letter,-" peace be with the dead. Regret cannot wake them. With a sigh to the departed, let us resume the dull business of life, in the certainty that we also shall have our repose." And now, upshooting from these dark vexations, appeared the glories of his future career; for we are at the dawn of that fame which was soon to rise so brightly above all contemporary reputations. Returning from his travels, Lord Byron had brought with him a kind of light satire, similar in many respects to the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and another work which, as well, perhaps, from its Dovelty as its merit, created a sensation, which hardly any poem ever produced at its appearance. The first was called Hints from Horace, the second, Childe Harold; and, if we are to believe Mr. Dallas, the Poet gave his preference to the first, a very clever but by no means surprising performance. To account for this is not difficult; a writer who has been for some time employed over his work does not perceive the merits of its originality, while he trembles for his want of example; and Byron, seeing no existing model of his method, shrunk from doing that which nobody had doue, nor saw that the very reason of his apprehensions would be the cause of his success. Childe Harold succeeded more than, I think, the merits of the two first Cantos deserved; and not only was the success extraordinary, but of a description the most likely to please. It was not the poem that was admired only; it was the poet, about whom an interest was excited. The fictitious hero of the tale, between whom and the writer of it, we must confess, there was some kind of resemblance, was considered at once as an accurate portrait of the mysterious young noble who had just returned from the lands of romance and song, which he had been describing. If Lord Byron had been known in the world before his travels, the world would have viewed both himself and his travels differently; but, though a peer of England, he was unknown, as I have said, to English society; and those who for the first time Dow made inquiries respecting him, heard that he was the grand-nephew of the singular old lord who had been tried for killing Mr. Chaworth; that he had a rained Abbey, and a damaged estate; that at college be had been known for keeping a bear; and on leaving college for drinking out of a skull; while numerous tales, not altogether without foundation, were circulated as to that life of licentiousness, under the satiety of which his pilgrimage was said to have been begun. His previous satire, though popular and admired, had never awakened any of those stories, and Lord (1) That Lord Byron had in all his passions a kind of premeditation is no where better proved than by a circumstance which I venture to state, namely, that many of the most apparently inspired letters which he sent about this time, as the outpourings of a deep attachment Byron after it, in spite of his bear, in spite of his skull, might have passed for any thing he pleased. But upon THE CHILDE they were all so much appropriate drapery, and set off, with a wilder horror, the enchanting young lord who wrote such beautiful poetry, and who seemed to have known every thing,-himself unknown. In a town always panting for novelty, and amidst that part of a town the curiosity of which is ever most alive, such a melancholy and romantic phoenix as the new poet, a gentleman who had been guilty of every misdemeanour, and, as he seemed to imply, of some dark and unutterable crimes; who had been to Lisbon and to Cadiz, to Athens, and to Constantinople, regions then much more unknown and remote than at the present time; and who, moreover, added to all these qualifications an old title, and a declaration that he had loved very much, and was determined never to love again; having, also, small ears and white hands, and curly hair, as he told the world Ali Pacha had told him, and a countenance peculiarly adapted to a frontispiece arrangement-was destined, for a year at least, to figure as the personage of the epoch. It was at this time, however, when the moodiness of his supposed character added in no small degree to his reputation, that Byron's real character became more amiable and composed. His manners, too, lost that unevenness, betwixt pride and playfulness, which had formerly distinguished them. He was no longer so proud of being a peer, because he found his rank at last attended naturally by all those circumstances which a patrician by birth expected, and which, as a plebeian by acquaintance, he did not formerly enjoy. It was now that a long series of gallantries began, the most notorious of which, as well on account of the singularities as the talent of the lady, was that of Lady Caroline Lamb. Whatever might have been the subsequent faults of this lady, her affection for Lord Byron was the first; and, though not beautiful, it would be difficult to imagine a person who, from the originality of her mind, and the fascination of her manners, was more likely to have attracted the attention, and, if the volatility of her character had permitted it, to have riveted the affections, of the Poet. Deeply attached to her he was at one time, and an elopement was meditated, which the lady had the merit of refusing. This refusal, and an offence to his personal vanity, which was supposed to have followed at no great distance of time, Lord Byron never forgave, and, up to the last hour of his existence, the lady in question, who adored his memory, was treated by him with ridicule and contempt. (1) were nothing more nor less than actual translations from a French novel, which every libertine has studied, but of which few lovers have made so profligate a use. Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It was during this period that Lord Byron was, and acquired, as he says, the reputation of being, a dandy, or fine gentleman. But though there is no doubt that he took to this existence at first, and retained a kind of respect for it afterwards, because it was one to which, however high his rank, he seemed originally to have been debarred by his want of connections, he had not, to use the common expression, been "long about town" before he was as much sickened by its finer vices and more fashionable follies, as he had been previous to his quitting England, by the grosser pleasures of a college and coffee-house existence. it was rather from a disease of the mind than of the heart that he sought a connection that would have opened to him a new species of life, and dissipated the satiety, if it did not add to the pleasure or fatigue, of existence. "I believe you think that I have not been quite fair with that alpha and omega of beauty, etc., with whom you would willingly have united me. But, if you consider what her sister said on the subject, you would still less wonder that my pride should have taken the alarm; particularly as nothing but the every-day flirtation of every-day people ever occurred between your heroine and myself. Had Lady appeared to wish it, or even not to oppose it, I would have gone on, or very possibly mar In a letter to Mr. Bankes from Cheltenham, in 1812, he says: "I have been here some time drink-ried (that is, if the other had been equally accordant) ing the waters, simply because there are waters to drink, and they are very medicinal, and sufficiently disgusting. In a few days I set out for Lord Jersey's, but return here, where I go out very little, and enjoy in its fullest extent the dolce far' niente. What you are about I cannot guess, even from your date-not dauncing to the sound of the gittourney in the halls of the Lowthers. I heard that you passed through here, at the inn where I first alighted, the very day before I arrived in these parts. We had a very pleasant set here. At first the Jerseys, Melbournes, Cowpers, and Hollands, but all gone; and the only persons I know are the Rawdons and Oxfords, with some later acquaintances of less brilliant descent; but I do not trouble them much; and as for your rooms and your assemblies, they are not dreamed of in our philosophy." One can hardly see a better specimen than in this extract, of a dandy beginning to be tired of his vocation. Again he says, Nov. 17, "I wish I could settle to reading again. My life is monotonous, yet desultory. I take up books and fling them down again." Sunday, Feb. 27, 1814. "Here I am alone, instead of dining at Lord H.'s, where I was asked, but not inclined to go any where. Hobhouse says I am growing a loup-garou-a solitary hobgoblin. True;-I am myself alone! The last week has been passed in reading, seeing plays, now and then visitors, sometimes yawning and sometimes sighing, but no writing, save of letters. If I could always read, I should never feel the want of society. Do I regret it? um! 'Man delights not me,' and only one woman-at a time." It was perhaps the not-to-be-satisfied satisfaction of a morbid mind, as well as the embarrassments of the irregular liaisons, and an ill-regulated fortune, which first induced him to turn his thoughts upon marriage; and there seems to have been something of seriousness in the admiration he entertained for Lady Elizabeth Forbes. Of this Byron speaks in a letter to Mr. Moore; and what he says indicates at once the state of his dispositions, and shows pretty clearly that with the same indifference which has frozen over the Black Sea of almost all my passions. It is that very indifference which makes me so uncertain and apparently capricious. It is not eagerness of new pursuits, but that nothing impresses me sufficiently to fix; neither do I feel disgusted, but simply indifferent to almost all excitements. The proof of this is that obstacles, the slightest even, stop me. This can hardly be timidity, for I have done some impudent things too in my time; and in almost all cases opposition is a stimulus. In mine, it is not; if a straw were in my way, I could not stoop to pick it up. I have sent this long tirade, because I would not have you suppose that I have been trifling designedly with you or others. If you think so, in the name of St. Hubert (the patron of antlers and hunters) let me be married out of hand, I don't care to whom, so it amuses any body else, and don't interfere with me much in the day-time." Sept. 5, 1814, he writes, with a mind more made up to the taking of that step, from which he seems, however, at the very last moment to have instinctively shrunk, and which, as it might have proved a blessing, completed the curse which hung, even at its dawn, over his miserable though magnificent career. "Now for a little egotism. My affairs stand thus:To-morrow I shall know whether a circumstance of importance enough to change many of my plans will occur or not. If it does not, I am off for Italy next month, and London in the mean time next week." The circumstance of importance to which he alludes in this letter was his second proposal for Miss Milbanke, his marriage with whom took place under circumstances that were certainly not very poetical. "A person," says Mr. Moore, "who had for some time stood high in his affectionate confidence, observing how cheerless and unsettled was his mind and prospects, advised him strenuously to marry." This person was, I believe, Lady Melbourne. She suggested to him one lady, Lord Byron mentioned another, and that' other was Miss Milbanke. "No," said Lady Melbourne, "Miss Milbanke will not suit you. In the first place, she has no fortune now, and you want money immediately. In the next place, you want a person who will have a great admiration for your genius, and she for this has too great an admiration of her own." "Well," said Lord Byron, “as you please;" and, sitting down, he wrote a letter to the lady recommended by Lady Melbourne. He received a refusal. "Now, you see," said Lord Byron," that after all Miss Milbanke is to be the person-I will write to her." He wrote to her on the moment, and, as soon as he had finished, his friend, remonstrating still strongly against his choice, took up the letter, but, on reading it over, observed [ well, really this is a very pretty letter,—it is a pity ! it should not go. I never read a prettier one." "Then it shall go," said Lord Byron; and in so saying sealed and sent off, on the instant, this fiat of his fate. It is rather ludicrous, after this very drawing-straw er head-and-tail way of making a selection, to hear him say, in a letter to Lady, "Miss Milbanke is the good-natured person who has undertaken me, and of course I am very much in love, and as silly as all single gentlemen must be in that sentimental situation." "She is said to be an heiress," he says, "but of that I really know nothing, and shall not inquire." Yet the matter seems to have been pretty well canvassed over as to the young lady's fortune; nor does he forget her birth-" she is niece to Lady Melbourne, and cousin to Lady Cowper." His first meeting with this lady, who had, once before refused him, was at Melbourne House, where, from her quiet and unpretending air, he had taken her for a governess or companion; and she seems, as it often happens with those who are subsequently to have an influence over our fate, to have made, even at first sight, a peculiar impression upon him. Mr. Moore says, that at this time,-which is rather unfortunate, Considering the advice he had so long and so eloquently bestowed,-he discovered that his friend was not fit for matrimony, and comments thereupon very sagely and shrewdly through a certain number of pages, in a homily which would have been better addressed at an earlier period to his friend, than preached, somewhat pompously as it is, over his misfortunes: -The very habits of abstraction and self-study, to which the occupations of men of genius lead, are in themselves of an unsocial and detaching tendency. Those images of ideal good and beauty which surround the poet in his musings soon accustom him to consider all that is beneath this high standard unworthy of his care, till at length, the heart becoming chilled ¦as the fancy warms, it too often happens that, in proportion as he has refined and elevated his theory of | all the social affections, he has unfitted himself for the practice of them. In looking back through the lives of the most illustrious poets, the class of intellect in which the characteristic features of genius are, perhaps, most strongly marked, we shall find that, with scarcely one exception, from Homer down to Lord Byron, they have been, in their several degrees, restless and solitary spirits, with minds wrapt like silkworms in their own tasks, either strangers or rebels to the mystic ties, and bearing about with them a deposit for posterity in their souls, to the jealous watching and enriching of which almost all other thoughts and considerations have been sacrificed." It is easy to acknowledge the truth, without admiring the elevation of Mr. Moore's simile; and, though Lord Byron was not equally a silk-worm, it is difficult to imagine that he could, in the ordinary sense of the word, have been "a good husband." But a man like Lord Byron is not to be considered, even by the woman he marries, as an ordinary mortal. She must be content to sacrifice some of that passion which love in general attaches to the person, or rather not to sacrifice, but to bestow it on the reputation of her life's partner—a reputation in which she shares.-After all, however, that man is rash who encumbers a literary life with a matrimonial connection. Poor Lord Byron himself found, upon arriving in town after his acceptance, and inquiring into the state of his affairs, that they were in so utterly an embarrassed condition as to fill him with some alarm. From the position in which he stood, however, there was no honourable retreat, and at the seat of Sir Ralph Milbanke, his wife's father, on the 2d of January, 1815, he was married, amidst, as he says himself, "the quivering recollections of the past, and melancholy reflections on the future." He could see, "Not that which was, nor that which should have been ;" but the old mansion, the accustomed hall, and the remembered chambers, where in earlier years he had loved and wooed and been rejected, came back at this hour and thrust their dark shadows between him and the light of his bridal. There is nothing except a few silly stories, circulated apparently without foundation, to induce us to suppose Lord Byron's honeymoon was not, what most honey-moons are, an effort on both sides to be peculiarly agreeable for a month, under the satisfactory consideration that there will be plenty of time afterwards to be otherwise. "Since I wrote last," says he, 2d February 1815, "I have been transferred to my father-in-law's, with my lady and my lady's maid, etc. etc., and the treaclemoon is over, and I am awake, and find myself married. My spouse and I agree to-and in-admiration. Swift says, no wise man ever married, but, for a fool, I think it the most ambrosial of all possible future states. I still think one ought to marry upon lease; but I am very sure I should renew mine at the expiration, though the next term were for ninety-nine years." In the course of this spring, Lord Byron first became personally acquainted with Sir Walter Scott, for whom he seems to have entertained, throughout life, a sincere respect and affection. "It was in the spring of 1815," says Walter Scott, "that, chancing to be in London, I had the advantage of a personal introduction to Lord Byron. Report had prepared me to meet a man of peculiar habits and quick temper, and I had some doubts whether we were likely to suit each other in society. I was most agreeably disappointed in this respect. I found Lord Byron in the highest degree courteous, and even kind." To Scott, Lord Byron did not seem, at this time, to be particularly well informed, and he says, that he recommended him to read many things (which, no doubt, he could) that he had never read before. "The last time we met," Walter Scott continues, "was in 1815, after I returned from France: I never saw him so full of gaiety and good humour. After one of the gayest parties I ever was present at, I set off for Scotland, and never saw Lord Byron again." Several lettersone about every six mouths-passed between the two poets; and, after the fatal event at Missolonghi, we owe to "the Ariosto of the North" those kindly and beautiful expressious:-"The voice of just blame and malignant censure are at once silenced; and we feel almost as if the great luminary of heaven had suddenly disappeared from the sky, at the moment when every telescope was levelled for the examination of the spots which had dimmed its brightness!" In the mean time his marriage, even yet, seems to have entered no very unfavourable signs of the hymeneal zodiac. "Lady B-," he says, "is better than three months advanced in her progress to maternity, and, we hope, likely to go well through with it. We have been very little out this season, and I wish her to keep quiet in her present situation." But as love is pronounced impossible in a cottage but shabbily furnished, so it finds no comfortable abode in a mansion in Piccadilly where the furniture is under the sentence of execution. Lord Byron's increased expenditure, which the small sum of ready money he received from Lady Byron (10,0001.) could not, for any length of time, support, and the long accumulation of early embarrassments, which the supposition that he was married to an heiress now thrust upon him, exposed him daily to the deepest grievance of which a proud spirit can be susceptible-the necessity of denying that which you know you have a right to give. "As his difficulties augmented, his mention of the partner of his home became more rare and formal; and there was observable, through some of his letters, a feeling of unquiet. It was at this moment, at the topmost tide-mark of his misfortunes, that Lady Byron somewhat unexpectedly took the resolution of quitting him. She left London on a visit to her father, where she was to be joined by Lord Byron in a few weeks. They parted kindly, and even warmly, and Lady B. wrote her husband a fond and playful letter on the road. But no sooner had she arrived at Kirkby Mallory, than Sir R. Milbanke wrote to say she would return no more." With an imagination that could conceive miseries which did not actually exist, Byron had a strength and rebelliousness of character which always supported him against real grievances; and his buoyant and poetical spirit sprang at once, in his reverses, to the blue skies and hallowed scenes of his early wanderings, where a proud and solitary soul knew that it would find companionship. "I shall be glad to see you, if you like to call," he says to Mr. Rogers, "though I am at present contending with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,' some of which have struck at me from a quarter whence I did not indeed expect them. But no matter, there is a world elsewhere, and I will cut my way through it." The circumstances of this separation,-Byron's eulogy and justification of his wife, I mean, immediately upon the separation (since he appears to have entertained far deeper feelings of a sense of injury at a subsequent period of his life), the affectionate manner, also, in which his wife's last letter was written, and, notwithstanding this, the mysterious justification of her conduct by Dr. Lushington,--have all tended to give that extraordinary colouring, shed more or less over every event of Byron's life, to this, the most important. Not long before his death, with that worldly knowledge for which he almost stands alone among minstrels, he himself said:-"The causes of my separation were too simple, my dear sir, to be easily found out." For my own part, if not easily discovered, I cannot help thinking that they are pretty easily explained. Lady Byron was, as it appears, almost singularly ignorant of the poetical character. She seems to have considered as distinctive marks of madness traits which, I will venture to say, no person of strong genius and passions ever passed a year in the society of another without displaying. Byron was affected to hysterics at seeing Kean in the part of Sir Giles Overreach (a similar story is told of Alfieri); and he threw a favourite watch, in a fit of indignation, into the fire. Lady Byron thought him mad in consequence, and, with that agreeable prepossession in her mind, viewed every ordinary circumstance. No marvel, then, that ordinary circumstances all appeared extraordinary; and that, instead of regarding any incidental weakness with forgiveness, she looked upon it with horror. No marvel that the impression she made upon Dr. Lushington, as the result of her own impressions, should have dictated his advice. Nor is this all. Lord Byron, as many men,-for I have known several,-of an imaginative turn of mind, had a pleasure in alluding to himself and his life in a manner less careful of exciting sympathy than of awakening interest. The train of thought which led him to the which his verse breathed a charm more holy than that portraiture of Lara and Conrad led him also to pour-❘ of olden legend; visiting the "place of skulls," our tray himself, not unfrequently, in the dark and ro- Waterloo-rendered ours doubly,-ours by the skill mantic garb of his heroes. Numerous proofs of this of our illustrious General, and ours by the glory of an occur in his poetry; as many occurred in his conver- as illustrious Bard,-wandering by the valley of sweet sation; and, if this be the case, it is hardly to be won-waters, and beneath dered at, that a prim and prudish lady, who already looked upon him as a madman, and heard him talk of himself as a criminal, should have felt rather uneasy under his protection, and have been able to prove, sufficiently to her lawyer though she might not to the world, the propriety of her resolution. It was on the 25th of April, 1816, that Lord Byron sailed for the second and last time from England, at that time the author of the two cantos of Childe Harold, and of the beautiful tales of The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Siege of Corinth, Lara, and The Corsair; all startling in their success, many of them written, as he says, in undressing from a ball, and some under feelings of great domestic misery and excitement. He left England for the last time; nor I did ever man, who had brought such glory to his country, leave it under greater disgrace. “He had, in the course of one short year, gone through every variety of domestic misery; had seen his hearth eight or nine times profaned by the visitations of the law; and been only saved from a prison by the privileges of his rank." At war with the world, in which at all times the base predominate-who rejoice in an opportunity of mangling the fallen lion; at war with his wife and his own home; deeply involved in debt; blackened by defamation; the noble wanderer, with something of that reckless spirit in which Satan spread his wings when Paradise was lost, put boldly out to sea with his fortunes, and dared to hope for consolation on distant shores. III. HERE commences a perfectly new epoch in Byron's life: from his infancy to his travels, from his travels to his marriage, from his separation to his death, form the three best divisions under which we can consider it. During the first, his individual character was developed; during the second, the romantic part of his character, as a poet; the last was memorable for the highest efforts of his Muse, in what sume might call her loftier inspirations, and still more remarkable for that newly-discovered vein in his sms, which, though equally imbedded in his mind by nature, had not yet been wrought out by accident or art. Under the unhappy auspices I have described, his household gods shattered on his hearth, he recommenced his wanderings. ge "The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls Jave pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps," he led for a while his lonely musings over Leman's consecrated Lake, living not in himself, but as a portion of that around him-feeling the high mountains and the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone-blending his being with the waves and skies, and earth-o'erhanging mountains; another apostle of that wild affliction which wrung overwhelming eloquence from Rousseau; another worshipper of that ideal beauty which threw over living words so heavenly a hue, and dedicated the classic Clarens to Julie and St. Preux. At Diodati, near Geneva, Lord Byron wrote three of his most remarkable works :-the third Canto of Childe Harold, composed, as he says, "when I was half mad, between mountains, metaphysics, lakes, loves unquenchable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies; "(1) The Prisoner of Chillon; and Manfred, the third act of which, however, he subsequently re-wrote. In October, after a tour in the Bernese Alps, he set out with Mr. Hobhouse, his old-fellow traveller, for Italy, and lingering some little time at Milan, where his chief attraction seems to have been a love correspondence between Cardinal Bembo and Lucretia Borgia, and visiting Juliet's tomb at Verona, took up his abode at Venice, a city with the melancholy romance of which he was, even before seeing it, enchanted. "Venice,”(2) says he, "pleases me as much as I expected, and I expected much. It is one of those places which I know before I see them, and has always haunted me most after the East. I like the gloomy gaiety of its gondolas, aud the silence of its canals. I do not even dislike the evident dreariness of the city, though I regret the singularity of its vanished costume." Nor was he long without annexing to this romantic city a romance of his own. He lodged with a merchant of Venice, whose wife, by name Marianna, was twenty-two years old, and answered to the following description : "Marianna is in her appearance altogether like an antelope; she has the large black oriental eyes, with that peculiar expression in them which is seen rarely among Europeans-even the Italians—and which many of the Turkish women give themselves by tinging the eyelids, an art not known out of that country, I believe. This expression she has naturally, and something more than this. In short, I cannot describe the effect Passing along the Rhine, over the blue wave of of this kind of eye, at least upon me. Her features are (1) Letter VIII. to Mr. Moore, Venice, Jan. 28, 1817. (2) Letter to Mr. Murray, Nov. 25, 1816. |