larities which he was accustomed, not only to permit himself, but to parade? The harassment of his affairs stimulated his violence, till she was inclined to suspect him to be mad. — JOHN NICHOL.

INCOMPATIBILITY OF BYRON AND LADY BYRON.

as

Some of Lady Byron's recently printed letters that to Lady Anne Barnard, and the reports of later observers of her character, as William Howitt tend to detract from the earlier tributes to her consistent amiability, and confirm our ideas of the incompatibility of the pair. It must have been trying to a poet to be asked by his wife, impatient of his late hours, when he was going to leave off writing verses; to be told he had no real enthusiasm; or to have his desk broken open, and its compromising contents sent to the persons for whom they were least intended. The smouldering elements of discontent may have been fanned by the gossip of dependants, or the officious zeal of relatives, and kindled into a jealous flame by the ostentation of regard for others beyond the circle of his home. Lady Byron doubtless believed some story which, when communicated to her legal advisers, led them to the conclusion that the mere fact of her believing it made reconciliation impossible; and the inveterate obstinacy which lurked beneath her gracious exterior made her cling through life to the substance-not always to the form, whatever that may have been of her first impressions. Her later letters to Mrs. Leigh, as that called forth by Moore's "Life," are certainly as open to the charge of

EXTRACT FROM A LETTER OF LORD BYRON TO MR. MURRAY, DATED MISSOLONGHI, FEBRUARY 25, 1824.

"

I have heard from Mr Dayles Thet that you

a sative

state a repat of
hamy amand from Italy
" written by me!

" = heve it.

any

body él.

hat that

and

you

is be

do not be

I dove say you

I should think.

that I am the auther or

of anything of the Lind his throat.

as

aletter

of the hind on Gifford - lies I always rejointed

litering father - and myself

my frontigal son

exists

well

it is none

of

as

and

вводу прет

have not

mitten- and you alw hunn.

whother they do or did not deserve that same.

self-righteousness as those of her husband's are to selfdisparagement. - JOHN NICHOL.

"THYRZA.'

But the death which most deeply wounded Byron came later. Nothing ever racked him with sharper anguish than the death of her whom he mourned under the name of Thyrza. To know the bitterness of his struggle with this sorrow, we have only to look at what he wrote on the day that the news reached him (Oct. 11, 1811); some of his wildest and most purely misanthropical verse, as well as some of his sweetest and saddest, belongs to that blackest of dates in his calendar. It is time that something were done to trace this attachment, which has been strangely overlooked by the essayists and biographers, because it furnishes an important clue to Byron's character, and is, indeed, of hardly less importance than his later attachment to the Countess Guiccioli. Mr. John Morley, in an essay which ought to be read by everybody who wishes to form a clear idea of Byron's poetry as a revolutionary force in itself and an index to the movement of the time, remarks upon the respect which Byron, with all his raillery of the married state in modern society, still shows for the domestic idea. It is against the artificial union, the marriage of convenience, that Byron's raillery is directed; he always upholds singleness of attachment as an ideal, however cynically or mournfully he laments. its infrequence, and points with laughter or with tears

1 Mr. Minto had been previously speaking of the deaths of Byron's friends, Matthews and Wingfield; also of the death of the poet's mother.

at the way in which it is crossed and cut short by circumstances when it does exist. Byron is not a railer against matrimony, except as a counterfeit of the natural union of hearts. His attachment to Thyrza shows that in this, as in other matters, he was transparently sincere. WILLIAM MINTO.

BYRON'S REAL CONSTANCY OF AFFECTION.

To look for the causes of moodiness and melancholy in material circumstances is a very foolish quest; but we may be certain that insufficiency of this world's money, and the daily vexations and insults to which his rank was thereby exposed, had much more to do with Byron's youthful gloom than satiety of this world's pleasures. His embarrassed finances, and the impossibility of securing the respect due to his title, formed a constant source of annoyance, put his whole system into a morbid condition in which every little slight and repulse festered and rankled with exaggerated virulence. From the daily humiliations and impertinences to which his false position exposed him, aggravated by his jealous and suspicious irritability, he may have turned sometimes to Childe Harold's consolations "the harlot and the bowl," but his nature prompted him rather to forget his vexations in purer and worthier objects. Unfortunately for him, such impetuous and passionate affections as his could rarely find the response for which he craved. In those few cases where devotion was repaid with devotion, the warmth of his gratitude was unbounded; he loaded poor Thyrza's memory with caresses, careless of what the world might say, remem

bering only that the poor girl clung to him with unselfish love; and he returned his sister's tender regard with an ardor and constancy that showed how highly he prized, and how eagerly he reciprocated, sincere affection. WILLIAM Minto.

SCOTT, ON BYRON AND BURNS.

I saw him for the last time in (September) 1815, after I returned from France; he dined or lunched with me at Long's in Bond Street. I never saw him so full of gaiety and good humor. The day of this interview was the most interesting I ever spent. Several letters passed between us-one perhaps every half year. Like the old heroes in Homer we exchanged gifts; I gave Byron a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the redoubted Elfi Bey. But I was to play the part of Diomed in the "Iliad," for Byron sent me, some time after, a large sepulchral vase of silver, full of dead men's bones, found within the land walls of Athens. He was often melancholy, almost gloomy. When I observed him in this humor I used either to wait till it went off of its own accord, or till some natural and easy mode occurred of leading him into conversation, when the shadows almost always left his countenance, like the mist arising from a landscape. I think I also remarked in his temper starts of suspicion, when he seemed to pause and consider whether there had not been a secret and perhaps offensive meaning in something that was said to him. In this case I also judged it best to let his mind, like a troubled spring, work itself clear, which it did in a min