him to like to be thouo-ht of and treated by women in the same way ? To be received by them on this footing, he would leave his bed early (say at 11 a.m.) so that he might breakfast with them, open their letters for them, chat with them, fondle their children in their boudoirs, for an hour or two at a time, before less privileged visitors dropt in for luncheon. It was in the character of candidate for the place of a sister in her affections that he sate for an entire hour with Lady Caroline Lamb, nursing her ladyship's babe all the time, without speaking a word above a whisper lest the sleeping infant should be roused to consciousness. As ' a favourite and sometimes froward sister ' he hung about the Countess of Oxford's skirts, playing at odd minutes with her beautiful little girl, Charlotte, — precisely of the same age as ^largaret Parker, when as a schoolboy he loved his pretty cousin passionately. As the Countess's sister and the little Lady Charlotte's aunt, he wrote the verses to lanthe, with ' that eye, which wild as the gazelle's, Now brightly bold or beautifully shy, Wins as it wanders, dazzles where it dwells.' If lanthe in her innocence had put the forbidden question to her mother's sister, and asked, ' Why to one so young his strain he would commend ? ' the unspoken answer would have been, ' Because vou remind me of ' CHILDE HAROLD.' 2:^9 my boyish passion for my cousin Margaret, of whom I thought tearfully, and wretchedly, and yet not altogether unhappily, when I wrote my beautiful poetry to Thyrza.' AYlien a young man is allowed to play the part of a sister to a beautiful woman, the position is dangerous both to the one and the other. For the man, who is sympathized w4th and treated like a sister, whilst feehng and acting like one, may in a moment be stirred by masculine impulses to feel and act like a man : — in which case, he feels and acts like a man without self-control, and the woman remains what she has been all along— an excited and weak woman. One of the incidents of this London season (1812) was the poet's introduction to the greatest personage of the realm vice a person with a more august title, but now^ in retirement from illness. At a ball given at a great house m July, where tlie poet was present, the Prince Reo-ent declared the deli":ht it would oive him to number the author of 'Childe Harold' amongst his personal acquaintance. Of course Byron was introduced to the Prince, who was still smarting under the 'Lines to a Weeping Lady,' which the poet had. thrown off m the previous March. Had he not attributed the anonymous lines to Tom Moore, His Royal Highness would have been less favourably dis- posed to their author, with whom he now held a long and animated conversation, on poets and poetry, and more particularly Walter Scott's poetry, — a conversa- tion that closed with the Regent's flattering expression of his desire to see his lampooner at Carlton House. It shows how manageable a creature Byron was that, in his delight at the Prince's blandishments, he put 230 THE REAL LORD BYROX. liis auburn curls into powder and his person into a court-suit, for the purpose of attending a levee, which was postponed at the last moment. If the powder had not been decidedly unbecoming to his style of beauty, the poet would ]ierhaps have grown grey again in homage to the guilty father of ' the weeping lady.' As it was, the accidental postpone- ment of the ceremony, personal vanity and self-respect saved Byron from the mistake of going whither he should not have thought of going so soon after the first publication of the notorious verses. Another incident of the season was the poet's attendance in May 1812, at the execution of Belling- ham in front of Xewgate. Coming to the Old Bailey about 3 A.M., with his old schoolfellows, Bailey and John Madocks, he found the house, from which they were to witness the ghastly spectacle, not yet open. Whilst ]\Ir. Madocks was rousing the inmates of the house, Byron sauntered up the street with ]\Ir. Bailey, when his compassion was stirred by the sight of a wretched woman lying on some door- steps. The act of charity to which pity moved him had a startling and painful result ; for, instead of taking the shillings he offered her, the miserable creature sprung to her feet, and uttering a yell of drunkard's derision began TO imitate his lame gait. Byron said nothing either to the woman or the friend on whose arm he was lean- ing, but Bailey felt the violent trembling of his com- panion's arm, as they walked back to the house. Another story is told by Moore in illustration of the degree to which the poet's lameness was noticeable to casual passers, and his annoyance at the attention they paid to his infirmity. ' CHILDE HAROLD.' 231 ' This way, my Lord,' cried a link-boy, as Byron was stepping, witli Rogers, to his carriage, from the door-way of the house where they had shown them- selv^es at a hall. ' He seems to know you,' said Rogers. ' Know me ! ' was the bitter reply ; ' every one knows me, — I am deformed!' Apart from such annoyances, from which there was no escape, and the annoyance that came to him from the comparative failure of his second essay in parlia- mentary debate, Byron could, however, at the close of the London season, review the previous five months with unqualified complacence. To be really worth having, success should come early, before time and trouble have embittered the feelings and blunted the appetite for praise. The author (whether he be peer or commoner) who becomes the idol of society in his twenty-fiftli year, and ' going everywhere ' never joins a brilliant throng without knowing that every individual of it has read his book with enthusiastic admiration, is an enviable mortal, though he dare not satisfy the cravings of his hunger for food, and whilst overflowing with merriment and frolic is persuaded that he is ' one of the most melancholy wretches in existence.' Having spent the London season of 1812 in the brightest circles of fashion and dignit}^^, Byron spent the closing weeks of summer and the autumnal months at Cheltenham (never in higher fashion), and in visits to some of the best houses of the country, — the rural homes of the Earl of Jersey, the Marquis of Lansdowne, and other personages of light and leading. Making his head-quarters at Cheltenham, where for 232 THE REAL LORD BYRON. several weeks he had a pleasant loitering time with the Jerseys, Melbournes, Cowpers, Hollands, Rawdons, and Oxfords ; and returning once and again from the country-houses to his lodgings at the Gloucestershire spa, he passed the greater part of his time there till the end of November, — reading, scribbling letters, writing good poetry and bad poetry (the verse of the latter sort comprising the trumpery satire on ' The Waltz,' which he had no sooner published anony- mously, than he disavowed it by means disagreeably near falsehood), and meditating on a disappointment that will be mentioned more particularly in the next chapter. And how about the pecuniary affairs of the peer, who, living lavishly, had no sufficient revenue for the payment of the interest of his debts ? Soon after his mother's death he received from her trustee, Baron Clerk, the residue of the price paid for the Gight estate, — something under 4000/. ; a sum that enabled the poet to pay a few of his most urgent creditors. Coming to him at a moment of divers difficulties, this modest inheritance was a great relief. But it did not lessen the necessity for measures that would give him an adequate and sure income, after releasing him from money-lenders and clamorous tradesmen. And now that his literary triumph and social success had afforded him superior titles to respect, he could with calmness and discretion think of selling the picturesque estate, to which he had clung for honour's sake, so long as he had no higher position than that of the chief of an impoverished territorial family. The man who had become famous no longer needed some old ruins and a few farms in Nottinghamshire as evidences ' CIIILDE HAROLD.' 23o of his respectability within tlie lines of his order. If the Newstead estate could be sold for 100,000/., and so many thousands more as would wipe out his debts, he would stiuid more creditably in the eyes of the world, than he now stood as the owner of a noble park and ruinous mansion, without the means to live in them. With the interest of money at five per cent., lie would have 5000/. of sure yearly revenue, and retain the still unproductive Rochdale property, to save him from the discredit of being a landless lord. Mr. Hanson had for years been imploring the young lord to take this view of his position ; but the lawyer begged and preached in vain, till his client could with reason value himself on his achievements rather than on being the Lord of Newstead Abbey. Early in the autumn of 1812 Newstead was offered for sale at Garraway's, when it was ' bought in,' 1)0,000/. beino' the hio-hest offer made in the auction- room for the property. Soon, however, Mr. Claughton came forward with an offer that even exceeded the vendor's hopes. ' You heard,' l>yron wrote from Cheltenham to his friend, William l>ankes, ' that Newstead is sold — the sum 140,000/. ; G0,000/. to remain in mortgage on the estate for three years, paying interest, of course. Rochdale is also likely to do well — so my worldly matters are mending.' By this contract it was stipulated that the estate should remain in the vendor's hands till the pur- chaser should fulfil his part of the agreement, and that in case of the buyer failing in that respect within a given tune he should forfeit 25,000/., and the bar- gain become void. Two years later the forfeiture was paid by Mr. Claughton in consequence of his 234 THE REAL LORD BYROX. inabilit}' to complete the purchase ; and the estate conthiued with Byron. Enabling him to pay some of his most pressing debts, the 25,000/. also enabled him to live in comparative freedom from pecuniary anxieties till his marriage with a lady, whose fortune which had been egregiously magnified by rumour, brought his creditors down upon him at a moment when the concessions of his marriajre- settlement had seriously lessened his ability to satisfy their desire for immediate payment. Whilst the fashionable drawing-rooms were ap- plauding the force, fire, and melody of ' Childe Harold,' the far laro:er multitudes of thou2:htfal and devout people living in comparative humility outside the uttermost breast-works of ' society ' were con- sidering the religious sentiments of the poem with alarm and Abhorrence, and commo; to the conclusion that the author was destined to perdition, and that, if liis pernicious influence were not counteracted by bold and timely denunciations of his impiety, he would lead countless thousands of light-headed people to the doom of eternal punishment. It is significant of the manners of the period that, whilst these earnest people were quick to detect the poet's infidelity and exclaim against it, they do not appear to have been greatly shocked by his account of his naughty life at Newstead before he started on his travels. The account was in truth too accordant with their conceptions of lordly living, and also with their experience of the less exalted ways of human life, for it to occasion them either astonishment or anxiety. But it was a new and terrifying thing for a poet to write of matters pertaining to religion m ' CIIILDK HAROLD.' 2?)0 the style of the third and fourtli stanzas of the second Canto : — ' Son of the Morning, rise ! approach you here ! Come — but molest not yon defenceless urn : Look on this spot — a nation's sepulchre ! Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn. Even gods must yield — religions take their turn : 'Twas Jove's — 'tis Mahomet's — and other creeds Will rise with other years, till man shall learn Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds ; Poor child of Doubt and Death, whose hope is built on reeds. ' Bound to the earth, he lifts his eye to heaven — Is't not enough, unhappy thing ! to know Thou art 1 Is this a boon so kindly given, That being, thou would'st be again, and go, Thou know'st not, reck'st not to what region, so On earth no more, but mingled with the skies 1 Still wilt thou dream on future joy and woe 1 Regard and weigh yon dust before it flies : That little urn saith more than thousand homilies.' Thono'li he was far from imafiininij" what a storm of reprobation tliese words wonhl bring upon him in the course of a few months, and still farther from conceiving that the outcry against them would grow louder and fiercer throughout successive years, Byron had not been many days at Cheltenham before he heard the first sounds of the rising tempest. For the moment he could smile at the letters and verses that came to him through Mr. IVIurray's office from good- natured correspondents ' anxious for his conversion from certain infidelities,' and could write with more flippancy than good taste to his publisher on Sc})- tember 14, 1812, ' The other letters are from ladies, who are welcome to convert me when they plea.se ; and if I can discover them, and they be young, as they 236 THE REAL LORD BYROX. say they are, I could convince tliem of my devotion.' Nine months later, when the protest had been steadily growing more audible, and the importance of the protesting voices had become more apparent, he wrote in a sober vein to the editor of ' The Quarterly,' ' To your advice on religious topics, I shall equally attend. Perhaps the best way will be by avoiding them altogether. The already published objection- able passages have been much commented upon, but certamly they have been rather strongly interpreted. 1 am no bigot to infidelity, and did not exj^ect that, because I doubted the immortality of man, I "should be charged with denying the existence of a God. It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in comparison with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be over-rated.' When Giffbrd, whom the young poet regarded with 'veneration,' and used to term his ' father ' in literary matters, urged him to be cautious, and spoke of rocks and dangers ahead, Byron could not doubt that he was sailing in perilous waters. And as the months went by, he saw more and more, clearly the msdom of his ' father's ' counsels. Of all the many strange mistakes made by clever men about Byron's career none is stranger than the error of supposing that the storm, that drove him from his native land, was brewed in a single hour, and that it was altogether due to the caprice of fashion and society's fantastic readiness to visit the sins of many upon one, and drive that one forth into the desert as a scapegoat. The sentiment, before ^vhich.the poet re- tired in early manhood, almost in his boyhood, into exile ' CIIILDE HAROLD.' 237 for his remaining days, was a sentiment of slo^^' gTOAvtli and diverse causes. Not the least powerful of those causes was the general social resentment at his religious opinions, and this cause began to operate before the lirst edition of ' Childe Harold' was ex- hausted. No greatly celebrated man ever had a shorter term of unqualified and unbroken applause. The inianimity of praise was the affair of a single day and a single class. It can scarcely be said to have lasted even in that one class for twenty-four hours. The morning's fame, of which he used to speak, had lost sometlrino^ of its whiteness before the evening;. Even from, the outset of his career, praise and dispraise joined hands to make him in the same moment famous and infamous. 238 CHAPTER XIII. THE RIVAL COUSINS-IN-LAW. The World of Fashion — Lady Carohne Lamb — Her Looks and Nature — 'Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know' — Platonic Love — Miss Milbanke • — Her Fortune and Expectations — Her Influence over Byron — Lady Caroline ' Playing the Devil ' — Love turned to Hate. It was a mad world Byron entered at twenty-four years of age, with the honour of his poem fresh upon him ; — a wild world strangely fascinating and perilous to the sensitive and excitable young man who, with his reputation for gallantry and genius, his travels in Greece and songs to Eastern beauties, knew no more of fashionable society and the ' high life,' than any son of an English parsonage who, during his education at school and college, has spent his holidays in the par- lours of a small provincial town. In his later time he used in his bitterness to declare that m domestic morality Venice would endure comparison with London, and Italy with England ; and if any reli- ance may be put on the chroniclers of English 'society' durmg the Regency, his words were only by a few degrees less truthful than severe. It was a wild world, honouring women for their beauty provided it was mated with loose principle, and caring little for womanly virtue that was un- attended Avitli personal attractiveness. And of all THE RIVAL COUSINS-IN-LAW. 239 its wild people none was wilder or more ca})ricious, lif^Lter or more wilful than Lady Caroline Lamb — the Mrs. Felix Lorraine of ' Vivian Grey,' the Lady Monteajrle of ' Venetia.' Vivian thought Mrs. Felix Lorrame ' a dark riddle.' In respect to her person and character, the Lady was, however, a light riddle. Her eyes, indeed, were dark and her countenance (in repose) was grave ; but her complexion Avas fair, her fi the followino; clubs or societies : — to the Altml ; to the Union ; to Racket's (at l^righton) ; to the Pugil- istic ; to the Owls, or " Fly-by-night ; " to the Cam- bridge Whig Club ; to the Harrow Club, Cambridge ; and to one or two private clubs ; to the Hampden (political) Club ; and to the Italian Carbonari, &c. &c. " though last not least." 1 got into all these, and never stood for any other — at least to my own know- ledge. I declined being proposed to several others, though pressed to stand candidate.' It was at Watier's, soon after he joined the club, that Byron made a characteristic fish-supper on May 19, 1814, after going with Moore to 'see Kean.' Bitten and goaded by hunger (wliich he had been quickening rather than appeasing for two days with biscuits and bits of gum-mastic) he came into the club, faint and famished, to devour two or three lob- sters (to his own share), which he washed down with four or five ( ' near half-a-dozen ' is Moore's expres- sion) small liqueur-glasses of strong white brandy, drunk neat, with a draught of hot water after each dram of the spirit. ' After this,' says Moore, 'we had claret, of which having despatched two bottles between us, at about four o'clock in the morning we parted.' This may be taken as a fair example of one of the ' outbreaks ' — one of the concessions to appetite — that varied at considerable intervals the poet's brave and suicidal persistence in the regimen, by which he kept down his fat and destroyed his stomach. The reader has already been told that Bvron sometimes appeased the famine, ever preying on the delicate membrane of his stomach, by chewing some- thing less cleanly than mastic. Writing to Harness 270 THE REAL LORD BYRON. on December 8, 1811, he says — ' You will want to know what I am doing — chewing tobacco.' On the same day he writes to Hodgson, ' I do nothing but eschew tobacco ; ' a curious mistake as to the meaning of eschew, which he repeated some ten years later in ' Don Juan ' (Canto xii., stanza 43) : — ' In fact, there's nothing makes me so much grieve, As that abominable tittle-tattle, Which is the cud eschewed by human cattle.' That Byron was an occasional (if not a regular) tobacco-chewer in Italy we know from Leigh Hunt's base book. Guilty of the unpleasant practice during his severe fasts, for the purpose of mitigating the pangs of hunger, from 1811 to 1824, he was, chiefly for the same purpose, a consumer of opium. At Bennet Street Byron found the hideous old woman, Mrs. Mule, whom he took under his protection in a manner so agreeably illustrative of his affection - ateness and also of his habitual kindness to his ser- vants. During one of his transient illnesses in Bennet Street, this aged person, whose ' gaunt and witchlike appearance ' made her a thing of dislike and dread to most beholders, waited on the lordly tenant of the best rooms of the Bennet Street lodging-house with a show of sympathy, that stirred his grateful nature. The particulars of her services are unknown. Possibly in Fletcher's absence, she had on a sudden emergency of spasms from indigestion, to which he was liable, come opportunely upon the scene with wet cloths for hot fomentations, and had ventured to soothe the sufferer by saying ' Dear my lord, your lordship will be easier soon ! ' That would have been THE TURNING OF THK TIDK, 271 quite enough to make the young man regard her ten- derly and feel she had a claim upon him for ever. To the surprise of his friends, who hoped to be quit of the ugly old body when he had left Bennet Street, Mrs. Mule appeared in better clothes at the Alban}' Chambers. A year later she shone forth in a black silk dress in the Piccadilly house, where Lord and Lady Byron played their parts in a domestic drama that will never perish from the annals of literature. On being asked by an intimate friend what on earth induced him to carry this ancient body about with him as one of his household gods, Byron answered, ' The poor old devil was so kind to me.' Having been instructed by ' Childe Harold ' to look for personal revelations in his literary produc- tions, the readers of ' The Giaour ' (published in May 1813) were quick to discover the author in one of the personages, and an episode of the poet's own history m the principal incident and positions of the ' wild and beautiful fragment ' (as Moore calls it) that, con- taining in the first edition about four hundred lines, grew with its success till it became a ])oem of nearl}'" fourteen hundred verses. It is still to be shown that the poem was based on one of the poet's adventures in Greece. The probability is that the underlying story relates to some affair, of which Byron heard when he was in Athens, and about which he made inquiries in a way that caused him to be confounded in local gossip with the heroic actor in the melodrama. Could Byron have truthfully told of himself the story which the ]\larquis of Sligo reported as being current about him after his departure from Athens, he would have certainly told it for himself with full particulars 272 THE REAL LORD BYRON. on his word of honour, instead of inviting the Marquis (a mere reproducer of hearsay gossip) to stand forth as sponsor for the truth of the romantic fable. The Junius mystery had produced a general appetite for literary mysteries ; and to gratify this appetite popular writers, from Walter Scott to very humble fabricators of romance, were exercismg their ingenuity in feats of literary mystification. The time was not far dis- tant when Byron could without compunction send to the journals of Continental capitals pure fictions about his own doings, — fictions by the way that redounded to his dishonour instead of his credit. But though he already delighted in mystifying his readers with misleading dates and other light touches of his pen, and delighted in ' bamming ' and hoaxing his hearers with piquant inventions, he had too much regard for truth and his own honour to be capable of exceeding the wide license accorded by fashion to humorous raconteurs, so far as to make on his honour a state- ment which he knew to be false. He could mystify his readers, hoax credulous quidnuncs, ' bam ' dull and impertinent questioners, within the limits of the license accorded to humorous talkers. Misled by heated fancy he would misstate matters of fact. But he was incapable of lying. To persons who asked whether he really saved the wretched damsel from execution, whether he really pulled out his pistol and threatened to shoot the chief of her escort at the very jaws of death, he could not reply, ' Yes, I did.' But, having no wish to contradict the stories that exhibited him in so interesting and heroic an attitude to his May- fair idolaters, he bethought himself of an ingenious way of avoiding the question and leaving the stories THE TURNING OF THE TIDE. 273 to do their work. He could say to questioners, 'You must excuse me for declining to speak of that matter, as it is a business on Avhicli I do not like to speak more than I can help. If you really Avish for the particulars, go to Sligo, who will tell you all he heard of the affair immediately after I left Athens. Or, if you hke, I will show you what Sligo has written to me on the subject. But you must permit me to hold my tongue on the matter.' By this means, without avouching the stories, or telling any positive untruth, he could leave his questioners under the influence of the delusions and misconceptions, in which he wished them to remain. To the last, Byron thus used the Marquis's letter, which merely states what the writer heard of certain loose and unsifted rumoui's. He offered to show IMedwm the letter. But he never committed himself by an assertion that the rumours, mentioned in the letter, were substantially true. Though it was no work to raise a new writer to the eminence Byron had achieved by ' Childe Harold,' the new poem was precisely the performance to enlarge the young poet's popularity and intensify the general admiration of his genius. Giving the novel-readers a romantic story, and tickling the ears that preferred to loftier and more thoughtful song the particular kind of musical verse, the poetry of sweet and deli- cate sounds, of which Moore was so perfect a master, ' The Giaour ' was a great success. The enlarged editions followed one another rapidly ; the poet throwing into each of them more and yet more verse, of animating lilt and lyric lightness. But the poem's success could not extinguish certain indications that the enthusiasm for tlie poet was already subsiding- in VOL. I. T 274 THE REAL LORD BYRON. that central and exclusive circle of the polite life of the capital, which claimed to be 'society ' {par excellence, and in inverted commas). No man of his day had a finer hand or more sensitive touch for feeling the pulse of this ' inner circle ' than its favourite piano- poet, Tom Moore ; and on coming to town for the season of 1813, he detected signs of a disposition in certain s6ts and coteries of ' society ' to think less cordially of the author of ' Childe Harold.' ' In the immediate circle, perhaps, around him,' says Moore, ' familiarity of intercourse might have begun to pro- duce its usual disenchanting effects.' If the change had been only the slightest, Moore's nice discernment would have apprehended it. But if it had been only a very slight change, the biographer, retained by Byron's publisher and the world's voice to re-dress and re-paint and re- varnish the battered poet, would have been silent about the matter. It must have been a change so considerable and obvious, that the biographer felt he could not forbear from referring thus lightly to it, without exposing himself to critical censure. Moore's words are even more remarkable when he sfoes on to account for this chang-e. ' His own liveliness and unreserve,' says the biographer, ' on a more intimate acquaintance, would not be long in dispelling that charm of poetic sadness, whicli to the eyes of distant observers hung about him ; while the romantic notions, connected hy some of his fair readers with those past and nameless loves alluded to in his jwems, ran some risk of abatement from too near an acquaintance with the supposed objects of his fancy and fondness at present.'' — In other words, Byron was found no more a Byromaniac than John Wilkes was THE TURNING OF THE TIDE. 275 a Wilkeite. On coming to know him intimately, ])ersons who would have preferred him to resemble his melancholy poetry, were disappointed at finding him so merry, droll and loquacious ; and he was at the same time suffering in the esteem of the best drawing- rooms from his devotion to Lad}' Oxford, and still more from his devotion to Lady Caroline Lamb. The many ladies with good reasons for disliking the Coun- tess questioned the taste of the young nobleman who had made so poor a choice of an especial object of adoration. The very many ladies with better reasons for disliking Lady Caroline were beginning to think meanly of him for his submissiveness to the caprices of the woman, who was doing her best to make him as ridiculous as she was making herself. That the universal favour, shown to Byron by society in his first season, should have waned thus perceptibly at the outset of the second season, is re- markable. It is part of the evidence that society did not, as Lord Macaulay imagined, make up its mind all in a single moment to pitch the poet away like an old glove. The season of 1813 closed with the famous ' Dandy Ball,' at which Byron was present as one of 'the dandies.' It was the season, in which he dined with Leigh Hunt in Horsemonger Lane Gaol, where the minor poet was undergoing his term of punishment for the libel on the Prince Regent. It was also the season, that heard (on June 1st) his third, least successful and last speech in the House of Lords, in the debate on Major Cartwright's Petition. Just as the first speech was in fact a tame success (though circumstances made him for a moment think 276 THE REAL LORD BYRON. it a brilliant one), tins third speech was a tame failure (though circumstances blinded him to its complete- ness) ; a failure that was another slight indication of the turning of the tide of triumph. On the occasion of the maiden speech people wanted to see and hear him ; on the occasion of the third speech, the lords and their friends, without being antagonistic to him, had ceased to be curious about him, and therefore in a mild way showed they had seen and heard enough of him — at least in their chamber. Combative on the masculine side, just as he was alternately yielding and fro ward on the feminine side of his double nature, Byron would have justified Dr. Drury's opinion and become a great parliamentary debater, had he in his first forensic essay encountered such humiliation as would have stung him to assert his natural superiority to other men. Bafiled at the outset like the younger Disraeli, he would have conquered like Beaconsfield. But in 1812 and 1813, things went smoothly with Byron, and it was only in troubled waters that he found his strength. Moreover his literary triumphs made him indifferent for the moment to political distinction. So his parliamentary career ended almost as soon as it had begun. Some one (surely, a humourist !) asked him in the November of this year to present the Debtors' Petition, and he declined to do so. 'I have', he wrote in his journal, ' declined presenting the Debtors' Petition, being sick of parliamentary mum- meries. I have spoken thrice ; but I doubt my ever becoming an orator. My first was liked ; the second and third — I don't know whether they succeeded or not. I have never yet set to it con amove; — one must have some excuse to one's self for laziness, or THE TURNING OF THE TIDE. 277 inability, or both, and this is mine. " Company, villanous company hath been the spoil of me ;" — and then, I have drunk medicines, not to make me love others, but certainly enough to make me hate myself.' During this year of 1813 (and also the next) he "was often at theatres, kept up his boxing and friend- ship with Jackson, dined with wits and statesmen, and was seen in the best of good society, — showing no disposition to go into any society, that was not good in some sense or other. In need of money for liimself he always had money for others ; doing- several deeds of munificence to people who had only the slightest claim, or no claim whatever, upon him, — one of these latter recipients of his bounty being the paltry fellow, Ashe, whom he assisted out of pity for him, and pitied out of disgust. At the eame time, though upbraiding himself in his journals for lazmess, he worked much — sometimes at high pressure. Each of the new editions of ' The Giaour ' might be called a new poem. ' The Bride of Abydos ' was published in December 1813 ; 'The Corsair' (with the padding of trifles at the end of the pamphlet) followed it quickly upon the turn of the year. What induced him to put ' Weep, daughter of a royal line,' in that padding is unknown. The avowal of the lines could not heighten his reputation, could serve no good end, was sure to make him many dangerous enemies. Yet he reproduced them thus obtrusively; — perhaps out of generous sympathy with the other libeller of the Prince Regent, with whom he had dined in Horsemonger Lane gaol. If the act was done out of concern for Leigh Hunt, generosity was never more completely wasted. The 278 THE REAL LORD BYRON. reckless act had the consequences he might have fore- seen. Forthwith abuse of the most passionate and even virulent kind was poured upon him by news- papers especially jealous and zealous for the honour and interest of the Prince Regent. Day after day throughout successive weeks of February and March 1814, these journals poured the vials of their wrath out upon him. He was a mean creature, who had eaten his own words, in order to curry favour Avith powerful writers whom he had assailed in the ' English Bards.' He was a scribbler of poor verse, to be placed low m the list of minor poets. He was a venal poetaster, guilty of the meanness of ' receiving and pocketing ' large sums of money from liis pub- lisher; — the rapid and prodigious sale of the last poem being pointed to as a justification of the charge. He was no less deformed in mind than he was in body. The Prince Regent almost shed tears of regret, on finding that the offensive lines, which he had attributed to Tom Moore, had been written by Byron. In his alarm at the outcry, which was no less surprising than the sale of the poem, Murray begged the poet to omit the lines from future editions of the pamphlet, and even ventured on his own authority to issue copies without the naughty verses. But Byron would not yield to the man of business. He would not with- draw the verses, and seem to be ' shrinking and shufflmg after the fuss made about them by the Tories.' Macaulay wrote of Byron that ' he lam- pooned the Prince Regent ; yet he could not alienate the Tories.' This was true in a limited sense, — but in a very limited sense. As a ' ladies' man,' as the dandy and poet especially acceptable to women of rank, THE TURNING OF THE TIDE. 279 Byron still went to certain of tlie great Tory houses. But if he continued to receive cards from great ladies to their routs, and had not yet provoked the Tories of high society into dropping him, he had most certainly so far alienated powerful organs of the Tory press, that they felt it tlieir duty to educate the great body of their readers to regard him with fierce ani- mosity. They had in truth become a great force for his overthrow. Whilst powerful papers were denouncing him for the lampoon, another thing happened in this third season of his fame, to show Byron how the tide was now setting against him. Murray sent him the manuscript of ' Anti- Byron,' which had been offered to the publisher. No work of reckless abuse, or angry flippancy, or dull flxnaticism, but a thoughtful performance, attacking the j^oet (as he himself wrote to Murray) ' in a manly manner and without any malicious intention,' ' Anti-Byron ' was a serious exhi- bition of what its author deemed pernicious in the religious sentiment and in the moral and political influence of Byron's writings. ' It is not,' Byron wrote of this work to Moore on April 9, 1814, ' very scurrilous, but serious and ethereal. I never felt myself important, till I saw and heard of my being such a little Voltaire, as to induce such a production. Murray would not publish it, for which he was a fool, and so I told him ; but some one else will doubtless.' In the autumn of 1812 serious ladies wanted to convert the poet to righteousness. In the spring of 1814, a book had been written to demonstrate that he was a teacher of evil. Having no doubt tliat this manuscript would find 280 THE REAL LORD BYRON. a publisher, Byron cannot have supposed it would be the only book produced to discredit him. He must have foreseen the approaching storm, and felt that he was nearing the troubles predicted by Gifford. But instead of disheartenino; him and shakinix his nerve, the prospect of the tempest seems to have inspired him with new zeal and energy. Anyhow, the man, — who at the end of April 1814, in a sudden fit of pique at the insults of certain of his anonymous assailants, and of distaste for labours that were rewarded with their abuse, had actually resolved to withdraw from literature, and ordered his publisher to stop selling his books, — now found courage to go to work on another poem. Begun towards the end of iMay, 'Lara' was ready for the printer, — indeed in the printer's hands and almost ready for publication — at the beginning of July. To think of the rapidity with which ' The Giaour,' ' The Bride of Abydos,' ' The Corsair,' the Napoleon ' Ode,' and ' Lara,' came from his pen, whilst he was in the quick stream of the social excitements of a man of pleasure and the world, is to be amazed at the fecundity of his genius, and of its power to achieve its ends amidst countless distractions. "^ 281 CHAPTER XV. byron's married life. Byron's spirits during tlie Engagement — The Wedcling at Seaham — Art of 'Bamming' — Ducli, Pippin, and Goose — Quiet time at 13 Piccadilly Terrace — Lord Wentwortli's Death — Matrimonial Felicity — The Poet's Will — Commencement of Bickerings — 'An Unhappy sort of Life ' — ' Causes of Quarrel.' Engaged to Miss Milbanke in September 1814, married to Iier in January 1815, Byron in July 181G wrote the poem, which made the whole world think that during his engagement to Sir Ralph ^Milbanke's daughter his heart was hi his cousin's (Mrs. ]Musters's) keeping, — that at the very moment when he took his bride for better and for worse, he was thinking of the Mary who ten years before had become ' another's bride.' Byron's journals and letters of 1813, 1814, and 1815, afford conclusive evidence that the autobio- graphy of ' The Dream ' was, in that matter, mere romance. Ilavinjj; cared enouiili for Miss Milbanke in 1812 to wish to make her his wife, he learnt to love her during the next two years ; and having by assiduous addresses won her love in the autumn of 1814, he married her — not in a frenzy of boyish passion, but with tlie steadier sentiment of manly devotion. On September 20, 1814, he writes to Moore in high spirits, ' I am going to be married — that is, I 282 THE REAL LORD BYRON. am accepted, and one usually hopes the rest will follow. My mother of the Gracchi (that are to be) you think too strait-laced for me, although the paragon of only children, and invested with " golden oj^inions of all sorts of men," and full of " most blest conditions " as Desdemona herself. . , . She is said to be an heiress, but of that I really know nothing certainly, and shall not inquire. But I know she has talents and excellent qualities ; and you will not deny her judgment, after having refused six suitors and taken me. ... I must, of course, reform thoroughly ; and, seriously, if I can contribute to her happiness, I shall secure my own.' — To the Countess of , he writes from the Albany on October 5, 1814, ' I am very much in love, and as silly as all single gentlemen must be in that sentimental situa- tion ; . . . all our relatives are congratulating away to rio'ht and left m a most fatio;uino^ manner. You perhaps know the lady. She is niece to Lady Mel- bourne, and cousin to Lady Cowper and others of your acquaintance, and has no fliult, except. being a great deal too good for me, and that I must pardon, if nobody else should. It might have happened two years ago, and, if it had, would have saved me a world of trouble.' — Again to his intimate friend, Moore, he writes on October 14, 1814, averring that he has chosen from love, not money, ' I certainly did not address Miss Milbanke mth these views, but it is likely she may prove a considerable parti. All her father can give, or leave her, he will ; and from her childless uncle, Lord Wentworth, whose barony, it is supposed, will descend on Lady Milbanke (his sister), she has expectations. But these will depend byron's married life. 283 upon his own disposition, wliich seems very partial towards her. She is an only child, and Sir R.'s estates, though dipped hy electioneering, are consider- able. Part of them are settled on her ; but whether that will be doiceml now, I do not know,— though, from wdiat has been mtimated to me, it probably will. ... I certainly did not dream that she was attached to me, which it seems she has been for some time. ^ I also thought her of a very cold disposition, in which I was also mistaken — it is a long story, and I won't trouble you with it. As to her virtues, &c. &c., you will hear enough of them (for she is a kmd of pattern in the north), without my running into a display on the subject.'— To Henry Drury, he writes on October 18, 1814, ' I am going to be married, and have been engaged this month. It is a long story, and, therefore, I won't tell it,— an old and (though I did not know it till lately) a mutual attachment.' Are these passages (which fairly represent the tone of the letters from which they are taken )^ indica- tive of selfish greed or despondency? AYould a fortune-hunter have written so carelessly and con- tentedly of the lady's small present fortune and uncertain expectations, and of the probability that her present fortune would be settled upon ^ her? Would a man, dropping in a ildnt-hearted way into a manage de convemmce, have written so proudly and affectionately of the lady's virtues, of his love of her, and of his pleasure at finding that her love of him was no vounger than his love of her ? ^loore speaks of finding the poet melancholy and despondent and restless in December, shortly before his marriage :— speaking, be it remembered, fourteen years after the 284 THE REAL LORD BYRON. marriage from memory, when events had trained the biographer to regard the wedding as a doleful business from first to last. The poet, however, may well have been anxious and troubled just then. The nervous man had cause for discomfort, on the eve of his marriage at a time of pecuniary embarrassments that made him foresee his bride's home would be besieged by bailiffs. His marriage would put him in a worse position than ever for dealing with his creditors. For he had ao'reed to make a lars^e settlement on his wife, whose trustees under the deed of settlement w^ould for the performance of the trust have control over 60,000/. of the capital that should come from the sale of Newstcad. Whilst Byron made this large settlement on his bride, her fortune of 10,000/. (which Byron is so generally believed to have squandered) was also settled upon her. Hobhouse knew all about this matter ; and in answer to one of the most serious of the two or three hundred misrepresentations of Med- win's book, he wrote in the ' Westminster Review,' ' The whole of Lady Byron's fortune was put into settlement, and could not be melted away.' Byron, widi Hobhouse for his * best man ' and his travelling companion from London to the north, set out for Seaham co. Durham at the end of Decem- ber 1814, and was there married to Miss Milbanke on January 2, 1815. Enough has been said to show that ' The Dream ' has no autobiographical value, ex- cept as evidence of the way in which the poet was pleased to regard certain, passages of his life, eighteen months after the wedding. A dream, it was as false to fact as dreams usually are. The ceremony over, and the breakfast a thing of the past, the happy pair started for Halnaby, Sir Ralph Milbanke's place near byron's married life. 285 Darlington. Hobliouse lianded Lady Byron to licr carriage, and saw her drive off with the poet hy her side ; her parting words to the ' best man ' being, ' If I am not happy, it will be my own fault.' Of course there was no lady's-maid in the carriage, sitting ' bodkin ' between the bride and bridegroom ; though Byron, no doubt, said to Medwin at Pisa in 1821, ' After the ordeal was over, we set off for a country seat of Sir Ralph's ; and I was surprised at the arrangements for the journey, and somewhat out of humour to find a lady's-maid stuck between me and my bride. It was rather too early to assume the husband ; so I was forced to submit, but it was not with a very good grace. Put yourself in a similar situation, and tell me if I had not some reason to be in the sulks. I have been accused of saying, on get- ting out of the carriage, that I had married Lady Byron out of spite, and because she had refused me twice. Though I was vexed at her pruderj^ or what- ever you may choose to call it, if I had made so uncavalier, not to say brutal, a speech, I am con- vinced Lady Byron would instantly have left the carriage to me and the maid (I mean the lady's). She had spirit enough to have done so, and would properly have resented the affront.' On reading this piece of literature in Medwin's book, Ilobhouse ex- claimed fiercely, that ]\Iedwin was an infamous im- postor. He had himself handed Lady Byron into the carriage and could swear there was no maid in it ! And Hobhouse was not mistaken on the point of fact. P>ut he was wrong in thinking Tom ]iledwin an impostor. How did this invention come into Tom's book? IIuw came Byron to put it there? 286 THE REAL LORD BYRON. When lie spoke to his especially confidential friends of Byron's most serious faults, Hobhouse used to put high in the list the poet's readiness to gossip with sycophants about his private affairs, — a failing which, though it had a show of amiability, was in truth a most hurtful weakness. Whilst the habit fed the selfishness which (according to Hobhouse) was Byron's worst and most deplorable characteristic, it was prolific of absurd stories that darkened the poet's fame. To Hobhouse it seemed that Tom Medwin was one of the sycophants who by humouring Byron's vanity led him to talk loosely ; and an impostor who deliberately vamped up the poet's imprudent statements with bits of fiction, so as to impose the gossip more readily on the public. But Shelley's familiar connexion and schoolmate — poor Tom Medwin, whilom of the 24th Light Dragoons, and in 1821 and the two followmg years living in Italy on insufiicient means — was neither knave nor toady. A man of gentlemanly address and puerile simplicity, he was a good-tempered fool. If he had disliked this relative and hanger-on of the Shelleys, Byron — living in close intimacy with Shelley — could not have treated him with open rudeness. But Byron had a tenderness for the young man who was just then no less unfortunate than unwise. Warned by Trelawny that this inquisitive prattler was taking notes with a view to printing them, Byron answered lightly, ' So many lies are told about me that Medwin won't be believed.' And having said thus much and a little more to Trelawny, Byron took care that Medwin should not be believed : — took care that the ' notes ' should comprise so large a proportion of byron's married life. 287 obvious fictions, that cautious readers would not know what of their statements they might believe, would be doubtful whether they contained a single pure and unadulterated foct. In a word, Byron 'bammed' ]\Iedwin ; and Medwm was a very easy man to ' bam ' ! ' To bam ' was to hoax with a humorous fiction. The old slang word ' bam ' meant a story which none but a simpleton would believe. It occurs in ' Sam Hall,' the convict's ditty that used to be encored loudly in the Cave of Harmony, when Arthur Pendennis was a young man, — * The parson, he did come, he did come, And talk of " kingdom come ; " But then it was all bam ! ' In the days when Kit North's friends wrote their convivial articles for 'Blackwood' over their tumblers, and sometimes under them, a reference to tlie art of 'bamming' was often seen in the columns of that polite magazine. At the same time the Prince Regent, a consummate master of the elegant art, made ' bam- mmg ' a favourite pastime with the gentlemen of his entourage. "When George the Fourth entertained a dinner-table by describmg gravely how he commanded- in-chief at Waterloo, he was not mad or tipsy ; he was tellino' ' a bam ' for the fun of secino: how it would be received by one of his guests, the Duke of Wellington. ' Bammino; ' was ' Ivino- with a difference.' It was necessary for ' a bam ' to be humorous ; it might not be uttered for the teller's pecuniary benefit or for his material advantage in any way ; it was needful for it to be so egregiously absurd that no one but a dullard 288 THE REAL LORD BYRON. would believe it. B^Ton's story about the lady's-maid was ' all bam.' Medwin having swallowed the inven- tion, and gravely put it away for use, it is not won- derful that Byron found him a diverting companion in idle hours. The marriage, on which Lady Melbourne had set her heart, was an accomplished fact. For the moment she could breathe freely, whilst her daughter-in-law meditated mischief and brooded over schemes of re- venge. She could breathe the more freely because she sincerely believed that her niece was precisely the wife for the young man, for whom she felt genuine affec- tion. And for a while it seemed that events would justify her opinion. The evidence of ' The Dream ' notwithstanding, Byron passed his time so agreeably at Halnaby, with the lady who had carried him off from the Byromaniacs, that in the very heart of the honeymoon he could Avrite gaily to ]\Ioore (Jan. 19, 1815) 'So you want to know about milady and m.e? ... I like Bell as well as you do (or did, you villain ! ) Bessy — and that is (or was) saying a great deal.' On his return to Seaham, he writes to the same friend (February 2, 1815), ' Since I wrote you last, I have been transferred to my father-in-law's, with my lady and my lady's-maid, &c. &c., and the treacle-moon is over, and I am awake, and find myself married ! My spouse and I agree to 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 am very sure I should renew mine at the expiration, though next term were for ninety and nine years.' On February 10, 1815, again writing from Seaham, he says to byron's married life. 289 Moore, ' Bell desires nie to say all kinds of civilities, and assure you of her recognition and high consider- ation. ... By the way, don't engage yourself in any travelling expedition, as 1 have a plan of travel into Italy, which we will discuss. And then, think of the }ioesy wherewithal we should overflow, from Venice to Vesuvius, to say nothing of Greece, through all which — God willing — we might perambulate in twelve months. If I take my wife, you can take yours ; and if I leave mine, you may do the same.' On the day before leaving Seaham for London, with the intention of visiting Colonel and the Hon. Mrs. Leigh, at Six Mile Bottom, near Newmarket, on the road to town, he writes to Moore (March 8, 1815), 'Bell is in health, and unvaried good-humour and behaviour. But we are all in the agonies of packing and parting ; and I suppose by this time to-morrow I shall be stuck in the chariot with my chin upon a band -box. I have prepared, however, another carriage for the abigail, and all the trum[)ery which our wives drag along with them.' If Byron was melancholy in the first nine weeks of his wedded life, and pining for ' another bride,' he hid his grief under a smiling flice. Writing to ^loore from Six Mile Bottom on ^larch 17, 1815, the young husband, touching a delicate question, says, ' To your question, I can only answer that there have been some symptoms which look a little gestatorv. It is a subject upon which I am not particularly anxious, except that I think it would ])lease her uncle. Lord Wentworth, and her father and mother. The former (Lord \V.) is now in town, and in very indifl'erent health. You, perhaps, know that his property, amounting to seven VOL. I. U 290 THE REAL LORD BYRON. or eight thousand a-year, will eventually devolve upon Bell. But the old gentleman has been so very kind to her and me, that I hardly know how to wish him in heaven, if he can he comfortable on earth. Her father is still in the country. We mean to metropolise to- morrow, and you will address your next to Piccadilly. We have got the Duchess of Devon's house there, she being in France.' The brief sojourn at Six Mile Bottom, under Colonel Leigh's roof, was especially agreeable to the newly- wedded couple, — Lady Byron conceiving a strong affection for Augusta Leigh, whom she ap- proached with a strong predisposition to love as if she were really her sister, whilst Byron was delighted to see how cordially and sincerely the two women ' took to one another.' The house was none too large and the children were noisy, but the stay was enjoyable in the highest degree to both visitors. Byron had never seen much of his little, plain, dowdy -goody sister. AVhilst he was on his travels and after his return to England fully occupied with literary labours, in which she felt no concern beyond a sisterly pride in their success, and with social distractions in which she was no participator, Augusta had her Cambridgeshire home, her husband, and children to engage her attention. Hence it was that, on July 8, 1813, Byron wrote from Bennet Street to Moore, ' My sister is in town, which is a great comfort, — for, never having been much to- gether, we are naturally more attached to each other.' Till October 16, 1814, Miss Milbanke had never either seen or written to Augusta, of whose amiability and womanly sweetness of nature she had however heard much from a common friend. Byron's married life. 291 At Six Mile Bottom, Mrs. Leigli and the newly married couple addressed one another by pet names. Whilst Byron called his wife ' Pippin ' and she called liim ' Duck,' they both fell into the habit of callintr Augusta ' Goose,' who addressed her sister-in-law by her husband's pet name for her, but in speaking to Byron persisted in her old practice of calling him ' Baby.' Their use of these pet names— Pippin, Duck, Goose and Baby — may be taken as an indication of the affectionate heartiness and freedom from fomiality that characterised the intercourse of the trio. Coming to town on March 18, 1815, in good spirits and undiminished affectionateness for one another, they settled down in the Piccadilly house, which had been lent to them by the Duchess of Devon, and had a very quiet time throughout the season. In his 'Westminster Review' article on the mis- statements of Medwin's ' Conversations,' Hobhouse said, ' Lord and Lady Byron did not give dinner- parties ; they had not separate carriages ; they did not launch into any extravagance.' Hobhouse's ac- curacy on these points is demonstrated by abundant evidence. The new chariot, which conveyed the bride and bridegroom from Durham to London, was never seen on the London pavements after that journey, until it was brought out of the coach-house on January 15, 1816, to convey Lady Byron to Kirkby Mallory. Lady ]>yron had this carriage at hand during her residence in 13 Piccadilly Terrace, but. she never used it between her arrival at and final departure from Piccadilly. She drove about town in her husband's carriage : often driving about town with him, and waiting good-temperedly for the 292 THE REAL LORD BYRON. hour at a time at the doors of houses, whilst he was making calls on people whom he did not care to introduce to her, as on the occasion of his visit to Leigh Hunt at Paddington Green, when, after going by herself to buy flowers at Henderson's Nursery Ground, she sent up twice to remind her lord that she was waiting. Several circumstances combined to make them live thus quietly. In the middle of April they went into mourning for Thomas Noel, second Viscount and ninth Baron Wentworth, who died on the seven- teenth of that month, leaving the bulk of his property (from 7000/. to 8000/. a-year) entailed on his sister, Lady Milbanke, for life, with remainder to Lady Byron and her issue ; and whilst she was in mourn- ing for so beneficent an uncle, the eventual heiress of his estate and barony could not with propriety have thrown herself into the gaieties of the London season, even if she had wished to do so. She had of course no disposition to go much at present to houses, where she would be almost sure to run across Lady Caroline Lamb. She was already in a state of health that gave her hope of becoming a mother. ' Lady Byron,' her husband wrote to Moore on June 12, 1815, 'is better than three months advanced in her progress to maternity, and, we hope, likely to go well through with it. We have been very little out this season, as I wish to keep her quiet in her present situation.' Moreover, for a peer and peeress, housed in Piccadilly, with a sufficient establishment of servants, the Byrons were as ' poor as mice.' Living with economy in Piccadilly as a married man, Byron lived at a greater cost than he had done as a bachelor of the Albany ; byron's married life. 293 and about 500/. a-year was all the immediate growth of his income from his marriage. Newstead was again in the market ; but a good purchaser for so considerable an estate was not to be found in a day ; and on its sale, it would devolve on the trustees of the marriage-settlement to determine how 60,000/. of the money paid for the property should be invested. Duns ran in upon the poet at every turn and from every quarter. Confirming them in their misconcep- tions respecting the change effected in their debtor's pecuniary circumstances by his marriage, Lord Wentworth's death made the poet's creditors louder and more urgent in their demands for immediate pay- ment. How matters went in this respect at 13 Pic- cadilly Terrace may be conceived from the fact that there had been nine executions in the house before Lady Byron left it on January 15, 1816. No wonder that tlie Byrons forbore to give dinner-parties, lived economically, and did as they best could with a single pair of carriage -horses. Annoyances and humiliations from want of money notwithstanding, the young husband and wife lived as young married folk should for four and even five months in the Duchess of Devon's house without quarrelling, or even bickering. In society Byron played the part of an idolising and trium])])ant hus- band ; at home he found in Lady Byron a thouglitful and sympathetic wife, who throwing herself into his literary interests was delighted to act as his amanu- ensis and secretary; — her service in this respect being of great convenience to the poet who wrote a poor hand, and on his nervous days disliked the drudgery of penmanship. During these months she 294 THE REAL LORD BYRON. wrote several small poems, some of which he cor- rected, — very much of course to their improvement. They had no altercation, dispute, or diiference of a serious kind, or indeed of any kind, till August. This was the time when he was habitually so cheerful, and sometimes so hilarious in her society, that he was surprised to find her of the same opinion as those who regarded him as the victim of deep and incurable melancholy. He had been more than usually gay and brilliant in society, when his wife declared her pleasure at seeing him in such high spirits. ' And yet, Bell,' he said, ' I have been called and miscalled melancholy — you must have seen how falsely, frequently.' ' No, Byron,' she answered, with the fine percep- tion of wifely sympathy, ' it is not so ; at heart you are the most melancholy of mankmd ; and often when apparently gayest.' If Byron had been so gloomy at his wedding as ' The Dream ' represents, he could scarcely have been so surprised at his wife's detection of his melan- choly. An incident of the time closely preceding the weeks in which they began to diff'er, deserves especial notice, as it shows how pleasantly they dwelt together up to the very threshold of their discord. Events having occurred to make it desirable that better pro- vision should be made for the Hon. Mrs. Leigh and her children, — the lady's husband having lately sus- tained losses, — Byron made the will that was proved at Doctors' Commons, London, after his death. Dis- posing of the residue of his estate, after the performance byron's married life. 295 of the trusts of Lady Byron's marriage- settlement, for the benefit of his sister and her issue, tlie tes- tator uses these words, ' I make the above provision for my sister and her children, in consequence of my dear wife Lady Byron, and any children I may have, being otherwise amply provided for.' A few days after making this will Byron told his wife the con- tents, — tellintr her at the same time of his reasons for doing so much for his dear Goose, and talking of his dear Goose's financial anxieties and her goodness, till the tears came to his eyes, and also to the eyes of his sympathetic listener. He expressed a hope that his action would have Lady Byron's approval, in con- sideration of the fact stated in the above-quoted words of the testament. The will was cordially approved by 'Pippin' on that ground, and for other reasons also. Despite the coldness and reserve of her manner, and notwithstanding the hard things said of her tem})er. Lady Byron had a warm and generous heart, at this period of her story ; and in her delight at Goose's good fortune, and also at her husband's display of brotherly aflfection, she declared her purpose of writing to Goose, telling her what a superlative brother her Baby was, and how cordially Pippin approved the will. It was on this occasion that Lady Byron (the cold, and stony-hearted Lady Byron, as she has been called by her detractors) thanked her husband for giving her the desire of her heart, — a sister whom she could love as thoroughly as she could have loved any sister given her by her own parents. Come what might, she promised always to be kind to Augusta ; — the promise of which she was in later time reminded by strange and impressive 290 THE REAL LORD BYRON. incidents, that bit tlie words too deep into her memory for time to be ever able to erase them from the tablet. From the day of Byron's withdrawal from England to the horn' of Augusta's death, and onwards to the hour of her own death, the words lived in Lady Byron's soul. They were a living part of it. No fire of anger could kill them, no force of hatred could pluck them out of the heart into which they had grown. Ao:ain and ao;ain at critical moments of her career those words struck her with awe. They were visible to her in luminous letters in the darkness of sleepless nights. She heard them even in her deep slumber, when her spirit could not sleep. Another incident of this point of B}n:*on's life with his wife must be mentioned ; — an incident showing how nicely considerate he was for her happiness shortly before the time when he began to show strangfe indifference to her feeling's. Havino; assumed the surname' of Noel, in accordance with the require- ments of Lord Wentworth's will, and taken up their abode at Kirkby Mallory, Sir Ralph and Lady Mil- banke (now Noel) offered Seaham to their daughter and her husband for a country residence. Made in July, this offer was accepted thankfully ; and forth- with Lady Byron began to thmk of going to Seaham for her accouchement. Byron at the same time, with his wife's hearty concurrence, asked Tom Moore and Mrs. Moore to stay at Seaham in the course of the autumn. ' If so,' he adds, 'you and I (without our idves) will take a lark to Edinburgh and embrace Jeffrey;' — this postscript of the invitation being probably withheld from Lady Byron. A few weeks later (at the beginning of August, 1815) Byron asked byron's married life. 297 his wife to invite Lady Noel to stay at Seahain in November, so as to be there during the accouchement. ' You see,' Byron added, ' at Kirkby Mallory your mother will be so miserable about you.' Even more ])leased by this nice though tfulness for her mother than by the suggestion itself, Pippin was a truly happy wife for a few days. And it shows the cordiality and completeness of her affection for her sister-in-law, that even in her delight at Byron's delicate mind- fulness for her mother, she liked to think that Goose had suggested to him that he should put the proposal in this peculiarly agreeable way. Feminine instinct causing her to attribute to feminine influence the alleged reason for the proposal, she was pleased to regard Augusta as the woman who had said to him, ' To give your wife the most pleasure, you must make her think your thoughtfulness is due to your thought- fulness for her mother ; she will be more gratified by the • show of consideration for her mother than by another display of consideration for herself.' At the same time, fearful of ruffling him, possibly even of vexing him into rebellion, by any premature or indiscreet exercise of wifely authority, the young wife hoped to govern him through her influence over the sister who had so much influence over him. In this hope she began a practice of hinting to iVIrs. Leigli wliat she might say to Byron on certain delicate and troubling matters. A good example of this practice is found in the way, in which she con- fided to her sister-in-law that the frequency of Byron's visits to Melbourne House caused her uneasiness. Of course, on liis coming to town, Byron went quickly to call on his wife's aunt, Lady Melbourne, his 'second 298 THE REAL LORD BYRON. mother.' He went there repeatedly. He was con- tinually calling there. Of course, the niece had no reason to resent his dutiful and affectionate attentive- ness to her aunt. But the cousin was troubled at his frequent visits to a house, where he would be so sure, or likely, to see Lady Caroline Lamb. She was jealous, but pride and prudence combined to make her desirous of concealing the jealousy from her husband. If she even hinted that he was troublino; himself over- much about her aunt, he would detect the motive of the hint, and cut her to the quick by retorting, ' You mean, your aunt's daughter-in-law. You are jealous ! You distrust your husband ! ' — But she would escape this suspicion and imputation, and yet carry her point, if she could induce Goose to say to her Baby, ' Take care you don't go so often to Melbourne House, as to make Pippin think you have a lingering weak- ness for Beautiful Silliness.' And in Lady Byron's uneasiness about the visits to Melbourne House, the reader sees the first rising- cloud over her domestic happiness : — a cloud from which many drops were soon to fall. When Lady Caroline Lamb called on Lady Byron after Byron's withdraw^al from England, she was received by her cousin with these words, ' I know all, Lady Caroline. He has told me all, and you could have saved me from all my misery.' It was natural for Lady Byron to take this view of her cousin's part in the dismal drama ; but she probably attached too much importance to the mischief done by the mischievous woman of fashion. But though they had no differences before August 1815, the month did not close without bickerings, and by the beginning of September the husband and wife btron's married life. 299 were in the ' some time ' of ' an unhappy sort of life,' described in the First Canto of ' Don Juan,' — ' Don Jose and the Donna Inez led For some time an unhappy sort of life, Wishing each other, not divorced, but dead ; They lived respectably as man and wife, Their conduct was exceedingly well-bred, And gave no outward signs of inward strife, Until at length the smother'd fire broke out. And put the business past all kind of doubt. ' For Inez call'd some druggists and physicians, And tried to prove her loving lord was mad, But as he had some lucid intermissions, She next decided he was only bad ; Yet when they ask'd her for her depositions, No sort of explanation could be had, Save that her duty both to man and God Required this conduct — which seem'd very odd. * She kept a journal, where his faults were noted, And open'd certain trunks of books and letters, All which might, if occasion served, be quoted ; And then she had all Seville for abettors, Besides her good old grandmother (who doted) ; The hearers of her case became repeaters, Then advocates, inquisitors, and judges, Some for amusement, others for old grudges.' It is needless to say that in thus describing his domestic troubles, the poet was not severely accu- rate. In his talk with Medwin, Byron admitted that the spies employed to watch and gather evidence against him were Mrs. Clermont, acting on her own account, and persons obeying Mrs. Clermont's instruc- tions. In the same talk, though he charged Lady Byron with sending the epistles to the writer's hus- band, he pointed to Mrs. Clermont as the person. 300 THE REAL LORD BYRON. who had broken open his writing-desk, and taken from it the letters he had received from a married woman before his marriage. He expressly acqnitted Lady Byron of being accountable for the visit of Dr. Baillie and the lawyer to ascertain whether he was insane. ' I do not, however, tax Lady Byron with this transaction : probably she was not privy to it,' he is represented as saying to the reporter who, though a simpleton, was an honest gentleman. It is certain that Lady Byron and her husband separated on account of reasons covered by the familiar and elastic phrase ' incompatibility of temper,' — a phrase that may cover serious unkindness, scarcely a hair's breadth short of legal cruelty. It is certain that no one of the various kinds of flagrant immorality charged against her husband by scanda- lous rumour was the reason why Lady Byron deter- mined to leave him. It is certain if he was guilty of any one of the charges so made by report, the sin was done with a secresy, that saved it from being an msult to his wife, and made him certain neither she nor any of her friends knew of it. On all these points fortu- nately for human nature there exists conclusive evidence, that will sooner or later be published to the world. It is certain also that she did not determine to repudiate him for trivial reasons ; but for reasons so serious and weighty, that they will not be deemed positively insufficient for her justification, even by those who may on hearing them be disposed to deem them scarcely sufficient to justify her action. It is certain that from the beginning of September to the date of her accouchement, — a time when it was byron's married life. 301 especially incumbent on liiru to make sympathetic allowance for the imevenness of her spirits, and to show her extraordinary kindness ; and afterwards from the day of her child's })irth to the day of her journey to Leicestershire, he treated her with extra- ordinary unkmdness for which her conduct afforded no sufficient excuse. It is certain that she had good reason to think he miglit be insane; and instead of being singular m attributing his strange behaviour to mental disease she was countenanced in this view of his case by the poet's sister Augusta and his cousin George Byron, who were both of opinion that his conduct might possibly be due to trouble of bram, falling withm the term of ' mental derangement.' On all these points, fortunately for human nature there exists evidence. Xo doubt, Harness heard nonsensical stories of the poet's ill-treatment of his wife ; but however absurd they may have been in their details or from the peculiarities of the narrator, the stories about the discomfort of the lady's meals pointed to no slight matter, but to a constant source of daily and serious annoyance. I)yron's alleged dislike to see women eating was probably nothing more than a poetical way of statin^: the fact that it irked and irritated him to see them enjoying their food, whilst he, with an ever keen appetite pinching and biting his vitals, resisted the cravings of appetite. And he was not the man to pretend day after day at his own table, that heliked what he disliked extremely. He was not the man to put himself to the discomfort of ' making believe ' that he enjoyed his dinner and chat with his wife, when he was all the while longing for the meal to be over. 302 THE REAL LORD BYRON. The consequence was that, after the earlier months of her married life. Lady Byron usually breakfasted alone, lunched alone, and dined alone,- — or, what was even less cheerful, had the solitude of her meals broken by a husband who came in for a few minutes in the middle of a repast, or after showing himself at the outset of dinner ran off at the second course. Just as life's happiness is made up largely of small, daily, unre- membered enjoyments, the misery of human existence is made up in a great degree of countless petty, daily, and too often bitterly remembered vexations, any one of which may be fairly termed insignificant. It follows therefore that the comfortlessness, coming to Lady Byron's life from her husband's regimen of diet, is a matter not to be overlooked, in the consideration of her position at a time, when — as a young wife, looking forward to the perils of child-birth, at a distance from the mother and father whom she loved vehemently — she had especial need of her husband's tenderest con- sideration and most soothing speech. One of the earliest causes of discord between the young husband and his younger wife was his deter- mination to leave England as soon as possible, — to breathe a warmer air, and live under bluer skies ; to escape from the duns and fogs of London, and be at ease and freedom in a sunny clime. Four years since he had returned from .Greece in submission to the tyranny of circumstances, with the intention of leav- ing England again as soon as he should settle his affairs. On February 28, 1811, he had avowed this purpose to his mother in the letter from Athens, in which he says, ' I feel myself so much a citizen of the world, that the spot where I can enjoy a delicious btron's married life. 303 cliiimte, and ever>^ luxury, at a less expense than a common college life in England, will always be a country to me ; and such are in fact the shores of the Archipelago.' In the following June, he wrote to Hodgson that, ' after having a little repaired his irre- parable affairs,' he would be off again to Spain or the East, where he could at least have ' cloudless skies and a cessation from impertinence.' He had no sooner relinfjuished his purpose of accompanying the Earl and Countess of Oxford to Sicily in the summer of 1813, than he began to lay plans for an expedition to Abyssinia. Immediately after ' the treacle-moon ' at Hainaby, he invited Moore to join him in a year's tour through Italy, adding significantly, ' If I take my wife, you can take yours.' Any annoyance in England made him restless ; and with him restlessness quickly shaped itself into a yearning to go abroad, to a land of sunshine, blue skies, and freedom. Moore knew there was trouble at 13 Piccadilly Terrace, on the morrow of January 5, 1816, when he read the letter ending, 'But never mind, — as somebody says, " for the blue sky bends over all ! " I only should be glad, if it bent over me where it is a little bluer ; like the "skyish top of blue Olympus," which, by the way, looked very white when I last saw it.' Lady Byron opposed this wish to roam. She did not oppose it warmly or with excessive firmness. She only let him see that if his heart was in the East, hers was in old England, where she had a fiither and mother, and would soon have a nursery with a child in it. Now-a-days, with railroads and steamboats and telegrapliic cables, to live in Madrid or Cairo or Athens is only to live in a rather out-of-the-way part 304 THE REAL LORD BYRON. of England. But in 1815 foreign travel was tem- porary expatriation. Tourists of pleasure returned from southern Europe to London, to be shocked at the gaps made in the ranks of their home-loving kindred. On preparing for his Eastern tour Byron had told his mother he had better roam the world at once, as his marriage would probably end his days and opportunities for roaming. But now that he had been married some eight or nine months ; now that his young bride was on the point of giving birth to her first child, he thought it preposterous that she should expect him to curb his passion for roaming, out of regard for her feelings. After Byron's death Hobhouse, who loved him dearly in spite of his failings, used to say that selfishness was the grand defect and blemish of his character; and it was not in the power of the poet's closest friends to gainsay the severe judgment. It was a curious failing for a young man of vivid sensibility and generous impulses, who could not see pain or sorrow with- out weeping over it, who in his most urgent pecuniary straits would give a struggling author, a miserable widow, a group of wretched orphans, half his rapidly sinking balance at his bankers ; — for the young man who won the love of men, women and thoughtless children by the completeness of his sympathy with them. But selfishness was Byron's grand failing. He w^ould concede, he would give away anything except the one thing on which he had for the moment set his heart ; but as soon as any one denied him that one thing, or tried to take it from his hands, the selfishness overpowered every generous force of his nature. byron's married life. 305 Lady Byron had no sooner declared lier disinclin- ation to travel in countries far away from England, than she became a person, set on denying him enjoy- ment for which he yearned, a hard and unsympathetic creature to whom he was linked for ever by that rash, fatal act — his marriage. He told her he did not wisli for her company in his journeyings by sea and land. She could have her own pleasure and remain in Eng- land, whilst he would please himself at a distance from her. As she preferred her mother and father to her husband, he would not imitate her example and hinder her from pursuing happiness in her own way. But he would not be her slave any more than he would be her tyrant. He and Hobhouse would go abroad together ; and before Lady Byron went to Leicestershire with her babe, Bj^ron and Hobhouse had arrano-ed to leave Enoiand together in the sprmg. The young wife saw that she was not necessary to her husband's happiness. The pleasure of touring was greater to him than the pleasure of livmg with her; the delight of visiting new scenes, keener than his delight in her society. All tliis as tlie time drew nearer and nearer for the birtli of her child ! This difference having arisen between them, Byron and his wife daily drifted farther apart. Ceasing to trouble himself about her poetry, he was seldom present at her meals. Taking little note of her proceedings, he spent more time at the Drury Lane Theatre, where it devolved upon him (as a member of the Sub-Committee of Management, — or ^lisman- agement, as mahcious censors averred) to confer with dramatic authors, peruse bad comedies and worse VOL. I. X 306 THE REAL LORD BYRON. tragedies, take counsel with actors, and arbitrate on the disputes of actresses. Working hard on his poems (' The Siege of Corinth ' and ' Parisina,' written as his troubles grew thicker, passed through the printers' hands when his troubles were at their tliickest) he was annoyed when his wife disturbed him at his work by coming into his room. ' Byron, I am in your way ? ' she inquired on one occasion, when she entered the room, and found him standing before the fire, musing on his troubles : — the answer was 'Damaiably!' After admitting that he made this unmannerly reply, the poet ob- served to Medwm, ' I was afterwards sorry, and re- proached myself for the expression ; but it escaped me unconsciously — involuntarily ; I hardly knew what I said.' But he said things far more brutal and inexcusable. In her hearing he inveighed against his folly in marrying her, and vowed to extricate himself from the unendurable bondage of the union. He did worse, he himself told her that he had per- sisted in wooing her till he won her — not from motives of love and devotion, but from resentment and a thirst for vengeance : — an absolutely false statement that in his passionate incontinence of speech was probably made to other people. From this mad and utterly untrue speech came the revolting reports of the brutal words said to have been spoken by him to her during the journey from Seaham to Halnaby, and in the subsequent weeks when he was overflo^ving with affection for her. At Venice Byron confessed to Moore that there were occasions during his life with Lady Byron, Avhen he had ' breathed the breath of bitier words.' From these examples of his more byron's married life. 307 violent utterances to his young wife, it may be seen that the poet told Moore in that respect no more than the bare truth against himself. When Byron breathed the breath of bitter words, the breath was hot indeed and the words were very bitter. It has been suggested by successive writers that he frightened Lady Byron with wild fables of his wickedness. It is conceivable that he was guilty of such freaks of morbid humour, but no satis- factory evidence that he terrified her in this way has come to the writer of this page. At other times, instead of cutting her with sharp and burning speeches, he punished her with silence. In his childhood he had been given to fits of what he styled 'silent rage;' and now, sulking and scowling- all the while, he maintained an insulting and exas- perating taciturnity to the victim of his wrath for days together. His violence, also, expressed itself in other ways than speech. In a sudden rage at an in- cident, arising out of his distress for money, he threw a favourite Avatch on the hearth, and then smashed it to pieces with the poker. Headers will be the better able to account for all this maniacal behaviour — the rages of false words, the rages of stubborn silence, the out- pouring of wrath on a favourite watch, as though it were a living creature — when they are told that Byron was at this time (no less than in later times of his career) a laudanum-drinker. The man, who chewed tobacco to deaden the pain of his rigorous fasting, may have had recourse to ()[)ium for the same purpose. But the practice of taking opium in some form or other was so common in the higher classes of English society from the 308 THE KEAL LORD BYRON. opening of the present century till De Quincey's ' Confessions of an Opium Eater ' (1822) called atten- tion to the pernicious effects of the indulgence, that the poet may have taken his first dose of the drug at the advice of Lady Caroline Lamb (who is known to have been an habitual laudanum-drinker in her later time), or at the suggestion of some other person of fashion. The habit may have been formed in the East, and brought home with him, together with the two cantos of ' Childe Harold.' Anyhow there is the very best evidence that Byron was taking laudanum at this point of his story. — Another fact to be borne in mind respecting his condition, when other persons besides his young wife watched his eccentricities with anxious suspicion, is that just at the opening of 1816 he was visited with jaun- dice. With an over- wrought brain, nerves shaken by laudanum, temper incessantly irritated by his creditors, digestive organs impaired by fasting, a liver undergoing constipation, and a mind torn and oppressed by matrimonial misadventure, he may well have said and done things for which charity would be slow to hold him accountable. People have made merry over the folly of Lady Byron's advisers in regarding his hysterical emotion, at witnessing Kean's impersonation of Sir Giles Overreach, as a matter worthy of mention in the list of sixteen symptoms of insanity ; but to those who were unaware of the nervous peculiarity referred to in previous pages of this work, his overpowering agitation from so inconsiderable a cause may well have seemed worthy of medical notice. There were numerous good reasons for his wife, in Byron's married life. 300 common with bis sister and cousin, to attribute to mental derangement the symptoms which the men of medicine accounted for in another way. Three or four months earHer the patient had given every indication of contentment with his lot and of deliQ;ht in bis wife's society. Now, though she was about to present him with offspring and by his own admis- sion had treated him with consistent affectionateness, be resfarded her with aversion and addressed her with liarshness and insult. At the beoinnino; of Auo-nst lie could reflect on the previous seven months as a period of unruffled harmony, and was exulting in her generous acquiescence in the will he had made for the advantage of Augusta and her children, to the injury of his ow^n future offspring. And now in October be was assuring her with every appearance of sincerity that he abhorred wedlock, and had married her solely from resentment and for revenge. AVliat kindlier or more rational view could a young woman take of such behaviour than that her husband's quick and subtle genius had broken down the thin partition that was understood to divide great w'its from mad- ness? From the outset of his manly time Byron recognised an element of insanity in his mental consti- tution, and was now and again apprehensive that the madness would eventually conquer all the other forces of his great genius. And yet he and his friends affected to think Lady Byron guilty of monstrous impertinence in thinking him mad when he certainly behaved very much like a madman. Shunned and harshly used by a husband, wdiose aversion for her caused him to look away from her or down on the carpet more often than at her when they 310 THE REAL LOKD BYRON. met, Lady Byron was glad to welcome to her house her old governess, Mrs. Clermont, who came to stay with her former pupil in the midst of her trouble and anxieties. It would not be surprising if it could be shown that, in her want of sympathy and in the absence of a more suitable confidante. Lady Byron told Mrs. Clermont too much of her griefs, and was in other respects imprudently communicative to the person, whom Byron came to regard as the principal cause of his wife's resolve to repudiate him. Evi- dence there doubtless is to support the general opinion that Lady Byron was guilty of a weakness, inconsistent with her abundant self-respect and liabitual regard for her own dignity ; but the evi- dence is by no means conclusive. Before one could give a confident opinion on this point, it would be necessary to know the exact time and other circum- stances of the withdrawal of the letters from the poet's desk, the wav in which they came to Lady Byron's hands, and the time when she sent them to the writer's husband. Byron, as readers know, ac- quitted his wife of, or at least forbore to charge her with, being an accomplice to the withdrawal of the letters. Moreover there are irrounds for believins; that at least till she went into Leicestershire, Lady Byron maintained a proper reserve to her former preceptress. Lady Byron was certainly under the impression that her parents knew nothing of her domestic troubles, when she arrived at Kirkby Mallory in January 1816 ; and she could scarcely have been under this impression, had she talked freely of her griefs and cares to her mother's especial and confidential dependant. That Mrs. Clermont btkon's married life. 311 was a vigilant, busy, prying, meddlesome, scheming, mischievous woman, as women of her years and way of living often are, is conceivable though not quite certain. Reasons altogether distinct from Byron's vulgarly abusive 'Sketch' of the woman, whose activity in his affairs caused him to say at the moment of signmg the deed of separation, ' This is Mrs. Clermont's work,' make it probable that she deserved her odious name of ' the Mischief-maker.' She certainly did Byron an ill turn. But it does not follow that she was so dangerously mfluential over Lady Byron before the middle of January as the poet wished people to imagine. Nor does it follow that she was so completely without a natural right to be curious about his domgs and meddlesome in his con- cerns, as he caused the world to think. 312 CHAPTER XYI. THE SErARATION. Ada's Birth — Augusta, the Comfortei- — Lady Byron's Withdrawal from London — Her case against her Husband — Written Statement for Doctor and Lawyer — Lady Noel's Interview with Dr. Lush- ington- — Lady Bj-ron's 'Additional Statement' — Mrs. Clermont, the Mischief-maker — Jane Clermont, Allegra's Mother — The Tare Thee Well ' — Results of its PubUcation. The discord between Lord and Lady Byron had not diminished, when their daughter, ' The child of love — though born in bitterness, And nurtured in convulsion,' was born on December 10, 1815, and soon afterwards was christened Augusta Ada, the former of the two names being given to her in compliment to her aunt, the Hon. Mrs. Leigh, who was one of the babe's sponsors at the baptism. In those darkest days of December 1815, and January 1816, Mrs. Leigh was in her sister-in-law's house, nursing her, comforting lier, encouraging her to take a hopeful \iew of Byron's state of health, which caused the comforter no less anxiety than it had caused the wretched wife and mother. George Byron was a frequent caller at 13 Piccadilly Terrace, and in his astonishment at the poet's recent treatment of his wife, concurred with the two ladies in thmking that the behaviour, so perplex- ing to persons of no medical experience, was or at THE SKPARATION. ol3 least might be referable to mental illness. Bailiffs were in the house, and the post kept bringing letters to quicken Byron's anger and humiliation at his pecuniary embarrassments. On one point, at least, he showed his good sense. A house occupied by bailiffs and besieged by clamorous tradesmen being no fit abode for his wife, he begged Lady Byron to be off with her babe as soon as possible to her mother in the country ; — the request being made in writing on January- G, 181 G ; so made possibly on account of the husband's desire to avoid a personal interview with the woman who six months since had been the delio'ht of his heart. Ijudy Byron forthwith made her arrangements for the journey to Kirkby Mallory, which she deferred no later than January 15th, though it was questionable whether her strength Avould be sufhciently restored by that time for the fatigue of travelling in so cold a season. Mrs. Leigh, who after paying her sister-in- law a long visit wished to return to her husband and children in Cambridgeshire, was entreated by Lad\' Byron to remain yet a while in Piccadilly. Augusta had been her grateful sister's best comforter ; Augusta could control her brother in his fits of anger ; if Augusta would remain with the invalid in London, his Avife at Kirkby ]\Iallory would receive regular and reliable ncAvs of the progress, for good or ill, of affiiirs in London. It was by such arguments that Lady Byron induced Augusta to postpone her return to Six ]\Iile Bottom. On January 8, 1816, after talking the matter over with Augusta and Ceorge Byron, Lady Byron consulted Dr. Baillic about her husband's state of health ; but this visit to the physician was 314 THE REAL LORD BYRON. not the cause of the call he made at a later date (in the company of a lawyer) on the poet, — for which intrusion on his privacy Byron believed his wife to have been in no way accountable. The doctor's advice was that Lady Byron should go into the country in accordance with her husband's desire, and during: her absence from town should write him bright and animating letters. It was arranged between Lady Byron and Augusta that they should correspond daily ; so that whilst the one would know every change in her husband's case and every incident of the life in her London house, the other would be informed of every matter of Lady Byron's intercourse with her parents, having any relation to the poet's interests. The agreement of these ladies to write thus frequently and fully to one another, demon- strates the completeness of their mutual confidence, and of their wish for the greatest possible measure of sisterly intercourse at a time of the keenest anxiety to both of them. Of the affectionate warmth of their correspondence a notion may be formed from the scraps and extracts of some of Lady Byron's letters to her dear sister, that were published in 1869 by the ' Quarterly Review ' in the article on the Byron Mystery : — one of the most sagacious and judicious, and in every respect ablest articles, ever contributed to a Review, where literary adroitness and strength are matters of course. Taking her child with her. Lady Byron left London on January 15, 1816, and entered her father's house on the following day, with the hope of having Byron with her in Leicestershire before the middle of next month. The hope cannot have been a confident THE SEPARATION. 315 one ; for the view she took of liis illness necessarily made her apprehensive that a month hence he mi^^fht be no fit inmate for her mother's house. One of her apprehensions was that he would commit suicide. She and Augusta had more than once spoken apprehensively to George Byron about the invalid's laudanum-bottle, their fear being that he might take an overdose of its contents. Still she left town with the hope of seeing him at Kirkby ]Mallory in the middle of February ; for he had promised to come to her before he should go abroad : — the promise being accompanied with a very remarkable and important statement of the poet's main purpose in determining to join his wife in Leicestershire, and to stay with her there for some weeks. Like most young husbands, with hereditary dignity to transmit to their descendants, — indeed, like most newly married men of every social degree, — Byron had set his heart on having a son. On October 31, 1815, he had written to Moore, 'Lady B is in full progress. Next month will bring to light (with the aid of "Juno Lucina/6^r op^m," or rather opes, for the last are most wanted), the tenth wonder of the world — Gil Bias being the eighth, and he (my son's father) the ninth.' His child's sex had therefore caused Byron much disappointment, in which Lady Byron sympathised. As the peerage, to which she had a prospect of succession would descend in the female line in case of her death without male issue, Lady Byron was less troubled than her husband at having a daughter, when a son would have been more welcome. She was however disappointed by the domestic incident, and before she left London for 316 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Kirkby Malloiy was comforting herself with the hope that her next child would be a son. Byron was toi^ched far more acutely by the misadventure ; and as he was not given to hide his feehngs out of regard for the feelino;s of others, it is not wonderful that he allowed Lady Byron- to see his vexation. It is less an affair for surprise than regret that he allowed his annoyance to express itself in petulant words. Like Lady Byron he hoped for better fortune in the coming time ; and on announcing his purpose of joining her in Leicestershire, he told her that he would remain there in her society until she should be in the first stage of another progress to maternit}':- — an assurance that aiforded her the liveliest gratification. In con- fidence iVugusta was informed of Byron's intention to visit Leicestershire in the ensuins: month, and also of the chief purpose of the visit. After her sister-in- law's departure, it devolved on Mrs. Leigh to use her influence over her brother to make him follow his wife to Kirkby Mallory ; and for the achievement of this end, she took occasion to influence Le Manu (Byron's apothecary), through her cousin, George Byron, who received a hint that he should instruct the medical attendant to urge his patient to go into the country for his health's sake. It follows therefore that, when she left London for Leicester- shire, Lady Byron was animated by a hope, which could not have occupied her breast had she not still regarded her husband afl'ectionately. On her way from town to Kirkby Mallory, Lady Byron wrote her husband a tender and cordial letter (beginning with 'Dear Duck' and signed with the pet name 'Pippin'), and on the following day (January 16) after her THE SEPARATION. 317 arrival at her parents' house she wrote him another epistle in the same vein of humorous fondness. This second letter was written by a wife still hopeful of seeinjr her husband in the course of a few weeks, in order that an lieir might be born to the liyron barony. And Lady Byron continued in this hope until she received intelligence from London that her husband, though seriously out of health, was not insane. Seventy years since people neither knew nor troubled themselves so much as they do now- a-days about the transmission of malady from parents to offspring. Participating in every anxiety, ]\Ir8. Leigh was cognizant of every hope that occupied Lady Bp'on's mmd during this season of their common trouble. ' There is no one whose society is dearer to me, or can contribute more to my happiness,' Lady Byron wrote, at the moment of leaving her husband to his sister's care, in one of her letters to Augusta, published fourteen years since in the ' Quarterly Review.' The mutual confidence of the two sisters-in-law was perfect. Eloquent oi" their affection for one another, the confidence was no less eloquent of the high opinion Byron's wife had of his sister's womanly discretion and womanly goodness. AVhen Lady Byron appeared before them at Kirk by IMallory on the 16tli of July, Sir Ralph and Lady Noel saw from her looks that she was far from well. She was pale and thin ; but till she spoke to them about it, they knew nothing of the anxiety that had been oppressing and fretting her for weeks and months. Before she went to bed she had told them her whole story, — withholding from them nothing of 318 THE REAL LORD BYRON. the cares she had brought with her to Leicestershire. Though she made a full statement — a statement without a single reserve — Lady Byron said nothing to move her parents to indignation against their child's husband. Byron was ill in body and mind, especially in mind. He was set on going abroad Avhen he was unfit for travel. His wife was possessed by terrifying apprehensions for him. After hearing her story, /rt'm which nothing was withheld, Sir Ralph and Lady Noel said that Byron must be induced to come to Kirkby Mallory, where he should be considered and humoured in everything. The knowledge of the cause of any perverse humour he might display would make it im- possible for Sir Ralph and Lady Noel to resent the perversity. Lady Noel, a kindly and well-intentioned woman, though excitable and passionate, made sensible suggestions of measures to be taken for the sufferer's advantage. Before their talk ended, Lady Byron and her parents came to several conclusions. It was decided that Lady Noel should write to Byron, entreating him to come to them. Respecting Byron's project for going abroad with Hobhouse, it was decided that, should it appear that the poet was in no fit state for the enterprise, it would be well for Sir Ralph and Captain Byron to wait upon Hobhouse, and give him their reasons for feeling strongly it would be hurtful to Byron to travel for the present,- — -hurtful to him in respect to his domestic peace and reputation as well as his health. In the face of such a representation from Lady Byron's father and Lord Byron's nearest kinsman, Hobhouse it was thought would not venture to persist in encouraging the invalid to go abroad. THE SEPARATION. 319 The 17tli of January, 1816 — the day on which Lady Noel with her daughter's concurrence wrote the kind and sympathetic letter to Byron, inviting him to Kirkby Mallory — was a day of pam and distress to Lady Byron. She had of late suffered severely from acute headache ; and on this day the headache assailed her with unusual vehemence, and put her to extra- ordinary torture. It cheered her to know that the invitation had been despatched to Byron ; and in the intervals between the neuralgic paroxysms she could look forward to the time when Byron would come to her. The next morning's post brought news from London that troubled her ; — news that her husband was not insane. Le Manu's report was that he detected nothing of mental derangement in his patient. The apothecary was confident that the symptoms, which had occasioned Lady Byron, Augusta and Captain Byron, so much alarm, were referable to the combined excitement and exhaustion of an overwrought brain, the excessive vexation to the patient's temper from the action of his creditors, the melanchol}^ arising from domestic annoyances, and the disorder of the liver, now declaring itself in manifest jaundice. On receiving this intelligence of her husband's mental soundness. Lady Byron declared that she would never live again with the man who, being sane, had treated her in a way, for which insanity alone could be pleaded as a sufficient excuse. Even yet if it could be proved that he was insane, she could live with him and love him ; but should Le Manu's opinion be con- firmed, she would never again put herself in the power of the man who had treated her so ill. Thus the case stood on the 18th of January, when Lady 320 THE REAL LORD BYROiST. Noel was making ready for lier journey to London, — in the first place to consult Dr. Baillie ; and then, in case Byron should be found of sound mind, to take counsel with Dr. Lushington, For the information of the physicians, and, if needful, for the instruction of the lawyer. Lady Byron mtide with her own pen a statement of her reasons for thinking her husband mad ; — a statement that was a repetition of the matters she had told her father and mother on tlie 16th instant. Notwithstanding what Lady Byron wrote and published to the contrary, fourteen years later, this statement comprised (without reserve of any kind) Lady Byron's whole case against her husband, as it then stood. Thus instructed and authorised to act for her daughter, she set forth on her mission ; and for several days after their arrival in London, Lady Noel and her companion (^Irs. Clermont — the mischief-maker) were busy. The first notable consequence of the activity ot' these two ladies was the visit, which Dr. Baillie and the lawyer paid Lord Byron, whose treatment of them, however wanting it may have been in courtesy, satis- fied the intruders that he was no madman. Tlie physician and lawyer having no doubt on this im- portant point, tlie ladies went off to Dr. Lushington, to learn whether Byron's treatment of his wife would entitle her to the benefit of judicial separation. After hearing and considering the case submitted to him by Lady Noel, who showed no disposition to exaggerate the facts, the counsel was of opinion that, though the poet's misconduct would entitle his wife to judicial separation, it was not of so heinous a kmd as to render separation indispensable. It was a case for THE SEPARATION. 321 reconciliation ; and the counsel wished to be of service in l)ringing the quarrel to an amicable conclusion. This opinion was given on what was then the whole of Lady Byron's case against her husband. The evidence is more than sufficient that she withheld nothing of her original case from her parents. In the absence of her mother and Mrs. Clermont, Lady Byron spent doleful days and wretched nights at Kirkby Mallory. There were moments when, in alarm for her own mind, she felt she w^as in no fit state to have the management of herself. One day she was seen riding about the Kirkby Mallory Park at her horse's fullest gallop. On the morrow she could not leave the room, where, racked with head- ache and burning with fever, she alternately lay on a couch or paced over the floor, — crying to God for help, declaring she had done nothing why he should desert her. Of Byron she thought by turns bitterly and tenderly, resentfully and relentingly. To lessen her distress of heart and brain, she took pen and wrote her husband a letter of vehement feeling (the letter mentioned by previous writers about Byron), which she withheld at the last moment from the post. Had Byron come before her, with the gentlest of his smiles, the richest tones of his irresistible voice, and the light of love in his eyes, wlien she was penning that letter, there would have been an end to their discord. This passage of softening emotion was followed by hard moods, and gusts of anger. On being told that to get judicial separation it would perhaps be necessary for her to endure the scandal and indignity of a trial, she declared she would endure any shame rather than the misery of living with the man who had treated VOL. I. Y 322 THE REAL LORD BYRON. her so badly. When she talked vindictively of her husband, Lady Byron's words of wrath were some- what seasoned with self-rig-liteonsness. As for Byron's sensibility and the pain and shame, that would come to him from the scandal of separation, Lady Byron thought it was better his pride should be broken and punished in this, than in the next world. It was hard she should be made the instrument of his cor- rection. But God's will must be done. She must do her duty. When Lady Byron had begun to think in this wild and insolent and self-righteous way, the chance was small for the speedy reconcilement of the angry husband and resentful wife. In all this miserable business George Byron and Augusta were wholly in Lady Byron's confidence, if not wholly on her side. George Byron indeed was completely on her side. In his opinion .the fault was altogether with his cousin, — none of it with his cousin's wife. And though she clung fondly to her brother, Augusta was brave enough to tell him the fault was chiefly, if not wholly, with him. Byron never in his heart forgave his cousin for siding with Lady Byron in this bitter contention ; but he admired and honoured his sister more than ever, for the steadi- ness and courage with which she defended his wife and censured him. To the last hour of her sojourn at 13 Piccadilly Terrace, Augusta never humoured her brother by speaking a single word in censure of his wife. One result of Lady Byron's perfect confidence in Mrs. Leigh and George Byron, was that they knew much more than the poet of his wife's doings and pur- poses, after the 15th of January. Byron did not know TIIK SEl'AKATION. 823 of liis wife's intention to repudiate liim till the '2iu\ of February, 18iG, wlien he received Sir Ralph Noel's letter of proposal for an amicable separation, (hi that day Mrs. Leioh and her cousin, Captain George Anson Byron, R.N., had been in possession of Lady Byron's purpose for more than a week; but the cousins forbore to give Byron a hint of the course atfairs had taken, thinking it best in every way that the poet should get his first knowledge of his wife's determination from her father. Consequently Augusta, still her brother's guest at 13 Piccadilly Terrace, and George Byron, a daily visitor at his cousin's house, were aware of Lady Byron's decision on this grand question some eight days before it was communicated to the person whom it concerned most deeply. The exact date of Lady Xoel's conference with Dr. Lushmgton is not known to the writer of this page. But the conference seems to have taken })lace on January 22, IK 16. It cannot well have been earlier. It certainly was not later. A fortnight " or three weeks later ( 'about a fortnight or perhaps more,' said Dr. Lushington in 1830) Lady Iiyron was in London with her father on business touching the separation. It has been assumed by most of the many writers about this business, that Sir Iial})h Noel was throughout the allair a mere cypher in the hands of the over-bearing Lady Noel and the artful Mrs. Clermont, — and had no strong feeling on the subject. In this last respect, at least, he has been misrepresented. He was the first to cry out for the lawyer. And as soon as he had reason to think Byron sane, he became the stern censor of his only 824 THE REAL LORD BYRON. child's husband. On learning that the poet certainly was not mad, the baronet was pugnacious in the highest degree and would not hear of reconciliation. Lady Byron probably took her own course in the matter from first to last. But if her action was in- fluenced by parental authority, the influence came from her father rather than her mother. If Byron knew this, he never admitted it. He preferred to attribute his domestic troubles and consequent social disgrace to tlie rancour of two deceitful women rather than the judgment of an honourable and sen- sible man. Writing to Moore on February 29. 1816, when he was in the fiercest period of his first fury against Lady Noel and Mrs. Clermont, Byron said, ' My little oirl is in the country, and, they tell me, is a very fine child, and now nearly three months old. Lady Noel (my mother-in-law, or, rather, a/law) is at present overlooking it. Her daughter (Miss Milbanke that was) is, I believe, in London with her father. A Mrs. C. (now a kind of housekeeper and spy of Lady N.'s) Avho, in her better days, was a washerwoman, is sup- posed to be — by the learned — ver}^ much the occult cause of our late domestic discrepancies. In all this business, I am the sorriest for Sir Ralph. He and I are equally punished, though magis pares quam similes in our afllictions. Yet it is hard for both to sufl*er for the fault of one, and so it is — I shall be separated from my wife ; he will retain his.' This was Byron's way of putting his case against the women, and showing his disposition (possibly sincere) to regard Sir Ralph as his friend. Whilst Lady Byron was in town with her father, she had an interview with Dr. Lushington, ' about a THE SEPARATION. 325 fortnight, or perhnps more, after the advocate's first interview with Lady Noel.' At that interview Lady liyron informed Dr. Lushington of facts, wliich the lawyer in 1830 was of o})inion coidd not have been known to Sir Ralph. These additional facts had such an effect upon the lawyer, that, instead of continuing to reirard the case as one for ^conciliation, he de- clared that reconciliation was impossible. On receiving the same additional information. Sir Sanutel Romilly underwent the same change of opinion and declared it no case for reconcilement. Writing in 1830, four- teen years after the events, Lady Byron spoke of these additional facts, as matters she had reserved from her parents, when penning the statement for her mother to submit to medical and legal advisers in January 1816. ' She,' Lady Byron wrote in 1830 of her mother's part in the affair, 'was empowered by me to take legal opinions on a written statement of mine, though I had then reasons for reserving a part of the case from the knowledge even of my father and mother.' AVritini*: so lonji' after the affair with in- sufficient memoranda Lady Byron may well have imagined that these additional matters were part of her ori"-inal case against her husbiind, when in truth they came to her knowledge at some time subsequent to 15 January, 1816. The memory of the most honest witnesses is so treacherous and unrelial)le, that to suggest Lady J^yron made this mistake in 1830 is to raise no suspicion of her general veracity, or of her l)o)ia fides on that particular occasion. Atler making lier statements (of January 1(5 and January 18. 1816) to her parents. Lady l^)yron believed the statements had been explicit. Affecting to take her parents 32G THE REAL LORD BYRON. wholly into her confidence, and causing them to think themselves so treated, Lady Byron cannot have been innocent of deceit, if whilst professing to tell them everything she withheld the chief fact from them. Disregard for truth certainl}^ was not one of Lady Byron's failings at this early stage of her career or (though she lived to say things strangely untrue) at any time of her passage through life. There is other evidence that Lady Byron's original statement to her parents was the whole of her case against her husband up to January 15, 1816. But of this evidence there is no need to give the par- ticulars. The additional statement, that had so great an effect on Dr. Lushington and Sir Samuel Romilly, was either a false statement (which is in the highest degree improbable), or a statement of matters that came to Lady BjTon after her first communication to her parents. As the poet was living more or less under espionage, circumstances to his greater discredit with Lady Byron may well have come to her ears in the course of three or four weeks. What was the statement ? By those, who gave their credulity to the monstrous invention set forth in Mrs. Beecher Stowe's book, it has been assumed that this mys- terious and additional statement to Lady Byron's counsel was a communication which could not have failed to inspire the lawyer with unutterable repug- nance to the Honourable Mrs. Leigh, and to make him think her unfit for the society of any Christian woman. Had the mysterious statement been what the writer of that lamentable book fancied it to be. Lady Byron would scarcely have told Dr. THE SEPARATION. 327 Lushington, only a few days later, that she Avas lonoino- to have an interview with her dear sister Augusta — her child's godmother — for the purpose of eonferrins: with her on their domestic interests. Nor would even so courteous a gentleman as young Dr. Lushington, on receiving this piece of information, have merely advised Lady Bjrron to keep away from Ada's godmother, till the business of the separation was settled, lest their necessarily emotional conversa- tion at so critical a moment should have a prejudicial effect on their future intercourse. Moreover, had the mysterious statement been what Mrs. Stowe was induced to imagine it, Lady Byron could scarcely have continued for many years to live on terms of close and affectionate mtimacy with her sister-in-law, and at the same time have been able to retain the cordial sympathy and chivalric admiration of her famous lawyer. What was the mysterious statement of which so much has been written? What were the words, spoken in strict confidence by Lady Byron to Dr. Lushington, that made the advocate take another and altogether different view of his client's case? What were the facts — or the alleviations which two hard- headed lawyers were content to receive as proven facts — that, besides working so great a change in the lady's legal adviser, determined the counsel on the other side (Sir Samuel Komilly) to return the fee with which he had been retained, on the ground that Lady Byron had a right to the privileges of separa- tion, and that under the newly discovered circum- stances of the case Byron had no right to resist her demand? What were the facts or the allegations VOL. I. 328 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. that affected Byron's own counsel in so remarkable a manner? Before an attempt is made to answer these questions, or rather to indicate the right answers to them, something must be said of two women who exercised no small influence over the poet's career. Two ladies named Clermont are memorable per- sonages of the Byronic story ; ]\Irs. Clermont, the Mischief-maker, the mature woman of proverbial infamy, and Jane Clermont, the sparkling girl of fervid temper and melancholy fate, the mother of Allegra. Whilst Mrs. Clermont appeared at Lady Noel's receptions as the whilom governess of Miss Milbanke, and the gentlewoman ever in faithful attendance on Lady Byron's overbearing and rather hot-t' mpered mother, Jane Clermont shone as one of the beauties of a literary set, some of whose members Lady Noel condescended to favour. Of Mrs. Cler- mont the Mischief-maker every one has heard from the satire Byron poured upon her, almost as much to his own discredit as to her infamy. But the poet's biographers have hitherto been strangely and suspi- ciously reticent about the charming girl wdio gave Byron his natural daughter. The surname of these two ladies has been spelt in various ways. One comes upon it m the form of Claremont, Clairmont, and Charlemont as well as Clermont. — Jane Clermont (as her name is rightly spelt m the British Museum Catalogue), the clever and brilliant daughter of William Godwin's second wife, had no likmg either for her Christian name or her surname. Dropping Jane (either because it was Christian or unromantic), she cut tlie second syllable from her surname, and adaptmg the lirst syllable of it to her sense of the fitness of things, THE SEPARATION. 329 called herself — Claire. A beautiful brunette, with fine thouii-h irre<;"ular features, this girl of a wayward spirit and Italian aspect called on Byron, as a ])erson of power in the Drury Lane Theatre, when lie was in the midst of his domestic troubles. Claire's purpose in the visit was to ask the poet to introduce her as an actress to the stage. The girl's name caught the ear of the poet, whose pulse always quickened at the sound of his old schoolmate's name (Clare) ; and the brightness of her beauty charmed his fancy. Why Claire's application for employment on the stage was unsuccessful does not appear. Possibly Byron saw she would not make a good actress. Possibly he thought she would do better by becom- ing his mistress. Any how the poet conceived a passion for Claire; and Claire, 'holding' (as Mr. Rossetti expresses it) ' independent notions on ques- tions such as that of marriage,' fell in love with the poet, — love that changed slowly to detestation. The day of Claire's first interview with P)yron is unknown ; the precise time at which she yielded to his addresses is of course unknown. Circumstances however point to some one of the earlier days of February 1816, — some day closely following on Sir Ralph Noel's announcement to Byron of his wife's desire for separa- tion, — as the time at which the poet's brief association with William Godwin's step-daughter began. It is not very probable that it began earlier. It certainly did not begin before Lady l^>yron's departure from Picca- dilly Terrace ; though there is reason to believe that Lady Byron was ere long induced to imagine it began whilst she was in town. Partly because he felt that greater communicativeness would weaken the case 330 THE REAL LORD BYRON. against Lady Byron and put discredit on the ' Fare Thee Well,' and partly because he wished to spare the feelings of Godwin and Mrs. Shelley, Moore skates very lightly over the dangerous surface of Byron's scarcely edifying friendship with Allegra's mother. After insisting that Byron's official connex- ion with Drury Lane Theatre afforded nothing at which his wife could fairly take umbrage, he observes, ' The sole case in which he afforded anything like real grounds for such an accusation did not take place till after the period of the separation.' The penod of separation is an elastic expression. It may be taken as covering only the time between Lady Byron's journey from Piccadilly to the second day of the following month, the day on which Byron was in- formed of his wife's purpose to keep away from him ; or it may be taken as covering the far greater time between Lady Byron's journey to the country and the 22nd of April, on which day the deed of separa- tion was signed. Li his own breast Moore used the expression in the smaller sense ; whilst he intended his readers to construe it in the laro;er sense. Feelino; it would be imprudent to make no reference to a matter which was imperfectly known to a large number of people, Moore thought it best to refer to it in a manner which would cause his readers to infer that the matter was of a time subsequent to the publica- tion of the verses on the unforgiving wife. Born at least as early as January 22, 1817, Allegra was no offspring of a premature birth. Leaving England on April the 25th, Byron saw nothing more of Claire till the 27th of the follow- ing month at Geneva, whither she travelled in THE SEPARATION. 331 the company of tlie Shelleys. Allegra's birth was due to nothing that took place after Byron's with- drawal from England. Byron had taken Claire for his goddess, and she had enjoyed his patronage for several weeks before he crossed the water from Dover to Ostend. The ' Fare Thee Well ' (published in the middle of April 1816) did not set the sentimental women weeping, till the poet had for a considerable period found consolation in Claire's smiles for the cruelty of his unforgiving wife. Whilst the poet's liaison with Jane Clermont was a new arrangement, it came to the knowledge of Mrs. Clermont, the Mischief-maker, who rendered Lord Byron the considerable dis-service, and her former pupil the questionable ser\4ce of informing Lady Byron of the affair. The intelligence could not fail to incense Lady Byron. It did incense her. For though liyron could have urged in his defence, that he had not knelt to Claire till he had been discarded by his wife, the quickness with which he had found material consolation for her severity was peculiarly calculated to pique Lady Byron's self-love, quicken her animositv against him, and confirm her in her purpose of having nothing more to do with him. On coming to her knowledge, the liaison may well have been regarded by Lady Byron as a deiwonstration that he had never really loved her. An unsuspicious woman, in Lady Byron's i)osition, would have been almost certain to assume that the liaison had begun before the separation, even to assume that her husband had sent her into the country, in order that he miglit enjoy the society of his mistress with greater security from detection. Being of a suspicious nature, Lady 332 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Byron necessarily leapt to the erroneous conclusions to which an unsuspicious woman would have come. Having taken this view of the liaison, it was natural for Lady Byron to place it amongst her ori- ginal grounds of displeasure with her husband, — to think and speak of it as part of her original case against him. It misses several barley-corns of certainty that Lad}^ Byron's ' additional statement ' to her counsel had reference to her husband's intimacy Avith Jane Clermont ; and in the absence of the several barley- corns of positive evidence — likely to appear at any moment, almost certain to appear on the publication of the Hobhouse papers — that would either convert a considerable body of circumstantial evidence into a perfect historic demonstration or exhibit its fallaciousness, no personal historian would be justi- fied in offering the present suggestion as anything more than a reasonable hypothesis, countenanced by a variety of facts. Readers are therefore cautioned to take the suggestion as nothing more than a reasonable hypothesis pointing to what will probably be found in due course the true explanation of matters that have caused the world much perplexity. The strong evidence that Lady l^yron's first state- ment (of January 16) of her case against her husband w\as a full and unreserved statement, the sufficient evidence that Lady Byron's written statement (of January 18) was no less explicit and complete, and the abundant evidence that Byron's marital behaviour up to January 15 had not been faulty in any impor- tant particular (discoverable to his wife) over and above the matters set forth in the two statements, are THE SEPARATION. 333 three several bodies of testimony justifying the strongest opinion that Lady Byron's additional state- ment \_if a true one, — and the lady was not at that time at all likely to make an intentionally untrue one] must have related to some matters that, besides coming to her knowledge had taken place since her departure from London on January 15, 1816. Though the precise date of its commencement is unknown and most likely undiscoverable, Byron's intimacy with Jane Clermont certainly followed so closely on Lady Byron's journey to Kirkby Mallory, that it was probably known to her before she came up to town towards the middle of February to confer with Dr. Lushington. Byron knew that Lady Byron's ' additional statement ' to Dr. Lushington (made towards the middle of February) was the cause of the advocate's new view of his client's case, — and the cause of Romilly's determination not to act profes- sionally against Lady Byron's demand for a separa- tion. Knowing this he regarded Mrs. Clermont as the person chiefly accountable for his domestic troubles ; — as the person really accountable for the ' additional statement ' that had operated so seriously to his dis- advantage. The period of Byron's wildest wrath against Mrs. Clermont lay midway between the middle of February, when the ' additional statement ' was made, and the middle of April, when the ignoljle ' Sketch' was published. On February 29, 1816, he wrote to Moore the letter of coarse abuse of Mrs. Clermont, and he dated the satire on the obscure gentlewoman March 29, 1816. He regarded Mrs. Clermont as the author of the ' additional statement ' made a fortnight before the railing letter. She was VOL. I. 334 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. the channel through which Lady Byron sooner or later gained her knowledge of her husband's intimacy with Jane Clermont ; — an affair that incensed Lady Byron long after she had heard of it. If the ' ad- ditional statement ' had reference to the Jane Cler- mont business, Dr. Lushington could only say to his client, ' That being so, and your feelings being what they are, I will no longer advise you to think of reconciliation ; ' and as a man of fine feeding Romilly could only say to his client, ' I will not be used as an instrument for forcing Lady Byron to return to a husband who knows so well how to make himself happy without her.' Regarding her husband's intimacy with Jane Clermont as an affair of older standing than January 15, 1816, Lady Byron (for reasons already indicated) may well have come to regard it in 1830 as part of her original case against her husband ; as something withheld from her parents in January 1816 ; as something kept back from the oral statement of January 16, and the written state- ment of January 18, although her first knowledge of the matter was considerably subsequent to those days. It is not difiicult to imagine reasons why Lady Byron felt herself bound in honour to withhold her know- ledge of the Jane Clermont affair from her parents. If the information, which Lady Byron withheld from her parents, related to that business, it was doubtless so withheld out of respect to the feelings and wishes of its giver, Mrs. Clermont. Several motives are conceivable, anyone of which would dispose the mis- chief-maker to bind her former pupil to withhold the information from her father and mother. Care for Jane's welfare and dread of her displeasure, concern THE SEPARATION. 335 for Jane's reputation and concern for her own advantage, may have made Mrs. Clermont urgent with Lady Byron to keep from every one but her lawyers a matter so discreditable to the girl and her connections. The Mischief-maker's natural preference for secrecy may have been stimulated by regard for Godwin's feelings. Slie may have been actuated by fear of Byron, and a nervous desire to avoid the very disrepute he put so ruthlessly upon her. — The large body of facts and considerations indicated in this long paragraph no doubt fall short of an historic demonstration, that Lady BjTon's mysterious state- ment to her lawyer referred to the Jane Clermont business. But they are facts and considerations to justify a strong opinion, that a perfect exhibition oiall the circumstances and consequences of the poet's intimacy with Jane Clermont would probably put an end to all uncertainty respecting his wife's ' additional statement ' to Dr. Lushington. Though the new love followed so closely upon the old, that prosaic persons "will be disposed to think the poet cannot have suffered severely from the loss of the wife, for whom he so speedily found a substitute, it would be a mistake to resfard the ' Fare Thee Well ' as an altogether insincere and theatrical performance, by which Bp'on hoped to win sympathy for himself, and cause antipathy to the wife, against whom he was so incapable of ' rebelling.' That it was published for such ends is more than probable. That it went to the press without his authority or knowledge, through the action of an officious friend, as he meant to inform the world in his posthumous ' Memoirs,' is very much less than probable. VOL. I. 336 THE REAL LORD BYRON. It can, however, be readily believed that the verses, which should have been seen by no one save the writer and the person to whom he addressed them, were the result of genuine emotion. The wife, Avhom he had wooed with a persistence foreign to the im- petuous and gusty passions of his earlier time, may have occasioned him the disappointment that is the usual sequel of extravagant expectations ; but their intercourse had been fruitful of endearments and mutual tenderness. Though she was not one of the few women, whose love is more likely to be quickened than extinguished by unkindness, she had unques- tionably married him from affection. The mere vanity, which has been declared her only motive in accepting him, would in so temperate a woman have been satisfied by a suit that was no secret in her circle. The oiFer which she declined had given her all the triumph she doubtless coveted over her rival at Mel- bourne House. Mere rivalry would have disposed her to declme the second offer, even as she had declined the first, rather than to accept the suitor who was not likely to revert to her married rival. On the other hand, though selfishness caused the poet to repent his marriage as soon as he was required to sacrifice his own wishes to his wife's happiness, and had chafed for a brief while under the petty vexations of conjugal bondage, it is no less certain that he also married from affection. Of course there were con- tributory motives and infiuences. But on either side the predominant motive to this luckless union was sentimental preference. On Lady Byron's side the feeling may have been deficient in fervour and in- tensity, qualities not to be looked for in a woman of THE SEPARATION. 337 lier tranquil and comparatively unemotional nature. On Lord Byron's side the feeling was certainly devoid — perhaps ominously devoid — of the tempestuous rage and sweet turbulence, which three years later made him sing on the river's brink, as he journeyed to- wards Bologna, * My blood is all meridian ; were it not, I had not left my clime, nor should I be, In spite of tortures, ne'er to be forgot, A slave again of love, — ' But it was no marriage of 'convenance.' It was as much a love-marriage on both sides as ninety-and- nme out of every hundred marriages done and cele- brated with all honesty in love's name, and without a hint heard from any corner to their sentimental discredit. Lady Byron was no woman to promise to love a man, without regard to the importance of the ^ vow. Pliable though he was in a clever woman's hands, Byron was not the man to marry a woman he didn't really care for, simply because Lady Melbourne (old enough to be his mother, as he called her:— indeed old enough to be his grandmother) wished him to do so. Plis letters before and after his marriage, all the circumstances of his suit to the lady, and the superabundant evidence of the har- mony of their tempers durhig the earlier half of their term of union, put it beyond doubt that he loved her on the bridal morning, and delighted in her for several months. That she was really acceptable to him during this period of their closest 'intunacy is shown by his reluctance to sign the deed of separation, and shown yet more strongly by his futile attempt to' lure VOL. I. 2 338 THE REAL LORD BYRON. her back to his embrace soon after his withdrawal from Eno;land, notwithstandino; all the embitterino: humiliations which their dissension and severance had occasioned him. Had he not still felt a strong attachment to his wife, it is inconceivable that within three months of putting his hand to the deed he would, in accordance with Madame de Stael's counsel, have made overtures throuo;h a friend in Engfland for a reconcilement. Of those overtures nothing is known positively, with the exception of their failure and his vindictive annoyance at their failure. But they must have been based on a frank admission that Lady Byron had much to forgive, and must have proceeded from a sincere yearning for restoration to her favour and companionship. They cannot have resulted from mere arguments and considerations of prudence. It is marvellous and perplexing that they should have been made so soon after the rupture which had been fruitful of so many exasperating incidents. It was absolutely impossible for Byron to have made them, liad he not found her a congenial companion, and persisted in loving her. In the first three months of his separation from the woman for whom he felt thus strongly, memory cannot have failed to stir his sensibility with words and looks she had given liim, — with pathetic scenes in which they had been the sole actors. His sensi- bility cannot have failed to rouse poetic fancy to play on these pictures of remembrance. Acting upon one another in their customary manner, remembrance, feeling, and imagination may well have produced the flood of tender and subduins: emotions that found utterance in the valedictory verses. But though the THE SEPARATION. 339 poem may have been an outpouring of genuine feel- ing, it was published with a mean and malicious pur- pose. Given to the world as a fair statement of his case against his wife and of her case against him, it became a falsehood. The act of publication was, in truth, a crafty attempt on the poet's part to catch applause at her expense, to get advantage to himself by lowering her in the world's regard. It was an act of public war upon the woman he had injured, that changing her regard for him, determined her to change her course towards him, — and henceforth to be silent in behalf of the man who was so well quali- fied to be her assailant and his own defender. On reading the pathetic verses, which brought their writer much sympathy and caused thousands of people to imagine he had been more sinned against than sinning, Madame de Stael exclaimed, ' How gladly would I have been unhappy in Lady Byron's place ! ' Had this woman of wit been in Lady Byron's place — had she been Lady Byron instead of Madame de Stiiel — she would have regarded the verses as comino; from a husband who, after woomo; her for two years and a half assiduously, had in nine short months found her society tame and wearisome ; a husband who after living in harmony with her for seven or eight months had made her feel that his delight in possessing her was merely the delight of a child playing with a new toy ; a husband who, whilst recognising her conscientious desire to please him, had told her she wasted her pains on an enterprise beyond her power ; a husband who, passing abruptly from tenderness to harshness, had poured cruel speech u})on her at a time when her health gave her a peculiar 340 THE REAL LORD BYRON. title to his most delicate consideration ; a husband who within a few weeks of her accouchement had told her she must choose between travelling with him, or staying at home with her mother, whilst he pursued his pleasure in distant lands, where he would find life enjoyable without her ; a husband who, whipped to wild fury by her reluctance to assent to either alterna- tive, had declared his union with her the one dis- astrous step of his life ; a husband who in moments of calmer malice had said he never loved her, and indeed wooed her out of spite from the date of his first ofi'er to the date of his second proposal ; a hus- band who, passing from noisy rage to silent rage, had lived with her for days together in speechless gloom, and whilst persecuting her with morose taciturnity had never encountered her glance, without instantly dropping or averting his eyes in a manner eloquent of aversion. Had she been Lady Byron, and seen the verses for the first time in the author's own hand- writing, Madame de Stiiel would have had reason for thinking it probable he had not sent them to her without first reading them, in a voice of cynical drollery, to Jane Clermont. Had she been Lady Byron, and seen the verses for the first time in a newspaper, she would have read them as an ingenious composition sent to the press for her injury by the man who, no long while since, had spoken of her as breaking her marriage-vow. Had she been fully instructed in the case, the Frenchwoman of a proud spirit and exacting temper would have been less ready to change places with Lady Byron, and less hopeful that the unforgiving wife would be induced by a few submissive and conciliatory phrases, to THE SEPARATION. 341 pillow herself once more on the breast 'where her head so oft had lain.' Had the verses been sent by their writer to Lady Byron for her sole perusal on the 17th of March (the date assigned to them by their author), they might have made her falter, at least for a few moments, in her purpose. It is even conceivable, though impro- bable, that surrendering herself to their influence, she might (the Jane Clermont business notwith- standing), have answered the verses in a way that would have saved her from the imputation of ' wanting one sweet weakness — to forgive.' But their publication in the middle of April was an outrage she had good reason to resent. To receive such an insult tamely, to endure unresentfiilly so undying an injury — a wrong repeated daily throughout the world — a woman must be either the equal of the angels or much loAver than sensitive and self-respecting womankind. To Lady Byron the out- rage was the more offensive on account of what she regarded its meanness. Heretofore she had admired, loved, feared, and pitied her husband. In the season of his triumph she had regarded him with admiration, whilst holding aloof from the crowd of Byromaniacs who suffocated him with their white shoulders and foolish flatteries. In the days of his tenderness to her she had worshipped and loved him for treating her so tenderly. Plis outbreaks of anger and 'the breath of his bitter words ' had made her fear him. AVhilst she thought him mad, she watched him with compassionate anxiety. On being assured that his violence and moodiness were not referable to insanity, she had parted from him in perplexity and dismay 342 THE EEAL LORD BYRON. rather than with repugnance. In her mental narrow- ness she had thought him possessed by the demon of impious insolence. In her spiritual arrogance she had for a few days been disposed to regard herself as an instrument chosen by the Almighty for his humiliation. But it never occurred to her to despise him till he tried to divert from himself the unantici- pated storm of obloquy, which he had provoked by his own action. She felt that if the storm had broken in thunder over her head, she would have borne all the infamy of it uncomplainingly. She scorned him for trying to turn the fury of the hurricane upon her ; and in her disdain of the meanness of his design she thought, to his shame, precisely what he wrote a few months later to her discredit, ' I would not do by thee as thou hast done ! ' 343 CHAPTER XYII. THE STORM. 'Simple Causes' — Lady Byron's Justification — Her abundant Frank- ness — The ' Quarterly Review ' Letter — Byron's Surprise at his Wife's Resolve — His First Action on the Intelligence — His subsequent Behaviour — Extravagances of Social Sentiment — Observations on tlie * Remarks on Don Juan ' — ' Glenarvon ' — Lady Jersey's Farewell I'arty — The Poet's Withdrawal from England. Using the word ' simple ' in the sense of ' ordinary and common,' Byron remarked shortly before his death to a gentleman, who was pressing him for an avowal of the causes of his separation from Lady Byron, ' The causes, my dear sir, were too simple to be easily found out ; ' — words by which he wished to intimate that to discover Lady Byron's grounds for dissatisfiiction with him and her reasons for repudia- ting him, people should seek them in matters that are the usual sources of discord to newly married couples, instead of imagining that the rupture resulted from extravagant crimes and improbable incidents. When their association has survived the first delights of novelty, it is not unusual for a newly married couple to bicker and even to quarrel bitterly from causes that, without being trivial and altogether fanciful, are remote from the outrages which afford a young wife the strongest justification for withdrawmg from un- congenial wedlock. 344 THE KEAL LORD BYRON. Though it may be a question whether Lady Byron was justified by the circumstances of her case in breaking from her young husband, when she was aware that by doing so she would compel a man of his temperament to a life of more or less flagrant libertinism, no holder of the nicely balanced scale can accuse her of taking so serious a step without serious provocation. As she acted fi-om prudent and selfish care for her own comfort and happiness, she can claim none of the admiration and gratitude, that would have been her proper and glorious reward, had she pre- ferred her husband's welfare and dignity to her own advantage. The sympathy due to her for the wretchedness, which came to her from the alliance she had not sought, is weakened almost to extinction by the recollection of the alacrity, with which she retreated from the position of trial and misery. Finding him no worse in any other particular (probably finding a better man in all other particulars) than she expected to find him, she had no sooner made acquaintance with what Hobhouse used to style the poet's morbid selfishness, and the gusty violence of his temper, and ascertained those defects to be no results of insanity but the chief and incurable failings of an otherwise noble nature, than she determined to be quit of him. Wanting the sympathetic large- heartedness and moral breadth of temperament, that would have enabled her to refer his wild speech to the maddening heats of constitutional irritability, she was stung to resentment by his outrageous and abso- lutely truthless assertions that he had never really loved her, and had pursued her from motives of resentment and vengeance. Instead of taking these THE STORM. 345 extravagant utterances seriously, and weejiing (jver them in her solitary hours, Lady Byron would have received them with cheerily ringing' laughter, would have rallied him about them with sly humour and pleasant irony in their privacy, and would even have chattered gaily and with piquant drollery about them in his hearing and presence (nei'er behind his back) to her more volatile acquaintances, had she been a woman capable of controlling the humours of her lord, and ' managing the devil ' that lurked in his nature, — a nature good and ill by turns. The woman is conceivable who would have made Byron a happy and good man, and won unutterable happiness to herself from the service of successful devotion to so marvellous a master ; but she would have been ' the one woman often thousand,' and greatly unlike Lady Byron in intellect and temper. Being a fairly good woman, Lady Byron should not be blamed for not being other than she was. On the contrary, she is rather to be compassionated, like all persons who have come through circumstances, rather than by voluntary intrusion, to high places for which they are singularly incompetent. It remains, however, that she retreated from tlio ])lace of trial and difficulty to please herself, iiot because she was under a clear and imperative obligation to leave it. If Byron was morl)idly selfish, his wife cannot be credited with perhaps the rarest virtue — absolute unselfishness. To her advantage it may be declared on sufficient evidence that, on withdrawing as far as possible from the dis- tasteful imion, she was convinced no good would ensue to Byron from her self-sacrifice, should she ^46 THE REAL LORD BYRON. constrain herself to remain witii liim. Recognising her complete impotence to make him happy, and believing that his grief at losing her would at the worst be nothuio; more serious than a transient annoyance, she resolved to escape from a companion- ship that, affording him no comfort, could yield her nothino- but grief. Under these circumstances it certainly is not obvious that she was wrong in re- verting from wedlock to singleness, and in falling back on her natural right to pursue her own happi- ness. Though it can never rise to rank with the virtues, selfishness is withm certain limits the salutary and even sacred privilege of all human creatures. And it does not appear that Lady Byron's selfislmess exceeded these limits, when she determined for her pleasure to leave for ever the husband, who for his own mere pleasure was preparing to leave her for a considerable time. Nothing havmg occurred since 1816 to enlarge liis knowledge of his wife's reasons for parting from him, it is remarkable that Byron spoke so confidently and precisely m 1824 of the nature of the matters, respect- ing which he had for years pretended to want clear and definite information. In spoken words and in written words it had for eight years been his com- plaint against Lady Byron and her advisers, that they had refused to tell him in what particulars he had wrono-ed her, when he was at leno^th moved to remark that the causes of the separation were too simple to be easily found out. Having for so long a period affected inability to account for a matter, so hurtful to his haj)piness and reputation, it is strange that in a sudden fit of candour and communicative- THE STORM. ness he should almost at the last moment have admitted liis sufficient knowledge of the mysterious business. Of course there never was a moment when he needed any enlightenment on the affair. After worry- mg a fairly sensible woman into thinking him a madman, no sane man needs to be told why she thinks him mad. The husband, who has whipped and goaded his wife into disaffection by malicious words and aggravating taciturnity, does not need to be informed why and how she has come to regard him with aversion. If he asks for the information, he does so from some freak of humour, from some notion of policy, from an appetite for further disputa- tion, or from curiosity respecting her feeling on particular points of the contention ; — not from a genuine inability to account for her disapproval of his treatment of her. When Byron, after perusing his father-in-law's letter of the 2nd of February, 1816, beirffed his wife to state her reasons for desiring a separation, he knew both her reasons and the reason- ableness of them. And it is only fiiir to Lady Byron, of whose silence so much has been said by her censors, to put it upon record that in reply to the requirement she gave the needless information with abundant frankness. To the letter, in which Byron made the request for the first time by his sister's pen, Lady l>yron rei)lied in a letter published in 1809 in the ' Quarterly Review,' — ' KiMy Mallory, Feb. Srd, 181G. ' ^Iy Dkarkst Augusta, — You are desired by your brother to ask, if my father has acted with my con- 348 THE REAL LORD BYRON. currence in proposing the separation. He has. It cannot be supposed that, in my present distressing situation, I am capable of stating in a detailed manner the reasons which will not only justify this measure, but compel me to take it ; and it never can be my wish to remember unnecessarily those injuries for which, however deep, I feel no resentment. I will now only recall to Lord Byron's mind his avowed and insurmountable aversion to the married state, and the desire and determination he has expressed ever since its commencement to free himself from that bondage, as finding it quite insupportable, though candidly acknowledging that no effort of duty or affection has been wanting on my part. He has too painfully convinced me that all these attempts to contribute towards his happiness were wholly useless, and most unwelcome to him. I enclose this letter to my father, wishing it to receive his sanction. ' Ever yours most affectionately, A. I. Byron.' It may not be inferred from the least perspicuous sentence of this epistle (penned under circumstances sufficiently trying to account for its occasional ob- scurities of expression) that Byron declared liis purpose of escaping from wedlock almost from the very moment of its celebration, or that it was the writer's purpose to accuse him of having done so. His gravest offence (which would have been received with laughter instead of dismay by ' the one woman in ten thousand ') against his wife was that, on coming to quarrel with her some eight months after their wedding, he declared that he had entertained a THE STORM. 349 purpose ever since his marriage of freeing himself from its bondage. As Lady Byron cannot have in- tended to make Mrs. Leigh and her brother a state- ment, whose untruth would be obvious to both the one and the other, it may be taken for granted that on this point she only wished to inform her sister-in- law and remind her husband, that on declaring his intention to escape from domestic thraldrom, he declared the resolution to have been formed at the very beginning of their union. Augusta being no less aware than her brother of the harmony of the marriao'e throuohout the earher months of 1815, it cannot have been Lady Byron's pm-pose to represent that the grossly offensive speech was made in the honeymoon. An editorial interpolation of four words (as an obvious omission) after ' he has expressed,' would give no more than the thought of the writer who must have meant to write, ' I will now only recall to Lord Byron's mind his avowed and insurmount- able aversion to the married state, and the desire and determination he has expressed himself as having entertained ever since its commencement to free himself from that bondage.' The propriety of this emendation appears also from the fact that the letter represents the offensive speech to have been made at a time, when its utterer could speak of himself as ' finding the bondage quite insupportable,' whilst ' candidly acknowledging that no effort of duty or affection had been wanting ' on the part of his wife; — a time that must have been, from the terms of the statement, considerably subsequent to the wedding. Written for persons who can ' read between the lines ' and catch the precise meaning of vague and inexact expressions, domestic 350 THE REAL LORD BYRON. letters are seldom so carefully worded as official epistles. AYliilst its frankness and directness indicate how little cause Byron had to charge his wife with stubbornly withholding her grounds of offence from his knowledge, the freedom and inconsideration of this epistle will prepare readers for the assurance that she was at the outset of the quarrel no more charge- able with caution than with uncommunicativeness. Instead of returning from London to Kirkby Mallory without seeing her sister-in-law, in accordance with Dr. Lushington's prudent advice, Lady Byron sought and had a meeting with Augusta. Greeting one another with undiminished affection ateness and cordiality, the two sisters-in-law after their conversa- tion parted in perfect friendship. Certainly Mrs. Leigh had no reason to complain of Lady Byron's dogged uncommunicativeness ; and it is not conceivable that Byron ventured to charge this fault upon his wife in his sister's hearing. Alluding to the smaller vexations she had endured since her marriage, in a manner to make it obvious that mere considerations of comfort and discomfort were in some degree accountable for her original determination not to return to an uncon- genial association, Lady Byron admitted that she had not come to the resolve without a struggle and passages of sentimental vacillation, which of course would not have troubled her had circumstances left no other course open to her. Acknowledging her weakness in not coming to the final resolve directly and unhesitatingly, she expressed sorrow for causing Augusta and several other friends much uneasiness, which she might have spared them by action less wavering and uncertain. Of what she had suffered THE STORM. 351 from Byron's ebullitions of temper and manifestations of selfishness, there was no need for her to speak to Augusta, who had been a witness of some of them, and was well aware of her brotlier's intention to go abroad with Hobhouse. Speaking thus frankly, she spoke with a singular appearance of freedom from the bitterness to be looked for in a person moved to a momentous conclusion by a strong sense of insult and injury. It comforted her to believe that the separation would cause Byron no acute sorrow or enduring discomfort, — that, instead of regretting her as a lost delight, he would remember her only as a former burden and incumbrance. She declared that, though she might not refer his ill-treatment of her to mental derangement, which would have made it alto- gether blameless, she thought of all that had passed between them without resentment, and almost witliout a sense of injury. If there was any subject on which Lady Byron was otherwise than frank in her com- munications to her sister-in-law, the subject was Byron's intimacy with Jane Clermont ; — the one subject on which Byron was probably most desirous for her to be free of speech. There are reasons for the opinion that Byron's first disposition to accuse his wife and her advisers of stubborn and mysterious re- ticence originated in his vexation at their avoidance of the matter, which he may well have thought chiefly accountable for his wife's displeasure. But this is no question on which the present writer can speak autlioritatively. Possibly tlie publication of the Hobhouse papers will remove it from the field of mere conjecture. Another proof of Lady 1 Byron's disposition to 352 THE REAL LORD BYRON. think generously of her husband and to act justly towards him, at a moment when she might be pardoned for regarding him vindictively, is found in her determination to do everything in her power to lessen the injurious effect which her action in with- drawing from him could not fail to have on his reputation. On being told that rumour was dealing hurtfully with her husband's reputation, she resolved to give the lie to any slander that sliould be uttered against him in her hearing. This was certainly her spirit and purpose for some time after she decided on separating from him. And there is reason to believe that she remained in this temper and resolve, till that disastrous act of publication two months later, by which he dragged her from her privacy, and exhibited her to universal reprobation as an unforgiving woman, who, having quarrelled bitterly with her unrebellious lord on trivial matters, refused to give him again the love he longed for. Though his wife's silence, persisted in for several days — a silence his sister could have fully accounted for, had she cared to do so — must have forewarned him of the coming trouble, and prepared him in some degree for the staggering blow, the first effect on Byron of the announcement (February 2, 1816) that his wife had resolved neither to return to him nor receive him again, was supreme and unqualified astonishment. The silence had told him that mischief was brewing. By the mysterious silence he had doubtless been caused to anticipate expostulation, and exhibitions of censure from his father-in-law and mother-in-law, with all the other disagreeable mcidents of a domestic difficulty, THE STORM. 353 that would not issue in an aniical)le arrangement, without occasioning him many vexations, much dis- turbance of temper, and some humiliation. But till the post brought him Sir Ralph Noel's demand for an act of separation, Byron had neither conceived nor suspected the seriousness of the situation. In his first surprise, he could not believe Lady Byron had authorised the astounding letter. Sir Ralph Noel (whom the poet regarded as a good-natured old fool) was surely the mere tool of Lady Noel and Mrs. Clermont, who had exceeded their instructions, possibly had acted without any instructions from Lady B)yron, in making their puppet pen the marvel- lous ultimatum. This was Byron's view of the situa- tion. It was inconceivable to him that ' Pi])])in ' would take such extreme measures without a few preliminary intimations through the post of her serious displeasure with her ' Dearest Duck,' In a moment Augusta was ordered to write to Lady Byron in his name to ascertain whether she had authorised her father's action ; and as she had for more than a week been fully informed of Pippin's purpose, and had for several days been looking for Sir Ralph's declaration of war, ]\Irs. Leigh may well have felt some compunction for her du})licity, if without a previous avowal of her knowledge of the real state of the case to her brother, she wrote the letter which drew from his wife the epistle set forth on a previous page of this chapter. Dispersing the mist of egotistic moodiness that had darkened his moral vision for several months, and lifting him for a season above the depraving influence of his morbid selfishness, the shock of Sir Ralph VOL. I. A A 354 THE REAL LORD BYRON. Noel's letter startled Byron out of his meaner nature, and in a trice raised liim to his better self. On realising^ the situation, he saw and confessed that the pain and humiliation of it were the natural con- sequences of his own folly and wrong-doing. Losing sight of his imaginary grievances he took a just view of his serious misconduct. At the same time he took a manly and even generous \'iew of his wife's resentment and resolve. Without overstating the case against him- self, as he was apt to do in seasons of hysterical con- trition and remorseful self-introspection, he confessed that he had behaved badly, very badly, and had only himself to thank and upbraid for his misfortune. Instead of pretending that he could not account for his wife's revolt, or talking miserable nonsense about her impious violation of her matrimonial vow, or accusing her of obstinately withholding the motives and considerations of her conduct, as he did with no ordinary meanness and dishonesty a few months later, he avowed that he had treated her worse than ill, and that she showed proper spirit in rebelling against his tyranny. If he stopt short of declaring her fully justified for her extreme measures of retaliation, he averred stoutly that she had been driven to them by great provocation, and forbore to hint that the justifi- cation was less than complete. Forbidding his friends to offer him a suggestion to her discredit, he was no less imperative that they should urge nothing in his defence, or even in palliation of his flagi-ant misbe- haviour. On February 29, 1816, he wrote to Moore, ' Don't attempt to defend me. If you succeeded in that, it would be a mortal, or an immortal, offence.' To the THE STORM. 355 same correspondent, who had suggested that liis friend's matrimonial misadventure was due to his injudicious choice of a wife, he wrote on the 8th of March, 1816, ' The fault was not — no, nor even the misfortune — in my " choice " (unless in choosiiuj at all) — for I do not believe — and I must say it, in tlie very dregs of all this bitter business — that there ever w^as a better, or even a brighter, a kinder, or a more amiable and agreeable being than Lady Byron. 1 never had, nor can have, any reproach to make her, while with me. Where there is blame, it belon":s to myself, and, if I cannot redeem, I must bear it.' No person saw more of him during this period of heavy trouble and exasperating annoyances than Rogers : no one was more certain than Sam Rogers to have heard the ungenerous talk had Byron in the time of tribulation been betrayed into speaking of his wife with animosity or disparagement ; and yet he could ^^ rite fearlessly and confidently to Samuel Rogers on ^larch 25, 1816, — ' You are one of the few persons, with wliom I have lived in what is called intimacy, and have heard me at times conversing on the untoward to})ic of my recent family disquietudes. Will you have the goodness to say to me at once, whether you ever heard me speak of her with disrespect, with unkind- ness, or defending myself at her expense by any serious imputation of any description against her? Did you never hear me say, " that when there was a right or a wrong, she had the rhjht?''' The reason I put these questions to you or others of my friends is, because I am said, by her and hers, to have resorted to such means of exculpation. — Ever very truly yours, '• B." ' It being in the nature of family quarrels to 3.')G THE REAL LORD BYRON. produce bitter and angry speech, one can readily believe that Lady Byron's nearest relations and "warmest partizans spoke ill and unjust words of Byron. In doing so they only did to his injury what he himself did to their discredit. The poet who, in the very letter of his testimony to his wife's irre- proachable goodness during their familiar association, described her ' nearest relatives ' by epithets too violent and gross for Moore to venture to publish them, was in no position to express surprise and indignation on hearmg that they spoke of him with similar ex- travagance. But though her closest friends doubtless thought and spoke of Byron much worse than he deserved, it is improbable that Lady Byron — ever mindful of b.er dignity, even to the vigilance of a jealous concern for it — was ever guilty of the same offence. Far from joining in the outcry, hourly becoming more violent agamst her husband, she was still in the mood to protest against its excesses of injustice. The time had not yet come for her to make the contribution of ' s])eechless obloquy ' to the clamour of monstrous slanders. Byron's note to Rogers should not be pro- duced in evidence against her. It is however o-ood evidence to the time when the poet, reverting to his former animosity against her, and dropping away from his better to his baser self, passed to the state of feeling that resulted m the publication of ' The Fare- well,' the ' Dream,' and the subsequent satires on the woman, about whom he should, for his own honour's sake, never have allowed himself to pen a single bitter verse or utter a single angry word. It has been suggested by several of his censors that, whilst he spoke justly and even generously of THE STORM. "..)( tlie wife who had repudiated him, the poet was l)hiy- ing the part of a s{)ecioiis hypocrite, with a view to restoring himself to her favour, — tliat the fair words were false words, s})oken only that they should be re- ported to her, and dispose her to condone his offences. But the suggestion can be accepted only by persons who have still to apprehend the elementary forces and the structure of Byron's mental and moral constitu- tion. To men of his acute sensibility and vehement temperament such hypocrisy is impossible. Insin- cerity might within certain limits be charged against Byron. He was capable of saying untrue things at the instigation of anger, pique, jealousy, spite, — like his monstrous assertion to his "wife that he had never loved her and had married her from a vindictive motive. Sincerity was by no means an ever-present characteristic of his art. But it was not in liis power to play the hypocrite consistently for any length of time. The creature of impulse and the slave of emotion he could neither mask his stronger feelings nor even ex- press them temperately. His insincerity was an affair more of show than reality. The natural vehemence, which made him too essentially hwiest for a hypocrite's career, was associated with a mobilit}' of thought, fancy and feeling that often had the appearance and the mischievous conse(|uences of insincerity when it w^as altogether devoid of falseness. A man so con- stituted passes quickly from mood to mood ; imd tlie inconsistencies of his speech and action in the course of successive moods, instead of being indications of falseness and superficiality or even fickleness, are signs of his sincerity to the impressions and feelings of the moment. Such a man may be untruthful for 358 THE REAL LORD BYRON. an Lour ; he may be a hypocrite for a single day, — but not for weeks together. So constituted Byron passed quickly from love to hate, from anger to pity, from cynical hardness to cordial benevolence. In regard to his wife he went suddenly from j ustice and generosity to mean and malignant animosity. But he was not more genuine in the later than in the earlier stage of feeling. When he spoke of her justly he thought of her with justice ; and when he spoke of her bitterly he thought of her with bitterness. Had he in February and March been the dissembler many people have been induced to think him, he would have acted more cautiously in several particu- lars, and dissembling a little longer would probably have compassed what he certainly desired — recon- cilement with his wife. He would have avoided the intimacy with Jane Clermont, — an affair which could not fail to confirm Lady Byron in her opinion that he had never really loved her. He would have persisted in generous speech about her for another month. He would have gone abroad without insulting her before the whole world by the publication of ' The Farewell,' and speaking in violent terms, certain to come to her knowledge, of her violation of her marriage-vow. For some days, even for some weeks, after Sir Ralph Noel's demand for an agreement of separation, Byron was hopeful that his wife would be silent. Knowing that, so long as she remained with him, he had done her no wrong greater than the unkindness described in previous pages of this work, he could not believe that she would persist in her resolve. He was even disposed to question the sincerity of the demand, and to regard it as a mere device for bring- THE STORM. 359 inff him t(i a i)erfect sense of his misconduct, and a proper state of contrition. On findino- his wife so much in earnest as to have already taken steps for a suit in the Ecclesiastical Court, sliould he decline to sign the deed of liberation, he saw that he must yield to her request. It has been urged by half-a-hundred writers before Mrs. Beecher Stowe meddled so miserably with the matter, that had he not been guilty of some extravagance of immorality, far more heinous and re- voltmff than the serious misconduct of which he had actually been guilty, he would have refused to join m the private arrangement, and insisted on a public statement and public investigation of her complaints against him. And could he have conceived all that slander would soon be saying loudly or whispering secretly to his infamy, he would probably have taken the course which, painful and inexpressibly humili- ating though it would have been to him, would have revealed to the world the precise number and nature of liis offences. Unforeseeing the violence of the coming storm, and the disadvantage that would come to him from the secresy of a private submission, it is not wonderful the poet consented to liberate his wife by the process that seemed least likely to occasion enormous scandal. The circumstances of the case forbade liim to hope that his wife's suit would [)e un- successful should her case go to trial. The evidence would expose him not only to the censure of rigid moralists, but to what he dreaded far more than their reprobation, — the ridicule and contempt of 'society.' Instead of l)eing exhibited as a gay and irresistible libertine, triumphing over the virtue of women of the hii'-liest rank and fashion, he would be found guilty 360 THE KEAL LORD BYRON. of the most unromantic offences, bad temper and pitifully bad manners, — ^vould be pilloried as the ill- conditioned fellow who had worried his young bride into rebellion from spite and peevishness begotten of a disordered liver. One of the chief witnesses against him would be his own sister. Another of them would be his nearest kinsman. What could he urge against their testimony? That he had not railed at his wife, and told her he had never loved her, without provo- cation ; that she had not been so cheerful as she ought to have been ; that she had murmured occasion- ally at the solitariness of her meals and the discomfort of a home besieged by bailiffs ; that the squabbling had not been all on one side. Was it possible for a man of sensibility and pride to go into court with no better defence than this, — no better o-rounds for insistino- that the woman, w^ho had found him an unendurable comj^anion, should return to him and his ill-humour? How could a gentleman, a man of honour, a poet, go into court with such a case to resist his wife's entreaty for liberation from insufferable bondage ? There being no alternative but the private deed or the public trial, he chose the former. Clinging to the hope that his wife would relent if she had a longer time for con- sideration, he delayed to do what was required of him. He parleyed with Sir Ralph Noel and wrangled with the lawyers. He asked them for particulars of Lady Byron's grievances ; a request that of course only elicited the assurance that the particulars (known of course to him, quite as well as they were known to the lawyers) would be produced in Doctors' Com- mons, should the case go to trial. He wished for the ' specific charges in a tangible shape ; ' not because he THE STORM. Obi needed further iiifoniiiitiou respectiii<;- the i'liar