memoirs with the leave to publish them, he consulted friends of taste and judgment, and, guided by their advice, decided that they were too scandalous to be preserved and therefore burned them all.

He certainly was a warm lover of Ireland. Nevertheless, the more earnest, serious and thoughtful patriots, who stayed at home instead of following his example of giving themselves up to London gayeties, are very far from ranking him among Erin's worthy sons; and think that his trivialities did his mother-land harm rather than goodmade it beloved and pitied but not respected.

CHAPTER XLII.

LORD BYRON.

F the question were to be asked, "Who is England's greatest poet?" the answers would vary as widely as the points of view from which such a subject can be approached; but if an inquiry should be made as to which of her writers of verse presents the most poetic personality, the general voice would probably be in favor of the handsome, lawless, brilliant, unfortunate Byron.

George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) inherited his turbulence with his title, for the grand-uncle from whom the title descended had killed his neighbor and relative, Mr. Chaworth, in a drunken brawl, and well earned the name of "the wicked Lord Byron," His father was a profligate officer who married Catherine Gordon, the poet's mother, only for her fortune, and left her as soon as that was used up. Byron's better qualities seem to have come through his grandfather, Admiral Byron, who is said to have had the virtues without the vices of his race. Among the things told of the family are the circumstances that

seven brothers fought in the battle of Edgehill, and that a later lord patronized literature and wrote verses.

Add to all these formative influences the fact that the family means had been wasted by the family spendthrifts (leaving nothing but the unprofitable estate of Newstead Abbey to support the title), and that the last lord, our poet, was born with a club-foot-all these things being considered, a part at least of his personality is fairly accounted for.

At the time of Byron's birth (which occurred in London) his father had squandered the maternal dowry, and Mrs. Byron, a fitful, passionate woman, went with her "lame brat," as she sometimes called him, to live in Aberdeen. At ten years old, the boy fell so violently in love with his cousin, Mary Duff, that when six years later he heard of her marriage, he "nearly went into convulsions." At fifteen he fell in love more seriously with Miss Chaworth, whose grandfather his great-uncle had killed in a duel. Her rejection of him was a matter of enduring grief, as testified in his poem "The Dream." He studied during this time at different private schools, making some progress in the classics and reading much general literature.

The drilled, dull lesson, forced down word by word,

was not to his taste.

of law or authority.

Nothing could be so that savored
His later utterance,

Then farewell Horace, whom I hated so,
Not for thy faults, but mine-

shows that he at least understood the cause of his repugnance. After five years at Harrow he went to Cambridge, where he stayed three years but took no degree. Still, he learned much beside the "swimming, riding, fencing, boxing, drinking, gambling and other occupations of idle undergraduates," which he says occupied his time.

The deformed foot, after many tortures, was at last so far

reduced that he was able to put on a common boot; yet an incurable lameness remained a bitter mortification. His poverty might have been cured by the large earnings of his genius, but unfortunately his unbridled extravagance and dissipation made any accumulation of wealth impossible. Debts, duns, flight from creditors and all the other incidents so common in English "high life” and so rare in American, were his constant miseries as long as he lived.

Byron had written verses while at Harrow; he wrote more during a year spent at Southwell during his college course, and had even printed a volume for private circulation; and in 1807, he put forth publicly (though of course anonymously) "Hours of Idleness," which was honored with much praise and also with a bitter and contemptuous critique in the "Edinburgh Review." This he met with the celebrated satire "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," which brought him at once prominently before the public. It was a general assault on everybody worth assaulting. Scott was "Apollo's venal son," a "hireling bard," etc. Southey was "ballad - mongering Southey," producing "annual strains to take the field like armies." "Vulgar Wordsworth" is "the meanest object in the lowly group," with "verse of all but childish prattle void;" Coleridge, "the laureate of the long-eared kind." "Smug Sydney" is Sydney Smith. "Blundering Brougham" is he who afterward became the lord and prime minister. The few names he excepts from his slurs are as significant as the victims:

Come forth, oh, Campbell! Give thy talents scope;
Who dares aspire if thou must cease to hope?

And thou, melodious Rogers! rise at last,

Recall the pleasing memories of the past.

Restore Apollo to his vacant throne,
Assert thy country's honor and thine own.
What! Must deserted Poesy still weep

Where her last hopes with pious Cowper sleep?

Yet still some genuine sons 'tis hers to boast,
Who, least affecting, still affect the most:

Feel as they write, and write but as they feel-
Bear witness Gifford, Sotheby, Macneil.

In other words the furious satirist puts not only Campbell and Rogers, but Gifford, Sotheby and Macneil, above Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge! In later years he did what he could to atone for some of this, and the magnanimous Scott not only forgave the younger poet but asserted his superiority to himself.

In 1809, Byron traveled on the continent; departing in deep dejection, feeling friendless and alone as such unfriendly and unrestrained persons are apt to feel. His travels gave rise to his greatest poem, "Childe Harold." The profound melancholy that marks that poem reflects faithfully the state of the poet's soul, but he denies the imputation that its hero is, in truth, himself. Poverty, increased by revolting extravagance and dissipation, and made more trying by high rank (which he could not forget), exposed his pride and vanity to continued friction, and kept him in a state of morbid irritation which is wearying to read about and must have been still more unpleasant to meet with.

He assumed his place in the House of Lords and took part in the debates, having at this time some ambition for a political career. But, to use his own words, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." This expresses the unexpected nature of the success of "Childe Harold," of which the first two cantos were published in 1811. Mrs. Oliphant says: "It is not too much to say that the public mind was moved by it to a sort of sudden ecstasy of interest such as is almost incredible in our calmer days. The first edition was sold out at once and a universal ferment of interest about the author flew through that society which, up to this time had known and cared nothing about him.”

This put a sudden stop to his political views, which never,

in truth, had any grave or stable aim, being a mere speculation as to how he would appear to the world: "Lord H. tells me I shall beat them all if I persevere, and Lord G. remarked that the construction of some of my periods is very like Burke's."

He now concluded that his easiest way to "beat them all" was through his poetry; yet he rested for a while on his "Childe Harold" laurels, during which period he was the lion of London, the friend and intimate of the Prince Regent and all the fashionable circle which revolved around him, in which Tom Moore was the minstrel and Brummell the dandy. Then he resumed his pen, and put forth, within eight years, "The Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," "Lara," "Siege of Corinth" and "Manfred." Many others, produced in the following three or four years, have the same fierce strength and fervid beauty that marks those named.

In 1815 he married Anne Isabella Milbanke, a lady of fortune, with whom he lived for about a year, during which his debts were pressed for collection with renewed vigor, nine executions being levied in the house within that time. After the birth of a daughter, Lady Byron went on a visit to her father, and a few days later Byron received a letter from the father saying that she had resolved never to return to him, and a formal deed of separation followed. The causes of this separation have never been made clear, but they are easy to guess. There had been no love to begin with, on either side; on his side were indifference, perversity, selfishness and a brutal disregard of the ordinary courtesies of family life, while she seems to have been coldly correct, unsympathetic and unyielding. Her appreciation of his fame and glory can be judged from her asking him when he meant to give up his bad habit of writing verses!

After Byron's separation from his wife and his infant daughter, he sold Newstead Abbey and took a final leave