“My whole ambition only doth extend

To gain the name of Stedman’s faithful friend.”

Sir Egerton Brydges, however, has found a poetic ancestry for Byron by connecting the Byrons of the 17th century with the family of Sydney.

The poverty into which Byron was born, and from which bis accession to high rank did not free him, had much to do in determining his future career. That he would have written verses in whatever circumstances he had been born we may safely believe; but if he had been born in affluence wo may bo certain that, with his impressionable disposition, he would never have been the poet of the Revolution—the moβt powerful exponent of the modern spirit. By the time of his birth (at Holies Street, London, January 22, 1788), his father had “squandered the lands o’ Gight awa,” and his mother was on her way back from the Continent with a small remnant of her wrecked fortune. Mrs Byron took up her residence in Aberdeen; and her'“lame brat,” as she called him in her fits, was sent for a year to a private school at 5s. a quarter, and afterwards to the grammar school of the town. Many little stories are told of the boy’s affectionate gratitude and venturesome chivalry, as well as of his exacting and passionate temper. The sisters Gray, who were his successive nurses, found him tractable enough under kind treatment. His mother, whose notions of discipline consisted in hurling things at him when he was disobedient, had no authority over him; he met her violence sometimes with sullen resistance, sometimes with defiant mockery; and once, he tells us, they had to wrench from him a knife which he was raising to his breast. At school he passed from the first to the fourth class, but with all his ambition to excel he was too self-willed to take kindly to prescribed tasks, too emotional for dry intellectual work; and he probably learned more from Mary Gray, who taught him the Psalms and the Bible, than he did from his schoolmaster. Before he left Aberdeen, which he did on tho death of his grand-uncle and his accession to the peerage in May 1798, he gave a remarkable proof of the precocious intensity of his affections by falling in love with his cousin Mary Duff. So strong a hold did this paseion take of him, that six years afterwards he nearly went into convulsions on hearing of her marriage.

When Byron’s name was first called in school with the prefix “Dominus,” the tradition is that he burst into tears,— from pride, Μ. Taine conjectures,—from pain at the gulf thus placed between him and his school-fellows, the Countess Guiccioli. Soon after, his mother, who had frequently taken advice for the cure of his lame foot, went with him to Nottingham, and placed him under the cure of an empiric, who tortured him to no purpose. The torture was renewed under the advice of a London physician at Dr Glennie’s school at Dulwich, at which he was entered in the summer of 1799; and at last the foot, as he wrote to his old Scotch nurse, was so far restored that he was able to put on a common boot. He was two years with Dr Glennie, and though he made little progress in his classical studies, he had the run of his master’s library, and added greatly to his general information. Before he left for Harrow lie had contracted another passion for his cousin Margaret Parker, so intense that he could not sleep nor eat when he was looking forward to meeting her. He went to Harroιv in 1801, “'a wild northern colt,” as the head-master said of him, very much behind his age in Latin and Greek. This deficiency he never quite overcame, though he worked enough to get into the same form with boys of his own age.

Antiquarian studies never had any charm for him. But though, according to his own account, he was always cricketing, rebelling, and getting into mischief, his brain was not idle. Partly to keep up his school repute for “general information,” he read every history he could lay hands on, and not without system either, for he set himself deliberately to know something about every country. He also went through all the British classics, both in Johnson and in Anderson, and most of the living poets. Few boys left Harrow with such a store of useful learning. Many anecdotes are told of the warmth of his friendships at Harrow, and his chivalry in defending his juniors. In the vacation of 1803 he again fell in love—this time more seriously—with Miss Chaworth, whose grandfather “the wicked Lord Byron” had killed. In the melancholy moods of his after life her rejection of him was often a subject of passionate regret.

Byron’s residence at Cambridge (Trinity College, 1805 to 1808, with interval of a year) added little to his knowledge of academical learning. The arts in which he qualified himself to graduate were swimming, riding, fencing, boxing, drinking, gaming, and the other occupations of idle undergraduates. When he went up to Cambridge he was wretched, he tells us, partly from leaving Harrow, partly “from some private domestic circumstances of different kinds,” chiefly, it may be presumed, the want of money; but his friend Scrope Davies lent him large sums, and he lived with a certain reckless happiness which had a great deal more to do with his moodiness and melancholy than the libertine excesses with which he is popularly credited. Much more important than his residence in Cambridge, as bearing on his mental development, was his year’s residence at Southwell. From that happy period, which saw the serious dawn of his genius, Μ. Taine has picked out only the unhappy violent quarrel with his mother, which was the cause of its termination. His intimacy with the Pigotts, and the expansion of his poetic impulses under their genial encouragement, are much more worthy of notice than this culmination of miserable bickerings which he was now strong enough to laugh at, when the domestic storm was over. He had scribbled many verses at Harrow, but had been too shy to show them to his roystering friends; and now finding for the first time an admiring audience, he put forth his powers in earnest, as he could do only under the influence of love or defiance. The result came before the public in the Hours of Idleness, published by Ridge of Newark in March 1807. The poems in that collection have something of the insipidity of the circumstances that gave them birth, but the fact of publication bound him to his vocation to a degree of which he was not at all aware. Hitherto his ambition had pointed towards politics as his natural field, and he said as much in the somewhat disdainful preface to his poems. Putting his ambition into verse, he characteristically compared himself to a slumbering volcano, and longed to burst on the world as a Fox or a Chatham. But the Hours of Idleness decided his career for him. When he went back to Trinity College he could not help eagerly watching their effect. Again and again he wrote to the friendly Miss Pigott to hear how they were succeeding. He was prepared for defeat, he said, and he promised to take vengeance on adverse critics. He was made a new man by the publication: he had tasted public applause and hungered for more of it. It was then that he carefully examined himself, and took stock of his acquirements in the very remarkable document dated November 30, 1807, to which we are indebted for our knowledge of the extent of his studies. In the midst of his rollicking set at Cambridge he was secretly girding up his loins, and collecting his powers to make a grand struggle for fame. Perhaps no poet was ever drawn out so directly by the thirst for public honour; no poet ever appealed so directly to the public eye and heart. He launched himself bodily before the world, almost ravenous for sympathy and homage.

It is generally said that but for the savage attack of the Edinburgh Review in the spring of 1808 Byron might never have returned to poetry. But the fact is that the review did not appear till a year after the publication of Hours of Idleness, and in the interval Byron, for all his farewell to poetry, was “scribbling,” as he called it, more furiously than ever. “I have written,” he wrote to Miss Pigott, six months before the Edinburgh attack, “214 pages of a novel; one poem of 380 lines, to be published (without my name) in a few weeks with notes; 560 lines of Bosworth Eield, and 250 lines of another poem in rhyme, besides half a dozen smaller pieces. The poem to be published is a satire.” This satire was the poem which he afterwards converted into a reply to the Edinburgh Review. He anticipated censure, and fore armed himself—always as eager to defy reproof as he was to win applause. Apparently he put off publishing his satire till all his critics should have had their say, and he should know clearly where to hit. When the attack came it wounded him bitterly; but a friend who called on him at the time thought from the fierce light in his eye that he had received a challenge. He was in no hurry to publish; he worked at leisure, with a confident consciousness of his powers, and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers did not make its appearance till the spring of 1809. When it did appear the authorship was soon discovered, and it was the talk of the town. To us who look back upon it dispassionately, and compare its somewhat heavy and mechanical couplets with the exquisite lightness and fitting-point of its antitype the JDunciad, the satire appears to possess no great force; but the personalities told at the time, when there was a vague unrest in the literary world at the outspoken severity and sometimes truculent malice of the Scotch review, and the injured poet had his revenge in a general acknowledgment that the objects of his wrath deserved castigation, and that the lash was well laid on.

Soon after the publication of his satire, Byron, in June 1809, left for his travels on the Continent; and one would have expected that the young lord, with the wreath of triumph still fresh on his head after his first literary battle, would have gone on his journey with satisfaction and hopeful curiosity. He sailed in deep dejection, with all the bitterness of a man who feels himself friendless and solitary, and he returned after two years’ wandering in Spain, Albania, Greece, Turkey, and Asia Minor, sadder than before. Why was this? Those who identify him with his own Childe Harold, are ready with the answer that he had lived a life of dissolute pleasure, and was already, at the age of twenty-one, experiencing the pains of satiety and exhaustion. But this is not borne out by such scanty light as he and his friends have thrown on his life at this period. He himself always protested, both in public and private, against being identified with Childe Harold. Childe Harold’s manor was an old monastic residence; he left his country in bitter sadness; in the original MS. his name was Childe Burun; he left behind him a mother and a sister; and he passed through the scenes of Byron’s travels. But there the resemblance ends. The resemblance is really confined, as the author alleged, to local details. There, is no reason to disbelieve what the author affirmed, that Childe Harold was a purely fictitious character, “introduced for the sake of giving some connection to the piece.” To make him what he intended—“a modern Timon, perhaps a poetical Zeluco,”—the poet drew, no doubt, upon his own gloomier moods; he felt occasionally as he makes Harold feel habitually, but the process was much more dramatic than the world, in spite of his protests, took for granted. Byron, with all his bitter moods of forlorn despondency, was too susceptible a spirit to “stalk in joyless reverie” through the south of Europe, as his letters home testify. And we know that his picture of the Bacchanalian feasts in the monastery, with “Paphian girls,” and “flatterers and parasites,” is not at all like what actually occurred at Newstead Abbey. There were no “laughing dames” there, except the domestics, and the flatterers and parasites were his bosom friends whom he loved with a romantic ardour. They held “high jinks” there as any young men might have done, masqueraded about in monkish habits to be in whimsical conformity with the place, practised pistol-shooting in the old hall, had a wolf and a bear chained at the entrance, had the garden dug up in search of concealed treasure, found a skull there, had it made into a cup, and passed this cup round after dinner, with the conceit that their mouths did it less harm than the worms, and that when its wit had ceased to sparkle, it had better be filled with Burgundy to make other wits sparkle than lie rotting in the earth. Byron himself was too poor, as Moore has remarked, to keep a harem, had such been his wish. He is known to have had a romantic passion for a girl who used to travel with him in England in boy’s clothes; but whoever thinks he was satiated with this poor creature’s devotion to him, should read the concluding stanzas of the second canto of Childe Harold, where the poet speaks in his own person, and laments her death in language utterly out of keeping with the dark unfeeling mood of his “modern Timon.” One can then understand why he should have said that “he would not for worlds be a man like his hero.” There is really very little of the personage Childe Harold in the poem; the poet simply has him by his side as a connecting link, while he describes the scenes through which he passed. In the two last cantos, indeed, Byron, angry that the public had identified him with Childe Harold, and then more defiant of public opinion, hardly cared to keep up the separation between his own character and the pilgrim’s; and in the last canto he avowedly makes them coalesce.

To look for the causes of moodiness and melancholy in material circumstances is a very foolish quest; but we may be certain that insufficiency of this world’s money, and the daily vexations and insults to which his rank was thereby exposed, had much more to do with Byron’s youthful gloom than satiety of this world’s pleasures. His embarrassed finances, and the impossibility of securing the respect due to his title, formed a constant source of annoyance, put his whole system into a morbid condition, in which, every little slight and repulse festered and rankled with exaggerated virulence. From the daily humiliations and impertinences to which his false position exposed him, aggravated by his jealous and suspicious irritability, he may have turned sometimes to Childe Harold’s consolations—“the harlot and the bowl,” but his nature prompted him rather to forget his vexations in purer and worthier objects. Unfortunately for him, such impetuous and passionate affections as his could rarely find the response for which he craved. In those few cases where devotion was repaid with devotion, the warmth of his gratitude was unbounded; he loaded poor Thyrza’s memory with caresses, careless of what the world might say, remembering only that the poor girl clung to him with unselfish love; and he returned his sister’s tender regard with an ardour and constancy that showed how highly he prized and how eager 1 y he reciprocated sincere affection. Circumstances that would have fallen lightly on a less sensitive man preyed upon his selftorturing spirit. In his dejection he had taken pleasure in the romantic notion of collecting the portraits of his friends, and one of>them refused to sit on the ground that he could not afford it. Another friend, invited to say good-bye, excused himself on the ground that he had to go shopping with his mother. Another prop on which he leaned also precipitated him into the Slough of Despond. His ambition pointed to political distinction, and having given fair youthful proof of the power he felt to be in him, his pride taught him to look for a warm welcome from his party chiefs when he came of age, but on the contrary, there was a haggle over his admission. Lord Carlisle held coldly aloof, and he had to wait with savage indignation till the marriage certificate of his grandfather was fished up in Cornwall before he could take his seat. This cold but perfectly correct and formal indifference added another pang to the bitterness with which he took leave of his country. When after two years’ absence he returned, still dogged by impecuniosity and the incivilities, real and imagined, tl⅛xt follow in its train, he “found fresh cause to roam.” Nursed as he had been in superstitions, he could hardly keep from crying out that the stars had combined against him, when in the months following his return friend after friend went to the grave. Matthews was drowned in the Cam; Wingfield died of fever at Coimbra; and he heard of both deaths on the same day. His mother died in the same month, and in spite of all their quarrels, he felt the bereavement bitterly.

But the death which most deeply wounded him came later. Nothing ever racked him with sharper anguish than the death of her whom he mourned under the name of Thyrza. To know the bitterness of his struggle with this sorrow, we have only to look at what he wrote on the day that the news reached him (October 11,1811); some of his wildest and most fiercely misanthropical verse, as well as some of his sweetest and saddest, belongs to that blackest of dates in his calendar. It is time that something were done to trace this attachment, which has been strangely overlooked by the essayists and biographers, because it furnishes an important clue to Byron’s character, and is, indeed, of hardly less importance than his later attachment to the Countess Guiccioli. Mr John Morley, in an essay which ought to be read by everybody who wishes to form a clear idea of Byron’s poetry as a revolutionary force in itself and an index to the movement of the time, remarks upon the respect which Byron, with all his raillery of i the married...