NOTE (D). ON THE EARLY POEMS OF BYRON NOTE (E). ON THE DESTRUCTION OF LORD BYRON'S MEMOIRS OF NOTE (F). CONCERNING THE ARRIVAL OF LORD BYRON'S RE- NOTE (H). WILHELM MÜLLER'S POEM ON THE DEATH OF PAGE 448 456 462 467 or to go home the nearest way as it is now quite well but too small to carry me I have sent a young Rallit which I beg Mifs Frances will accept off and which I promised to her send before My Mamma desires, best com. pliments to you all in which I join Tam Yours sincerely Byron LIFE OF LORD BYRON. CHAPTER I. FAMILY AND CHILDHOOD. 1788-1798. THE Byron family ranks among those historical races, in which a strongly-marked, ominous family type has been propagated from generation to generation. With Schiller's Thekla Byron might have said :— There's a dark spirit walking in our house, Es geht ein finstrer Geist durch unser Haus, For unbridled passions, defiant self-will, arrogant contempt of the received order of things and of the world's opinion, associated with high endowments and much resolute energy of character, formed the inauspicious inheritance, which, in full measure, accumulated on the head of the poet. Of this Byron was conscious, and repeatedly expressed it. Some curse '-he writes, in a 1 Coleridge's translation. Die Piccolomini, Act ii. sc. 8. B letter to his friend Davies on the death of his mother'hangs over me and mine.' He was nevertheless proud, to an extraordinary degree, of his descent, prouder, it has been said, than of his works. He laid great stress on his being of a Norman not of a Saxon family, and lost no opportunity of asserting it; nor, strange to say, was his pride in any wise ruffled by the undeniable blot in his genealogical tree, indicated in his escutcheon by the 'bordure,' the sign of illegitimacy; for that he had no knowledge of this circumstance is inconceivable, though he constantly concealed it by his reticence from himself and others.? The legendary genealogy of the family reaches back, as a matter of course, to a hoar antiquity. A branch of the original Scandinavian Buruns settled, according to this authority, in Normandy, from whence two members of the family, Erneis and Ralph de Burun, followed the Conqueror to England, where the former received important possessions in Yorkshire and Lancashire, while the latter is mentioned in Domesday Book as a great landed proprietor in Nottinghamshire. The accounts, however, regarding these two heroic progenitors, as well as of their successors, are too vague and unauthentic to reward the trouble of repeating them in fuller detail; though, perhaps, it may be remarked, that the growth of the possessions of the family was rapid; that, about the time of Henry II. (1155-1189), the present form of the name 'Byron' seems to have been fixed; that-a requisite in every correct 1 Moore's Life and Letters of Lord Byron, ii. 39. 3 Galt's Life of Lord Byron, preface, p. v. Life, p. 6. 2nd edition, London, 1830. [Thomas Watts] Athenæum, May 16, 1868, p. 687 et seq. See also Appendix (A). The poet pronounced his name in different ways, yet generally almost as a monosyllable with the short y. In Italy his friends, following perhaps his own example, used to quiz the Countess Guiccioli for pro |