minus" prefixed to it. Unable to give utterance to the usual answer "adsum," he stood silent amid the general stare of his school-fellows, and, at last, burst into tears. turn. The largest of these vessels had been built for him at some seaport on the eastern coast, and, being conveyed on wheels over the Forest to Newstead, was supposed to have fulfilled one of the "when a ship laden with ling should cross over Sherwood Forest, the Newstead Estate would pass from the Byron family." In Nottinghamshire, "ling" is the term used for heather; and, in order to bear out Mother Shipton and spite the old Lord, the country people, it is said, ran along by the side of the vessel, heaping it with heather all the way. The cloud which, to a certain degree undeserv-prophecies of Mother Shipton, which declared that edly, his unfortunate affray with Mr. Chaworth had thrown upon the character of the fifth Lord Byron, was deepened and confirmed by what it, in a great measure, produced, the eccentric and unsocial course of life to which he afterwards betook himself. During his latter years, the only companions of his solitude-besides that colony of crickets which he is said to have amused himself with rearin and feeding (1) — were old Murray, afterwards the favourite servant of his successor, and a female domestic, who, from the station she was suspected of being promoted to by her noble master, received generally through the neighbourhood the appellation of "Lady Betty." This eccentric peer, it is evident, cared but little about the fate of his descendants. With his young heir in Scotland he held no communication whatever; and if at any time he happened to mention him, which but rarely occurred, it was never under any other designation than that of "the little boy who lives at Aberdeen." On the death of his grand-uncle, Lord Byron having become a ward of Chancery, the Earl of Carlisle, who was in some degree connected with the family, being the son of the deceased Lord's sister, was appointed his guardian ; and in the autumn of 1798, Mrs. Byron and her son, attended by their faithful May Gray, left Aberdeen for Newstead. Previously to their departure, the furniture of the humble lodgings which they had oc linen, which Mrs. Byron took with her—sold, and the whole sum that the effects of the mother of the Lord of Newstead yielded was 747. 178. 7d. Though living in this sordid and solitary style, he was frequently much distressed for money; and one of the most serious of the injuries inflicted by him upon the property was his sale of the family estate of Rochdale in Lancashire, of which the mineral produce was accounted very valuable. He well knew, it is said, at the time of the sale, his inability to make out a legal title; nor is it supposed that the purchasers themselves were unacquainted with the defect of the conveyance. But cupied was-with the exception of the plate and they contemplated, and, it seems, actually did realize, an indemnity from any pecuniary loss, before they could, in the ordinary course of events, be dispossessed of the property. During the young Lord's minority, proceedings were instituted for the recovery of this estate, and with success. At Newstead, both the mansion and the grounds around it were suffered to fall helplessly into decay; and among the few monuments of either care or expenditure which their Lord left behind, were some masses of rock-work, on which much cost had been thrown away, and a few castellated buildings on the banks of the lake and in the woods. The forts upon the lake were designed to give a naval appearance to its waters, and frequently, in his more social days, he used to amuse himself with sham fights,—his vessels attacking the forts, and being cannonaded by them in re (1) To this Lord Byron used to add, on the authority of old servants of the family, that on the day of their patron's death,, these crickets all left the house simultaneously, and in such From the early age at which Byron was taken to Scotland, as well as from the circumstance of his mother being a native of that country, he had every reason to consider himself-as, indeed, he boasts in Don Juan-"half a Scot by birth, and bred a whole one." To meet with an Aberdonian was, at all times, a delight to him; and when the late Mr. Scott, who was a native of Aberdeen, paid him a visit at Venice in the year 1819, in talking of the haunts of his childhood, one of the places he particularly mentioned was Wallace-nook, a spot where there is a rude statue of the Scottish chief still standing. From first to last, indeed, these recollections of the country of his youth never forsook him. In his numbers that it was impossible to cross the hall without treading on them. early voyage into Greece, not only the shapes of the mountains, but the kilts and hardy forms of the Albanese,-all, as he says, "carried him back to Morven ;" and, in his last fatal expedition, the dress which he himself chiefly wore at Cephalonia was a tartan jacket. Cordial, however, and deep as were the impressions which he retained of Scotland, he would sometimes in this, as in all his other amiable feelings, endeavour perversely to belie his own better nature, and, when under the the excitement of anger or ridicule, persuade not only others, but even himself, that the whole current of his feelings ran directly otherwise. The abuse with which, in his anger against the Edinburgh Review, he overwhelmed every thing Scotch, is an instance of this temporary triumph of wilfulness; and, at any time, the least association of ridicule with the country or its inhabitants was sufficient, for the moment, to put all his sentiment to flight. A friend of his once described to me the half playful rage into which she saw him thrown, one day, by a heedless girl, who remarked that she thought he had a little of the Scotch accent. "Good God, I hope not!" he exclaimed. "I'm sure I have n't. I would rather the whole d―d country was sunk in the sea -I, the Scotch accent!" : To such sallies, however, whether in writing or conversation, but little weight is to be allowed, particularly, in comparison with those strong testimonies which he has left on record of his fondness for his early home and while, on his side, this feeling so indelibly existed, there is, on the part of the people of Aberdeen, who consider him as almost their fellow-townsman, a correspondent warmth of affection for his memory and name. The various houses where he resided in his youth are pointed out to the traveiler; to have seen him but once is a recollection boasted of with pride; and the Brig of Don, beautiful in itself, is invested, by his mere mention of it, with an additional charm. Two or three years since, the sum of five pounds was offered to a person in Aberdeen for a letter which he had in his possession, written by | Captain Byron a few days before his death; and, among the memorials of the young poet, which are treasured up by individuals of that place, there is one which it would have not a little amused himself to hear of, being no less characteristic a relic than an old china saucer, out of which he had bitten a large piece, in a fit of passion, when a child. It was in the summer of 1798, as I have already said, that Lord Byron, then in his eleventh year, left Scotland, with his mother and nurse, to take possession of the ancient seat of his ancestors. In one of his latest letters, referring to this journey, he says, "I recollect Loch Leven as it were but yesterday-I saw it in my way to England in 1798." They had already arrived at the Newstead toll-bar, and saw the woods of the Abbey stretching out to receive them, when Mrs. Byron, affecting to be ignorant of the place, asked the woman of the tollhouse-to whom that seat belonged? She was told that the owner of it, Lord Byron, had been some months dead. "And who is the next heir?" asked the proud and happy mother. "They say," answered the woman, "it is a little boy who lives at Aberdeen."-" And this is he, bless him!" exclaimed the nurse, no longer able to contain herself, and turning to kiss with delight the young Lord who was seated on her lap. Even under the most favourable circumstances; such an early elevation to rank would be but too likely to have a dangerous influence on the character; and the guidance under which young Byron entered upon his new station was, of all others, the least likely to lead him safely through its perils and temptations. His mother, without judgment or self-command, alternately spoiled him by indulgence, and irritated, or-what was still worse amused him by her violence. That strong sense of the ridiculous, for which he was afterwards so remarkable, and which showed itself thus early, got the better even of his fear of her; and when Mrs. Byron, who was a short and corpulent person, and rolled considerably in her gait, would, in a rage, endeavour to catch him, for the purpose of inflicting punishment, the young urchin, proud of being able to outstrip her, notwithstanding his lameness, would run round the room, laughing like a little Puck, and mocking at all her menaces. In the few anecdotes of his early life which he related in his "Memoranda," though the name of his mother was never mentioned but with respect, it was not difficult to perceive that the recollections she had left behind, at least those that had made the deepest impression, were of a painful nature. One of the most striking passages indeed, in the few pages of that Memoir which related to his early days, was where, in speaking of his own sensitiveness, on the subject of his deformed foot, he described the feeling of horror and humiliation that came over him, when his mother, in one of her fits of passion, called him "a lame brat." As all that he had felt strongly through life was, in some shape or other, reproduced in his poetry, it was not likely that an expression such as this should fail of being recorded. Accordingly we find, in the opening of his drama, "The Deformed Transformed," Bertha. Out, hunchback! Arnold. I was born so, mother! It may be questioned, indeed, whether that whole drama was not indebted for its origin to this single recollection. While such was the character of the person under whose immediate eye his youth was passed, the counteraction which a kind and watchful guardian might have opposed to such example and influence was almost wholly lost to him. Connected but remotely with the family, and never having had any opportunity of knowing the boy, it was with much reluctance that Lord Carlisle originally undertook the trust; nor can we wonder that, when his duties as a guardian brought him acquainted with Mrs. Byron, he should be deterred from interfering more than was absolutely necessary for the child, by his fear of coming into collision with the violence and caprice of the mother. Had even the character which the last Lord left behind been sufficiently popular to pique his young successor into an emulation of his good name, such a salutary rivalry of the dead would have supplied the place of living examples; and there is no mind in which such an ambition would have been more likely to spring up than that of Byron. But, unluckily, as we have seen, this was not the case; and not only was so fair a stimulus to good conduct wanting, but a rivalry of a very different nature substituted in its place. The strange anecdotes told of the last Lord by the country people, among whom his fierce and solitary habits had procured for him a sort of fearful renown, were of a nature livelily to arrest the fancy of the young poet, and even to waken in his mind a sort of boyish admiration for singularities which he found thus elevated into matters of wonder and record. By some it has been even supposed, that, in these stories of his eccentric relative,his imagination found the first dark outlines of that ideal character which he afterwards embodied in so many different shapes, and ennobled by his genius. But however this may be, it is at least far from improbable that, destitute as he was of other and better models, the peculiarities of his immediate predecessor should, in a considerable degree, have influenced his fancy and tastes. One habit, which he seems early to have derived from this spirit of imitation, and which he retained through life, was that of constantly having arms of some description about or near him-it being his practice, when quite a boy, to carry, at all times, small loaded pistols in his waistcoat pockets. The affray, indeed, of the late Lord with Mr. Chaworth had, at a very early age, by connecting duelling in his mind with the name of his race, led him to turn his attention to this mode of arbitrement; and the mortification which he had, for some time, to endure at school, from insults, as he imagined, hazarded on the presumption of his physical inferiority, found consolation in the thought that a day would yet arrive when the law of the pistol would place him on a level with the strongest. On their arrival from Scotland, Mrs. Byron, with the hope of having his lameness removed, placed her son under the care of a person who professed the cure of such cases, at Nottingham. The name of this man, who appears to have been a mere empirical pretender, was Lavender; and the manner in which he is said to have proceeded was, by first rubbing the foot over, for a considerable time, with handfuls of oil, and then twisting the limb forcibly round, and screwing it up in a wooden machine. That the boy might not lose ground in his education during this interval, he received lessons in Latin from a respectable schoolmaster, Mr. Rogers, who read parts of Virgil and Cicero with him, and represents his proficiency to have been, for his age, considerable. He was often, during his lessons, in violent pain, from the torturing position in which his foot was kept; and Mr. Rogers one day said to him, "It makes me uncomfortable, my Lord, to see you sitting there in such pain as I know you must be suffering." "Never mind, Mr. Rogers," answered the boy; "you shall not see any signs of it in me.” This gentleman, who speaks with the most affectionate remembrance of his pupil, mentions several instances of the gaiety of spirit with which he used to take revenge on his tormentor, Lavender, by exposing and laughing at his pompous ignorance. Among other tricks, he one day scribbled down on a sheet of paper all the letters of the alphabet, put together at random, but in the form of words and sentences, and, placing them before this all-pretending person, asked him gravely what language it was. The quack, unwilling to own his ignorance, answered confidently "Italian"-to the infinite delight, as it may be supposed, of the little satirist in embryo, who burst into a loud, triumphant laugh at the success of the trap which he had thus laid for imposture. With that mindfulness towards all who had been about him in his youth, which was so distinguishing a trait in his character, he, many years after, when in the neighbourhood of Nottingham, sent a message full of kindness to his old instructor, and bid the bearer of it tell him, that, beginning from a certain line in Virgil, which he mentioned, he could recite twenty verses on, which he well remembered having read with this gentleman, when suffering all the time the most dreadful pain. Finding but little benefit from the Nottingham practitioner, Mrs. Byron, in the summer of the year 1799, thought it right to remove her boy to London, where he was put under the care of Dr. Baillie. It being an object, too, to place him at some quiet school, where the means adopted for the cure of his infirmity might be more easily attended to, the establishment of the late Dr. Glennie, at Dulwich, was chosen for that purpose; and as it was thought It was about this period, according to his nurse, advisable that he should have a separate apartment May Gray, that the first symptom of any tendency to sleep in, Dr. Glennie had a bed put up for him towards rhyming showed itself in him; and the in his own study. Mrs. Byron, who had remained occasion which she represented as having given a short time behind him, at Newstead, on her arririse to this childish effort was as follows. An elderly val in town took a house upon Sloane Terrace; lady, who was in the habit of visiting his mother, and, under the direction of Dr. Baillie, one of the had made use of some expression that very much Messrs. Sheldrake (1) was employed to construct an affronted him, and these slights, his nurse said, he instrument for the purpose of straightening the generally resented violently and implacably. The limb of the child. Moderation in all athletic exerold lady had some curious notions respecting the cises was of course prescribed; but Dr. Glennie soul, which, she imagined, took its flight to the found it by no means easy to enforce compliance moon after death, as a preliminary essay before it with this rule, as, though sufficiently quiet when proceeded further. One day, after a repetition, it along with him in his study, no sooner was the boy is supposed, of her original insult to the boy, he released for play, than he showed as much ambiappeared before his nurse in a violent rage. "Well, tion to excel in all exrcises as the most robust my little hero,” she asked, "what's the matter with youth of the school-"an ambition," adds Dr. you now?" Upon which the child answered, that Glennie, in the communication with which he fa"this old woman had put him in a most terrible voured me a short time before his death, "which I passion—that he could not bear the sight of her," have remarked to prevail in general in young peretc., etc.—and then broke out into the following sons labouring under similar defects of nature." doggrel, which he repeated over and over, as if Having been instructed in the elements of Latin delighted with the vent he had found for his rage:-grammar according to the mode of teaching adopted In Nottingham county there lives at Swan Green, (1) In a letter, addressed lately by Mr. Sheldrake to the Editor of a Medical Journal, it is stated that the person of the same name who attended Lord Byron at Dulwich owed the honour of being called in to a mistake, and effected nothing towards the remedy of the limb. The writer of the letter adds that he was himsel consulted by Lord Byron four of five years afterwards, and, at Aberdeen, the young student had now unluckily to retrace his steps, and was, as is too often the though unable to undertake the cure of the defect, from the unwillingness of his noble patient to submit to restraint or confinement, was successful in constructing a sort of shoe for the foot, which, in some degree, alleviated the inconvenience under which he laboured. 66 which are requisite for a youth destined to a great public school, young Byron was much behind other youths of his age, and that, to retrieve this deficiency, the undivided application of his whole time would be necessary. Though appearing to be sen less embarrassed and obstructed the teacher in his task. Not content with the interval between Saturday and Monday, which, contrary to Dr. Glennie's wish, the boy generally passed at Sloane Terrace, she would frequently keep him at home a week beyond this time, and, still further to add to the distraction of such interruptions, collected around him a numerous circle of young acquaintances, without exercising, as may be supposed, much discrimination in her choice. "How indeed could she ?" asks Dr. Glennie-" Mrs. Byron was a total stranger to English society and English manners: case, retarded in his studies and perplexed in his recollections, by the necessity of toiling through the rudiments again in one of the forms prescribed by the English schools. I found him enter upon his tasks," says Dr. Glennie," with alacrity and success. He was playful, good-humoured, and be-sible of the truth of these suggestions, she not the loved by his companions. His reading in history and poetry was far beyond the usual standard of his age, and in my study he found many books open to him, both to please his taste and gratify his curiosity; among others, a set of our poets, from Chaucer to Churchill, which I am almost tempted to say he had more than once perused from beginning to end. He showed at this age an intimate acquaintance with the historical parts of the Holy Scriptures, upon which he seemed delighted to converse with me, especially after our religious exercises of a Sunday evening; when he would reason upon the facts contained in the Sacred Volume, with every appear-with an exterior far from prepossessing, an underance of belief in the Divine truths which they unfold. That the impressions,” adds the writer," thus imbibed in his boyhood, had, notwithstanding the irregularities of his after life, sunk deep into his mind, will appear, I think, to every impartial reader of his works in general; and I never have been able to divest myself of the persuasion that, in the strange aberrations which so unfortunately marked his subsequent career, he must have found it difficult to violate the better principles early instilled into him." standing where nature had not been more bountiful, a mind almost wholly without cultivation, and the peculiarities of northern opinions, northern habits, and northern accent, I trust I do no great prejudice to the memory of my countrywoman, if I say, Mrs. Byron was not a Madame de Lambert, endowed with powers to retrieve the fortune and form the character and manners of a young nobleman, her son." The interposition of Lord Carlisle, to whose authority it was found necessary to appeal, had more than once given a check to these disturbing indulgences. Sanctioned by such support, Dr. Glennie even ventured to oppose himself to the privilege, so often abused, of the usual visits on a Saturday; and the scenes which he had to encounter on each new case of refusal were such as would have wearied It should have been mentioned, among the traits which I have recorded of his still earlier years, that, according to the character given of him by his first nurse's husband, he was, when a mere child, "particularly inquisitive and puzzling about religion." It was not long before Dr. Glennie began to dis-out the patience of any less zealous and consciencover-what instructors of youth must too often tious schoolmaster. Mrs. Byron, whose paroxysms experience that the parent was a much more diffi- of passion were not, like those of her son, "silent cult subject to deal with than the child. Though rages," would, on all these occasions, break out professing entire acquiescence in the representa into such audible fits of temper, as it was impostions of this gentleman, as to the propriety of leav-sible to keep from reaching the ears of the scholars ing her son to pursue his studies without interrup-and the servants; and Dr. Glennie had one day the tion, Mrs. Byron had neither sense nor self-denial pain of overhearing a school-fellow of his noble enough to act up to these professions; but, in spite pupil say to him, " Byron, your mother is a fool;" of the remonstrances of Dr.Glennie, and the injunc- to which the other answered gloomily, "I know tions of Lord Carlisle, continued to interfere with it." In consequence of all this violence and imand thwart the progress of the boy's education, in practicability of temper, Lord Carlisle at length every way that a fond, wrong-headed, and self- ceased to have any intercourse with the mother of willed mother could devise. In vain was it stated his ward, and on a further application from the to her, that, in all the elemental parts of learning instructor for the exertion of his influence, said, |
