tunities. Hanson urged him to the sale of Newstead ; Byron rebelled against the proposal, adding that, if it must be alienated, he would end his days in a foreign country, for Newstead was the only tie he had to England. Enough-Byron saw himself compelled to return home, because he wanted the means for the further prosecution of his travels, and because his involved circumstances demanded his presence in London. With what feelings he began the homeward journey under these circumstances may easily be conceived. Disgust, vexation, and profound dissatisfaction seem to have mastered him. 'Indeed' (so he writes to his friend Hodgson during the voyage) 'my prospects are not very pleasant. Embarrassed in my private affairs, indifferent to public, solitary without the wish to be social, with a body a little 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 lawyer, the next a creditor, then colliers, farmers, surveyors, and all the agreeable attachments to estates out of repair and contested coalpits. In short, I am sick and sorry, and when I have a little repaired my irreparable affairs, away I shall march, either to campaign in Spain, or back again to the East, where I can at least have cloudless skies and a cessation from impertinence.' ' He begs his mother to get his apartments at Newstead ready, where he means to live in complete retirement; his books only he bids her take care of, and reminds her to leave him a few bottles of champagne.2 How Byron reached Malta is nowhere mentioned; we learn only that the above-named Giraud accompanied him thither. After another attack of tertian fever at Malta, 1 Moore's Life, i. 354. 2 Dallas' Correspondence, ii. 12, 27. he embarked in the 'Volage' frigate, which sailed for England on June 3, and came to anchor in the Thames in the beginning of July, his pilgrimage having lasted two years and some days. On his arrival in London he found it impossible to tear himself from it so quickly as he had contemplated. What, beside matters of business, detained him there will be related in the next chapter. On the 23rd he wrote to his mother, that he was kept very much against his will in London, but promised to come to her as soon as possible. A few days later he suddenly received accounts of her dangerous illness; he hastened as quickly as possible in his carriage with four horses to Newstead, but received on the road the news of her death. Mrs. Byron, inclined always to superstition, had for some time cherished the fancy, that possibly she would not live till the return of her son: If I should be dead,' she remarked to her maid when she received the account of his safe arrival at London, 'before Byron comes down, what a strange thing it would be!" She had felt for some time unwell, and her excessive corpulence always in itself excited apprehension. Her death is said to have been brought on by a fit of anger, into which she had been thrown by an upholsterer's account. She died August 1, and the next day her son reached Newstead. Although his grief was manifested in a peculiar manner, it was greater than might have been expected from his relations to such a mother. Death asserted its reconciling power, and Byron now saw that we can only have one mother." On the evening after his arrival, his mother's waiting-woman, passing by the room where the corpse lay, heard sounds as if some one were sighing heavily within. On entering, she found, to her astonishment, Byron sitting in the dark beside the bed. On her representing to him 1 Moore's Lifeìi. 31. 2 Ibid. ii. 32. that he should not yield so far to grief, he burst into tears and said: 'Oh I had but one friend in the world, and she is gone!' This was the natural Byron; but as soon as he again appeared in public, he reassumed his artificial demeanour. He could not bring himself to follow his mother to the grave, dreading, perhaps, to be overcome with grief before others, and to appear unmanly; he remained standing at the Abbey gate, and watched the procession until it disappeared. He then called young Rushton, and made him fetch the boxing-gloves; and with a violent effort proceeded to his usual sparring exercise. But the strain was too great; he was obliged to fling away the gloves and retire to his own room. 1 Moore's Life, i. 34. CHAPTER V. LONDON. 1811-1815. BYRON was now entirely without family ties, his halfsister, at this period of his life, for him hardly existing. We do not hear that she manifested any feeling at the death of her step-mother, or sympathised with the grief of her brother. She does not seem to have regarded herself as a member of the Byron family, but to have identified herself with that of her mother, in which she was educated and brought up. She was married in 1807 to her cousin, afterwards Colonel Leigh,' but it was only at a later period that she entered into more intimate and sisterly relations with her brother. The desolation of his condition Byron felt the more deeply, as the day after the death of his mother he was shocked by the news, that his friend Matthews had been drowned in the Cam. His Harrow friend Wingfield had died in May at Coimbra, as he learned shortly before setting out for Newstead, and poor Eddlestone succumbed a few weeks later to consumption. It was Byron's misfortune, that all the persons to whom at this period his affectionate nature clung, either shunned him, or were snatched from him by an early death. He spent those days at Newstead in great depression, although Scrope Davies at his invitation came to visit him there. 'We have nothing new to say on any His mother was a daughter of Admiral Byron. 2 subject'—he writes to Dallas '-' and yawn at each other in a sort of quiet inquietude.' In a letter to Hodgson he says: 'My days are listless and my nights restless; I have very seldom any society, and when I have I run out of it.' When in October he lost by death another person dear to him, of whom nothing further is known, he poured forth his grief at all these losses in the poem "To Thyrza.' The desolation of his feelings is expressed most bitterly and with an intensity bordering on mental aberration in the will which he now caused to be drawn up, some provisions of a former one having become void by the death of his mother. He repeats emphatically the provision that my body may be buried in the vault of the garden of Newstead, without any ceremony or religious service whatever; and that no inscription, save my name and age, be written on the tomb or tablet: and it is my will that my faithful dog may not be removed from the said vault.' In answer to the objections of his man of business, Mr. Bolton of Nottingham, he alleges that the garden was already consecrated ground, and that by this, as he hopes, the conscience of his sorrowing relations should be set at rest. In such a state of feeling it was anything but a relief to his mind, rather a new source of torment to him, that, in the last days of September, he had to repair, in company with Hanson, to his coal mines in Lancashire; and great was his joy when, towards the end of October, he could escape from his desolate Newstead, to return by way of Cambridge to London, to which he was fortunately summoned by business relating not to his property, but to his poetry. 1 Moore's Life, ii. 66. * See the note on this poem, ix. 13. 2 Ibid. ii. 77. In a letter to the above-named man of business, he speaks even of his carcase, Ibid. 47. |