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 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 school-boy, 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 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 warm baths. 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 ÆT. 18.] HIS LAMENESS. HABIT OF READING AT DINNER TIME. 75 afflicted with such an infirmity. When that accomplished scholar and traveller, Mr. D. Baillie, 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 school-fellow, it was not till he mentioned his name that Mr. Baillie could recognise him. "It is odd enough, too, that you shouldn't know me," said Byron, "I thought nature had set such a mark upon me, that I could never be forgot." "fair But, while this defect was such a source of mortification to his spirit, it was also, and 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 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 a 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." 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 much 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. 5. I SHALL 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, * "It was the custom of Burns," says Lockhart, "to read at table." 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. "LIST OF HISTORICAL WRITERS WHOSE WORKS I HAVE PERUSED IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. "History of England.-Hume, Rapin, Henry, Smollet, Tindal, Belsham, Bisset, Adolphus, Holinshed, Froissart's Chronicles (belonging properly to France). "Scotland.-Buchanan, Hector Boethius, both in the Latin. "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 connection with European politics. 66 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. 66 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 I., to the peace of Passarowitz, in 1718,-the battle of Cutzka, in 1739; 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. |