chioness, requesting her to send him as much as she could. She who had loved him too well to hesitate at the surrender of her honour and her character, did not pause upon the application, but immediately sent him bank-notes to the amount of one hundred pounds, and with them a letter in which she begged him to come to her. She expressed in this letter the most boundless love for him, and informed him that, the marquis being out of town, they could again enjoy each other's society without the fear of detection. This letter never reached its destination, being intercepted by the agents of the marquis. Captain Byron came to town full of wonder at receiving no answer to his very urgent application; and the eclaircissement which took place on his seeing her ladyship of course convinced them that their connexion was no longer a secret. They learnt that the servants had been examined; and Lady Carmarthen immediately left her own house, and went to that of Admiral Byron. A suit for a divorce was then commenced by the marquis, to which no defence was offered on the part of his lady; and sentence was pronounced of a separation between them, a mensa et thoro.

Lord and Lady Holdernesse and the old admiral exerted themselves to bring about a marriage between the guilty parties, as the only means of repairing the lady's character: in this they succeeded, but her happiness was blighted for ever. Her new husband was brutal and unprincipled; his passion for her, which was never, perhaps, very ardent, had now entirely subsided; and after lingering out two years of uninterrupted misery, during which she bore him a daughter, the wretched lady died of remorse, and the incurable pains of a broken heart.

Captain Byron was married a second time, to Miss Gordon, of Gight, in 1785. This lady was of one of the most ancient families in Scotland, and possessed in her own right of a very considerable estate in Aberdeenshire. She, however, experienced the fate of every one who came in contact with Captain Byron: he dissipated the whole of her property, and, soon after the birth of his only son, the late Lord Byron, he totally abandoned her: he went to live at Valenciennes, where death put an end to his powers of doing mischief in 1791. He was one of those beings who seem to possess the active principles of evil alone, and who are permitted to exist for no other purpose, as far as human knowledge can penetrate, but to work out the punishment of others. The death of the fifth Lord Byron's eldest son having taken place in the same year as the late Lord Byron was born, the latter became on his father's death the heir apparent to the honours and estates of the family, which were limited on the heirs male.

CHAPTER II.

GEORGE GORDON BYRON was born on his mother's estate in Aberdeenshire, ou the 22d of January, 1788. The extravagance of her husband soon afterwards reduced her income to little more than a bare competence; and his subsequent desertion, which compelled her to retire to lodgings in the city of Aberdeen, left her no care nor employment but that of educating her son. Her amiable temper and accomplished mind qualified her for this task, so far as it could be effected by a female; but the infirmity of her child's constitution during his earlier years rendered any thing like application inconsistent with the preservation of his health. A lameness, the consequence of the malformation of one of his feet, and some symptoms indicating a tendency towards consumption, induced his mother to suffer him to spend his time at this period of his life with very little restraint. He was permitted to .oam at will through the romantic scenery in the neighbourhood of Aberdeen; and perhaps it was this practice that first cherished those sparks of genius which afterwards burst into so brilliant a blaze. The effect which the objects of Nature, in her wildest and most sublime forms, (and such are those which she presents in Aberdeenshire,) can produce upon a mind in which the principles of poetry lie hid are little short of inspiration; that Lord Byron's was such a mind, and that such were the habits of his infancy, being beyond doubt, seem to prove irrefragably the truth of the position, and to give an air of prophecy to Beattie's delightful poem :

Lo! where the stripling, rapt in wonder, roves
Beneath the precipice o'erhung with pine;
And sees, on high, amidst the encircling groves,
From cliff to cliff the foaming torrents shine!
While waters, woods, and winds, in concert join,
And Echo swells the chorus to the skies.

And oft he trac'd the uplands, to survey,

When o'er the cloud advanced the kindling dawn,
The crimson cloud, blue main, and mountain grey,
And lake, dim gleaming on the smoky lawn:
Far to the west the long long vaie withdrawn,
Where twilight loves to linger for a while;
And now he faintly kens the bounding fawn.
And villager abroad at early toil.

But, lo! the son appears! and heaver, earth, ocean, smile:

And oft the craggy cliff he loved to climb,
When all in mist the world below was lost.
What dreadful pleasure! there to stand sublime,
Like shipwreck'd mariner on desert coast,
And view th' enormous waste of vapour, tost
In billows, lengthening to the horizon round
Now scoop'd in gulfs, with mountains now emboss'd!
And hear the voice of mirth and song rebound-
Flocks, herds, and waterfalls, along the hoar profound!

The following account of Lord Byron's early days, by a schoolfellow, is characteristic, and, we have every reason to believe, quite faithful:

'As soon as circumstances permitted, he was sent to the Grammar School, and there, though he did not show any symptoms of talent superior to that of his fellow-students, he was among the boldest and bravest of them all Though weak in body, he was invincible in mind · and in all sports and amusements which were of a manly nature ho took the lead among his schoolfellows. Riding upon horses, fishing, sailing, swimming, and all those occupations which had something of spirit in them, were congenial to his mind; and in all these he conducted himself with a dignity far surpassing what could have been expected from one of his years. Although by no means the strongest either in frame or in constitution, he was exceedingly brave; and in the juvenile wars of the school he generally had the victory. Upon one occasion, a boy who had been attacked, rather without just cause, took refuge in his mother's house; and he interposed his authority to say that nobody should be ill used while under his roof and protection. Upon this the aggressor dared him to fight; and, though the boy was by much the stronger of the two, the spirit of Byron was so determined, that, after they had fought for nearly two hours, the combat had to be suspended, because both were out of breath.

'The most remarkable circumstance of Byron at this time was extreme sensibility of mind; and he was exceedingly attached to the customs of the remote place in which he was born, and deeply impressed by the legends and sayings which were common among the people.

'One of his schoolfellows had a little Shetland pony; and, one day, the two together had got the pony to take an alternate ride, or to "ride and tie," as it was vulgarly called, along the banks of the Don. When they came to the old bridge, Byron stopped his companion, and

insisted that he should dismount, while he himself rode along the bridge; "for," said he, "you remember the prophecy

"Brig o' Balgownie, though wight be thy wa',

Wi' a widow's ae son, an' a mare's ae foal,
Down thou'lt fa'!

"Now who knows but the pony may be a 'mare's ae foal;' and we are both widows ae sons;' but you have a sister, and I have nobody to lament for me but my mother." The other boy consented; but, as soon as young Byron had escaped the terrors of the bridge, the other insisted upon following his example. He, too, rode safely across, and they concluded that the pony was not the only production of its mother.

'As an instance of his sensibility, it may be mentioned that, when his name was first called out in the catalogue as Georgius Dominus de Byron," the boys set up a shout, which the master could not suppress; and this had such an effect upon him, that it was with great difficulty he could be prevailed upon to continue at the school. His elevation seemed to give him no great pleasure; and the distance which many of his old companions felt it proper to keep from him, upon its being made generally known, gave him so much pain that he sometimes burst into tears.

At that time, though he was occasionally a moody and thoughtful boy, he was the foremost and gayest in all the more manly sports; but he was extremely kind-hearted, and would not be guilty of any act of cruelty or injustice. All who knew him at that time must hold his memory in the greatest respect.'

The death of his noble relative, in 1798, altogether changed the prospects of the subject of these memoirs. His right to the family honours was acknowledged; the Earl of Carlisle undertook the office of his guardian; and he was sent to Harrow School, to receive an education more suitable to his rank and fortune than could be procured at the humble Grammar School of Aberdeen. In his progress through this justly famous seminary he seems to have differed little from ordinary boys; and perhaps, indeed, at this period, he was but an ordinary boy. The restraint was, of course, hateful to him, because it was repugnant to his temper, and totally opposite to the habits in which he had, up to this time of his life indulged. The nature of the studies to which he was compelled do not seem to have been very congenial with his feelings or his temper; and, although he had every disposition to

be a student, he had no affection for being a scholar. He has said

'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.'

It was for this reason, probably, that he neither distinguished himself much at Harrow nor at Trinity College, Cambridge, whither he went on his leaving the former school. His impatience of every kind of domination exposed him to frequent squabbles with the persons having authority in college; and he quitted Cambridge without having excited in the minds of those persons any suspicion that he possessed either talents, or a disposition to cultivate them, beyond those of the mob of gentlemen' who fill that university. A thousand absurd stories are told of his extravagancies at college, in which, like those of gentle Master Shallow, 'every third word is a lie, more religiously paid than the Turk's tribute,' and which, if they were true, are not worth retailing. From the fact of his having, for a short time, kept a young bear in his rooms at Trinity College, many fruitful inventions have sprung. Among others, it is said he told the master of Trinity that he intended his bear should 'sit for a fellowship.' This is untrue; and, if it were otherwise, it would be only a bad attempt to imitate the brutal madman, Lord Camelford, who threatened to return his black servant to Parliament for one of his boroughs; or that better story of Rabelais, who had his mule entered as a member of the Sorbonne, under the title of Doctor Johannes Caballus.'

Although, however, Lord Byron, either from waywardness or pride, did not choose to take a part in the strife for college distinctions, his life was not quite an idle one. His devotion to poetry had long been manifested; and he had occasionally written verses, which, being far superior to the compositions of young men in general, had received the too flattering approbation of his friends. Having quitted college at nineteen, he was induced soon afterwards to publish some of these poems at Newark, under the title of Hours of Idleness.' This first step which he made in the career of literature decided his fate for life, and he became, as Voltaire said to a young man of genius, whose premature death disappointed the hopes which had been formed of him, 'a poet and a man of letters; not because he chose to be so, because Nature had so decreed.' There was no evading the destiny

but