chased this bed at the sale of Mrs Byron's furniture, on her removal to Newstead, gave out-with a view of attaching a stronger interest to the holes in the curtains that they were pierced by the same sword with which the old lord had killed Mr Chaworth, and which his descendant always kept as a memorial by his bedside. Such is the ready process by which fiction is often engrafted upon fact;-the sword in question being a most innocent and bloodless weapon, which Lord Byron, during his visits at Southwell, used to borrow of one of his neighbours.

His fondness for dogs-another fancy which accompanied him through life-may be judged from the anecdotes already given, in the account of his expedition to Harrowgate. Of his favourite dog, Boatswain, whom he has immortalized in verse, and by whose side it was once his solemn purpose to be buried, some traits are told indicative, not only of intelligence, but of a generosity of spirit, which might well win for him the affections of such a master as Byron. One of these I shall endeavour to relate as nearly as possible as it was told to me. Mrs Byron had a foxterrier, called Gilpin, with whom her son's dog, Boatswain, was perpetually at war, taking every opportunity of attacking and worrying him so violently, that it was very much apprehended he would kill the animal. Mrs Byron, therefore, sent off her terrier to a tenant at Newstead, and on the departure of Lord Byron for Cambridge, his "friend" Boatswain, with two other dogs, was intrusted to the care of a servant till his return. One morning the servant was much alarmed by the disappearance of Boatswain, and throughout the whole of the day he could hear no tidings of him. At last, towards evening, the stray dog arrived, accompanied by Gilpin, whom he led immediately to the kitchen fire, licking him and lavishing upon him every possible demonstration of joy. The fact was, he had been all the way to Newstead to fetch him, and having now established his former foe under the roof once more, agreed so perfectly well with him ever after, that he even protected him against the insults of other dogs (a task which the quarrelsomeness of the little terrier rendered no sinecure), and, if he but heard Gilpin's voice in distress, would fly instantly to his rescue.

In addition to the natural tendency to superstition, which is usually found connected with the poetical temperament, Lord Byron had also the example and influence of his mother, acting upon him from infancy, to give his mind this tinge. Her implicit belief in the wonders of second sight, and the strange tales she told of this mysterious faculty, used to astonish not a little her sober English friends; and it will be seen, that, at so late a period as the death of his friend Shelley, the idea of fetches and forewarnings, impressed upon him by his mother, had not wholly lost possession of the poet's mind. As an instance of a more playful sort of superstition, I may be allowed to mention a slight circumstance told me of him by one of his Southwell friends. This lady had a large

agate bead, with a wire through it, which had been taken out of a barrow, and lay always in her workbox. Lord Byron asking, one day, what it was, she told him that it had been given her as an amulet, and the charm was, that, as long as she had this bead in her possession, she should never be in love. "Then give it to me," he cried eagerly, " for that's just the thing I want." The young lady refused;but it was not long before the bead disappeared. She taxed him with the theft, and he owned it; but said she never should see her amulet again.

Of his charity and kind-heartedness he left behind him at Southwell-as, indeed, at every place throughout life, where he resided any time-the most cordial recollections. "He never," says a person, who knew him intimately at this period, 66 met with objects of distress, without affording them succour." Among many little traits of this nature which his friends delight to tell, I select the following,-less as a proof of his generosity, than from the interest which the simple incident itself, as connected with the name of Byron, presents. While yet a schoolboy he happened to be in a bookseller's shop at Southwell, when a poor woman came in to purchase a Bible. The price, she was told, by the shopman, was eight shillings. "Ah, dear Sir," she exclaimed, "I cannot pay such a price ;-I did not think it would cost half the money." The woman was then, with a look of disappointment, going away,-when young Byron called her back, and made her a present of the Bible.

In his attention to his person and dress, to the becoming arrangement of his hair, and to whatever might best show off the beauty with which nature had gifted him, he manifested, even thus early, his anxiety to make himself pleasing to that sex, who were, from first to last, the ruling stars of his destiny. The fear of becoming, what he was naturally inclined to be, enormously fat, had induced him, from his first entrance at Cambridge, to adopt, for the purpose of reducing himself, a system of violent exercise and abstinence, together with the frequent use of warmbaths. But the embittering circumstance of his life, that which haunted him, like a curse, amidst the buoyancy of youth, and the anticipations of fame and pleasure, was, strange to say, the trifling deformity of his foot. By that one slight blemish (as in his moments of melancholy he persuaded himself) all the blessings that nature had showered upon him were counterbalanced. His reverend friend, Mr Becher, finding him one day unusually dejected, endeavoured to cheer and rouse him by representing, in their brightest colours, all the various advantages with which Providence had endowed him,-and, among the greatest, that of "a mind which placed him above the rest of mankind." Ah, my dear friend," said Byron, mournfully,-" if this (laying his hand on his forehead) places me above the rest of mankind, that (pointing to his foot) places me far, far below them." It sometimes, indeed, seemed as if his sensitiveness on this point led him to fancy that he was the only person in the world afflicted with such an infirmity. When that accomplished scholar and traveller, Mr D. Bailey, who was at the same school with him at Aberdeen, met him afterwards at Cambridge, the young peer had then grown so fat that, though accosted by him familiarly as his schoolfellow, it was

66

not till he mentioned his name that Mr Bailey could recognize him. "It is odd enough, too, that you should'nt know me," said Byron-"I thought nature had set such a mark upon me, that I could never be forgot."

But, while this defect was such a source of mortification to his spirit, it was also, in an equal degree, perhaps, a stimulus :-and more especially in whatever depended upon personal prowess or attractiveness, he seemed to feel himself piqued by this stigma, which nature, as he thought, had set upon him, to distinguish himself above those whom she had endowed with her more "fair proportion." In pursuits of gallantry he was, I have no doubt, a good deal actuated by this incentive; and the hope of astonishing the world, at some future period, as a chieftain and hero, mingled little less with his young dreams than the prospect of a poet's glory." I will, some day or other," he used to say, when a boy, "raise a troop, -the men of which shall be dressed in black, and ride on black horses. They shall be called 'Byron's Blacks,' and you will hear of their performing prodigies of valour."

I have already adverted to the exceeding eagerness with which, while at Harrow, he devoured all sorts of learning,-excepting only that which, by the regimen of the school, was prescribed for him. The same rapid and multifarious course of study he pursued during the holidays; and, in order to deduct as little as possible from his hours of exercise, he had given himself the habit, while at home, of reading all dinner-time. In a mind so versatile as his, every novelty, whether serious or light, whether lofty or ludicrous, found a welcome and an echo; and I can easily conceive the glee-as a friend of his once described it to me with which he brought to her, one evening, a copy of Mother Goose's Tales, which he had bought from a hawker that morning, and read. for the first time, while he dined.

I shall now give, from a memorandum-book begun by him this year, the account, as I find it hastily and promiscuously scribbled out, of all the books in various departments of knowledge, which he had already perused, at a period of life when few of his schoolfellows had yet travelled beyond their longs and shorts. The list is, unquestionably, a remarkable one; and when we recollect that the reader of all these volumes was, at the same time, the possessor of a most retentive memory, it may be doubted whether, among what are called the regularly educated, the contenders for scholastic honours and prizes, there could be found a single one who, at the same age, has possessed any thing like the same stock of useful knowledge.

"Ireland.-Gordon. "Rome.-Hooke, Decline and Fall by Gibbon, Ancient History by Rollin (including an account of the Carthaginians, &c.), besides Livy, Tacitus, Eutropius, Cornelius Nepos, Julius Cæsar, Arrian, Sallust.

"Greece. Mitford's Greece, Leland's Philip, Plutarch, Potter's Antiquities, Xenophon, Thucydides, Herodotus.

"France.-Mezeray, Voltaire.

"Spain. I chiefly derived my knowledge of old Spanish History from a book, called the Atlas, now obsolete. The modern history, from the intrigues of Alberoni down to the Prince of Peace, I learned from its connexion with European politics.

"Portugal. From Vertot; as also his account of the Siege of Rhodes,-though the last is his own invention, the real facts being totally different.-So much for his Knights of Malta.

"Turkey. I have read Knolles, Sir Paul Rycaut, and Prince Cantemir, besides a more modern history, anonymous. Of the Ottoman History I know every event, from Tangralopi, and afterwards Othman İ. to the peace of Passarowitz, in 1718,-the battle of Cutzka, in 1739, and the treaty between Russia and Turkey in 1790.

"Russia.-Tooke's Life of Catherine II., Voltaire's Czar Peter.

"Sweden.--Voltaire's Charles XII., also Norberg's Charles XII.-in my opinion the best of the two. A translation of Schiller's Thirty Years' War, which contains the exploits of Gustavus Adolphus, besides Harte's Life of the same Prince. I have somewhere, too, read an account of Gustavus Vasa, the deliverer of Sweden, but do not remember the author's name.

"Prussia.-I have seen, at least, twenty Lives of Frederick II., the only prince worth recording in Prussian annals. Gillies, His own Works, and Thiebault,-none very amusing. The last is paltry, but circumstantial.

"Denmark I know little of. Of Norway I understand the natural history, but not the chronological. "Germany.-I have read long histories of the house of Suabia, Wenceslaus, and, at length, Rodolph of Hapsburgh and his thick-lipped Austrian descendants.

"Switzerland.-Ah! Willam Tell, and the battle of Morgarten, where Burgundy was slain.

"Italy.-Davila, Guicciardini, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the battle of Pavia, Massaniello, the revolutions of Naples, &c. &c.

Hindostan.-Orme and Cambridge.

America.-Robertson, Andrews' American War. Africa.-Merely from Travels, as Mungo Park,

Bruce.

BIOGRAPHY.

"Robertson's Charles V.-Cæsar, Sallust (Catiline and Jugurtha), Lives of Marlborough and Eugene, Tekeli, Bonnard, Buonaparte, all the British Poets, both by Johnson and Anderson, Rousseau's Confessions, Life of Cromwell, British Plutarch, British Nepos, Campbell's Lives of the Admirals, Charles XII., Czar Peter, Catherine II., Henry Lord Kaimes, Marmontel, Teignmouth's Sir William Jones, Life

of Newton, Belisaire, with thousands not to be detailed. "LAW.

"Blackstone, Montesquieu.

"PHILOSOPHY.

"Paley, Locke, Bacon, Hume, Berkeley, Drummond, Beattie, and Bolingbroke. Hobbs I detest.

rie.

"GEOGRAPHY.

or images, than in that want of a fitting organ to give these conceptions vent, to which their unacquaintance with the great instrument of the man of genius, his native language, dooms them. It will be found, indeed, that the three most remarkable examples of early authorship, which, in their respective lines, the history of literature affords-Pope, Congreve, and Chatterton-were all of them persons selfeducated, according to their own intellectual wants

useless pedantries of the schools, to seek, in the pure "well of English undefiled," those treasures of which they accordingly so very early and intimately possessed themselves. † To these three instances may now be added, virtually, that of Lord Byron, who, though a disciple of the schools, was, intellectually speaking, in them, not of them, and who, while his comrades were prying curiously into the graves of dead languages, betook himself to the fresh, living sources of his own, and from thence drew those rich, varied stores of diction, which have placed his works, from the age of two-and-twenty upwards, among the most precious depositories of the strength and sweetness of the English language that our whole literature supplies.

In the same book that contains the above record of his studies, he has written out, also from memory, a "List of the different poets, dramatic or otherwise, who have distinguished their respective languages by their productions." After enumerating the various poets, both ancient and modern, of Europe, he thus proceeds with his catalogue through other quarters of

women.

"B.-Nov. 30, 1807.

"I have also read (to my regret at present) above four thousand novels, including the works of Cervantes, Fielding, Smollet, Richardson, Mackenzie, Sterne, Rabelais, and Rousseau, &c. &c. The book, in my opinion, most useful to a man who wishes to acquire the reputation of being well read, with the least trouble, is 'Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,' the most amusing and instructive medley of quotations and classical anecdotes I ever perused. But a superficial reader must take care, or his intricacies will bewilder him. If, however, he has patience to go through his volumes, he will be more improved for literary conversation than by the sal of any twenty other works with which I am acquainted, at least in the English language."

peru

To this early and extensive study of English writers may be attributed that mastery over the resources of his own language, with which Lord Byron came furnished into the field of literature, and which enabled him, as fast as his youthful fancies sprung up, to elothe them with a diction worthy of their beauty. In general, the difficulty of young writers, at their commencement, lies far less in any lack of thoughts

"Arabia.-Mahomet, whose Koran contains most sublime poetical passages, far surpassing European poetry.

"Persia-Ferdousi, author of the Shah Nameh, the Persian Iliad,-Sadi, and Hafiz, the immortal Hafiz, the oriental Anacreon. The last is reverenced beyond any bard of ancient or modern times by the Persians, who resort to his tomb near Shiraz, to celebrate his memory. A splendid copy of his works is chained to his monument.

"America.-An epic poet has already appeared in that hemisphere, Barlow, author of the Columbiad, -not to be compared with the works of more polished nations.

"Iceland, Denmark, Norway, were famous for

I took to reading by myself," says Pope, for which I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm; ..... I followed every where, as my fancy led me, and was like a boy gathering flowers in the fields and woods, just as they fell happiest part of my life." It appears, too, that he was himself aware of the advantages which this free course of study brought with it:-"Mr Pope," says Spence, thought himself the better, in some respects, for not having had a regular education. He (as he observed in particular) read originally for the sense, whereas we are taught, for so many years, to read only for words."

in his way. These five or six years I still look upon as the

+ Before Chatterton was twelve years old, he wrote a catalogue, in the same manner as Lord Byron, of the books he had already read, to the number of seventy. Of these the chief subjects were history and divinity.

The perfect purity with which the Greeks wrote their own language was, with justice perhaps, attributed by themselves to their entire abstinence from the study of any other. If they became learned," says Ferguson, it was only by studying what they themselves had produced."

their Skalds. Among these Lodburg was one of the most distinguished. His Death-Song breathes ferocious sentiments, but a glorious and impassioned strain of poetry.

"Hindostan is undistinguished by any great bard, -at least, the Sanscrit is so imperfectly known to Europeans, we know not what poetical relics may exist.

"The Birman Empire.-Here the natives are passionately fond of poetry, but their bards are un

known.

"China.-I never heard of any Chinese poet, but the Emperor Kien Long, and his ode to Tea. What a pity their philosopher Confucius did not write poetry, with his precepts of morality!

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· Africa.—In Africa some of the native melodies are plaintive, and the words simple and affecting; but whether their rude strains of nature can be classed with poetry, as the songs of the bards, the Skalds of Europe, &c. &c. I know not.

"This brief list of poets I have written down from memory, without any book of reference; consequently some errors may occur, but I think, if any, very trivial. The works of the European, and some of the Asiatic, I have perused, either in the original or translations. In my list of English, I have merely mentioned the greatest;-to enumerate the minor poets would be useless, as well as tedious. Perhaps Gray, Goldsmith, and Collins, might have been added, as worthy of mention, in a cosmopolite account. But as for the others, from Chaucer down to Churchill, they are voces et præterea nihil;'sometimes spoken of, rarely read, and never with advantage. Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed on him, I think obscene and contemptible; -he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity, which he does not deserve so well as Pierce Plowman, or Thomas of Ercildoune. English living poets I have avoided mentioning;-we have none who will not survive their productions. Taste is over with us; and another century will sweep our empire, our literature, and our name, from all but a place in

the annals of mankind.

6

"November 30, 1807."

"BYRON.

Among the papers of his in my possession are several detached Poems (in all nearly six hundred lines), which he wrote about this period, but never printed-having produced most of them after the publication of his "Hours of Idleness." The greater number of these have little, besides his name, to recommend them: but there are a few that, from the feelings and circumstances that gave rise to them, will, I have no doubt, be interesting to the reader.

When he first went to Newstead, on his arrival from Aberdeen, he planted, it seems, a young oak in some part of the grounds, and had an idea that as it flourished so should he. Some six or seven years after, on revisiting the spot, he found his oak choked up by weeds, and almost destroyed. In this circumstance, which happened soon after Lord Grey de Ruthen left Newstead, originated one of these poems, which consists of five stanzas, but of which the few opening lines will be a sufficient specimen :

Young Oak, when I planted thee deep in the ground,
I hoped that thy days would be longer than mine;

That thy dark-waving branches would flourish around,
And ivy thy trunk with its mantle entwine.

Such, such was my hope, when, in infancy's years,
On the land of my fathers I rear'd thee with pride;
They are past, and I water thy stem with my tears,-
Thy decay not the weeds that surround thee can hide.

I left thee, my Oak, and, since that fatal hour,

A stranger has dwelt in the Hall of my Sire," &c. &c. The subject of the verses that follow is sufficiently explained by the notice which he has prefixed to them; and, as illustrative of the romantic and almost love-like feeling which he threw into his school friendships, they appeared to me, though rather quaint and elaborate, to be worth preserving.

"Some years ago, when at H, a friend of the author engraved on a particular spot the names of both, with a few additional words as a memorial. Afterwards, on receiving some real or imagined injury, the author destroyed the frail record, before he left H. On revisiting the place in 1807, he wrote under it the following stanzas :

1.

Here once engaged the stranger's view

Young Friendship's record, simply traced; Few were her words,-but yet though few, Resentment's hand the line defaced.

2.

Deeply she cut-but, not erased,

The characters were still so plain, That Friendship once return'd, and gazed,Till Memory hail'd the words again.

3.

Repentance placed them as before;
Forgiveness join'd her gentle name;
So fair the inscription seem'd once more,
That Friendship thought it still the same.
4.

Thus might the Record now have been;
But, ah, in spite of Hope's endeavour,
Or Friendship's tears, Pride rush'd between,
And blotted out the line for ever!

The same romantic feeling of friendship breathes

throughout another of these poems, in which he has taken for his subject the ingenious thought “l'Amitié est l'Amour sans ailes," and concludes every stanza with the words "Friendship is Love without his wings." Of the nine stanzas of which this poem consists, the three following appear the most worthy of selection :

Why should my anxious breast repine,
Because my youth is fled?

Days of delight may still be mine,

Affection is not dead.

In tracing back the years of youth,
One firm record, one lasting truth
Celestial consolation brings;

Bear it, ye breezes, to the seat,

Where first my heart responsive beat,

*

'Friendship is Love without his wings!'

Seat of my youth! thy distant spire
Recalls each scene of joy;

My bosom glows with former fire,-
In mind again a boy.

Thy grove of elms, thy verdant hill,
Thy every path delights me still,

Each flower a double fragrance flings;
Again, as once, in converse gay,
Each dear associate seems to say
'Friendship is Love without his wings!'
My Lycus wherefore dost thou weep?
Thy falling tears restrain;

Affection for a time may sleep,

But, ob, 'twill wake again.
Think, think, my friend, when next we meet,
Our long-wish'd intercourse, how sweet!

From this my hope of rapture springs,
While youthful hearts thus fondly swell,
Absence, my friend, can only tell,

* Friendship is Love without his wings!' Whether the verses I am now about to give are, in any degree, founded on fact, I have no accurate means of determining. Fond as he was of recording every particular of his youth, such an event, or rather era, as is | here commemorated, would have been, of all others, the least likely to pass unmentioned by him;-and yet neither in conversation nor in any of his writings do I remember even an allusion to it. On the other hand, so entirely was all that he wrote,-making allowance for the embellishments of fancy,--the transcript of his actual life and feelings, that it is not easy to suppose a poem, so full of natural tenderness, to have been indebted for its origin to imagination alone. TO MY SON! 1.

Those flaxen locks, those eyes of blue,
Bright as thy mother's in their hue;
Those rosy lips, whose dimples play
And smile to steal the heart away,
Recall a scene of former joy,
And touch thy father's heart, my Boy!
2.

And thou canst lisp a father's name-
Ah, William' were thine own the same,
No self-reproach-but, let me cease-
My care for thee shall purchase peace;
Thy mother's shade shall smile in joy,
And pardon all the past, my Boy!

3.

Her lowly grave the turf has prest,
And thou hast known a stranger's breast.
Derision sneers upon thy birth,
And yields thee scarce a name on earth:
Yet shall not these one hope destroy,-
A Father's heart is thine, my Boy!

4.

Why, let the world unfeeling frown,
Must I fond Nature's claim disown?
Ah, no-though moralists reprove,
I hail thee, dearest child of love,

Fair cherub, pledge of youth and joy-
A Father guards thy birth, my Boy!

5.

Oh, 'twill be sweet in thee to trace, Ere age has wrinkled o'er my face,

The only circumstance I know, that bears even remotely on the subject of this poem, is the following. About a year or two before the date affixed to it, he wrote to his mother, from Harrow (as I have been told by a person, to whom Mrs Byron herself communicated the circumstance), to say, that he had lately had a good deal of uneasiness on account of a young woman, whom he knew to have been a favourite of his late friend, Curzon, and who, finding herself after his death in a state of progress towards maternity, had declared Lord Byron was the father of her child. This, he positively assured his mother, was not the case; but, believing, as he did firmly, that the child belonged to Curzon, it was his wish that it should be brought up with all possible care, and he therefore entreated that his mother would have the kindness to take charge of it. Though such a request might well (as my informant expresses it) have discomposed a temper more mild than Mrs Byron's, she notwithstanding answered her son in the kindest terms, saying that she would willingly receive the child as soon as it was born, and bring it up in whatever manner he desired. Happily, however, the infant died almost immediately, and was thus spared the being a tax on the good-nature of any body .

Ere half my glass of life is run,
At once a brother and a son;
And all my wane of years employ
In justice done to thee, my Boy!
6.

Although so young thy heedless sire,
Youth will not damp parental fire;
And, wert thou still less dear to me,
While Helen's form revives in thee,
The breast, which beat to former joy,
Will ne'er desert its pledge, my Boy!

B

37

-, 1807.* But the most remarkable of these poems is one of a date prior to any I have given, being written in December, 1806, when he was not yet nineteen years old. It contains, as will be seen, his religious creed at that period, and shows how early the struggle between natural piety and doubt began in his mind.

THE PRAYER OF NATURE.

Father of Light! great God of Heaven!
Hear'st thou the accents of despair?
Can guilt like man's be e'er forgiven?
Can vice atone for crimes by prayer?
Father of Light, on thee I call!

Thou see'st my soul is dark within;
Thou who canst mark the sparrow's fall,
Avert from me the death of sin.
No shrine I seek, to sects unknown;
Oh point to me the path of truth!
Thy dread omnipotence I own;

Spare, yet amend, the faults of youth.
Let bigots rear a gloomy fane,
Let superstition hail the pile,

Let priests, to spread their sable reign,
With tales of mystic rites beguile.
Shall man confine his Maker's sway

To Gothic domes of mouldering stone?
Thy temple is the face of day;

Earth, ocean, heaven, thy boundless throne.
Shall man condemn his race to hell
Unless they bend in pompous form;

Tell us that all, for one who fell,
Must perish in the mingling storm?
Shall each pretend to reach the skies,
Yet doom his brother to expire,
Whose soul a different hope supplies,
Or doctrines less severe inspire?
Shall these, by creeds they can't expound,
Prepare a fancied bliss or woe?
Shall reptiles, groveling on the ground,
Their great Creator's purpose know?
Shall those, who live for self alone,
Whose years float on in daily crime-
Shall they by Faith for guilt atone,

And live beyond the bounds of Time?
Father! no prophet's laws I seek,-
Thy laws in Nature's works appear;-
I own myself corrupt and weak,

Yet will I pray, for thou wilt hear!
Thou, who canst guide the wandering star
Through trackless realms of Ether's space;

In this practice of dating his juvenile poems he followed the example of Milton, who (says Johnson), "by affixing the dates to his first compositions, a boast of which the learned Politian had given him an example, seems to commend the earliness of his own compositions to the notice of posterity."

The following trifle, written also by him in 1807, has never, as far as I know, appeared in print :

Epitaph on John Adams, of Southwell, a carrier, who died of drunkenness.

John Adams lies here, of the parish of Southwell,
A Carrier, who carried his can to his mouth well;
He carried so much, and he carried so fast,
He could carry no more-so was carried at last;
For, the liquor he drank, being too much for one,
He could not carry off,-so he's now carri-on.

B, Sept., 1807