I had said of them, "Because I had been such a friend of her husband's." This instance of fond remembrance, after an interval of more than forty years, in a woman of no very sensitive nature-a woman of more intellect than feeling-conveys to my mind no slight argument in defence of Byron's conduct as a husband. His wife, though unrelenting, manifestly regretted his loss. May not some touch of remorse for the exile to which she had dismissed him-for the fame over which she had cast a cloud-for the energies which she had diverted from their course of useful action in the Senate, to be wasted in no honourable idleness abroad—and for the so early death to which her un-wifelike conduct doomed him, have mingled its bitterness with the pain of that regret?

But what do I know of Byron? The ill I will speak of presently. Personally, I know nothing but good of him. Of what he became in his foreign banishment, when removed from all his natural ties and hereditary duties, I, personally, am ignorant. In all probability he deteriorated; he would have been more than human if he had not. But when I was in the habit of familiarly seeing him, he was kindness itself. At a time when Coleridge was in great embarrassment, Rogers, when calling on Byron, chanced to mention it. He immediately went to his writing-desk, and brought back a cheque for a hundred pounds, and insisted on its being forwarded to Coleridge. "I did not like taking it," said Rogers, who told me the story, "for I knew that he was in want of it himself." His servants he treated with a gentle consideration for their feelings which I have seldom witnessed in any other, and they were devoted to him. At Newstead there was an old man who had been butler to his mother, and I have seen Byron, as the old man waited behind his chair at dinner, pour out a glass of wine and pass it to him, when he thought we were too much engaged in conversation to observe what he was doing. The transaction was a thing of custom; and both parties seemed to flatter themselves that it was clandestinely effected. A hideous old woman, who had been brought in to nurse him when he was unwell, at one of his lodgings, and whom few would have cared to retain about them longer than her services were required, was carried with him, in improved attire, to his chambers in the Albany, and was seen, after his marriage, gorgeous in black silk, at his house in Piccadilly. She had done him a service, and he could not forget it. Of his attachment to his friends, no one can read Moore's Life, and entertain a doubt. He required a great deal from them—not more, perhaps, than he, from the abundance of his love, freely and fully gave-but more than they had to return. The ardour of his nature must have been in a normal state of disappointment. He imagined higher qualities in them than they possessed, and must very often have found his expectations sadly baulked by the dulness of talk, the perversity of taste, or the want of enthusiasm,

which he encountered on a better, or, rather, longer acquaintance. But, notwithstanding, I never yet heard anybody complain that Byron. had once appeared to entertain a regard for him, and had afterwards capriciously cast him off.

Now, after these good and great qualities, I revert to the evil of Byron's character and conduct. And here, if he were bad, were there no extenuations, derived from the peculiarities of his position and education, to be pleaded for him? Was he not better, instead of worse, than most young men have proved who were similarly circumstanced? He had virtually never known a father's care or a mother's tenderness. He was from early childhood wholly cut away from those motives to virtue, and those restraints from vice, which, amid a band of brothers and sisters, grow up around us with the family affections. Home is the only school in which right principles and generous feelings find a genial soil and attain a natural growth. Without a home, the boy sees nothing, knows nothing, considers nothing, and feels. for nothing but himself; and a home Byron never had. The domestic charities and their ameliorating influences were only known to him by name. He was from boyhood his own master; and would it have been strange, if, with strong passions, an untutored will, fervent imagination, and no one with authority to control him, he was sometimes led astray? But during the time he was in London society, what young men were there, with the same liberty to range at will as he, who were less absorbed by its dissipations? Who among them abstracted so much time from the fascinations of the world as he, to study as he studied, and to write as he wrote? I have little doubt, though I don't know it, that in the season of his unparalleled success he was not likely to have been more rigid in his conduct than his companions were in their principles. But it is at least extraordinary that, while thus courted and admired, if his life was as licentious as some have represented, the only scandal which disturbed the decorum of society, and with which Byron's name was connected, did not originate in any action of his, but in the insane and unrequited passion of a woman.

Byron had one pre-eminent fault—a fault which must be considered as deeply criminal by every one who does not, as I do, believe it to have resulted from monomania. He had a morbid love of a bad reputation. There was hardly an offence of which he would not, with perfect indifference, accuse himself. An old schoolfellow, who met him on the Continent, told me that he would continually write paragraphs against himself in the foreign journals, and delight in their republication by the English newspapers as in the success of a practical joke. Whenever anybody has related anything discreditable of Byron, assuring me that it must be true, for he heard it from himself; I always felt that he could not have spoken upon worse authority, and that, in all probability, the tale

was a pure invention. If I could remember, and were willing to repeat, the various misdoings which I have from time to time heard him attribute to himself, I could fill a volume. But I never believed them. I very soon became aware of this strange idiosyncrasy; it puzzled me to account for it; but there it was-a sort of diseased and distorted vanity. The same eccentric spirit would induce him to report things which were false, with regard to his family, which anybody else would have concealed though true. He told me more than once that his father was insane, and killed himself. I shall never forget the manner in which he first told me this. While washing his hands, and singing a gay Neapolitan air, he stopped, looked round at me, and said, "There always was madness in the family." Then, after continuing his washing and his song, he added, as if speaking of a matter of the slightest indifference, "My father cut his throat." The contrast between the tenor of the subject and the levity of the expression was fearfully painful it was like a stanza of Don Juan. In this instance, I had no doubt that the fact was as he related it; but in speaking of it only a few years since to an old lady* in whom I had perfect confidence, she assured me that it was not so; that Mr. Byron, who was her cousin, had been extremely wild, but was quite sane, and had died very quietly in his bed. What Byron's reason could have been for thus calumniating, not only himself, but the blood which was flowing in his veins, who can divine? But, for some reason or other, it seemed to be his determined purpose to keep himself unknown to the great body of his fellow-creatures-to present himself to their view in moral masquerade, and to identify himself in their imaginations with Childe Harold and the Corsair, between which characters and his own-as God and education had made it-the most microscopic inspection would fail to discern a single point of resemblance.

Except this love of an ill-namc-this tendency to malign himself— this hypocrisy reversed, I have no personal knowledge whatever of any evil act or evil disposition of Lord Byron's. I once said this to a gentleman who was well acquainted with Byron's London life. He expressed himself astonished at what I said. "Well," I replied, "do you know any harm of him but what he told you himself?" "Oh, yes-a hundred things!" "I don't want you to tell me a hundred things; I shall be content with one." Here the conversation was interrupted. We were at dinner-there was a large party-and the subject was not again renewed at table. But afterwards, in the drawing-room, Mr. Drury came up to me and said, "I have been thinking of what you were saying at dinner. I do not know any harm of Byron but what he has told me of himself."

* Mrs. Villiers, Lord Clarendon's mother.

AN OCTOGENARIAN.

+ The Rev. Henry Drury.

Friends; and How to Test Them.

By C. SEARS LANCASTER.

CHAPTER I.

"We might have been! but these are common words,
And yet they make the sum of Life's bewailing;
They are the echo of those finer chords,

Whose music we deplore when unavailing.

We might have been!"

L. E. L.

THERE are few tests of friendship stronger than the pocket; but it is not an unerring one: because many a man will lend or give in the proportion that he expects to see his money back in money or money's worth; while many a man does not lend or give when a similar opportunity arises, either because he does not possess the money, or, possessing it, has other, prior or stronger, claimants upon his purse.

Then, again, there are cases in which cash is sought for an improper purpose, in the prosecution of which no sincere friend would assist; or it may be for an inimical purpose, in which a real friend would decline to participate. Thus we see that, however on the face of it the "yes" may seem to indicate a friendship denied by its opposite, the mere facts of lending and giving-or not lending and not giving-prove, of themselves, nothing beyond the simple act recorded.

There are some cases, however, in which no question can arise, as happened with Michael Lawrence, who gained an action for five thousand pounds, and yet had to go to prison for the costs.

It occurred thus :

Michael Lawrence was a young man of good education and no prospects, with the knowledge that he did not know who to ask forhow to obtain or where to seek a situation; and the consolation that there were thousands of equally young and well-educated men in this great metropolis in precisely the same position.

The only person he did know in London (but who was quite unable to help him) was a retired sea-captain, from the same country locality as himself; who, owning a daughter of agreeable manners and decided attractions, was the only hold to anywhere that he possessed.

He had some friends (?) in the country, from whom he had received

a few ordinary introductions-in most cases very cautiously worded— to acquaintances in town; but these promised little, and led to less.

Michael Lawrence had lately lost his second parent, under whose will he got a little money in hand; and with this he came to town to seek his fortune. His fortune! his fortune! Well! hundreds of thousands have done so before; and exactly what hundreds of thousands have obtained, so did he disappointment. But in earning this he managed to get somewhere else, if not something else—in love.

Of course, with the daughter of the retired sea-captain.

What an extraordinary thing it is that poor people will continually be falling in love! Your rich young man, with money enough both to win and to keep a wife, seeks neither; he is too fond of his own indulgences too social-too generally received-or too something-to care to barter his liberty for one girl, although that girl be mentally and morally worth her weight in gold. Well, that would not be much, perhaps, with gold at only something like £3 175. 11d. per oz.-so let us say, worth her weight in bank-notes at once.

This sort of man has ordinarily no notion that, just in proportion as there are two sides to everything, so are there two values to every piece of money. He is fond of saying,

"I like to call a thing by its right name: I am upright and downright, and call a spade a spade, and a guinea a guinea!"

We wonder what he would call a spade-guinea?

He quite forgets that there are spades and spades-guineas and guineas; just as much as there are men and men-women and women; and that a philanthropist is as different from a wife-beater, and a Florence Nightingale from a baby-farmer, as is the value of one shilling from another.

It is not, "How much is it?" but, "What will it purchase?"

One man will put a five-pound note in his pocket, and, after having paid for his stall at the opera, his cab to and fro, his supper and his bottle of 15-shilling champagne after it, return to his chambers with something like a couple of sovereigns change; while another, who has been content with a half-crown seat in the amphitheatre of the same opera house, with a humble omnibus for transit, and a rumpsteak and a bottle of Bass's for supper, will, at the end of the evening, find himself in possession of change out of half a sovereign. each will have enjoyed actually the same mental treat.

Yet

The man who says that price is, in itself, the test of goodness is simply a man of no experience.

But to return; if rich young men will not fall in love, it is certain that poor ones do, whether they will or no. Perhaps it is because, never fearing an attack, they provide no defences, and are thus left open to the slings and arrows of the mischievous (simple term!) boy who"not to put too fine a point on it"-has been the cause of more crime