their part; but who shall name the agent for the rest of that fulfilment ?

In the late summer of 1798, Mrs. Byron and her son left Aberdeen for Newstead. So ended the Scottish sojourn, which was never repeated, though he kept alive to the last an affection for the Auld Lang Syne of it all. The first tour in Greece "carried me back to Morven "; and in the second expedition (says Moore) the dress chiefly worn at Cephalonia included a jacket of the Gordon tartan. But what of the other association which Scotland came to have for him-what of the Edinburgh Review? Can we doubt, on even slender knowledge of him, that during that turmoil Scotland became the very Hades? A girl, at the time of the notorious article, happened to observe that she thought he had a slight Scotch accent.

"Good God!" he cried,

on hearing of it, "I hope not. dd country was sunk in the accent!"

I would rather the sea. I, the Scotch

"He passed", said a writer in the Quarterly Review for 1831, "as at the changing of a theatrical scene . . . from a shabby Scotch flat to a palace". Well, if not to a palace, at least to something almost as fairy-tale-like in its difference from that abode whose furnishing, when sold on their departure, fetched £74. 7s. 7d.! At the Newstead toll-house, Mrs. Byron, savouring the drama of the moment, asked the woman in charge "to whom these woods might belong?"

"The owner, Lord Byron, has been dead some weeks".

"And who is the next heir?"

"They say it is a little boy who lives at Aberdeen ".

1 A lofty mountain in Aberdeenshire.

2 And see the famous Don Juan stanza (x. 18).

"And here he is, bless him!" broke in the nurse -that "May Gray" around whom Moore hangs a garland of pathos, and whom John Hanson (in a letter to Mrs. Byron of September 1, 1799)1 despoils of it with blunt and all too convincing hand. Let us compare the accounts, for this child's childhood is of poignant interest. If his nurse were really "another mother" to him, no overcharged fiction of young mental suffering surpasses his reality. "Such is his dread of the woman that I really believe he would forego the satisfaction of seeing you if he thought he was to meet her again. He told me that she was perpetually beating him . . . that she brought all sorts of company of the very lowest description into his apartments; that she was out late at nights, and he was frequently left to put himself to bed; that she would take the Chaise-boys into the Chaise with her, and stopped at every little Ale-house to drink with them"; and Hanson adds that her conduct towards the boy was so shocking that it was the general topic of conversation among "dispassionate persons at Nottingham.

When we examine Moore's garland in connection with this unmistakably truthful tale, we find him, perhaps, at nothing worse than his darling trick of the suppressio veri. In the very early days (he tells us),

she gained an influence over the boy's mind against which he rarely rebelled "—and this will, to the reader enlightened by Hanson, seem a not wholly ingenuous statement of the possible case. Again, when putting on the appliances which the little twisted limb required, the woman "would . . . teach him to repeat the first and twenty-third Psalms". Such teachings may be, have often been, associated with personal cruelties; and we read elsewhere that in the Aberdeen

1 Letters and Journals, i. 10.

days, after the first and twenty-third Psalms had been duly repeated, the woman, leaving the child alone in that darkness which is so easily filled with every chosen horror of the mind, would slip out to her lover, while "Geordie", who was persuaded that the house was haunted, would get out of bed and run along the lobby till he saw a light, there to stand until he got so cold that he was obliged to go back to the warmth of the dreaded bedroom. And of course, in the mysterious and pathetic secrecy of babyhood, he never spoke of all this suffering to his mother until after May Gray had left them. Moore's wreath was twined of flowers supplied by herself to the doctor who attended her when she died in 1827-three years after the death in Greece. Dr. Ewing of Aberdeen was an ardent admirer of Byron, whose name just then was haloed like a saint's. May Gray would perhaps hardly have been human if she had not enskied herself. The doctor may be excused for his credulity, and all the more because she could show him keepsakes given her by the boy when she left Mrs. Byron's service in 1799, a date coinciding too well with Hanson's accusatory letter. The keepsakes were a watch-the first that he had ever possessed-and a fulllength miniature of himself, painted by Kay of Edinburgh in 1795 (when he was six years old), which shows him with a bow and arrows in his hand, and long, curly hair falling over his shoulders. Both these treasures were given by May Gray's husband, after her death, to Dr. Ewing.

Thus stands the case for and against the nurse and unfortunately Moore is a witness too often convicted of amiable evasions for us to take his word against the damning bluntness of the Hanson letter. I fear that the garland must be scattered, and a new pang added to the heartache with which we ponder on Byron's childhood.