of Dr Swift, who left Pope's house without ceremony, and afterwards informed him, by letter, that it was impossible for two sick friends to live together; for I found my shivering and invalid frame so perpetually annoyed by the thoughtless and tumultuous health of every one about me, that I heartily wished every soul in the house to be as ill as myself.

"The journey back I performed on foot, together with another of the guests. We walked about 25 miles a day; but were a week on the road, from being detained by the rain.

Having put the finishing hand to his new edition, he, without waiting for the fresh honours that were in store for him, took leave of London (whither he had returned) on the 11th of June, and, in about a fortnight after, sailed for Lisbon.

Great as was the advance which his powers had made, under the influence of that resentment from which he now drew his inspiration, they were yet, even in his Satire, at an immeasurable distance from the point to which they afterwards so triumphantly rose. It is, indeed, remarkable that, essentially as his genius seemed connected with, and, as it were, springing out of his character, the development of the one should so long have preceded the full maturity of the resources of the other. By her very early and rapid expansion of his sensibilities, Nature had given him notice of what she destined him for, long before he understood the call; and those materials of poetry with which his own fervid temperament abounded were but by slow degrees, and after much self-meditation, revealed to him. In his Satire, though vigorous, there is but little foretaste of the wonders that followed it. His spirit was stirred, but he had not yet looked down into its depths, nor does even his bitterness taste of the bottom of the heart, like those sarcasms which he afterwards flung in the face of mankind. Still less had the other countless feelings and passions, with which his soul had been long labouring, found an organ worthy of them ;-the gloom, the grandeur, the tenderness of his nature, all were left without a voice, till his mighty genius, at last, awakened in its strength.

In stooping, as he did, to write after established models, as well in the Satire as in his still earlier poems, he showed how little he had yet explored his own original resources, or found out those distinctive marks by which he was to be known through all time. But, bold and energetic as was his general character, he was, in a remarkable degree, diffident in his intellectual powers. The consciousness of what he could achieve was but by degrees forced upon him, and the discovery of so rich a mine of genius in his soul came with no less surprise on himself than

on the world. It was from the same slowness of selfappreciation that, afterwards, in the full flow of his fame, he long doubted, as we shall see, his own aptitude for works of wit and humour,-till the happy experiment of "Beppo" at once dissipated this distrust, and opened a new region of triumph to his versatile and boundless powers.

But, however far short of himself his first writings must be considered, there is in his Satire a liveliness of thought, and, still more, a vigour and courage, which, concurring with the justice of his cause and the sympathies of the public on his side, could not fail to attach instant celebrity to his name. Notwithstanding, too, the general boldness and recklessness of his tone, there were occasionally mingled with this defiance some allusions to his own fate and character, whose affecting earnestness seemed to answer for their truth, and which were of a nature strongly to awaken curiosity as well as interest. One or two of these passages, as illustrative of the state of his mind at this period, I shall here extract. The loose and unfenced state in which his youth was left to grow wild upon the world is thus touchingly alluded to:

Ev'n I-least thinking of a thoughtless throng,
Just skill'd to know the right and chuse the wrong,
Freed at that age when Reason's shield. is lost,
To fight my course through Passion's countless host,
Whom every path of Pleasure's flowery way
Has lured in turn, and all have led astray-*
Ev'n I must raise my voice, ev'n I must feel
Such scenes, such men destroy the public weal:
Although some kind, censorious friend will say,
"What art thou better, meddling fool,† than they?"
And every brother Rake will smile to see
That miracle, a Moralist, in me.

But the passage in which, hastily thrown off as it is, we find the strongest trace of that wounded feeling, which bleeds, as it were, through all his subsequent writings, is the following:

The time hath been, when no harsh sound would fall
From lips that now may seem imbued with gall,
Nor fools nor follies tempt me to despise

The meanest thing that crawl'd beneath my eyes. But now, so callous grown, so changed from youth,etc. Some of the causes that worked this change in his character have been intimated in the course of the preceding pages. That there was no tinge of bit

terness in his natural disposition we have abundant testimony, besides his own, to prove. Though, as a child, occasionally passionate and headstrong, his docility and kindness, towards those who were themselves kind, is acknowledged by all; and "playful" and "affectionate" are invariably the epithets by which those who knew him in his childhood convey their impression of his character.

Of all the qualities, indeed, of his nature, affectionateness seems to have been the most ardent and most deep. A disposition, on his own side, to form strong attachments, and a yearning desire after affection in return, were the feeling and the want that formed the dream and torment of his existence. We have seen with what passionate enthusiasm he threw himself into his boyish friendships. The all-absorb

* In the MS. remarks on his Satire, to which I have already referred, he says, on this passage-"Yea, and a

pretty dance they have led me."

+ Fool then, and but little wiser now.-MS. ibid.

ing and unsuccessful love that followed was, if I may so say, the agony, without being the death, of this unsated desire, which lived on through his life, filled his poetry with the very soul of tenderness, lent the colouring of its light to even those unworthy ties which vanity or passion led him afterwards to form, and was the last aspiration of his fervid spirit in those stanzas written but a few months before his death:

Tis time this heart should be unmove,
Since others it has ceased to move;
Yet, though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!

It is much, I own, to be questioned whether, even under the most favourable circumstances, a disposition such as I have here described could have escaped ultimate disappointment, or found anywhere a resting-place for its imaginings and desires. But, in the case of Lord Byron, disappointment met him on the very threshold of life. His mother, to whom his affections first, naturally and with ardour, turned, either repelled them rudely or capriciously trifled with them. In speaking of his early days to a friend at Genoa, a short time before his departure for Greece, he traced the first feelings of pain and humiliation he had ever known to the coldness with which his mother had received his caresses in infancy, and the frequent taunts on his personal deformity with which she had wounded him.

The sympathy of a sister's love, of all influences on the mind of a youth the most softening, was also, in his early days, denied to him, his sister Augusta and he having seen but little of each other while young. A vent through the calm channel of domestic affections might have brought down the high current of his feelings to a level nearer that of the world he had to traverse, and thus saved them from the tumultuous rapids and falls to which this early elevation, in their aftercourse, exposed them. In the dearth of all home endearments, his heart had no other resource but in those boyish friendships which he formed at school; and when these were interrupted by his removal to Cambridge, he was again thrown back, isolated, on his own restless desires. Then followed his ill-fated attachment to Miss Chaworth, to which, more than to any other cause, he himself attributed the desolating change then wrought in his disposition.

"I doubt sometimes" (he says, in his "Detached Thoughts") "whether, after all, a quiet and unagitated life would have suited me; yet I sometimes long for it. My earliest dreams (as most boys' dreams are) were martial; but a little later they were all for love and retirement, till the hopeless attachment to M*** C*** began and continued (though sedulously concealed) very early in my teens; and so upwards for a time. This threw me out again alone on a wide, wide sea.' In the year 1804 I recollect meeting my sister at General Harcourt's in Portland Place. I was then one thing, and as she had always till then found me. When we met again in 1805 (she told me since), that my temper and disposition were so completely altered that I was hardly to be recognized. I was not then sensible of

the change; but I can believe it, and account for it."

I have already described his parting with Miss Chaworth previously to her marriage. Once again, after that event, he saw her, and for the last time,-being invited by Mr Chaworth to dine at Annesley not long before his departure from England. The few years that had elapsed since their last meeting had made a considerable change in the appearance and manners of the young poet. The fat, unformed schoolboy, was now a slender and graceful young man. Those emotions and passions, which at first heighten, and then destroy, beauty, had as yet produced only their favourable effects on his features; and, though with but little aid from the example of refined society, his manners had subsided into that tone of gentleness and self-possession which more than any thing marks the well-bred gentleman. Once only was the latter of these qualities put to the trial, when the little daughter of his fair hostess was brought into the room. At the sight of the child, he started involuntarily,-it was with the utmost difficulty he could conceal his emotion; and to the sensations of that moment we are indebted for those touching stanzas, "Well-thou art happy," &c., which appeared afterwards in a Miscellany published by one of his friends, and are now to be found in the general collection of his works. Under the influence of the same despondent passion he wrote two other poems at this period, from which, as they exist only in the Miscellany I have just alluded to, and that collection has for some time been out of print, a few stanzas may, not improperly, be extracted here.

THE FAREWELL-TO A LADY.†
When man, expell'd from Eden's bowers,
A moment linger'd near the gate,
Each scene recall'd the vanish'd hours,
And bade him curse his future fate.

But, wandering on through distant climes,
He learnt to bear his load of grief,
Just gave a sigh to other times,
And found in busier scenes relief.
Thus, lady, must it be with me,

And I must view thy charms no more;
For, whilst I linger near to thee,

I sigh for all I knew before, &c. &c.

The other poem is, throughout, full of tenderness; but I shall give only what appear to me the most striking stanzas.

STANZAS TO*** ON LEAVING ENGLAND.
'Tis done and shivering in the gale
The bark unfurls her snowy sail;
And whistling o'er the bending mast,
Loud sings on high the fresh'ning blast:
And I must from this land be gone,
Because I cannot love but one.

I go-but wheresoe'er I flee

There's not an eye will weep for me;
There's not a kind congenial heart,
Where I can claim the meanest part :
Nor thou, who hast my hopes undone
Wilt sigh, although I love but one.

To think of every early scene,

Of what we are, and what we've been
Would whelm some softer hearts with woe-
But mine, alas! has stood the blow.
Yet still beats on as it begun,
And never truly loves but one.

And who that dear loved one may be
Is not for vulgar eyes to see;
And why that early love was crost,
Thou know'st the best, I feel the most:
But few that dwell beneath the sun
Have loved so long, and loved but one.

I've tried another's fetters too,
With charms, perchance, as fair to view;
And I would fain have loved as well,
But some unconquerable spell
Forbade my bleeding breast to own
A kindred care for aught but one.

'Twould soothe to take one lingering view,
And bless thee in my last adieu;
Yet wish I not those eyes to weep
For him that wanders o'er the deep:
His home, his hope, his youth are gone,
Yet still he loves, and loves but one.*

While thus, in all the relations of the heart, his thirst after affection was thwarted, in another instinct of his nature, not less strong-the desire of eminence and distinction-he was, in an equal degree, checked in his aspirings, and mortified. The inadequacy of his means to his station was early a source of embarrassment and humiliation to him; and those high, patrician notions of birth in which he indulged, but made the disparity between his fortune and his rank the more galling. Ambition, however, soon, whispered to him that there were other and nobler ways to distinction. The eminence which talent builds -for itself might, one day, he proudly felt, be his own; nor was it too sanguine to hope that, under the favour accorded usually to youth, he might with impunity venture on his first steps to fame. But here, as in every other object of his heart, disappointment and mortification awaited him. Instead of experiencing the ordinary forbearance, if not indulgence, with which young aspirants for fame are received by their critics, he found himself instantly the victim of such unmeasured severity

as is not often dealt out even to veteran offenders in literature; and, with a heart fresh from the trials of disappointed love, saw those resources and consolations which he had sought in the exercise of his intellectual strength also invaded.

While thus prematurely broken into the pains of

* Thus corrected by himself in a copy of the Miscellany now in my possession;-the two last lines being, originally, as follows:

Though wheresoe'er my bark may run,

I love but thee, I love but one.

life, a no less darkening effect was produced upon him by too early an initiation into its pleasures. That charm with which the fancy of youth invests an untried world was, in his case, soon dissipated. His passions had, at the very onset of their career, forestalled the future; and the blank void that followed was by himself considered as one of the causes of that melancholy, which now settled so deeply into his character.

66

66

"My passions" (he says, in his "Detached Thoughts,") were developed very early-so early that few would believe me if I were to state the period and the facts which accompanied it. Perhaps this was one of the reasons which caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts,-having anticipated life. My earlier poems are the thoughts of one at least ten years older than the age at which they were written, I don't mean for their solidity, but their experience. The two first Cantos of Childe Harold were completed at twenty-two; and they are written as if by a man older than I shall probably ever be."

Though the allusions in the first sentence of this extract have reference to a much earlier period, they afford an opportunity of remarking, that however dissipated may have been the life which he led during the two or three years previous to his departure on his travels, yet the notion caught up by many, from his own allusions, in Childe Harold, to irregularities and orgies of which Newstead had been the scene, is, like most other imputations against him, founded on his own testimony, greatly exaggerated. He describes, it is well known, the home of his poetical representative as a "monastic dome, condemned to uses vile," and then adds,—

Where superstition once had made her den,

Now Paphian girls were known to sing and smile.

Mr Dallas, too, giving in to the same strain of exaggeration, says, in speaking of the poet's preparations for his departure, "already satiated with pleasure, and disgusted with those companions who have no other resource, he had resolved on mastering his appetites;-he broke up his harams." truth, however, is that the narrowness of Lord Byron's means would alone have prevented such

The

oriental luxuries. The mode of his life at Newstead was simple and unexpensive. His companions, though not averse to convivial indulgences, were of habits and tastes too intellectual for mere vulgar debauchery; and, with respect to the alleged "harams," it appears certain that one or two suspected "Subintroducta" (as the ancient monks of the Abbey would have styled them), and those, too, among the ordinary menials of the establishment, were all that even scandal itself could ever fix upon to warrant such an assumption.

That gaming was among his follies at this period, he himself tells us in the Journal I have just cited :"I have a notion (he says) that gamblers are as happy as many people, being always excited. Women, wine, fame, the table,-even ambition, sate now and then; but every turn of the card and cast of the dice keeps the gamester alive; besides, one can game ten times longer than one can do any thing else. I was very fond of it when young, that is to

say, of hazard, for I hate all card games,—even faro. When macco (or whatever they spell it) was introduced, I gave up the whole thing, for I loved and missed the rattle and dash of the box and dice, and the glorious uncertainty, not only of good luck or bad luck, but of any luck at all, as one had sometimes to throw often to decide at all. I have thrown as many as fourteen mains running, and carried off all the cash upon the table occasionally; but I had no coolness, or judgment, or calculation. It was the delight of the thing that pleased me. Upon the whole, I left off in time, without being much a winner or loser. Since one-and-twenty years of age I played but little, and then never above a hundred, or two, or three."

drunk deep of in reality;-at an age when the one was but looking forth on the sea of life, the other had plunged in, and tried its depths. Swift himself, in whom early disappointments and wrongs had opened a vein of bitterness that never again closed, affords a far closer parallel to the fate of our noble poet,* as well in the untimeliness of the trials he had been doomed to encounter, as in the traces of their havoc which they left in his character.

That the romantic fancy of youth, which courts melancholy as an indulgence, and loves to assume a sadness it has not had time to earn, may have had some share in, at least, fostering the gloom by which the mind of the young poet was overcast, I am not disposed to deny. The circumstance, indeed, of his

TO MR WILLIAM BANKES.

"Twelve o'clock, Friday night.

66 MY DEAR BANKES, "I have just received your note; believe me I regret most sincerely that I was not fortunate enough to see it before, as I need not repeat to you, that your conversation for half an hour would have been much more agreeable to me than gambling or drinking, or any other fashionable mode of passing an evening, abroad or at home.-I really am very sorry that I went out previous to the arrival of your dispatch: in future pray let me hear from you before six, and whatever my engagements may be, I will always postpone them.-Believe me, with that deference which I have always from my childhood paid to your talents, and with somewhat a better opinion of your heart than I'have hitherto entertained,

"Yours ever, etc."

Among the causes-if not rather among the results of that disposition to melancholy, whieh, after all, perhaps, naturally belonged to his temperament, must not be forgotten those sceptical views of religion, which clouded, as has been shown, his boyish thoughts, and, at the time of which I am speaking, gathered still more darkly over his mind. In general, we find the young too ardently occupied with the enjoyments which this life gives or promises to afford either leisure or inclination for much inquiry into the mysteries of the next. But with him it was unluckily otherwise; and to have, at once, anticipated the worst experience both of the voluptuary and the reasoner,-to have reached, as he supposed, the boundary of this world's pleasures, and see nothing but "clouds and darkness" beyond, was the doom, the anomalous doom, which a nature, premature in all its passions and powers, inflicted on Lord Byron.

When Pope, at the age of five-and-twenty, complained of being weary of the world, he was told by Swift that he "had not yet acted or suffered enough in the world to have become weary of it." But far different was the youth of Pope and of Byron ;-what the former but anticipated in thought, the latter had

I give the words as Johnson has reported them;-in Swift's own letter they are if I recollect right rather different.

study, a number of skulls highly polished, and placed on light stands round the room, would seem to indicate that he rather courted than shunned such gloomy associations. Being a sort of boyish mimickry, too, of the use to which the poet Young is said to have applied a skull, such a display might well induce some suspicion of the sincerity of his gloom, did we not, through the whole course of his subsequent life and writings, track visibly the deep vein of melancholy which nature had imbedded in his character.

Such was the state of mind and heart,-as, from his own testimony and that of others, I have collected it,-in which Lord Byron now set out on his indefinite pilgrimage; and never was there a change wrought in disposition and character to which Shakspeare's fancy of "sweet bells jangled out of tune" more truly applied. The unwillingness of Lord Carlisle to countenance him, and his humiliating position in consequence, completed the full measure of that mortification towards which so many causes had concurred. Baffled, as he had been, in his own ardent pursuit of affection and friendship, his sole revenge and consolation lay in doubting that any such feelings really existed. The various crosses he had met with, in themselves sufficiently irritating and wounding,— were rendered still more so by the high, impatient temper with which he encountered them. What others would have bowed to, as misfortunes, his proud spirit rose against, as wrongs; and the vehemence of this reaction produced, at once, a revolution throughout his whole character,‡ in which, as

* There is, at least, one striking point of similarity between their characters in the disposition which Johnson has thus attributed to Swift :-"The suspicions of Swift's irreligion," he says, "proceeded, in a great measure, from his dread of hypocrisy; instead of wishing to seem better, he delighted in seeming worse than he was."

Another use to which he appropriated one of the skulls found in digging at Newstead was the having it mounted in silver, and converted into a drinking cup. This whim has been commemorated in some well-known verses of his own; and the cup itself, which, apart from any revolting ideas it may excite, forms by no means an inelegant object to the eye, is, with many other interesting relics of Lord Byron, in the possession of the present proprietor of Newstead Abbey, Colonel Wildman,

Rousseau appears to have been conscious of a similar sort of change in his own nature:- They have laboured without intermission," he says in a letter to Madame de Boufflers, to give to my heart, and, perhaps, at the same time to my genius, a spring and stimulus of action, which they have not inherited from nature. I was born weak,ill-treatment has made me strong."-Hume's Private Correspondence.

in revolutions of the political world, all that was bad and irregular in his nature burst forth with all that was most energetic and grand. The very virtues and excellencies of his disposition ministered to the violence of this change. The same ardour that had burned through his friendships and loves now fed the fierce explosions of his indignation and scorn. His natural vivacity and humour but lent a fresher flow to his bitterness, till he, at last, revelled in it as an indulgence; and that hatred of hypocrisy, which had hitherto only shown itself in a too shadowy colouring of his own youthful frailties, now hurried him, from his horror of all false pretensions to virtue, into the still more dangerous boast and ostentation of vice.

The following letter to his mother, written a few days before he sailed, gives some particulars respecting the persons who composed his suite. Robert Rushton, whom he mentions so feelingly in the Postscript, was the boy introduced, as his Page, in the First Canto of Childe Harold.

"I am about to sail in a few days; probably before this reaches you. Fletcher begged so hard, that I have continued him in my service. If he does not behave well abroad, I will send him back in a transport. I have a German servant (who has been with Mr Wilbraham in Persia before, and was strongly recommended to me by Dr Butler of Harrow), Robert and William; they constitute my whole suite. I have letters in plenty-you shall hear from me at the different ports I touch upon; but you must not be alarmed if my letters miscarry. The continent is in a fine state-an insurrection has broken out at Paris, and the Austrians are beating Buonaparte the Tyrolese have risen.

"There is a picture of me in oil, to be sent down to Newstead soon.-I wish the Miss P**'s had something better to do than carry my miniatures to Nottingham to copy. Now they have done it, you may ask them to copy the others, which are greater favourites than my own. As to money matters, I am ruined-at least till Rochdale is sold; and if that does not turn out well, I shall enter into the Austrian or Russian service-perhaps the Turkish,if I like their manners. The world is all before me, and I leave England without regret, and without a wish to revisit any thing it contains, except yourself, and your present residence.

"P.S.-Pray tell Mr Rushton his son is well, and doing well; so is Murray, indeed better than I ever saw him; he will be back in about a month. ought to add, the leaving Murray to my few regrets, as his age perhaps will prevent my seeing him again. Robert I take with me; I like him, because, like myself, he seems a friendless animal."

To those who have in their remembrance his po

* "It was bitterness that they mistook for frolic."-Johnson's account of himself at the university, in Boswell.

"We sail to-morrow in the Lisbon packet, having been detained till now by the lack of wind, and other necessaries. These being at last procured, by this time to-morrow evening we shall be embarked on the vide vorld of vaters, vor all the vorld like Robinson Crusoe. The Malta vessel not sailing for some weeks, we have determined to go by way of Lisbon, and, as my servants term it, to see "that there Portingale;"-thence to Cadiz and Gibraltar, and so on our old route to Malta and Constantinople, if so be that Captain Kidd, our gallant commander, understands plain-sailing and Mercator, and takes us on our voyage all according to the chart.

"Will you tell Dr Butler† that I have taken the treasure of a servant, Friese, the native of Prussia Proper, into my service, from his recommendation. He has been all among the Worshippers of Fire in Persia, and has seen Persepolis and all that.

"H** has made woundy preparations for a book on his return;-100 pens, two gallons of japan ink, and several volumes of best blank, is no bad provision for a discerning public. I have laid down my

The poet Cowper, it is well known, produced that master-piece of humour, John Gilpin, during one of his fits of morbid dejection, and he himself says, "Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all."

†The reconciliation which took place between him and Dr Butler, before his departure, is one of those instances of placability and pliableness with which his life abounded. We have seen, too, from the manner in which he mentions the circumstance in one of his note-books, that the reconcilement was of that generously retrospective kind, in which not only the feeling of hostility is renounced in entertained. future, but a strong regret expressed that it had been ever

Not content with this private atonement to Dr Butler, it was his intention, had he published another edition of the Hours of Idleness, to substitute for the offensive verses against that gentleman, a frank avowal of the wrong he had been guilty of in giving vent to them. This fact, so creditable to the candour of his nature, I learn from a loose sheet in his handwriting, containing the following corrections. In place of the passage beginning, "Or if my Muse a pedant's portrait drew," he meant to insert

If once my Muse a harsher portrait drew,
Warm with her wrongs, and deem'd the likeness true,
By cooler judgment taught, her fault she owns,
With noble minds a fault confess'd atones.

And to the passage immediately succeeding his warm praise of Dr Drury, "-Pomposus fills his magisterial chair," it was his intention to give the following turn :

Another fills his magisterial chair;
Reluctant Ida owns a stranger's care;

Oh may like honours crown his future name!-
If such his virtues, such shall be his fame.